Six years after the heavily over-Orwelled if otherwise unfateful year of 1984, and fully forty years since his death in 1950, one still feels that nothing like a clear picture of the precise quality of George Orwell has yet to emerge. Fame—a great, billowy, international cloud of fame—has got in the way. Ozone-like layers of controversy, chiefly having to do with conservative and left-wing claimants to Orwell’s political legacy, have further obscured the atmosphere. The highly uneven nature of Orwell’s writing has sent up yet more in the way of mist. Q. D. Leavis, for example, who early praised Orwell’s essays and criticism, asked that he write no more fiction. Then there is Orwell’s life, which from one standpoint appears so seamless, an unblemished sheet of uninterrupted goodness, and then from another makes him appear a cold and rather tasteless fish indeed, whose first wife felt that her husband’s work came before her and in fact before everything else in life and who died during an operation for an illness—presumably cancer—he scarcely knew about.

Fame of the kind enjoyed by performing artists, politicians, and other public figures is rarely available to writers and creative artists generally. Whenever he was in danger of thinking himself famous, Virgil Thomson used to say, he had only to go out into the world to disabuse himself of the notion. Soon after the burial of Balzac, a writer always keenly interested in fame, the bookkeepers at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery sent their bill for