Orwell, p.1
Orwell, page 1
For Richard Blair, with many thanks
And in memory of Peter Davison, 1926–2022
Who is he? What is he like?
Logan Pearsall Smith to Cyril Connolly, shortly after finishing Animal Farm
I don’t know if I would, as it were, get up to the point of having anything biographical written about me, but I suppose it could happen and it’s ghastly to think of some people doing it.
Letter to Richard Rees, 5 July 1946
He was decent to such a degree that his decency was almost a form of imagination.
Lucian Freud
I spent a day with Orwell just before he died. I sat on his sanatorium bed, tried to smoke the frightful cigarettes he insisted on making for himself. I heard him say: ‘The problem of the world is this: Can we get men to behave decently to each other if they no longer believe in God?’
Charles Curran, Daily Mirror, 15 December 1954
By and large I think it is true that in order to write one must have experience, which must include hardship and insecurity.
Letter to B. J. Taylor, 22 March 1947
Orwell in Time
At any point over the past fifty years or so a small band of dissidents have made it their business to inform the reading public that the Orwell game is up. In most cases this process involves the revisionist either deciding that the seams of Orwell scholarship are exhausted or insisting that the attention focused on him was hopelessly misguided to begin with. In the first category could be found Orwell’s old friend the novelist Anthony Powell, who as long ago as 1982 pronounced that ‘by this stage it is not easy to say anything new about George Orwell’. In the second lurk the editors of the New Left Review, who in 1979 predicted that Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘will be a curio in 1984’, or the academic Scott Lucas, whose Orwell (Life and Times), published in the centenary of his birth, offers a wholesale debunking of the subject’s claims to any kind of lasting literary or political esteem. Naturally, it takes guts to swim quite so strenuously against the tides that have always held back the Orwell-sceptics – the tiny handful of Stalinists who have never forgiven him for Animal Farm’s burlesque of the Soviet Revolution, say, or the left-wing purists outraged by his disdain for the communist fellow-travellers of the 1940s. On the other hand, none of these rebuttals has ever had the slightest effect on Orwell’s readers or their awareness of his centrality to the political arrangements of the twenty-first century. Upwards of seventy years after his death, he seems more important than ever.
One of the really striking things about Orwell’s long shadow is just how early his reputation solidified. Most writers – even the great ones – have their ups and downs, tread water for a generation or two, or go through periods where an exacting posterity decides to review their status in the light of information not available at the time of the first flourishing. Even Dickens, towards the end of the nineteenth century, was sometimes unfavourably compared to his old rival Thackeray on the snobbish grounds that the author of Vanity Fair was more of a ‘gentleman’. Orwell was never a victim of this critical sand-shifting, and his triumphs were set in stone almost from the moment of his death. Within a few years of his passing in January 1950, his two great novels were being filmed, animated and adapted for radio, while the younger talents who followed in his wake fell over themselves to acknowledge him as a formative influence. ‘Of all the writers who appeal to the post-war intelligentsia he is far and away the most potent,’ Kingsley Amis declared in 1957. ‘No modern writer has his air of passionately believing what he has to say and of being passionately determined to say it as forcefully and simply as possible.’
Amis was a left-winger heading purposefully towards the right, but the specimen Orwell-fancier of the post-war years was as least as likely to be an erstwhile conservative veering to the left. Once his early death and the tumultuous success of Nineteen Eighty-Four had turned him into a legend, his appeal became universal: a Tory prime minister summoning up a vision of bygone England; a freedom fighter in some ground-down former Soviet republic; a politics student debating the nature and uses of propaganda – all of them could look to Orwell and find something that not only existed nowhere else but seemed to explain a world which Orwell himself had had no opportunity to quantify. Just as the Marxist critic Raymond Williams, writing in 1973, is charmed by Orwell’s foresight and his ‘liberating consciousness’, thinks Newspeak, the artificial language of Nineteen Eighty-Four, offers the ‘central perception’ that there is a relationship between social and linguistic forms, and marvels that ‘it is as if [Orwell] had seen the news reels from Vietnam’, so a substantial proportion of the US electorate were sufficiently impressed by the resemblance of modern America to Orwell’s dystopia to inflate Amazon sales of the novel by something over 900 per cent in the week of Donald Trump’s inauguration.
