It is seventy years since the first full-length biographical study of George Orwell (1903–50) appeared in 1953, a forty-page overview of his career written by a casual acquaintance and fellow left-wing London journalist, Tom (later Sir Henry Thomas) Hopkinson. While Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) had been a commercial success, catchphrases such as “Big Brother,” “thoughtcrime,” and “Newspeak” were not in wide usage. Not even Hopkinson and the rest of literary London cited them—indeed, not even Orwell’s close friends and acquaintances.
Fast-forward to 2023. The reputation of Orwell has come a long way in seven decades; its arc is without precedent or rival. And yet: do we really need a new “life” of George Orwell?
We already have five excellent full-length biographies of Orwell, by Bernard Crick, Michael Shelden, Jeffrey Meyers, Gordon Bowker, and D. J. Taylor (the author of Orwell: The Life), the last two of which were published in the centenary year of Orwell’s birth in 2003. This is not to mention at least a dozen biographical studies or book-length portraits of Orwell, along with numerous books devoted to Orwell’s diverse interests (George Orwell and Religion, George Orwell and Russia, Orwell and Marxism, etc.). There are even books of dual portraiture featuring Orwell’s purported resemblances to Evelyn Waugh and Winston Churchill respectively. (Orwell and Waugh developed a cordial relationship; Orwell and Churchill never met, though Orwell read Churchill’s memoirs and Churchill read Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Plus there are full-length biographies of Orwell’s two wives (Eileen O’Shaughnessy and Sonia Brownell) and two self-advertised “biographies” of Nineteen Eighty-Four, including one of them by Taylor. We also have the twenty-volume Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, a compendium of Orwelliana that clocks in at an exhaustive (if not exhausting) nine thousand pages.
Do we really need a new “life” of George Orwell?
Such a plethora of books would appear to suggest that very little room, let alone need, remains for D. J. Taylor’s Orwell: The New Life.1 It turns out, however, that this judicious and readable new biography is well justified. Barring any major revelations about Orwell, Taylor’s new version seems likely to serve for the foreseeable future as the go-to book for readers who want to learn about the man who has become perhaps the most quoted writer of the twentieth century, the wordsmith of “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” “Big Brother is watching you,” “2 + 2 = 5,” and other locutions that have become so woven into the cultural lexicon that millions of people who use the words today have no idea of their author or source.
How and why has Orwell acquired such a towering public reputation since his death in January 1950? His spectacular renown is a matter, mostly, of posthumous fame. Taylor poses this question, and his answer is that Orwell magnificently diagnosed and depicted the spiritual malaise at the core of modern life, a condition that fueled the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. This illness of mystique begat a corruption of politique, Orwell believed, to borrow (and invert) the famous formulation of Charles Péguy. The basis of Orwell’s worldview, Taylor contends, is the conviction that the political horrors of his time, especially the power-worship and cults of personality characteristic of totalitarian regimes, are consequences of “modern man’s struggle to come to terms with the absence of God and the need for a secular morality that would somehow replace a value system built on the belief in an afterlife.” Orwell’s own struggle with these issues endowed his writings with a rare power and intensity, particularly his treatment of tyrannical dictatorship in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm (1945).
George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in India, where his father worked as a governmental opium agent. He had two sisters, the older Marjorie and the younger Avril, the latter of whom he was especially close to throughout his life. He was brought to England and raised by his mother until his father rejoined the family upon his retirement from the Indian civil service in 1912. Orwell’s education included a painfully unforgettable five years at his boarding prep school, St Cyprian’s, about which he wrote an excoriating essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys” (1952). (Some scholars believe that his portrait of the school foreshadowed the grim world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, representing it in microcosm.) Orwell won a scholarship to Eton, one of England’s most prestigious schools, but admitted that, while he enjoyed his time there, he did little work, which effectively denied him an opportunity to attend Oxford or Cambridge, a fact that he came to regret later in life.
Orwell spent five years in Burma as a policeman upholding the imperial rule that he came to hate among a people on the brink of revolt. Those five years stayed with him for the rest of his life and fueled his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). He returned to England in 1927, whereupon he determined to become a writer. Almost two years spent in Paris learning his trade produced little of significance. But Paris laid the groundwork for his first real success, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), a series of gross vignettes of life at the bottom of society, which Orwell claimed all happened.
Orwell was developing a unique literary approach … “terrific directness.”
Orwell was developing a unique literary approach, what Taylor calls “the terrific directness” of his style, which surfaced as early as 1931 in his portrait of the execution of a Burmese peasant, “A Hanging.” He later revisited the event in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), writing, “I saw a man hanged once; it seemed to me worse than a thousand deaths.” Orwell contended that his approach consisted of “simply reporting . . . what I have seen.”
That style of reporting was always evident in Orwell’s essays, and one of his greatest talents was the ability to take a mundane topic—such as boys’ magazines, the difference between English murder mysteries and American ones, or something as simple as comic postcards—and draw out a deeper meaning. The serious essay about a popular topic, so prevalent today, was his creation.
Between 1934 and 1939, Orwell produced four traditional novels, all of which except the last, Coming Up for Air, he regarded as failures, asking after he became famous that they not be reprinted. Taylor believes they are better than that. But then Orwell tended to see all his work as a failure at some level, excepting Animal Farm, for which he retained great affection. It is also true, as Taylor notes, that Orwell’s success came later than that of those other young lions of literary England in the 1930s whom Orwell labeled “moneyed young beasts,” talents such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, whom Orwell deeply admired. Taylor notes, however, that Orwell’s fame and influence have come to surpass theirs.
