Orwell (38 page)

He writes in a consistently flat and graceless style (and even “takes up the cudgels”—a cliché specifically condemned in “Politics and the English Language”); emphasizes “how his books and essays came to be written”
and published, rather than Orwell's development as an artist; and provides a strictly external view of the man—with neither vivid details nor rich revelation of character—that tends to ignore his psychological motivation, guilt, masochism and self-hatred. But Orwell (echoing Heine) stressed the inner life and self-reflectively wrote in his essay on Salvador Dalí: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying; since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

Crick was the first scholar with permission to use and quote from the unpublished papers at the Orwell Archive in London. He provides a more thoroughly documented factual biography than Peter Stansky and William Abrahams' two-volume life, which appeared in 1972 and 1979. But because Crick is more interested in Orwell's political ideas and their context than in the man who thought them out, we come no nearer to understanding the contradictions in Orwell's elusive character: Etonian prole, anticolonial policeman, Tory anarchist, Leftist critic of the Left, puritanical seducer, kindly autocrat. Though Orwell was radical in politics, he was conservative in feeling. Malcolm Muggeridge, who once planned to write his life, said he “loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future.”

Crick's comparison with Hobbes' political thought is misleading, for Orwell had comparatively few ideas and tended to express the same thoughts in all his works. He is more important for his brilliant style and noble character than for his rather superficial and frequently inconsistent political beliefs. His personal qualities—courage, compassion, honesty, integrity—led, immediately after his death, to the legend of the tall, lined and shaggy man who shot the elephant in Burma and was wounded in Spain, witnessed a hanging and saw the poor die, lived with tramps and went down the mine, and was canonized as a secular saint. Crick fails to mention that this legend was based on Orwell's own carefully constructed self-image.

Crick rejects Stansky and Abrahams' dubious theory that in 1933 Eric Blair (his real name) was suddenly transformed into the pseudonymous George Orwell (the transformation in this biography is Orwell into Crick). But Orwell was such an impersonal and aloof figure that his obscure friends of the twenties and thirties have almost nothing significant to relate about his Burmese or Parisian days. There was nothing unusual about the young Orwell, no promise of genius, very little to suggest that he would become, after D. H. Lawrence, the most influential English writer of the century. Crick does not explain how the youth who began by writing banal poems finished by transforming the political experience of an entire generation into the mythic power of
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Crick's attitude toward Orwell scholars is churlish. He sneers at their errors, though they can scarcely be blamed for being misled by the published chronology of Ian Angus, the curator of the Archive, who was instructed to prevent scholars from checking the facts. And he plunders the discoveries of his predecessors, who first established the bibliography of criticism, the history of Orwell's reputation, the reason he went from Eton to Burma (he supposedly could neither win a university scholarship nor afford the expense), and his selection and training as an imperial policeman. His account of Orwell's constabulary duties (84), for example, is lifted straight from Stansky and Abrahams (179)—without acknowledgment.

Crick argues—against the generally accepted belief first proposed by the
New Yorker
critic Anthony West—that the autobiographical essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” was probably written in 1938 rather than in 1947 (when Orwell was writing
Nineteen Eighty-Four)
, and that the
origins
of his most important novel lie in the political events of the thirties and forties rather than in his terrifying experiences in the authoritarian school. Crick quotes Orwell's statement: “I originally undertook [the essay] as a sort of pendant to Cyril Connolly's autobiography,
Enemies of Promise
(1938), he having asked me to write a reminiscence.” But this does not necessarily mean that Orwell wrote the essay just after Connolly's memoirs appeared. Crick also insists that Orwell's censored letters home during his first term at prep school give “no evidence of disturbance.” But Kipling, who also endured agonies at school, wrote in
Something of Myself:
“Badly treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.” Contrary to Crick's theory, Orwell states that these traumatic memories took place “thirty years ago and more,” which makes the date of composition precisely 1947. Connolly regards “Such, Such” as the “key to Orwell's formation.”

