It was a real pleasure to spend some more time getting to know the genial, flawed and very human genius that was George Orwell. I was broadly familiar with the structure of Orwell’s life – India, prep school, Eton, Burma and so on – but Taylor draws these events together into a coherent whole. So when I say this, it needs to be seen in that context: Orwell remains as much a mystery to me now as he ever was. This edition quotes John Sutherland on the dust-jacket as saying “He (Taylor) presents the ‘living’ Orwell as well as anyone will be able to”. That may be the case, but to me Orwell remains enigmatic, hidden, and incomplete. I’ll try and explain why.
There are so many aspects of Orwell’s life that remain puzzling to me. Some of the things we don’t really know about him include:
Why didn’t he go to university?
Why did he leave his post in the Burmese Imperial police, after more than five years of service?
Why didn’t he get a conventional job and write in his spare time?
What did he do for money – was he living off his parents, figures who also don’t really emerge into the light in this book.
Almost everything about his relationship with his first wife, Eileen
Let’s take those in order. The traditional explanation of his decision to join the Burmese Imperial Police instead of going to university is that his grades at Eton weren’t good enough. Certainly he wasn’t a star pupil and financial pressures to get a proper job, one following in the family traditions of Imperial service, would have been compelling. But that’s just speculation – we don’t really know for certain what led him to this decision. Having made it he stuck at the job for several years (five and a half) – this wasn’t just the equivalent of a brief period of national service – but on returning to the UK he made the key decision in his life – to become a writer. Where did that decision come from? Were there any signs prior to this that Orwell aspired to the life of an author? Had he been writing out in Burma? If so there’s no record of it. And what a strange way to start the life of a writer – instead of using the five years of experience in Burma (which he was later to use of course) he instead decides almost out of the blue to go tramping? Why? Even in the context of going ‘undercover in the under-classes’, something earlier writers had done, this still seems such a sudden and mysterious choice. Collecting material is something some writers feel compelled to do, but there seems few less promising areas to mine for content for a novel than tramps. Orwell did of course use this content, both in essays and in A Clergyman’s Daughter, but it still seems a very random choice.
When asked later in life about his decision to quit the Burmese police Orwell always cited his opposition to imperialism, and texts such as A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant certainly support that idea. I can’t suppress the suspicion that this was a simplification of his reasons (which is fair enough, most life decisions are complex and when explaining them to other people we often reduce them to one or two elements).
Orwell did have conventional jobs, lots of them. He worked in Parisian kitchens and hotels, he sold books, he was a tutor, briefly a headmaster (in a private school with a teaching staff of two, where his CV as an Old Etonian would have helped) and during the war he worked for the BBC. I think he never stayed in a job for much more than two years. Was this because he couldn’t settle at a job for any length of time, getting bored and disenchanted with the value of his work very quickly, or was it because work was always supplementary to his writing, something that paid the rent and kept the bailiffs away, always secondary to his ‘real’ work? Once again we simply don’t have any definitive evidence that explains this nomadic lifestyle which was reflected in his relentless moving from address to address, never staying in the same place for more than a year or two – a full list of Orwell’s residences would fill an address book.
Despite making a reasonable income from his journalism, his publishing, and his various jobs, I suspect Orwell often relied on his parents and wealthier friends for financial support. I admittedly have no real evidence for this, just another suspicion – he did keep going back to his parents’ house in Southwold when he first started out as a writer. Certainly he had that middle class carelessness with money, putting up with considerable hardship when necessary and always assuming that something would come up to help out. You really can only live that life if you know there is always some support available as a last resort – Orwell was never going to find himself homeless.
And finally there is the closed book that is his relationship with Eileen. They married in 1936 after a relatively brief courtship (their very modest wedding was held in Wallington, the hamlet where Orwell ran the village stores), she went with him to Spain to support him in the civil war, and she died in 1945 just after the end of the war in Europe, and very shortly after having adopted their son, Richard. Taylor speculates the marriage was reasonably happy although hints at affairs on both sides – other biographers have been much more categorical about their infidelities, and certainly Orwell left some deeply incriminating letters. Lots of people who knew the couple wrote about them, but none seem to have understood the real dynamic of the relationship, what attracted one to the other, what made them tick as a couple. Why did Eileen put up with being a junior partner in the relationship despite her many talents, indeed why did she put up with living in the cottage in Wallington for so long with its outdoor privy, no heating and cramped rooms.
What is all the more extraordinary about this mysteriousness of the real Orwell is that he was a journalist, was famous after Animal Farm, was interviewed many times and had many writers as friends who left memoirs. A surprising number of people he wrote to preserved his letters, even when he asked them not to. Yet no recording of his voice exists, and I believe there is no film of him either, despite his working for a year and half at the BBC!
