He looked for trouble
by Hilary Spurling

May 2003

Reviews of Orwell: the Life by DJ Taylor and George Orwell by Gordon Bowker

Biographers have always taken a stern line with George Orwell, partly perhaps because he explicitly rejected their attentions in his will, but partly also because of the air of make-believe and play-acting that hangs over so much in his strange career. Thin, gangling and inordinately tall, with his toothbrush moustache and baggy tweeds, Orwell could never hope to blend in with the crowd. Instead, he trained himself to stick out. DJ Taylor cites a typical sighting of him in 1930, as a 27-year-old ex-colonial recently resigned from the Burma police, sleeping in a Whitechapel doss-house and going out to work as "a kind of male charwoman", scrubbing floors, cleaning lavatories and blacking grates for a local family who paid him half a crown (25p) a day.

One of the things that has bedevilled attempts to write Orwell's Life is the gap between this sort of behaviour on the one hand, and his aristocratic family connections, standard middle-class upbringing and Etonian schooling on the other. Destined by his parents for the inside track, young Eric Blair cast himself as an outsider from the start. "He was one of those boys who seem born old," Cyril Connolly wrote of Blair at prep school. Steven Runciman, who was at Eton with him, said his mind "worked differently from other boys".

He seemed equally evasive to his peers in London literary or political circles, and to his Catalonian hosts when he arrived to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Even his closest friends were as baffled as his half-dozen biographers have been ever since. "Was Blair the dark sadistic self that the noble Orwell was wrestling to suppress?" asks Gordon Bowker (George Orwell, 495pp, Little, Brown, £20). "What was he like? What preoccupied him? What were his ambitions?" echoes Taylor, who favours a brisk courtroom style of cross-examination, dismissing his subject's account of himself ("these claims should be treated with a degree of scepticism"), undercutting his testimony ("tall stories") and discounting his persistent view that he had been victimised ("not to be taken with undue seriousness"). Taylor's forensic summing-up fills a chapter called "The Case Against":

"As a political thinker, Orwell is hopelessly naïve… completely misread the national mood in the run-up to the war… permanently detached from the practical realities of politics… secretive, incompetent, womanising, offhand, anti-Semitic and homophobic… public schoolboy who could never shake off his origins… and whose misleading perceptions of an entire political and literary era are now our own."

This turns out to be the kind of elaborate Orwellian tease that would have appealed strongly to Taylor's hero. What starts as a strategy for undercutting Orwell's current status as a secular saint surreptitiously turns into a sharp tool for exploring the power of memory as a creative faculty. It is not just that the rigours of life at prep school and in wartime London lie behind the totalitarian vision of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell ruthlessly exploited every particle of personal observation, feeling and experience to feed and fuel his prophetic imagination. Taylor's biography is a persuasive and profoundly moving exploration of the ways in which Orwell's work was constructed from the stones of a ruined life.

Large parts of that life inevitably look in isolation desiccated, mean and dry. Bowker, too, makes it clear that Orwell became a great writer not so much in spite as because of emotional aridity and wretched health. Born with defective bronchial tubes, he seized every opportunity to court the TB that eventually killed him. Like his constant role-playing, it contributed to his slantwise stance, enabling him to operate at one remove from his contemporaries, to submerge himself in what he called "the great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning". Bowker charts with tact and patience the cost involved, for Orwell himself and others, especially women, above all his brave, loving and eventually defeated first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy.

Both these books rest solidly on the phenomenal researches of two great Orwell scholars, Ian Angus and Peter Davison. Both add interesting footnotes of their own (Taylor has interviewed the husband of one of the many girls who rejected Orwell's advances, as well as the daughter of his parents' cleaner; Bowker has turned up the KGB agent – code-named O'Brien, like the interrogator in Nineteen Eighty-Four – sent to spy on the Blairs in Spain). Taylor is brilliant on the "low-level conspiracies" of London literary networking, power-broking and reputation-building but, again in his own phrase, "short on personal resonance". Bowker is duller and more old-fashioned, notably in his lit-crit resumés, but far more humane in deciphering the emotional undertext of Orwell's life.

Neither can bring himself to be generous to Orwell's second wife, Sonia Brownell, although both acquit her of the charges of greed and cold-hearted exploitation laid against her by previous biographers. Both include a fair quota of mistakes (for instance, it was me, not Ian Angus, as Bowker claims, to whom Sonia explained why she married Orwell; and I was not, as Taylor states, her executor). But both books are well worth reading, and Taylor's is likely to prove in many ways definitive.

D J Taylor, one guesses, simply came to like Orwell less, and indeed it isn't hard to dislike the man at times. As Taylor's two dozen witnesses testify, he could be such a misery, and was - as well he might be - often borne down by incessant illness. But, as both biographers bring out, he was much admired, even loved by his comrades in the Spanish Civil War; he brought out a strong protectiveness in the women he pursued with such awkwardness; he was long-lasting friends with a surprising mixture of old Etonians, Hebridean fishermen, international revolutionaries, and BBC bureaucrats, one of whom, his boss in the India section, Rushbrook Williams, wrote with strong feeling and openness of Orwell's "rare moral dignity and unerring taste".