Once Orwell decided to become a writer—he was a late and slow starter—he pursued his goal with fanatical determination. His friend Ruth Pitter observed: “He had the gift, he had the courage, he had the persistence to go on in spite of failure, sickness, poverty, and opposition, until he became an acknowledged master of English prose.” His imaginative powers were limited, and he often sought experience for literary purposes (“I would like to spend Christmas in gaol”). Nearly every phase of his life was reflected in his books: school days in “Such, Such Were the Joys,” the East in “Shooting an Elephant” and
Burmese Days
, dishwashing and tramping in
Down and Out in Paris and London
, illness in “How the Poor Die,” teaching in
A Clergyman's Daughter
, working in a bookshop in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, investigating the condition of slums and mines in
The Road to Wigan
Pier
, fighting for Republican Spain in
Homage to Catalonia
, convalescing in “Marrakech,” childhood fishing in
Coming Up For Air
, farming at Wallington in
Animal Farm
, working for the wartime BBC in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell, who had a chronic cough as a child, was hospitalized with pneumonia in 1929, left teaching after a second attack in 1933, and had his first tubercular hemorrhage in 1938. He was always careless about his health. He worked compulsively, ate poorly, lived austerely, wore no overcoat during wintry rides on a motorbike and distrusted doctors. An anonymous gift from the novelist L. H. Myers allowed him to spend the winter of 1938 recovering in the mild climate of Morocco.

Orwell had predicted the war throughout the thirties. When it came, Connolly thought he was “enormously at home in the Blitz, among the bombs, the bravery, the rubble, the shortages, the homeless, the signs of rising revolutionary temper.” His proletarian affectations in the BBC staff canteen—slurping tea from a saucer and rolling shaggy cigarettes—em-barrassed colleagues and shocked the doormen. Friends were struck by his peculiar combination of gaiety and grimness, of personal gentleness and literary ferocity.

Though Orwell believed he was sterile, Crick suggests that the fault was more likely his wife's. They apparently had sexual problems. The heroines of
Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter
, and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
are all frigid; she may well have been frightened of his contagious disease; he had several casual affairs during the last years of the war. They finally adopted a month-old baby in June 1944. In March 1945 his wife (aged 39) died of cardiac failure during an operation for cancer of the uterus. Orwell, who had another hemorrhage while reporting the war in Germany that month (Crick says nothing about his direct experience with concentration camps), was shattered and guilt-ridden by her death. But he was determined to keep the baby, precipitously proposed to four women who gently turned him down and then capably cared for his son.

After the success of
Animal Farm
, Orwell wanted to get away from the distractions of London in order to complete
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
A friend told him about the remote island of Jura, off the west coast of Scotland, and he moved to Barnhill in May 1946. Crick opposes friends and critics like T. R. Fyvel and Anthony West who believe the move to Jura was a fatal mistake. He calls it a “long premeditated and quite sensible decision,” and then inadvertently provides evidence that contradicts his own argument. Barnhill, at the end of a seven-mile rutted track that was “extraordinarily uncomfortable and exhausting,” was far from a telephone, a doctor, a hospital. The paraffin stove in his writing room gave off “smelly and heavy fumes.”
The farm life was physically arduous, the climate was wet, the dampness “obviously harmful.”

Orwell had two hemorrhages in 1945–46; he was in poor health when he went to Jura and gravely ill when he left to enter a hospital in 1947. He had an adverse reaction to the newly discovered streptomycin, which could cure the disease and was specially imported from America. He desperately needed a warm, dry climate and would almost certainly have lived longer if he had gone to Switzerland, Morocco or the Mediterranean. He was the last of the modern writers—Chekhov, Mansfield, Kafka, Lawrence—to succumb to tuberculosis.

