George Orwell was born 100 years ago today. He had a short, not exactly happy life, but he left an impressively diverse body of work, writes Eileen Battersby
Literary fame is as capricious as any other. Popular appeal, good timing and that time-honoured winner the mood of the moment can make a book famous, but nothing confers immortality quite as effectively or as securely as historical fact. Few would dispute the importance and truth of Animal Farm, from 1945, or Nineteen Eighty-Four, from 1949. As satire and stark prophecy they continue to compel. But however much these modern Swiftian classics convince, their reputations always leave one feeling the need to add that there is far more to George Orwell than a viciously ingenious political satire cum fable and his final work, that cautionary tale about futuristic dehumanisation that so quickly became dangerously real.
Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Eric Arthur Blair, a lower upper-middle-class Etonian who wanted to be a writer and duly became George Orwell. If it is a century since his birth, it is just over half a century since his death, in January 1950, five months shy of his 47th birthday. Orwell lived a short, not exactly happy life, suffering poor health and a great deal of self-doubt and leaving his adored adopted son an orphan. But he produced an impressively diverse body of work.
His biographers can't seem to arrive at a consensus. Repressed bully, saintly prophet or both? Does it matter? Contradictions are always useful. Orwell - the sickly man with diseased lungs who nevertheless volunteered to fight in Spain, where he was wounded - has his share of them. As a writer he passes the ultimate test by being as great as he is important.
So often regarded as an inspired political journalist and essayist who also wrote novels, Orwell is probably the most underrated novelist of the major 20th-century writers. For all the passion of his polemic and his sense of social injustice, Orwell was more than a commentator possessed of a natural, almost colloquial prose style, capable of extraordinary essays such as his 25,000-word critique of Dickens; he understood the essential grief of the individual as well as he did the tyranny of government.
True, his humanity was often best expressed within a social and non-fictional context. "She looked up as the train passed," he writes in a famous passage from The Road To Wigan Pier (1937),"and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is 25 and looks 40, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then we are mistaken when we say that it isn't the same for them as it would be for us and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. She knew well enough what was happening to her - understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drainpipe."
Yet even in a work as polemical as Nineteen Eighty-Four, marked by Orwell's concern for the individual, he is writing a love story. Sex when it occurs between Winston Smith, a man who has lost his personality, and Julia is both escape and a desperate attempt to reassert themselves as human. In A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) he made an honourable if dismal attempt at a Joycean narrative and strayed far closer to George Gissing.
Invariably challenging Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four for centre stage in any discussion of Orwell is Homage To Catalonia (1937), his account of fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
It is an honest book, brilliantly capturing the chaos of that most chaotic of conflicts. For many readers it is the Spanish Civil War, an eye-witness account plotting the bewilderment of it for all, Orwell included. Look to his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), and running parallel to the personal frustrations of Flory, the police officer anti-hero, is an exposé of British imperialism.
All of this deflects attention from Orwell the novelist. But the key to understanding him as a writer, and perhaps even as a man, could be in his finest novel, Coming Up For Air. Published only days before his father's death, in the summer of 1939, it is the story of George Bowling, fat, 45 and, most importantly, conscious not only of the threat of war but also of the impending death of the England he once knew. For him the time has come to revisit Lower Binfield, his childhood home. "The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth," he begins.
It is one of those novels that are difficult to forget. Not because Bowling is charming or tragic but because he is neither tragic nor appealing - and is well aware of his many defects. It was the first of Orwell's books that I read. It was lying on the floor of a bookstore, having fallen off the shelf. Despite the fall its cover was white and very clean. Its contents impressed my 15-year-old self so profoundly that I went on an Orwell binge and read all the books as well as Inside The Whale, a collection of essays. Here was a writer worth trying to figure out - he still justifies the effort.
Even his most ardent admirers would admit that Orwell's socialism was simplistic, but his sense of outrage was always real. Invariably it was the individual, not the theory, that he could evoke. In Bowling he explores not only being human but also coming to terms with the limitations of what that means. Married to the miserable Hilda, being father to two screaming brats and living in an anonymous suburb, Bowling is no hero and, most importantly, never aspired to heroism. The absence of the heroic renders him utterly human, as does his lack of ambition. His sentimentality is well tempered by the cynicism of middle age.
Orwell, or at least Blair, as he was until the publication of his first book, Down And Out In Paris And London, in 1933 - he took his pen name from a river flowing near the last home of his parents - was born in the same year as Evelyn Waugh. In terms of prose style there is no contest. Waugh is a master of it, as well as a very fine novelist with a flair for comedy. But Orwell's work is far more diverse, with a weightier political content. Between them they wrote several of the most important books of 20th-century English literature. Both wrote well about society. Waugh lamented the passing of a particularly English way of life in passages of remarkable beauty through Brideshead Revisited, like Animal Farm published in 1945.
None of Waugh's narrators can match the Everyman candour of Bowling. "I was trying to shave with a bluntish razor blade while the water ran into the bath. My face looked back at me out of the mirror, and underneath, in a tumbler of water on the little shelf over the washbasin, the set of teeth that belonged in the face . . . . I haven't such a bad face, really. It's one of those brickey-red faces that go with butter-coloured hair and pale-blue eyes."
A chance headline proves an unlikely memory prompt, returning Bowling's mind to Sunday hymns competitively sung in the church of his childhood. And this marks the beginning of his retrospective meditations. "The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time, I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened 10 or 20 years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past."
Bowling's articulation at times rises beyond his character, and this is a weakness of the book. But Orwell is more consistent than not and tries to steer Bowling true to himself. "I don't idealize my childhood, and unlike many people I've no wish to be young again," he says, later qualifying it with one of many quasi philosophical comments: "I am about my childhood - not my own particular childhood but the civilisation which I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick."
His thoughts move from fishing as among the "things that don't belong to the modern world", and he continues: "The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool - and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside - belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler."
Fishing and reading fill up his early life. Then both are overshadowed by the emergence of Bowling the soldier. So taken is he with this that his pride in his uniform, specifically his appearance in it, upstages any feelings he may have had at the death of his father and, most pointedly, when his mother abruptly dies. Emotion and its absence are well examined by Bowling. Orwell pleads no case for his narrator. Bowling recalls noting of his ailing mother: "I'd known her as a great splendid protecting kind of creature, a bit like a ship's figurehead and a bit like a broody hen, and after all she was only a little old woman in a black dress. Everything was changing and fading."
Many elements make Coming Up For Air an important novel. It provides further insights into Orwell's life and is an example of Orwell balancing an individual's reading of life against the background of a changing culture. It is where the modern English novel begins to move closer to its 1930s and subsequent US counterparts. Keep The Aspidistra Flying, published in 1936, also explored this territory but not quite as effectively as the later novel, which triumphs through its first-person voice.
Regardless of incidental biographical details, Bowling no more than Gordon Comstock, the ineffectual central character of Keep The Aspidistra Flying, is George Orwell.
Winston Smith may well be the creation he had most in common with. Orwell's father was a Victorian, a believer in empire. His son the writer refuted many of the essential notions of the world he was born into. The passion, anger and truth that often set Orwell's political writings slightly off balance - but ensured the insights of his criticism and made his personalised reportage, such as Down And Out In Paris And London, The Road To Wigan Pier and Homage To Catalonia so persuasive - consolidate the achievement of Coming Up For Air.