Taylor's emphasis is largely literary-critical. He takes the books to pieces, ticks and crosses them. He adds a number of piquant excursions into Orwell's face and voice, clears him of anti-Semitism, explains his paranoia (telling us that at one point Orwell thought Gollancz might have him bumped off). His book is also crammed with detail and throngs of the characters from literary London, many of whom appear in Taylor's excellent book on postwar novelists, After the War.

Neither writer offers to know better than Orwell what he was up to, in the supercilious manner of today's higher theoreticians, whom Orwell would have cut to shreds. And if neither biography attains to art itself, they are far from inimical to it. Taylor one can imagine being at his most useful to the scholar or the student: he is close, crisp, judicious.

THE GIRL FROM THE FICTION DEPARTMENT
Review by DJ Taylor

A Portrait of Sonia Orwell by Hilary Spurling
(H Hamilton) £9.99 pp194

The first great mystery that hangs over Sonia Brownell (1918-1980) is why, for the last three decades of her life, she should have called herself Sonia Orwell. Her marriage to George Orwell lasted three months, during the winter of 1949-50, and was conducted across the hospital bed in which he died. “George Orwell” was not the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four's real name, and his first wife had spent nine years as Mrs Blair. Why not “Sonia Pitt-Rivers”, for that matter, the name of her second husband, briefly entertained during the 1950s? As Hilary Spurling shows in this concise and elegant book, the decision to become, and to remain, Sonia Orwell reveals something deliberate about the view that Sonia took of herself.

The second great mystery is why, 20 years after her death, so distinguished a writer as Spurling, the biographer of Matisse, Paul Scott and Ivy Compton-Burnett, should want to produce a portrait of her. Granted, Spurling was a chum — they met during her research on Compton-Burnett — but for all the luminous circle of literary and artistic friends that Sonia accumulated around herself, she wrote practically nothing (although there was a distinguished editorial contribution to the 1968 four-volume edition of Orwell's essays, letters and journals) and left only a public legacy of drink-fuelled bad behaviour. Here, it turns out, is the root of Spurling's motivation. Trailing the clutch of Orwell biographers (notably Michael Shelden and Jeffrey Meyers) who portrayed her as a temperamental gold-digger, The Girl from the Fiction Department is, finally, the case for the defence. As such, and despite the existence of a fair amount of prosecution evidence, it is about 80% successful.

Like her first husband's, Sonia's background was Anglo- Indian. It was also traumatic. After burying one rackety husband and leaving a second, her mother was forced to retire to the old country and open a boarding house. Dispatched at six to a convent school (where, it can be plausibly inferred, she acquired her gargantuan sense of “conscience”), Sonia hated the nuns so much that in later life she took to spitting in the street whenever one went by. There was also a terrifying incident in her teens when her three companions on a Swiss boating trip drowned, Sonia only surviving by pushing away a boy whose struggles threatened to drag her under. According to her psychiatrist brother, this remained the dominant memory of her life.

Bright, beautiful and irrevocably damaged, the late-teenage Sonia escaped to prewar Fitzrovia, was taken up by the painterly Bohemians who hung around the Euston Road art school and, in terms of her reputation at least, never looked back. By 1940 she was an assistant on Cyril Connolly's influential Horizon, returning after war work to the post of editorial secretary and virtual command of the magazine (among other discoveries she turned up Angus Wilson's first stories) while Connolly idled elsewhere. Connolly may have formed her opinions but, as Spurling deftly shows, it was Peter Watson, Horizon's homosexual proprietor, on whom she lavished her real affection.

To mark down this bearer of slippers to the feet of great or even mildly interesting men as a high-class literary groupie would be a mistake. Though it mystified their friends, her marriage to Orwell, while on the rebound from the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is quite understandable in her terms. Widowed and gravely ill, Orwell wanted a wife (he and Sonia had had a brief fling three years before). Sonia wanted to help. Begun in the most prosaic way (“Learn how to make dumplings”, Orwell apparently instructed, while proposing), the union realised only a spectacular posthumous responsibility. Apart from a short-lived second marriage to Michael Pitt-Rivers, another of the gay men with whom she was periodically smitten, she spent the rest of her life burnishing Orwell's memory and laying out his money on good works.

Towards the end it all went badly wrong and she fetched up in Paris: ill, detached from her London friends and strangely hard-up (she took legal action against Orwell's accountants). Having read the first sanctioned biography, by Bernard Crick, she went to her death convinced that she had betrayed her husband's memory.

Spurling does her best for Sonia, stressing her many kindnesses and benefactions, but never glosses over how tiresome she could be. Frances Partridge's diaries, for instance, give a good picture of Sonia's other side: domineering, drunk and volatile to the point where prudent onlookers simply kept out of the way.

As for the girl from the fiction department of the title, Spurling makes an interesting attempt to connect her to the genesis of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and quotes from a Horizon review from 1946 that may be thought to foreshadow the novel's emotional centrepiece. On the other hand it could equally well be argued, on the strength of a rediscovered poem published some years back in the TLS, that Orwell's first wife, Eileen, had a similar impact on the book. Beautifully illustrated, and written with Spurling's customary grace, The Girl from the Fiction Department is a lavish work of pietas, which never wholly dispels its subject's legendarily forbidding air.