Who was the man who made 1984 a household year?
George orwell requested in his will, made three days before his death, that no biography of him be written. A writer should know better. Even if Orwell had not become posthumously famous he would have been too tempting a subject, for his short life was filled with dramatic reversals. He was a police officer in British Burma, a bum in Paris and London, a wounded soldier in the Spanish civil war, hunted by his own side, and a writer racing with death to finish his masterpiece. Terribly reticent even with close friends and family members, he left a spotty record of himself—which in itself tempts biographers who like psychological theories.
Peter Lewis’s admirably brief biography, George Orwell: The Road to 1984, leaves such theories aside. He does not belabor the facts, or go into deep literary criticism. He simply gives, in a breezy, interesting way, the story of Orwell’s life. A vivid picture of Orwell as a gloomy, likeable, unflagging intelligence emerges. Numerous photos help recapture the period. I thought the final line aptly summarized the book’s impact. It was from the poet W. H. Auden, on Orwell’s writing: “Today, reading his reactions, my first thought is: Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!”
His book reviews could be brutal, even when discussing a friend’s work. His discussions of politics showed an unfailing nose for hypocrisy. He could not have been an easy friend, yet he left a crowd of admirers, who apparently genuinely cared for him and liked him. All biographies leave a residue of sadness; they are like novels in which the hero dies at the end. George Orwell’s life seems melancholy all through—the silhouette of an admirable man made lonely because he couldn’t stop telling the truth.
Born under the name of Eric Blair to a minor civil servant, Orwell went to school at Eton. In Britain this branded him, just through the accent he acquired, as a member of the upper-crust intelligentsia. He was intensely uncomfortable with this position. Instead of going on to Cambridge or Oxford, he joined the Imperial police, which stationed him in Burma for five years.
He returned home, quit, and became more or less a bum, choosing to live on next to nothing in order to learn about the poorest of the poor. This was the beginning of his rejection of his middle-class past, with its conservative moorings. It was part reporting, for he wanted to write a book about it. But an element of penance seems to have been involved. Orwell was haunted by class. The book required five years, sometimes spent in unconvincing disguise. He really wanted to write fiction, but couldn’t get any published. Down and Out in Paris and London was published after two rejections and several required revisions. In his frustration he left the rejected manuscript on a friend’s floor, telling her to throw it out. She got it published instead. Apparently because he was not proud of the book, he published it under the name George Orwell.
Now, he was a literary man, but it proved to be a difficult life. Two more books were published with little success. He went to Spain, got caught in the revolutionary spirit, and volunteered to fight Franco. Shot through the neck by a sniper, he recovered. Then the faction he had joined was branded as too revolutionary by the Soviet-sponsored Communists and was outlawed. He hid like a hunted beast, until he could get out of the country. When he returned to Britain he found no influential socialists interested in an account of the witch-hunt. Though a socialist to his dying day, Orwell caught a powerful, lasting dose of anti-Stalinism. It did not make him popular with other socialists. He was far in advance of the massive defections from communism that came after the Stalin-Hitler pact. He also learned to despise the self-censorship of the left-wing establishment. Orwell wrote a splendid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia, of which unsold copies still gathered dust in the warehouse when he died.
It was during World War II that he began to find himself as an essayist. His essays still have a shocking freshness, like cold water. He tried desperately to enlist in the army, but was turned down each time because of his lungs. Instead, he had to work for the BBC, broadcasting to India. He wrote for newspapers, reviewing books and commenting on the times. It was work he disliked, and he compared it to pouring his spirit down the drain “half a pint at a time.”
But then, at the end of the war, he got an idea for a fable about Stalinism. It would involve animals revolting against a farmer, and turning the farm into an animal commune. Sound like a promising idea? It did not to anyone but him, but it became Animal Farm. The timing could not have been worse: the Russians were our victorious allies, and it was not the best time to attack them. He did anyway. Three publishers rejected it; he was ready to publish it himself as a pamphlet when a fourth finally took it. Twenty American publishers went through the book before one accepted it.
After that his life would have been easy if he had not lost his wife, who had been a tremendous sustaining help, and his health. He was in and out of the hospital, and only barely managed to get his next good idea to the typesetter before going into a hospital for good. He worked from a remote, cold Scottish island with his adopted son, Richard. Not even a typist could be found to go there to help him, and he apparently typed much of 1984 in bed. For fear of passing on tuberculosis he could not even touch his son, whom he loved more openly than he had ever loved anyone.
He was only 46 when he died in the winter of 1950. The doctors were letting him go to Switzerland; he had a fishing pole in his hospital room, ready for the trip. He said, with his usual grim humor, “Either I’m better or they don’t want a corpse on their hands.” Evelyn Waugh, the Catholic novelist, visited him not long before his death and reported him “very near to God.” But Orwell, an atheist, never said so to himself, unless you consider his desire for a Church of England funeral a statement. He was not the type to make sentimental gestures.
A biography is the tribute Orwell didn’t want; he preferred to be remembered by his writings. 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century, a collection of essays, makes a powerful tribute to Orwell just in the fact that such a crowd of intelligent people are still spurred to write on what he wrote. The essays vary in quality and interest, as one would expect, and on the whole they would make dense prose for someone not terribly interested in political theory. But in mulling over the meaning of 1984, this book puts you in smart company.
The focus is “totalitarianism,” the kind of government usually ascribed to Hitler and Stalin, and which Ayatollah Khomeini apparently wishes to achieve. Totalitarianism is brutal, but more than brutal: it aims to master church, family, even thoughts. 1984 portrays the ultimate, and no one has matched it. Stalin came closest, but his regime has faded into a merely cruel authoritarian state, where people can make jokes about their leader without fearing the prison camps. One of the debating points in this book is whether this “failed totalitarianism,” usually associated with socialist countries, is on the same moral level as traditional authoritarian states, dictatorships which, while cruel, leave family, church, and tradition alone. Right-wing theorists make much of this distinction, for it makes it possible to support, say, Chile, but not Poland. Left-wing theorists suggest that to the person being tortured the distinction is academic.
Another debating point is whether a form of 1984 can come into power without using force. This view holds that Orwell partly missed the boat—Big Brother need not use torture, he can merely use the advertising agencies, and we will all conform to his way of thinking quite willingly. Or alternatively, technology, our promised savior, has mutated into an omnipresent Big Brother. Some opponents of nuclear power or computerization would take this view. They seem to hint, though they do not state explicitly, that a spiritual crisis is at the heart of 1984. The problem is dehumanization, not political terror, and there is more than one way to achieve it.
Orwell would have liked updating 1984 in company with these thinkers. He foresaw the dominance of television years before its spread. Only, as Bernard Avishai puts it, in 1984 “Big Brother won’t let you turn the set off. In America—little brother.” What would Orwell have made of that? I wish I knew.
George Orwell: The Road to 1984, by Peter Lewis (Harcourt, Bruce, Jovanovich, 1981, 122 pp.; $12.95). 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century, Irving Howe, editor (Harper and Row, 1983, 276 pp.; $3.50). Reviewed by Tim Stafford.
