Book Review: DJ Taylor gets to the heart of George Orwell.... who still remains elusive
Undated file photo of George Orwell.
- Orwell: The New Life
- DJ Taylor
- Constable, €24.99
“It takes genius to devise pieces of mental shorthand,” DJ Taylor writes in his new biography of George Orwell.
Orwell meets this test perhaps better than any other writer in English other than Shakespeare, his words etched even in the minds of people who have read not a word of his books or who would not recognise his face in a photograph.
His grip on modern language is undeniable and unbreakable. ‘Big Brother’. ‘Newspeak’. ‘Doublethink’. ‘Room 101’. ‘Unperson’. ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’…
Orwell was someone who “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”.
A friend George Woodcock, hearing of Orwell’s death when it was announced by a guest at a party he was attending in Vancouver, recalled, “A silence fell over the room, and I realised that this gentle, modest and angry man had already become a figure of world myth.”
Taylor recounts all of the near misses in the construction of that myth: the other names considered as a nom de plume before settling on George Orwell (to replace Eric Blair) were Kenneth Miles, H Lewis Allways and PS Burton; The Last Man in Europe, the title that was nearly used for ; the agonies of getting published while Stalin was still Britain’s indispensable ally against Hitler.
The clash of attributes within Orwell’s temperament noted by Woodcock is both typical and instructive. Orwell came from, as he put it, “one of those ordinary middle-class families of soldiers, clergymen, government officials, teachers, lawyers, doctors”. Ordinary, yes, but “with an occasional glint of oddity”, as Taylor notes. In Orwell, this occasional glint became something more like a permanent beam.
The man we meet in Taylor’s book, his second biography of Orwell, is a slow-boiling stew of contradictions: a left-winger who detested “the shallow self-righteousness of left-wing intelligentsia”; an unpredictable oscillator between detachment and passionate engagement; a mild-to-heavy philanderer and a serial marriage proposer; an Old Etonian policeman who followed that up with living hand-to-mouth in the seediest corners of Paris; an anti-establishment rebel who yearned for the world as it was in 1910. Being half in love with the things he was attacking is what gave his radicalism its edge, according to Taylor.
Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, found him to be a man who is “not quite of this world but wanders on its lonely extraneous margin”. Yet from this margin, he would plunge headlong into the world, whether Paris or the industrial north of England (for ), or the Spanish Civil War.
Serving in Spain on the Republican side, shortly before he got shot in the neck on the Aragon front, Orwell had, in his words, “the misfortune to be mixed up in the internal struggle on the Government side, which left me with the conviction that there is not much to choose between Communism and Fascism”.
It was in Barcelona, following the two weeks of in-fighting that began on May Day 1937 and which left 218 dead, that Orwell first saw close-up the workings of a totalitarian state: arbitrary arrests, mass incarcerations, a permanent fear of denunciation among foreigners such as himself. Orwell and Eileen seem to have been continually spied upon by a Comintern unit and, in some cases, by their own friends. In the end, he had to escape the country to avoid arrest or worse.
Much of Orwell’s approach to life glows with unreality, never more so than when, as a widower, he upped sticks from London with his adopted son, Richard, and his sister Avril to live on a smallholding on the remote island of Jura in Scotland. Here, far from specialist doctors and care, his health declined disastrously as he flogged himself to finish his masterpiece, . (To judge by accounts of those who met him, the thin, gaunt figure we know from photographs was even more strikingly gaunt and unhealthy looking in reality. An early grave was always beckoning.)
Other examples of Orwell’s unique character and appearance pile up throughout the book. He had the strange habit of writing letters of great length and self-disclosure to virtual strangers. I also hadn’t realised that, though not a religious man, Orwell fretted greatly about the decline of religious faith. In his review of by Henry Miller (a writer Orwell revered, though perhaps not as much as he revered Joyce), he writes: “Modern man is rather like a bisected wasp which goes on sucking jam and pretends the loss of its abdomen does not matter.” Beat that for an epigram. (This line, by the way, also shows us Orwell, the sedulous observer of the natural world. He described stray bullets flying above his head in Spain as “like redshanks whistling”.)
Readers will not always find a man congenial to early 21st-century ways of thinking when it comes to relations between the sexes, homosexuality or even imperialism. As Taylor puts it, “Orwell, it can’t be too often stressed, was a man of his time.” In his short career as a teacher, he was approachable, but also exacting and — dismally — authoritarian: he caned a boy once who was unable to sit down for a week afterwards.
This book is a labour of love: “By my late teens,” Taylor writes, “just as The Jam were ‘my’ pop group and Norwich City were ‘my’ football club, so Orwell was ‘my’ writer.” “No other twentieth-century titan comes close,” he declares, “and to read him and write about him is one of the greatest satisfactions I know.”
As a means of at least half-pinning his subject down, Taylor devotes several mini-chapters to ruminating on discrete themes within Orwell’s life and character: his voice (amazingly, no recording has ever been found); his obsession with rats; his relationship with the working classes. Here again nothing is ever quite fixed or can be taken for granted: the chapter on ‘Orwell’s Enemies’ begins “Enemies is putting it strongly.”
However, there is no theme, large or small, for which DJ Taylor cannot pluck an accompanying fact from his immense knowledge of his subject matter: discussing one of Orwell’s forefathers, Charles Blair, who had built up a fortune from the trade in slaves and sugar in Jamaica, Taylor recalls that Orwell himself played a slave owner in a BBC radio drama about abolition written by Venu Chitale; writing about Orwell’s friendship with Cyril Connolly, Taylor mentions that Connolly’s military father was a snail fanatic who wrote a 660-page treatise titled ; during the Second World War, serving in the St John’s Wood Home Guard, Orwell ended up making bombs, to be used in the event of a German invasion, above a garage on Abbey Road. (Despite Orwell’s disconnection from the world, he also seems to have been an immensely practical man.)
Yet at the end of 540 pages, Orwell remains elusive. This is no discredit to Taylor: elusiveness seems to have been part of the very essence of Orwell. VS Pritchett concluded that it was “impossible to know such a straying and contradictory man well”. Indeed, this memorable, utterly idiosyncratic elusiveness (I haven’t mentioned the half of it) is one of the reasons one might be drawn to write or read such a long book about a relatively short life. Engrossing.