And this, it should straightway be said, is not an Anglo-American or even a Eurocentric view: one might note Orwell’s popularity in Zimbabwe, where the crowds protesting against Robert Mugabe’s government were fond of comparing him to Napoleon, the leader of the Manor Farm pigs, or in Myanmar, where a Western journalist was assured by a local that ‘Animal Farm is a very Burmese book… it is about pigs and dogs ruling the country’. In much the same way, ‘Orwellian’ has become one of the key adjectives of the modern age, endlessly pressed into service to describe anything from an over-vigilant CCTV system to a government plan for ID cards or the absurdities of cancel culture, one of those all-purpose words – the correct term is probably a ‘floating signifier’ – that long ago tugged free from its original moorings and went flying off into the outer margins of cyberspace, sanctified to its users (and mis-users) by virtue of its connection to the dystopian world of hate, enforced obedience and state-sanctioned suppression that Orwell coaxed into life in his Hebridean farmhouse three-quarters of a century ago. In May 2021, for example, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that GCHQ’s bulk interception of online communications was illegal, no fewer than three of judges invoked a passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given time.’
All this, naturally, is a mark of Orwell’s universality. It takes genius to devise pieces of mental shorthand – Big Brother and Room 101 are two more – that have entered the everyday language of people who would struggle to recognise your face in a photograph and have never read a word of your books. Like Dickens, Orwell is not merely a popular writer who has sold millions of copies of his works: he is someone who has quarried his way down into the heart of the human condition and, by doing so, managed to colonise the mental world both of his own age and the ones that followed. As even those critics who profess themselves faintly bewildered by the constant re-imaginings and extensions of the Orwell industry usually concede, this process is unlikely to stop any time soon: the world outside the window is too Orwellian, too pre-ordained, too mysteriously foretold, for the connection to be ignored. Significantly, having begun the piece quoted above by wondering if there is anything left to say about Orwell, Anthony Powell ends it by remarking – this is 1982, remember, when the Cold War had several more years to run – ‘that we may wish he were here to see what is happening in Poland and Afghanistan’. Four decades later we may wish he were here to see what is happening in Ukraine, in China and a dozen other places where individual and collective freedom is under threat from what he once called ‘the smelly little orthodoxies that are now contending for our souls’: those malign exterior forces, vengeful and insistent, that are bent on stopping us from living in conditions of peace, freedom and self-determination – and all the other abstract nouns whose desirability Orwell spent his short lifetime in proclaiming.
Part I A Question of Upbringing
1903–1927
People always grow up like their names. It took me nearly thirty years to work off the effects of being called Eric.
Letter to Rayner Heppenstall, 16 April 1940
1 Then and Now
I do earnestly think you are wrong. The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries, but between authoritarians and libertarians.
Letter to Malcolm Muggeridge, 4 December 1948
It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
Anthony Powell
On the morning of 13 October 1949 a small group of visitors could be seen making their way through the entrance of University College Hospital in Gower Street, London WC1. There were four of them altogether: a plump, blonde girl in her early thirties named Sonia Brownell, her tall, dark-haired friend Janetta,I Janetta’s husband Robert Kee, and a slightly older man named David Astor. All were in some degree connected with the world of books and journalism. Sonia, for example, was currently employed on Cyril Connolly’s monthly magazine Horizon; Kee, the author of a novel, A Crowd is Not Company, describing his experiences as a prisoner of war, had recently set up the publishing firm of MacGibbon & Kee; Astor was the editor and co-proprietor of the Observer. They were on their way to an event thought to be unprecedented in the annals of the hospital: the wedding of a patient who was too sick to leave his bed. Astor, who had made the arrangements, had a copy of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special licence in his pocket. Each guest, carefully negotiating the long, shiny corridor that led to Room 65, would have been conscious of the role they had agreed to fill: Sonia, the bride-to-be; Kee there to give her away (Sonia’s father had died long ago in India); Astor the best man; Janetta as witness. All they now required was the arrival of the hospital chaplain, the Rever end W. H. Braine, to conduct the ceremony.
