Orwell (39 page)

Shelden is justly severe on Orwell's second wife, Sonia. She was, like Orwell, born in India; and as a teenager she was responsible for the death of a friend by drowning. She gave in to Orwell's “clumsy efforts” at lovemaking at least once before his final illness; and her other notable lovers included the English painters William Coldstream and Lucian Freud, and the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. She married the wealthy, famous and gravely ill Orwell for mercenary motives, bought herself an expensive engagement ring and was in a Soho nightclub with one of her former lovers when Orwell died.

Orwell's life seems to be divided into separate phases: being miserable at prep school, slacking off at Eton, shooting an elephant in Burma, tramping and dishwashing when down and out (which resembled T. E. Lawrence's self-conscious degradation in the ranks of the RAF), getting shot through the throat in Spain (and having the hospital assistants steal his valuables), broadcasting futile war propaganda to India for the BBC, achieving astonishing success with
Animal Farm
(which was rejected by T. S. Eliot, who completely missed the political point of the book), retreating to the unhealthy Scottish island of Jura and dying of tuberculosis when he reacted adversely to the newly discovered streptomycin.

The consistent element in this extraordinarily diverse life was Orwell's elusive, guilt-ridden, masochistic character. A former friend vividly described him as “a tall, big-headed man, with pale blue, defensively humorous eyes, a little moustache and a painfully snickering laugh.” A fellow fighter in Spain called him “a good shot, a cool customer, completely without fear.” He was capable of “intellectual brutality” and was intensely fair-minded, cynical yet idealistic. Self-deprecating about the romantic fatalism of his conventional early novels, he brilliantly fulfilled himself in his late political satires. This nobly impressive man, whom Victor Pritchett called “the wintry conscience of his generation,” was, in Shelden's words, “willing to sacrifice everything—his health, his security, his career, his happiness, his life—for his dreams.”

D. J. Taylor's and Gordon Bowker's lives appeared in Orwell's centenary year, three years after my own biography was published. Unlike Crick's self-defeating book, these two lives attempted to explore the inner man. Orwell, who helped construct his own personal legend, has been dishonestly appropriated by extremists like Mary McCarthy on the Left and Norman Podhoretz on the Right. His great themes are longing and loss. Bowker's biography, though more careless than Taylor's, is more dramatic and penetrating, and he's discovered more new material. Burma gave Orwell a knowledge of two Asian languages (Burmese and Hindi), Oriental people and colonial society, and provided valuable legal and quasi-military experience.

Samuel Johnson defined biography as an attempt to understand the lives of others, as “an act of the imagination.” Ideally, the modern biographer—an investigative reporter of the spirit—should have Johnson's sympathy and intuition, critical judgment and healthy scepticism. These new lives by D. J. Taylor and Gordon Bowker—the fifth and sixth biographies of Orwell—attempt to explore the inner man.

D. J. Taylor mentions the vats of ink expended on Orwell's ghastly prep school and the shelf-full of memoirs by his contemporaries at Eton. He concedes that Orwell's life is a “well-trodden path, and the scenery can be distressingly familiar.” He asks, but doesn't answer, the crucial question: “what more [is] there to be said?” Taylor uses Peter Davison's twenty-volume edition of Orwell's
Complete Works
and the unpublished memoirs of Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit and David Holbrook—just as I did in my recent life of Orwell. And some of his sentences are surprisingly
déjà lu:
“He impulsively proposed marriage to several attractive younger women whom he scarcely knew” (Meyers) and he made “proposals of marriage to a series of younger women some of whom he barely knew” (Taylor); “the outboard motor … was wrenched off the mounting and fell into the sea” (Meyers) and “the engine sheared away from its mounting and disappeared into the sea” (Taylor).

