Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Orwell helped construct his personal myth, has been claimed by extremists on both the Left and the Right, and is still a “mentor, guide, motivating spirit and conscience.” His achievements, Taylor notes, were considerable: “an Eton scholarship, first book published before he was thirty, friendships with the great minds of his age, authorship of at least two novels that literally changed the way people thought.” But, like Somerset Maugham, “the writer [he said] who has influenced me most,” Orwell had a negative world view. Both men were miserable at school, refused to go to a university and had their early novels rejected. They were committed to clear prose, and had socialist sympathies and a desire to improve the lives of the working class. They were disenchanted with the Orient, nostalgic for Edwardian England and disgusted by modern pollution. Most importantly, both felt profound guilt and self-hatred.

  Orwell's great themes are longing and loss: for his Thames Valley childhood, his intellectual freedom at Eton, the haunting landscapes of Burma, the idealism and comradeship of Spain, the neglected wife who died in her thirties, the child he was unable to raise, his brief years of good health and chance to serve in the war. Like the tubercular Stevenson and Lawrence, Orwell knew he was destined for an early death. Just before the tragic end he remarked: “I've made all this money and now I'm going to die.” Both these biographies increase one's admiration for Orwell who, one friend observed, “in earlier days would have been either canonized—or burnt at the stake!”

  TWENTY-ONE

  TRUE TO LIFE

  Writing Orwell's Biography

  I first read this essay at the Partisan Review conference on biography and memoirs (where I was a last-minute replacement for the ailing Saul Bellow) and then published it in the very last issue of that distinguished journal. My research and interviews, and the use of unpublished material in the Orwell Archive, shed new light on Orwell's strained relations with his weak and passive father, his role in the social and political upheavals in Burma in the 1920s, his career as a teacher in two shoddy schools, his long, loyal connection with his literary agent Leonard Moore, and his arduous life on the island of Jura. Orwell's Soviet police report shows that he was nearly captured and killed in Spain. My biography also describes his close friendships with two shadowy figures, Georges Kopp and Reginald Reynolds, and his literary relations with Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson and Wyndham Lewis. Unlike Orwell's other biographers, I also asked many authors what Orwell meant to them and included an important Epilogue on Orwell's influence and legacy. In all my writing on Orwell I have followed the nineteenth-century French critic, Sainte-Beuve, who believed that “a personal acquaintanceship with a writer, and a knowledge of his biography, were the surest bases for sound literary judgment.”

  The impulse to write literary biography begins in fascination with an artist's character, mind and art. George Orwell had interested me since 1968, when I went to read his unpublished letters and manuscripts at University College in London. Unwittingly, I came up against a classic stumbling block: the obstructive literary widow. The curator had given me written permission, but Sonia Orwell had abruptly closed the Archive to scholars. Orwell had left instructions that no biography was to be written, and she was furious that Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had deceptively used the Archive for that purpose. To get even with them, Sonia impulsively asked Bernard Crick, a professor of politics, to write an official biography. When Crick's book, a dry compendium of facts that ignored Orwell's inner or emotional life, appeared in 1980, she naturally disliked it. The four-volume edition of Orwell's essays, diaries and letters which she and Ian Angus had brought out in 1968, together with Crick's biography, remained for some years the definitive word on Orwell. In 1991 Michael Shelden published a third biography, authorized this time by the Orwell estate.

  Orwell's life and works, then, had been thoroughly researched, but my fascination with the complex personality behind the lucid prose had lasted. For thirty years I'd been teaching and thinking about Orwell, and I disagreed with all three biographies in matters of fact, emphasis and meaning. So I took up the challenge to find new material and to write a better book than the previous ones. A biographer begins by asking questions. That's the essence of research. You ask questions of the novels, essays and letters; you look questioningly at a landscape and at a house where he lived, as well as at the friends and family who've survived him. What was he like? How did he look? What did he say? How did he laugh? What did he eat? Why did he go to Burma and not Cambridge? Why did he leave Burma? What sort of Socialist was he? Was he as gloomy and pessimistic as his last novel? How often we read a voluminous book which leaves us with no clear impression of its subject. We may get to know in excruciating detail everything he did on a certain day, in a certain city, but nothing of how he felt or what he thought as a human being.

  The existence of new material spurred me on. In 1998 Peter Davison published a monumental, brilliantly annotated, 20-volume, 8,500-page edition of Orwell's Complete Works, which contained a great deal of new information, including several moving letters from his first wife, Eileen O'shaughnessy, written just before her unexpected death. Peter Davison himself proved a marvelous resource. A passionate researcher and generous colleague, he couldn't quite let go of Orwell and helped me answer many questions. He even trekked out to the British Newspaper Library to search for unsigned articles by Orwell in the Rangoon Gazette. The intervening years had brought new books, articles, memoirs, interviews, oral history, radio and television material. The Orwell Archive had grown, and family members and friends were still alive. Though dead for fifty years, Orwell's language and ideas still permeate the culture. Vivid phrases like “Big Brother Is Watching You,” “Thought Police,” “Vaporized” and “Unperson” uncannily expressed the thoughts and feelings of people forced to live in totalitarian societies.