The sheer oddity of Orwell’s second marriage occurred to nearly everyone who attended it. His first wedding, thirteen years before, had taken place in a country church in Hertfordshire with a contingent of relatives looking on from the pews. This time round, apart from bride, groom and celebrant, there were only three people squeezed into a hospital room with the noise of the traffic booming outside the window. By this point the groom had been bed-bound with advanced tuberculosis for the past nine months; it was doubtful whether he could survive. Over the entire proceedings, meanwhile, hung the question of motive. Kee remembered Orwell propped up in bed ‘but wholly participating and showing real attachment to Sonia’. For all the peculiarity of the circumstances, Astor thought it a ‘real wedding’ albeit ‘very strange’, with the spectre of approaching death hanging in the air: ‘I can only think he was imagining he would still have a life.’ Janetta, who left the only detailed account of the ceremony, found herself absorbed by the surroundings. Apart from the bedside tables, a couple of chairs and a glass table near the door, there was no furniture, and the atmosphere ‘was one of bleakness and touching sadness’.
Never one for religion or matrimony (although she was herself to be married four times), Janetta, as she fiddled nervously with the bottle of champagne Sonia had handed to her for safe keeping, found herself inexpressibly moved, overcome with the poignance of the spectacle, conscious of its spectacular incongruity – the Reverend Braine in his flowing robes; the champagne bottle set down amid the medical paraphernalia; the counterpoint of Orwell and Sonia’s voices uttering the responses. ‘I think I had tears in my eyes watching that ill, smiling face.’ Was there a congratulatory toast? Janetta thought that the champagne was consumed around the bedside, after which the guests departed for a wedding breakfast which Astor, at the prompting of Arthur Koestler’s wife Mamaine, had arranged at the Ritz. The alternative, as Mamaine put it, would have been for the bride ‘to go home and eat bread and milk on her wedding day, which I knew she was rather dreading to have to do’. In Mayfair they ate a sustaining meal of oysters, filets de sole d’Antin, supreme de volaille à la Ritz with green beans and potatoes and poire Melba. The signed menu card bears the additional signatures of the bride and groom’s friends Mamaine Koestler and her sister Celia, and Kee’s business partner James MacGibbon (Orwell would have been furious had he known that many years later MacGibbon would be unmasked as a Soviet spy). There is one curiosity. For practically the only time in her life, Sonia uses her husband’s original surname. Here on her wedding day she was Sonia Blair.
Visitors to Room 65 over the next couple of weeks agreed that Orwell was immensely cheered by his wedding. Sitting up in bed in the crimson corduroy jacket his friends Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge had bought him to be married in, he had, Powell thought, ‘an unaccustomed epicurean air’. In some indefinable way, he seemed in ‘better form’ than Powell had ever known him. The Bloomsbury diarist Frances Partridge, who came across the Kees on their return from the Ritz, thought that his chances were rated fifty-fifty, ‘and as he is much in love with her everyone hopes that the marriage will give him a new interest in life’. But the arrival of the second Mrs Orwell was a false dawn. In mid-November the patient had a relapse. Two months later he was dead. In the end Sonia’s marriage lasted for exactly one hundred days.