Orwell’s first popular success came with an example of “poverty tourism,” a genre popular in England in the 1930s. The Road to Wigan Pier is an investigation of economic conditions in the north of England, especially the coal mining districts hard hit by the economic crisis of the time. Financed by Victor Gollancz’s new creation, The Left Book Club, the book was a great success, selling forty-three thousand copies.
“We have nothing to lose but our aitches.”
The first half of Wigan Pier showed Orwell’s ability to describe, classify, and judge, most memorably in his portrait of a young woman poking a stick up a blocked drainpipe and his description of miners at work. The critic Dwight Macdonald called Wigan Pier the greatest piece of sociological analysis he ever read.
In the second half, Orwell linked his own struggle to find himself politically with the middle class’s fear of losing social status. Don’t be afraid, he wrote, as it won’t be dreadful: “we have nothing to lose but our aitches.”
After finishing Wigan Pier, Orwell, like many of his contemporaries, went to Spain to fight for the republic against the forces of General Franco. He did not, however, join the International Brigades like most of his fellow Englishmen, choosing instead to enlist with a small radical anarchist faction, the poum. He discovered that the Communists were taking control of the Republican movement while denouncing the poum as fascists. Orwell’s hatred of Communism dates from his time in Spain, and one can even find the first roots of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in his time there. As Taylor notes, Spain completed Orwell’s political education and turned him into a socialist, albeit an idiosyncratic one. His friend Cyril Connolly’s view was different: Orwell was “a rebel in love with 1910.” Taylor believes that this nostalgic love gave Orwell’s radicalism its edge.
Orwell discovered that he could not get his views of Spanish events published in the left-wing press, on the grounds that they were politically unacceptable. His book describing his experiences in Spain, Homage to Catalonia (1938), now regarded as one of the classic accounts of the Spanish Civil War, was a failure, selling only 643 copies.
In 1938, Orwell’s first major bout with tuberculosis flared up. He spent a little more than six months in Morocco trying to recover his health, producing one significant essay, “Marrakech,” with one of his classic openings: “As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.”
“As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table . . .”
Taylor believes that the early years of World War II were crucial for Orwell’s literary development. Because of his health, he was unable to find military employment, which bothered him deeply as he wanted to contribute to the war effort. He found a new outlet in Connolly’s journal Horizon, began writing for the American leftist magazine Partisan Review, went to work for the bbc (which he considered “two wasted years”), and eventually became the literary editor of the left-wing weekly Tribune, to which he contributed some of his most eccentric essays.
Curiously, Taylor devotes a mere eighty pages in a book of roughly six hundred pages to a discussion of what has made Orwell an enduring presence in contemporary culture, namely his two masterpieces Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Taylor has little new to say about them. They made Orwell rich and famous, although he called those earnings “fairy gold” because of his failing health. “I’ve made all this money and now I’m going to die,” he told an old friend.
Taylor’s book is certainly the first study that newcomers to Orwell’s work should turn to; if you read only one book about Orwell, this should be the one. Those interested in scholarly detail, engagement with sources, and citations that can be checked and followed up are better served by the Crick and Bowker biographies. Yet Taylor’s achievement is impressive: this is a well-written study that gives us a human picture of Orwell, who lived his life in “watertight compartments” and can seem a blurry and elusive figure, as Taylor writes.
Taylor draws heavily on a dozen new letters from a pair of Orwell’s lovers in the early 1930s (Eleanor Jacques and Brenda Salkeld) and on some interviews with people in their eighties and nineties who possess childhood memories of Orwell (Taylor estimates that seven people are still alive today who have concrete memories of the man). Otherwise, Taylor’s “new life” has little new material to offer. Yet its subtitle may also be understood as a “new” look at Orwell by one of his former biographers and lifelong enthusiasts, a fellow British man of letters. Taylor is also a seasoned biographer, having authored a recent composite biography of the “lost girls” who worked (or hung out) in the office of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, where they—including Sonia Brownell—met contributors such as Orwell.
This is the sort of biography that various men of letters of Orwell’s own generation, including several of his closest friends—among them Julian Symons, T. R. Fyvel, and George Woodcock—might have written. (All three men appealed to his widow, Sonia Orwell, for permission to write a biography during the 1950s and ’60s, even renewing their requests across a full decade; all three were summarily turned down by Sonia, who became a caricature of the classic literary widow. The first full-length biography, written by Crick, did not appear until after her death in 1980.)
The newness of Taylor’s biography consists, therefore, not in its revelations about Orwell, but rather in its furnishing us with a compelling biography for our times. Taylor addresses all the hot-button issues that preoccupy us in the era of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, though some of them barely registered when Orwell was alive. The biography devotes substantial discussion to Orwell’s sexism, racial prejudices, and other less than Saint George–level views, coming down hard in its judgments on him on all counts.
The best excursus addresses how rats figure in Orwell’s writing.
Orwell: The New Life contains a few excursus sections interlaced between the main narrative chapters, also a feature of Taylor’s 2003 biography. Two of these earlier excursus sections remain unchanged in the present biography, along with some other material that has been slightly rewritten, but the biography is no mere update of the earlier version. Orwell: The New Life contains an additional eight chapters and runs one hundred pages longer. Taylor specializes in offbeat commentaries on Orwell’s quirks. (The best excursus addresses how rats figure in Orwell’s writing; more serious is one on his latent anti-Semitism and how the war and Holocaust changed his views.)
“No decent person,” wrote Orwell in a passing observation, “cares tuppence for the opinion of posterity.” Perhaps so. Yet this astute and absorbing biography by D. J. Taylor shows how dearly posterity has valued the life and legacy of George Orwell.