  Other new documents had surfaced as a result of political changes. The Soviet Secret Police report on Orwell, dated July 7, 1937, is now in the Central Party Archives in Moscow. This NKVD report shows that he was well known to the Communists and had played an active role in the Barcelona battles between the factions on the Left. By labeling him a Trotskyist, the Communists signed his death warrant. Orwell was wounded and on the run. If they'd caught him before he escaped into France, they would certainly have executed him to prevent him from telling the truth about the Communists’ destruction of their former allies in Spain—a major cause of their defeat in the Civil War.

  Orwell's was the dominant voice of his age, and his moral and literary influence has long outlasted the political context of the 1930s and 1940s. John le Carré, in response to my query about what Orwell meant to him, summed up the way his life and works have fused into a noble ideal: “Orwell meant and means a great deal to me. Burmese Days still stands as a splendid cameo of colonial corruption. Orwell's commitment to the hard life is a lesson to all of us. I taught at Eton. It always amused me that Blair-Orwell, who had been to Eton, took great pains to disown the place, while Evelyn Waugh, who hadn't been to Eton, took similar pains to pretend he had. Orwell's hatred of greed, cant, and the ‘me’ society is as much needed today as it was in his own time—probably more so. He remains an ideal for me—of clarity, anger and perfectly aimed irony.” I realized that this image of Orwell the man and writer had attracted me to him in the first place: the “wintry conscience” Orwell, the volunteer in the Spanish war, the austere figure with a quirky sense of humor. But what intrigued me most was the inner man. I wanted to ask different sorts of questions, to get closer to this enigmatic personality, to hear the private voice as well as the public one.

  One crux of Orwell biography is the account he gives of his prep school days at St. Cyprian's in a justly famous essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys.” Is it an embroidered Dickensian tale or deadly accurate satire? Previous researchers had interviewed the headmistress, who claimed it was wildly exaggerated. I consulted the memoirs of other distinguished Old Boys—the photographer Cecil Beaton, the nature writer
Gavin Maxwell, the advertising man David Ogilvy and the golfing expert Henry Longhurst—as points of comparison. They all corroborated Orwell's account. At breakfast the young Orwell was repelled by the encrusted strips of cold porridge under the rims of the pewter bowls. For poor Henry Longhurst it was much worse: after getting sick into his bowl he was forced to stand up in front of the school and gobble down the nauseous mixture.

  I wanted to define Orwell by putting him into his social context. Who were his friends and what did they say about him? In the Orwell Archive I now made frequent discoveries: details seemed to jump out at me and fit into the pattern of the book I was conceiving. The best things were unpublished memoirs about Orwell and Eileen, letters to him and television documentaries that had many interviews with people who knew him. One poignant tape of long-dead friends, Cyril Connolly and Malcolm Muggeridge, showed them lying on the summer grass of the Sussex Downs and reminiscing about “gloomy George.”

  Some of this material, of course, has been read over and over again by other people. But if you look at documents in a new way, you can find new connections. I found a fascinating letter, which no one else had noticed, from his older married patron, Mabel Fierz, who'd encouraged Orwell at the start of his career and helped him get published. In the summer of 1932 Mabel, planning an outdoor excursion, gushingly wrote: “Take your costume in case we find a suitable place. I hate the usual swimming bath. Will also take tea. It will be nice. Not as you say a decent walk. I prefer the opposite!” Was this a love letter? To me it suggested a clandestine affair.

  I remembered that twenty years earlier, when writing my life of Katherine Mansfield, I'd visited her old school, Queen's College in London, and met the headmistress, Stefanie Fierz. When I asked her: “Doesn't your family have something to do with Orwell?” she replied: “You are a clever young man.” She invited me home to taste the same greengage jam her mother-in-law, Mabel, had made for Orwell. In 1998 I got back in touch with Stefanie and her husband Adrian Fierz and went to see them again. Orwell, in his midtwenties, had been a friend and mentor to the schoolboy Adrian. I hesitated to ask about his mother's possible affair with Orwell, but I need not have worried. Adrian said that he'd guessed the truth about their relationship early on, and when he'd questioned his mother late in her life (she lived to be a hundred years old) about her affair with Orwell, she confessed: “Yes, you could say so. He was my lover.”

  Evidence of sexual relationships is rarely as clear as this—the biographer seldom finds a letter that says: “You were wonderful in bed last night!” So he has to weigh the evidence carefully and make his judgment. In this case, I had gotten to know a lot more about Mabel. She was a bohemian, literary type who not only encouraged Orwell to write and placed his first book with an agent, but also adored and worshipped him. Back from Burma, lonely and hard up, Orwell was glad to sleep with his patron. He also slept with several other women in London and Southwold.

  I found several printed sources unknown to previous biographers. One example is A Russian's England by Elisaveta Fen, whose real name was Lydia Jackson. A Russian émigré, she was a close friend of Orwell's wife Eileen, and knew Orwell for several years in the late 1930s. At Eileen's urging she visited him when he was recuperating from a flare-up of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Gloucestershire. Her memoir reveals that Orwell was a lonely, sexually needy man. She felt so sorry for him she allowed him to kiss her. Her kindness encouraged his hopes of becoming her lover and he sent her love letters when he spent a winter in Morocco. When he returned in 1939 he planned to seduce her. Lydia, who loved Eileen and valued her friendship, was mortified by his conduct, but understood his desperate desire to assert his masculinity as his body betrayed him.