Orwell married the beautiful Sonia Brownell, who had been Connolly's secretary at
Horizon
, in University College Hospital in October 1949 and died there three months later at the age of 46. “The tragedy of Orwell's life,” wrote Connolly, “is that when at last he achieved fame and success he was a dying man. He had fame and was too ill to leave the room, money and nothing to spend it on, love in which he could not participate; he tasted the bitterness of dying.” But, as Orwell said of Gandhi, “How clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!”

No Orwell biographer had ever gone to Burma, though Michael Shelden made the forty-eight-hour journey from London to Orwell's house on Jura. Shelden's life is decent, dutiful and dull; his style is graceless and he fails to bring Orwell and his circle of friends to life. But his account of Orwell's two marriages is interesting, and he's surely right in stating that Sonia Brownell married Orwell on his deathbed for mercenary motives.

There is a real need for a new life of George Orwell (1903–50). Stansky and Abrahams' biography is thesis-ridden and superficial; Crick's is turgid and imperceptive. Michael Shelden's decent, dutiful and thoroughly researched life has made good use of the Orwell Archive at London University. But his numerous interviews do not seem very probing, and neither he nor the previous biographers have searched for traces of Orwell in Burma or given firsthand descriptions of the places where he served as a policeman in the 1920s. Shelden's assertion that the chief Burmese official of the district could not have been excluded from the English club is highly unlikely. Julius Nyerere, as prime minister of Tanzania, was excluded from the white club in Dar-es-Salaam even after his country had become independent.

Shelden's work also has serious flaws. He has a graceless style (“There is a description of a horse named Boxer being beaten by an army officer with a whip, and the horse is given the name ‘Boxer'”) and lacks the vivid details that bring his now-familiar subject to life. His criticism of Orwell's work is descriptive rather than analytical, and frequently descends to awkward paraphrase. The rare insights are always derived from previous critics.

Shelden clumsily and obviously maintains that “Orwell has no box into which he is determined to stuff Dickens, no ideological sledgehammer with which he wants to pound him.”
Homage to Catalonia
, Orwell's account of the Spanish War, “is an intensely personal book” that “refuses to accept easy answers.” Completely missing the wit of a provocative simile, Shelden solemnly characterizes as “intemperate” Orwell's deliberately outrageous but acute attack on socialist cranks: “all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of [Marxist] ‘progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat.” Worst of all, Shelden is disappointingly dull.

He tends to elaborate the obvious—Orwell's father was “disappointed” when his son left the Burmese police, and Orwell was “very pleased” when his first book was accepted—but tends to miss the more subtle points. The
Lucknow Pioneer
, which offered Orwell an editorial job in 1938, was Kipling's old newspaper. Andrew Morland, who treated Orwell during his last illness, had been D. H. Lawrence's doctor. And when Orwell told Middleton Murry about his tuberculosis, he knew that Murry's first two wives had died of that disease. Shelden gives very little sense of what Orwell's friends were like, what drew him to these men and what kind of relations he had with such diverse figures as the conventional Murry and the bohemian Henry Miller, the editor Max Plowman and the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, the professorial William Empson and the Hungarian refugee Arthur Koestler.

Shelden's new discoveries, based on “previously unknown documents,” tend to confirm what is already known: that
Down and Out in Paris and London
was based on fact and that Orwell was in serious danger of being arrested by his political enemies in. Spain. Though Orwell's prep school may not have seemed too bad to many other boys, it
was
hellish for him. His crush on another boy at Eton was commonplace. The information about Burma has been known since 1972, and the police report from the archives of Madrid was published in the
Observer
in 1989. Many of the names on Orwell's private list of crypto-Communists were extremely doubtful.

The most interesting part of Shelden's book is his account of Orwell's two marriages and his suggestion that Orwell's first wife, Eileen, may have had an affair in Spain with Georges Kopp, the heroic commander who was
idealized in
Homage to Catalonia.
After Eileen's doctor-brother was killed at Dunkirk, she went into a deep depression and had serious marriage problems. As Orwell wrote after her unexpected death during an operation: “I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and also treated her very badly, and I think she treated me badly too at times, but it was a real marriage in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together.”