He was a man who had long since resolved that his life should be a success. It would seem that all men would so resolve, if the matter was simply one of resolution. But the majority of men, as I take it, make no such resolution, and very many resolve that they will be unsuccessful. – Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington
Orwell was obsessed by the idea of failure. Life, he once wrote, was on balance a succession of defeats, and only the very young or the very foolish believed otherwise. To look back on past time was to be eternally cast down by a sense of your own insignificance. Leaving St Cyprian’s at the age of thirteen with two public school scholarships under his belt he was uncomfortably aware that he had been judged and found wanting, and that the judgement would irreversibly continue. ‘Failure, failure, failure – failure behind me, failure ahead of me – that was by far the deepest conviction that I carried away.’ It was the same when he sat down to examine the down-at-heel, vagrant life of his mid – to late twenties. Disillusioned by the Imperial racket, thrown upon his own resources, he came, as he put it, to know both poverty and ‘the sense of failure’. Glittering prizes lay strewn across the path of the Eton election of 1916 – All Souls fellowships, literary editorships and calls to the Bar – but Orwell knew, and according to his retrospective glosses seems always to have known, that they would never be his. Failure, he wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, seemed the only positive virtue.
And if the man was a failure, so, too, was the work. Orwell’s attitude to his books is generally that of bitter disparagement. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the essay ‘Why I Write’, written in 1946 for the little magazine Gangrel shortly after publication of the novel that had definitively made his name. Orwell hoped at some point in the near future to write another work of fiction, he told his readers. ‘It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure …’ Every book? Ulysses and Vanity Fair and the Origin of Species? All of them? There is no getting away from this blanket disavowal of his own and everyone else’s talent, for it had been there since the very start of his career. The idea of a pseudonym was first advanced to his agent back in 1932 on the slightly implausible grounds that he was ‘not proud’ of Down and Out in Paris and London. A Clergyman’s Daughter was written off as ‘bollix’. Keep the Aspidistra Flying, on which he claimed to have sweated blood at the time of writing, was later marked down as a pot-boiler, written simply to get his hands on Gollancz’s £100. Neither would he allow to be reprinted in his lifetime. A new edition of A Clergyman’s Daughter hung fire until as late as 1961. Generally speaking Orwell seems to have decided shortly after, or in some cases before, publication that what he had written was a mess in which a promising idea or good material had defied his ability to render it down. As for his workaday journalism, one need only read a sketch like ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’ to grasp the depths of professional futility by which he was regularly oppressed.
And if the books were failures, so – given that most of his leading characters are exercises in self-projection – were the people who wandered about in them. Each of Orwell’s protagonists, in fact, is a study in failure, of life not sustaining its early promise, dreams cast down into dust. Flory in Burmese Days is a lonely fantasist, his best years squandered in drink and whoring; Dorothy in A Clergyman’s Daughter an old maid at twenty-eight; Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying a moth-eaten minor poet turned sour by his blighted hopes. Even George Bowling, the most resourceful of this shabby crew, is irrevocably caught up in the ooze and stagnation of a life lived out with the mirthless Hilda in the shadow of approaching war. Each of Orwell’s novels, by extension, is the story of a rebellion that fails, of an individual – in the case of Animal Farm a mini-society – who, however feebly or obliquely, attempts to throw over the traces. Each ends in more or less the same way, with the protagonist humbled, defeated, sent back to square one. Flory shoots himself. Dorothy returns to the sedative thraldom of her father’s rectory. Gordon succumbs to the insidious embrace of the money god. Winston, brainwashed and re-educated, knows that he loves Big Brother. There is no way out. The best one can hope for is a kind of coming to terms with this environmental quicksand, the ‘he is dead but won’t lie down’ idea peddled by the epigraph to Coming up for Air.
When did Orwell begin to cultivate, or have cultivated for him, the notion of his personal inadequacy? Undoubtedly he felt that he had disappointed his parents, his father especially, by his choice of career, and yet the whole thing seems much more integral to him, much more bound up in his idea of who he was, than to have been a consequence of parental hurt. To go back to ‘Why I Write’, it is the off-handedness of the line about every book being destined to fail that really startles, the absence of gesture. It was Orwell, we can infer, who decided that he was a failure. The rest, the opinions of parents, schoolmasters and literary critics, was merely corroborative. At the same time it is important to distinguish what Orwell thought and said about himself from the habitual self-deprecation practised by other men of his age and background. To read accounts of the career of Ian Fleming’s brother Peter, four years below Orwell at Eton, at least one of whose best-selling ’30s travel books Orwell admired, is to descry a wall of quite impenetrable reserve, a stylisation of personal (and literary) manner founded on an almost painful diffidence. Orwell displayed many of the same characteristics – the laconic speech, the dry humour, the tolerant irony, the shirking from a limelight in which he might have performed to advantage – and yet, whatever his constant down-playing of his abilities, Fleming never seems to have thought he was a failure. He was only an upper-class Englishman, petrified by the thought that he might be ‘showing off’.
Perhaps the strongest evidence of Orwell’s sense of his own inadequacy comes in his dealings with women. By the standards of his time Orwell was a more than moderately successful ladies’ man. And yet his surviving letters to women are shot through with trepidation, fear that they won’t like him, that he has offended, certainty that something is bound to go wrong (significantly, one of his favourite poets was Housman, to whose sexual pessimism he clearly responded). The notes to Eleanor Jaques, for example, are full of plaintive self-pity. Those to Brenda Salkeld assume an uncharacteristic and therefore suspect bluffness. The ones to Lydia Jackson are just arch. The letters he addressed to Anne Popham in early 1946 are almost worse than this – an object lesson in how not to press a suit, an invitation to spurn what had been so kindly proposed. Seen with any kind of objectivity, Orwell’s career is a riot of incident, hard work and achievement – an Eton scholarship, first book published before he was thirty, friendships with the great minds of his age, authorship of at least two novels that literally changed the way in which people thought. Reckoning up his life as he lay dying in University College Hospital, did Orwell imagine that it had been a success? Almost certainly the human skeleton in the hospital bed believed that in this, as in so many other compartments of his life, he had failed.