There are a number of minor flaws in Taylor's book. His doubts about Orwell's elusive life and character, though commendably honest, are tactically unwise and undermine his credibility as a biographer. He insists that there are “few verifiable facts” and “no hard evidence,” Orwell “is impossible to pin down” and it's “anyone's guess,” his motives “are unfathomable” and
circumstances “are not wholly decipherable,” whatever happened “is lost in time” and “beyond recreation,” “there is no way of knowing” and “we shall probably never know.” Repeating the epigraphs to the chapters in the text blunts their effect, and there are several other pointless repetitions. Lady Grigg is identified twice in three pages, and Orwell's well-known disdain for his early novel
Keep the Aspidstra Flying
is mentioned three times.

Taylor did not go to Burma, where Orwell spent five years as a policeman in the 1920s—surely
(contra
Taylor) a more glamorous, exotic and responsible job than teaching or working in the City—and gets lost on the geography. Maymyo is inland (not on a peninsula); Twante is ten minutes across the river from Rangoon (not “a thirty-six-hour steamer trip”); Katha is northeast (not west) of Mandalay; and the Governor in Orwell's time was Sir Harcourt Butler (not Harcourt Brace, his American publisher). Other errors have also crept into the text. The correct title of Orwell's four-volume works is
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
; the condemned man in “A Hanging” went to the gallows (not the block); Dwight Macdonald's surname is spelled two different ways, both incorrect; William Phillips and Philip Rahv (not Macdonald and Clement Greenberg) were the editors of the
Partisan Review
; the van Georges Kopp sold Orwell was not just “in poor condition,” but had to be pushed off the Jura ferry and was permanently abandoned on the dock; Orwell's adopted son Richard got sick after smoking a pipe (not a cigarette); and, in a famous scene, Orwell saw a woman trying to unblock a drain pipe from a train (not while walking up a back-alley) in Wigan.

There are also some unresolved contradictions. Was Orwell unable to get the northern miners to treat him “as an equal” or were they “willing to take [him] for granted”? Did Henry Miller give him, when he was on the way to the Spanish Civil War, a corduroy jacket or a more useful pigskin jacket? Did he leave Spain with only a tiny oil-lamp as a souvenir or did he also have a goatskin water-bottle? Did he “probably” or “certainly” make his first trip to Jura in the autumn of 1944? Was the climate of Jura “temperate” or was the remote Scottish island lashed by ferocious storms, with endless icy rain “blowing east from the Atlantic?”

Finally, Taylor does not always extract the maximum meaning from the events he describes. He asks, if Orwell wasn't proud of his first book,
Down and Out in Paris and London
, “why try to get it published in the first place?” Clearly Orwell was aware of its faults but believed in its merits. He wanted to justify his years as a dishwasher and tramp, get into print and make some money. Taylor doesn't fully explain the bond forged between Orwell and his devoted wife Eileen, both of whom risked their lives in Spain, as well as
Orwell's guilt about exposing her to this risk both in Barcelona and when she visited him during an artillery bombardment on the Aragon front.

Despite these criticisms, Taylor's is a highly competent book, which reinforces rather than changes the traditional view, and has several merits. His style is clear and lively, and he sympathizes with his subject. His interchapters on Orwell's face, voice, obsession with rats, attitude toward Jews, paranoia and possessions are useful and interesting. He's been industrious and turned up some new bits of information: Orwell being chased on South-wold common by a romantic rival on a motorcycle; Orwell working as a “male charwoman, cleaning the house for half a crown a day.” He suggests that Rayner Heppenstall's description of Orwell's “sadistic exaltation” during their fight in the 1930s was retrospectively influenced by the sadistic torture scenes in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Taylor (like Bowker) is sound on Orwell's now notorious but quite innocuous “List” of well known Communist sympathizers and (in contrast to Hilary Spurling's absurd self-serving whitewash) on the self-serving character of Sonia Brownell, who married him on his deathbed.