Another point that comes across vividly in this text is the tragedy of Orwell’s early death. He published his first novel, Burmese Days, in 1934, and was dead less than sixteen years later. In that time he did an extraordinary amount of work, and living, for a man in such poor health. He published six novels and three full-length pieces of non-fiction, got married, fought in the Spanish Civil War, worked at the BBC, served in the Home Guard, wrote a prodigious amount of journalism, reviews, diaries and journals, essays, opinion pieces, and letters, finding the time somehow to adopt a child and then remarry in the final weeks of his life. Dying aged 46, it is striking just how incredibly truncated his life was – cramming all those novels and experiences into little more than a decade dominated by the rise of fascism and the second world war.
If you are not a fan of Orwell you probably won’t become one on reading this biography. Taylor is honest about Orwell’s shortcomings and flaws. What doesn’t emerge clearly from these pages is Orwell the politician. There’s no real account of Orwell’s personal political journey from Old Etonian and imperial policeman to avowed socialist. The Spanish Civil War was obviously a turning point, but the transition was much more complex than just changing his views after being shot at (and of course, shot). His membership of the Independent Labour Party, a left-wing off-shoot of the Labour Party, is barely mentioned, and although his friendships and acquaintances within the Attlee Government are referred to there is no sense of Orwell the political animal, which was such a central part of his identity.
The chronological narrative is broken up from time to time with short thematic chapters – Orwell on faces, rats, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and so on. These essays felt like a way of using left-over material (and many of them did appear in the original version of this biography) and felt strangely out of place. If I was editing this book I would have put a line through all of them and suggested they be sent to the Orwell Society for publication.
The attempt early on to draw comparisons with St Cyprians, Orwell’s prep school (a private, fee-paying school where the middle classes sent their children to prepare them for public school examinations) and Oceania are absurd. Similar ill-thought through comparisons could have easily been made between Oceania and the BBC or Eton or the Burmese Imperial Police Force – the idea that an author’s literary ideas must all have their origins in childhood experiences or institutions is as ridiculous as it is demeaning, undermining the ability of an author to – you know – make things up.
There were a couple of other things that bugged me about this book and should really be fixed in the next edition:
a) Eileen’s war-time job. See if you can spot why this paragraph irked me? Chapter 20 ‘The Melting Iceberg’ describes Orwell’s account to find a role in the overall war effort. On page 366 Taylor, quoting a letter from Orwell to his literary agent, tells us that
“The letter to Moore notes ‘my wife has already got a job in a government office’ as if Eileen’s rapid deployment were the most natural thing in the world. But it might be wondered just exactly how, in the paranoiac conditions that prevailed in Whitehall corridors circa 1939, the wife of a writer regarded as an ‘extremist’ by the India Office, suspected of importing contraband material and already on MI5’s radar, could have fetched up in such a sensitive part of the wartime bureaucracy”.
I reread this sentence several times thinking “What sensitive part of the wartime bureaucracy”? What was her job, and why was it such a matter of surprise that she was given it. It’s not until page 375 that we learn what it was – she worked in the Censorship Department. An editor should have caught this omission and made the minor changes required for the narrative to make sense. A similar thing happens in:
b) Chapter 26 ‘Pain in Side Very Bad’ is prefaced by two quotes dated 1948. The text itself then starts with this sentence:
“The Blair party left for Jura on the afternoon of 10 April, went by overnight train to Glasgow, and then flew on to Islay. By the evening of 11 April they were back in Barnhill.”
What year is this? We are in the closing years of Orwell’s life – every year matters. The previous chapter is one of the rather irritating filler essays – this one is on Orwell and anti-Semitism – so the reader can be forgiven for not knowing or remembering that Taylor is picking up where he left off the preceding chapter. It’s just unnecessary and irritating, when a year after the first reference to April would make everything clear.
These are minor, fixable points.
I opened this review with a comment on one of the observations from critics quoted on the book’s dust-jacket, so I am going to close with one as well. Hilary Spurling from the Daily Telegraph apparently wrote
“A persuasive and profoundly moving exploration of the ways in which Orwell’s work was constructed from the stones of a ruined life”.
I know he had health issues, died early, and lost his first wife, but despite all that I never thought of Orwell’s life as ruined. There are sad moments in his story but it is not a tragedy – he lived, wrote and achieved more in his 46 years than many of us manage in 70. And while his early works draw upon his life experiences, the idea that Animal Farm and 1984 are in any way autobiographical (or ‘constructed from the stones’ of his life) is preposterous. This instinct, to try and find the seeds of a writer’s creativity in their life stories, actually ends up diminishing their ability to tell stories and work with ideas. That’s one reason why Orwell was so dismissive of his early novels in later life, to the extent of not allowing them to be republished on the back of the popularity of Animal Farm in particular. What led to that late blooming of creativity and inventiveness remains yet another mystery about this extraordinary author.