by Jeffrey Meyers
2000 • W. W. Norton & Company
400 pages / ISBN 0-393-32263-7 (paperback)
Jeffrey Meyers set to work on his authoritative biography of George Orwell with the advantage of an engaging writing style and the opportunity to right mistakes by other historians. Meyers, a thorough and conscientious researcher, finished his 400-page book at a later stage of the game, well after names such as Peter Stansky, William Abrahams, Bernard Crick, and Michael Shelden published their efforts with varying results.
Anyone interested in writers' lives should familiarize himself with Meyers, whose publishing history includes books on Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Conrad, Poe, Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield. Fusing thorough research with lucid prose, Meyers makes biography stimulating and entertaining; his work is of the page-turner variety that few biographers manage to achieve. And in the case of Meyers, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, this achievement seems nearly without effort.Not that Meyers has to go out of his way in making Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation an exciting book. Anyone in search of an interesting person to read about cannot go wrong with Orwell, the Englishman whose journalism and novels drastically altered the world political scene for all times. Meyers's biography is a superbly-handled account of Orwell from birth to death (1903-1950), describing his social life, career path, political commitments, and eccentricities in rich detail.
Meyers, who has researched Orwell at various points in his career, is the first biographer to make use of Peter Davison's Complete Works, a twenty-volume, 8,500-page collection of Orwell's novels, essays, letters, diaries, and miscellaneous papers. Until recently, biographers faced a repression of key documents by Orwell's surviving wife Sonia Brownell or an inability to locate their whereabouts. With Orwell's truly 'collected' works now published and his unpublished holdings at University College, London, now freely accessible, Meyers's interests in Orwell have an ideal time to flourish.
The main text of Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation is divided into seventeen chapters, each reflecting a phase of Orwell's social development. His public and private life are equally considered, drawing from primary sources and interviews with those who knew him, including David Astor, Jacintha Buddicom, Susan Watson, Anne Popham Bell, and his adoptive son Richard. Meyers tracks Orwell's life in strictly chronological order, allowing us to follow his progression from Eton scholar to Burmese policeman to London pseudo-tramp to ill-fated enlistee in the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that solidified his position against Communism.
Meyers describes Eric Arthur Blair - he became 'George Orwell' upon publication of his first novel - as the product of a rigid, middle-class upbringing. Eric's father Richard Blair was a minor official in the Indian Opium Police for his entire working life; Eric and his two sisters were raised by mother Ida Limouzin Blair, a woman 18 years Richard's junior, on her own in England. While Eric hardly knew his father until young adulthood, he received an upright education at the dreary St. Cyprian's School in Sussex and renowned Eton College.
Eric's childhood is presented as one of guilt and repression, feelings that the George Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London and Nineteen Eighty-Four constantly struggled against and looked to purge. Meyers uses recollections by Orwell's intimates, published writings, diaries, and letters to prove that he fought a constant war against his childhood, always sympathizing with the underprivileged classes but never able to fully shed his elitist background. The result was a writer firmly dedicated to social justice and journalistic integrity, though at times it was laughably overblown.
Illness also figures heavily in Orwell's life, especially the years 1947-50 when he alternated between home and hospital with worsening tuberculosis. Despite having TB for nearly his entire forty-seven years, Orwell did little to reduce its symptoms, smoking heavily and engulfing himself in the worst living conditions possible. For four years, Orwell and his first wife Eileen lived at The Stores, a dilapidated cottage without electricity or adequate heating in Wallington, Hertfordshire; following Eileen's death in 1945, Orwell lived for extended stretches on Jura, an undeveloped island 16 miles off the west coast of Scotland where the bulk of Nineteen Eighty-Four was written. Besides a desire to live simply and privately, Orwell also exhibited a self-abasing, masochistic streak through his crude homes and neglect of his well-being.
This embrace of poverty largely inspired the writings for which Orwell is known today. Orwell had an uncanny knowledge of socioeconomic conditions around the globe, helped greatly by first-hand experiences with the poor, distant travels, a brief stint as commentator for BBC Radio, and mastery of language. An author of nine novels and truckloads of essays, Orwell's determination to separate fact from propaganda has made him a revered figure throughout the literary world; in his own time, he won support from many literary names while alienating plenty of others who chose to toe political lines.
To the biographer's credit, Meyers does not fall into idol-worship that has become rather common in describing Orwell. Meyers explains that Orwell was a remarkable man but not a 'saint,' as V. S. Pritchett once called him (he also called Orwell the 'wintry conscience' of Meyers's subtitle). The usually kind writer also had a sadistic bend, confessing, for example, to fairly rough treatment of the Burmese he was policing and cutting open a jackdaw that he and a friend killed at Eton. It appears that Orwell was much a lady's man, having dawdled with Burmese prostitutes and enjoyed post-marital excursions with female friends. He disrespected Eileen during these affairs (though she appears to have been just as unfaithful) and talked her into wasting a university education on tending animals and living in squalor.
Still, the pervading idea of Orwell is a warmhearted, though remote, figure who tried to separate his public life from what was private. Besides his cozy circle of friends like Arthur Koestler, Malcolm Muggeridge, David Astor, and Cyril Connolly, he also befriended people you would never have expected him to - T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and to an extent, P. G. Wodehouse. His legacy as a writer endures through an unwavering commitment to socialism and a fiery opposition to totalitarianism that became the prime subject of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
If there is a flaw to be pointed out in Meyers's book, it is the noticeable lack of photographs. Since photos of Orwell and his intimates have been constantly printed and seen by the reading public, Meyers has limited this section to 32 images, several of which had never been committed to print. Unfortunately, there are moments in the text when Meyers describes well-known photos of Orwell that can be found in other books but not in his own. I am not sure if Meyers chose to do this because of space considerations or issues of copyright, but it was frustrating to rely on memory. The text also feels slightly weighted towards Orwell's later years, moving at a rather brisk pace through his childhood and adolescence. So neatly does Meyers bring the life story to a close, however, that it's barely noticeable.
Orwell died sadly, but he realized fame in his own time and his presence in world literature was bound to increase. He certainly ranks as one of the greatest political commentators in the English language and may very well rank as the greatest journalist of the modern era. While far from an ideal man, Orwell felt strongly enough about his convictions to make them the guiding spirit of his work. Meyers always brings this element of Orwell to the fore, galvanized by his superb investigation and engrossing style. The book, published by W. W. Norton, is a must-buy for studiers of twentieth-century English literature and those with political or journalistic interests.
