LETTERS: Orwell: A Life in Letters.Selected and Annotated by Peter Davison Harvill Secker, 542pp. £20
THE CONJUNCTION in a title of the words “Orwell” and “life” strikes a certain terror in the breast. My own bookshelf features, side by side, biographies by Gordon Bowker, Bernard Crick, Jeffrey Meyers, Michael Shelden and DJ Taylor, and a few shorter memoirs and studies are lurking somewhere, too. The present volume, however, though ambiguously named, proves to be not the life of a literary man but a selection of his correspondence through which it may be possible to discern some elements of his biography and character.
It might be going too far to say that this was a book we needed, but after so much (inevitably repetitious) judgment in the five biographies mentioned above, published between 1980 and 2003, it is a relief to return to Orwell’s words and, if one wishes, to make one’s own judgment of the man based on these.
Judgment is the word. Eric Blair/George Orwell was a man much inclined to judge others – often harshly – and in recent years, after an initial spell of roughly three decades when he came close to canonisation – "St George of England" – a more critical generation has set about judging him. On the works there is near consensus: on the genius side are Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Fourand a fair number of the political essays; on the hack side are the other novels; and in between are the documentary works, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pierand Homage to Catalonia.
Recent biographers have also been keen to criticise the man, planting a seed of doubt about just how nice this secular saint really was. First there was his apparent “trouble with girls” – a clumsy, over-ardent or even rough approach to lovers. Then the apparent survival into later life of his policeman’s instinct, when, in the late 1940s, he supplied a long list of suspected communist fellow travellers to a friend who worked for the security services.
But these should be taken in context – and the second is arguably quite justifiable. More seriously, some recent critics have attempted to undermine Orwell’s still very considerable reputation as a thinker, a fresh and fearless scourge of lies and tyranny, a stout defender of freedom and decency. For Stefan Collini he was something of an intellectual bully and “guilty of that most unlovely and least defensible of inner contradictions, the anti-intellectualism of the intellectual”. For Scott Lucas, author of a short and implacably negative biographical study in 2003, he was guilty of anything and everything, but principally of providing aid and comfort to the enemy by attacking “his own side”, the left. (In reality what Orwell chiefly attacked was not the left but communism and those who would go down the road a bit with it; he was in fact intimately attached in later life to the democratic socialists of the left wing of the Labour Party, men such as Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot.)
The letters gathered here can be divided into several categories: those to intimate long-standing friends, male and female; those to publishers, literary agents and translators; those to collaborators in political campaigns; and those to members of the public or persons unknown to Orwell who have written to him with a query or asking a favour. Each of these categories will yield valuable matter to readers with particular interests, some seeking clarification of literary intention, some focused on the backgrounds of English radical politics, some in quest of “the real man” behind the literary persona.
Many of Orwell’s biographers have written of a contradiction in his character, the co-existence of an apparent austerity, gloominess and puritanism (the face helps) with personal kindness and even a puckish humour. He has been compared to his own literary creation Benjamin the donkey in Animal Farm. (Asked why he never laughed, he would say he saw nothing to laugh at.) Yet his friend David Astor said that when he was feeling low he would seek out Orwell to be cheered up over a few pints in the pub.
There is nothing so surprising about this: grumpy old men (of any age), transmuting rage and spleen to laughter, have been a comic staple for centuries. Many of Orwell’s best essays are partially fuelled by anger, genuine and assumed. It is fascinating to see him trying out this persona in letters to friends:
I really don't know which is the more stinking, theSunday Times or theObserver. I go from one to the other like an invalid turning from side to side in bed and getting no comfort.
We see him contradicting himself, which, as his critics point out, he did all his life:
I take in theChurch Times regularly and like it more every week. [October 1932] The CT annoys me more and more. [June 1933]
And we see him trying out on friends the knockabout intellectual boot-boy mode, a great favourite in the later political essays:
So many of them are the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell who go about spreading sweetness and light and have at the back of their minds a vision of the working class all TT, well washed behind the ears, readers of Edward Carpenter or some other pious sodomite and talking with BBC accents.
Elsewhere in the selection we see him dealing with publishers; he was rather patient and realistic on the whole, given the trouble he had finding someone willing to take on his best works. And we see him cultivating his long-term friends (it is striking how many of them were anarchists) and responding to strangers, invariably with kindness and generosity.
The engaging tone of so many of the letters collected here (those to Brenda Salkeld, for example) is likely to enhance rather than detract from Orwell’s reputation, which has suffered a few dents in recent years yet still survives.
It is salutary that it has been pointed out, after too much idolatry, that his positive political opinions are something of a mess, that he was frequently unfair and bullying and that, as any baby Marxist can tell you, his often reiterated moral touchstone, decency, is “a concept that lacks intellectual rigour”. And yet it seems to me that even as one pulls the work apart, it, and the man, are more attractive and fascinating than ever.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Timesjournalist and joint editor of the Dublin Review of Books (drb.ie)