  Eileen shared Orwell's need to suffer, but his masochism sometimes became too much—even for her. One unnerving letter she wrote to him, influenced by fear of her impending operation, conveys her horror of urban life during World War II and foreshadows the grimmer passages of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “I don't think you understand what a nightmare the London life is to me…. I can't stand having people all over the place, every meal makes me feel sick because every food has been handled by twenty dirty hands…. I can't breathe the air, I can't think any more clearly than one would expect to in the moment of being smothered.” After her death Orwell felt guilt-ridden for having neglected her. Eileen's letter is desperately sad, but my sympathy for her led me to understand rather than to criticize Orwell. With tuberculosis hanging over his head, he had a bleak future. People in London during the blitz were under great stress and tended to be promiscuous. Sex was an escape from a hard life of long hours and insufficient food, like the boiled cod and bitter turnip tops in the BBC canteen. To me, his human weaknesses made his courage and achievement more remarkable.

  Many of my interviews, the most pleasurable part of the research, have taken place in bizarre circumstances: in freezing English houses where my breath was visible in the sitting room, in convents, insane asylums and on deathbeds. I've introduced people to brothers and sisters they'd never known about. I found and held in my hands the brain of Wyndham Lewis. Nothing's more riveting than talking to sympathetic and intelligent people about a subject in which you're passionately interested. This brings you as close as you'll ever get to the character you're trying to recreate. Two of the most interesting meetings were with women who'd known Orwell, under unusual circumstances, in the mid-1940s.

  After Eileen's sudden death during an operation at the age of 39, Orwell, lonely, sick and left with an adopted baby he refused to give up, was desperate for a wife. He impulsively proposed to several young women—including the exceptionally beautiful and charming Celia Paget, whose twin sister Mamaine was married to Orwell's close friend Arthur Koestler. Though Celia was many years younger, Koestler implored her to marry Orwell. She liked him and enjoyed his sardonic humor, but to her he seemed old and ill. She emphasized that Orwell “expressed great concern for my happiness. He always seemed to feel that he wasn't a good bet for me, both because he was quite a lot older and because of his poor health.” When she sat on Orwell's lap in a crowded taxi, he confessed he was so excited by embracing her that the passion went through him like an electric shock.

  Orwell also proposed to Anne Popham, a young art student he scarcely knew. She told me about this bizarre episode. Orwell invited her to tea, and dismissed his son Richard and the nanny with “Go along, now.” He then told Anne: “Come and sit here. It will be more comfortable on the bed in the corner.” Coming directly to the point, he kissed and embraced her, and asked: “Do you think you could care for me?” Since there was absolutely no courtship, wooing or getting to know him, Anne was deeply embarrassed and shocked by his proposal, which seemed both precipitate and calculating. Feeling intensely uncomfortable, yet aware of his loneliness, she wriggled out of his arms and rejected his offer as gently as possible. Neither of these young, pretty women saw themselves as widowed stepmothers.

  Orwell's relations with Sonia Brownell, who became his second wife, developed in this context of desperation and fear of death. David Astor, editor of the Observer and a loyal friend who'd helped Orwell in innumerable ways, told me about his deathbed marriage to Sonia—a blooming Renoir beauty with a gaunt El Greco saint. I asked a number of Sonia's friends to describe her role in Orwell's life. The moribund Orwell was deeply in love with the gorgeous Sonia. But why did she agree to marry him in 1949 after rejecting him in 1945? Was she a devoted Florence Nightingale or a mercenary Kate Croy? Sonia herself was perplexed about her motives and said: “The reasons why George married me are perfectly clear. What aren't clear are the reasons why I married George.” Part of the complex answer must be that in 1949 he was a rich and world famous author who made no sexual demands and would soon be dead.

  Up to now I've always visited every place where my subjects had lived and traveled, believing that places had a magic influence on people's lives. Since I'd spent several years in London in the 1970s, I felt I knew Orwell's London q
uite well. At the end of my research trip in November 1998, with a day to spare, I decided to go to Eton, which I'd not seen for many years. Orwell's Eton years had been well documented, and I just wanted to pick up some local color. But my visit turned out to be a perfect example of how, when you work on a biography, places, people and documents all come together in unpredictable ways.

  It was a beautiful fall day, and I was lucky to find the librarian, Michael Meredith, who gave me a whirlwind tour of the College. He showed me the young Orwell's copy of G. K. Chesterton's book of comic verse, Greybeards at Play (1900), with his pen-and-ink bookplate, “Eric Blair—His Book,” and his drawing of a rocky, Middle Eastern landscape, with palm trees, domed mosque and fortified castle. The beauty of the College, its atmosphere of learning and privilege, were overwhelming. As we talked about Orwell we got on to the subject of his fateful choice, at the age of eighteen, of going to Burma instead of to Oxford or Cambridge.