Bowker's biography—which attempts to explore the roots of Orwell's emotional life and illuminate his shadowy self—is better than Taylor's: more lively, dramatic and penetrating. He reveals the French influence on Orwell, the dominant patterns in the life and work, the paradoxical elements of “one of the great misfits of his generation,” the romantic and tragic aspects of his character. Bowker has also discovered much more new material: Eurasian relatives in Burma; letters to the unattainable girlfriend Brenda Salkeld (source not cited) suggesting a
ménage à trois
(Orwell said that Eileen unselfishly wished he could sleep with Brenda “about twice a year”); a letter from another girlfriend, Celia Kirwan, to her twin sister about Orwell's marriage proposal; an interview with Orwell's sometime roommate Michael Sayers; the diary of his publisher Roger Senhouse, at Eton; material in the Archive de Paris, the Marx Memorial Library in London and the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam; and the Spanish political poster that probably inspired O'Brien's picture of the future in
Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

But Bowker is more careless than Taylor. In addition to misspelling twenty proper names, he misstates the first names of John Aubrey and Heinrich Mann, confuses a duck with a goose and Herbert Read with Harold Acton, garbles a sentence on page 332 (lines 6–7) and misplaces a parenthesis (with
Tether
misspelled) on page 340 (lines 10–11). Many of his factual statements are inaccurate. Orwell's father did not remain in the same grade of the Indian Opium Department for twenty-two years, and his service in the
Great War
was
reflected in the fictional George Bowling's; Orwell didn't blow up toads, but punished boys who did; Rangoon is not in the mouth of the Irrawaddy Delta; Maugham's
On a Chinese Screen
is a travel book (not stories); Orwell's “Clink” (1932)
was
published; his memoir
Down and Out in Paris and London
is more autobiographical than his novel
Keep the Aspidistra Flying;
Málaga was
not
captured “without a shot being fired”: the city fell after a naval bombardment and a three-pronged land attack; Malraux was
not
a “journalistic spectator” during the Spanish Civil War, but flew many dangerous missions with the Escadre España; Orwell was
not
“paranoid” about being murdered by the Communists: they tried to kill him in Spain and his name “was on a Moscow hit list”; Victor Pritchett was
not
“always appreciative” of Orwell, but wrote a harsh and unjust review of
Homage to Catalonia;
T. S. Eliot did
not
“resist” Orwell's invitations, but stayed overnight in his flat during the Blitz; Orwell, pushing a wheelbarrow, couldn't possibly have made an “eight-mile round trip during his lunch-hour”; he had a motorboat (not a sailboat) on Jura; and Kafka did
not
destroy his papers, but gave them to Max Brod.

Bowker could also have extracted more meaning from several passages. He misses Orwell's quotation of Scott's
Marmion
in “what tangled webs we weave” and allusion to Maugham's story “The Hairless Mexican” in his unpublished story “The Hairless Ape.” It's not “astonishing” that during his wife's mourning for her dead brother Orwell lusted after Brenda Salkeld: when Eileen rejected him and withdrew into prolonged depression, he naturally sought the consolation of other women. Bowker fails to comment on Orwell's weirdly self-denigrating proposal to Anne Popham (which recalls Kafka's tortured letters to Felice Bauer); and he fails to note that Sonia's futile wish to save the moribund Orwell by taking him to Switzerland was an attempt to compensate for the lifelong guilt she felt about her inability to save a friend who'd drowned in that country.

Bowker exaggerates Orwell's superstitious schoolboy dabbling in black magic and the negative influence of his early education at a Catholic school, for there's no evidence that he disliked the nuns or was unhappy there. He mistakenly asserts that Orwell—who did his job well and could have returned after home leave—had “failed” in the Burmese Police. In the 1920s Harold Acton had got ahead in the literary race and published several volumes of poetry, but Orwell's precious years in Burma were worth infinitely more than those now forgotten poems. Besides a knowledge of Asian languages, Oriental people and colonial society, he gained valuable legal and quasi-military experience. While still in his teens he had tremendous responsibility. Burma was a crucial experience that provided material for his
best early novel,
Burmese Days
, and two of his greatest essays: “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant.” As a young recruit on the voyage out he was horrified to see a white policeman kicking a coolie, but soon compromised his values and began to beat his servants. When he left Burma he abandoned his casual brutality and taught himself compassion for the oppressed. He also gave up the purple passages in his exotic, jungly novel and cultivated a prose as transparent as a window pane.

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.