* * *
The first critical studies of Orwell’s work, by Laurence Brander, who had known him at the BBC, and John Atkins, were published shortly after his death. Many more were to follow over the next three decades, several of them fleshed out by personal reminiscence: Paul Potts’s engaging memoir ‘Don Quixote on a Bicycle’ appeared in the London Magazine in 1957; Richard Rees’s study Fugitive from the Camp of Victory in 1961; George Woodcock’s The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell in 1967. Meanwhile, the wish, expressed by Orwell in his will, that no biography of him should appear was becoming increasingly tricky to enforce. While Sonia began her campaign in the 1950s by installing Malcolm Muggeridge as a decoy biographer, remained a vigilant enforcer of her husband’s copyrights – there was a legendary meeting with David Bowie in which she turned down his plan to stage a musical of Nineteen Eighty-Four – and managed to see off all but a single authorised version during her lifetime, by the late twentieth century the stream had turned into a torrent. Since Bernard Crick’s inaugural effort in 1980, which Sonia lived to read and disapprove of, there have been four more full-length biographies – one of which I wrote myself – half a dozen introductions to his life and times, and countless studies of aspects of his work. In recent years Planet Orwell has grown minutely particularised. There have been books about Orwell’s sense of smell, about his health, about his politics, about his relationship with Winston Churchill (albeit that the two men never met), about his time in Southwold, where he lived on and off in the late 1920s and early 1930s, about his declining years on the remote Inner Hebridean island of Jura, about both his wives, his attitude to nature, his attitude to ‘Englishness’, his attitude to God and a whole lot more besides. In the seventy-three years since his death the pile of volumes either by or about him must have reached the height of a small terraced house. Why add to them?
To that always inexhaustible ‘relevance’, those files of newspaper articles about Brexit, or the future of NATO or the latest technological updates that begin by asking the question ‘What would Orwell have thought?’ can be added a second justification for a new biography: fresh information. In the two decades since the centenary of his birth in 2003, a vast amount of new material has come to light. A description of these finds is given in ‘A Note on Sources’, but they include caches of hitherto unknown letters to two of the women he aspired to marry, significant details of his relationship with his first wife, intriguing glimpses of the life he led in Suffolk in the 1930s, his adventures in the London literary world of the 1940s, and his last years on Jura. At times their effect is to alter the view that posterity has come to take of Orwell and, in several instances, to make him seem a radically different person. Meanwhile, as the data expands, so the number of expert witnesses continues to dwindle. When I started work on this book in 2019 there were ten people left in the world with coherent memories of Orwell. The oldest was ninety-five; the youngest – Orwell’s adopted son Richard – was seventy-five. When I finished writing it there were eight. Not the least of the reasons for wanting to have another shot is that there are so few Orwell survivors left to consult. Before very long there will be none.
At the same time, there are procedural issues to take account of. Biographies are necessarily snapshots, in which the biographer confronts a particular sensibility at a particular point in time using a set of skills, prejudices and assumptions common to the era in which he or she labours. The new analytical skills brought to biography and to literary criticism in the twenty-first century are as applicable to Orwell as to anyone else. It is perfectly possible, and sometimes desirable, to inspect him through the prism of colonialism, or the Me Too movement or even, given the source of the original family fortune, Black Lives Matter, while remembering that there is very little novelty in these interrogations: after all, feminist scholars such as Daphne Patai were busy deconstructing Orwell’s patriarchal tendencies nearly forty years ago, while Tosco Fyvel’s exploration of his attitude to Jewishness dates from the time of the Falklands War. Orwell, it can’t be too often stressed, was a man of his time, with a set of attitudes towards gender relations, homosexuality and even imperialism that many a modern reader may find objectionable. Somehow, once the dust has settled and the fact that Orwell once referred to Stephen Spender as ‘one of your fashionable pansies’ duly filed away, the man and his work are still there and liable to remain so. I once sat on a literary festival panel next to the feminist critic Beatrix Campbell as she lamented The Road to Wigan Pier’s sexual bias and the effect was like watching a small child trying to bring down an elephant with a pea-shooter.
