THE YEAR 1984 HAS now receded as far back into the past as it initially loomed, thirty-five years in the future, when Orwell published his best-selling novel of that name. Never out of print, the novel spiked to the top of Amazon’s sales list in January 2017, immediately after Donald Trump’s inauguration. This is only the latest turn in the ongoing story of Orwell’s reception. Since his untimely death in January 1950, Orwell’s work has never ceased to be read, quoted, deployed, distorted, praised, scorned, and studied by scholars, fellow writers, and readers. Now freed from a cold war context, Orwell’s stream of politically passionate, generically restless writing can take on still more meanings today.
Bernard Crick’s 1980 life of Orwell is a milestone in this reception history, setting a template for many biographies that followed. The first scholar with full access to Orwell’s papers, Crick was also one of the last able to interview associates and contemporaries of Orwell who were still alive. Deploying these varied sources to consider Orwell’s life in its entirety, Crick’s book captures a distinctive moment of biographical synthesis. For many readers of Orwell, myself included, it remains a touchstone, a point of orientation for this deceptively simple, endlessly elusive writer.
Crick’s Orwell is above all a political thinker and writer. His main objective is to unfold “how the books came to be written and published,” rather than to plumb the depths of Orwell’s psychology or to establish the final literary significance of his writing. Crick begins with the ironic admonition that “an honest biographer must be more dull than he could be.” This comment was picked up on by later biographers, who sometimes claimed to be painting darker, more intimate, and thus more knowing versions of Orwell. But Crick’s circumspect approach is canny. He understands how the biographer’s inherent urge to gain narrative momentum often comes at the expense of careful and accurate witness. To grasp Orwell’s life and art most directly, for Crick, means to look from the outside in, and to acknowledge uncertainty. Biography is a dance between the author and the life he or she seeks to comprehend, more intricate still when following the tracks of a writer as insistently autobiographical as Orwell.
The first three decades of Orwell’s life are fascinating in this respect, since they are initially quite obscure, with Orwell leaving scant contemporaneous records, and then over-illuminated by the stream of autobiographical writing he subsequently produces. As Crick emphasizes, Orwell, born Eric Blair, came to writing slowly and late. It was a secondary vocation, begun only after five years of service in the Military Police of Burma. Nor did Orwell’s writing evolve smoothly out of this experience. On the contrary, it entailed a decisive and seemingly bitter break, a rejection of one kind of life (imperial policeman) for an entirely different kind (literary writer). Yet something in Blair’s Burmese experience led him to embrace a new ambition to write. The biographical record here is sparse, and, as Crick demonstrates, we cannot rely simply on Orwell’s retrospective accounts. It is better to preserve the enigma of this five-year period in Burma and to recognize the unusual silence that precedes this prolific writer’s emergence than to fill in all of the blanks through Orwell’s later words.
Crick’s circumspection does not dull the biography but establishes a field of tension between Orwell’s writing and his experience, not in order to keep them separate but to capture their intricate entanglement. “Right from the beginning I realized how complex was the relationship between Orwell’s life and his writings.” It is remarkable how many of Orwell’s major texts are autobiographically inflected, and equally striking that he never writes a traditional memoir. Despite Orwell’s commitment to the plain style, it is always autobiography at a slant. With “A Hanging,” “Shooting an Elephant,” Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” and many shorter pieces, we get a palimpsest of experience transmuted through varied forms and emphases. For any biography of Orwell, these texts are impossible to dismiss as a basis of information or to take at exact face value. They are, oddly, both a source of light and what needs to be illuminated. It is this complexity that underlies Crick’s characteristic hesitation, his willingness to show his own thinking and to sometimes remain uncertain. Thus Crick’s caveats describing these hybrid texts: “not likely to be pure invention,” “one cannot assume that it is all literally true,” “we simply don’t know,” “unlikely but possible,” “either semi-fictional or heavily overdrawn.”
Crick’s circumspection has another advantage: he is not afraid to give extensive excerpts from Orwell’s published and unpublished prose (as well as long quotations from memoirs and interviews with others). Orwell’s writerly voice emerges tangibly in the book, not least because Crick is wary of absorbing it too swiftly into his own overarching narrative. The writing has some room to breath. Because they are not turned automatically into a record of Orwell’s life, the excerpts stand more firmly as a record of the writing itself. Orwell’s plain style prose can too easily be overlooked, even when it is praised, by not being gauged carefully enough in its own right. Take one memorable snippet of Orwell’s autobiographical writing – his comment, in Part Two of The Road to Wigan Pier that “I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class.” As an instance of self-categorization this is intriguing, and a biographer might either build off of or disagree with this sociological claim. Meanwhile there is something wonderful, yet disconcerting, in the phrase itself, and the way it comically squeezes together all three of the markers that would usually emblematize division. (We expect these three terms, when combined, to describe the entire social structure, not a single individual). Poker-faced, Orwell’s neologism is both precise and ironic, distilling and mocking the categories of class analysis simultaneously. It shows Orwell’s commitment to the framework of class even as, substantively and tonally, it puts pressure on this framework. In this paradoxical quality, it might remind us of the still more famous line from Animal Farm (both an apotheosis and a negation of the concept of equality): “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Crick’s biography does not engage in a lot of textual analysis but rather holds the life and the writing in place, allowing us to consider them both, displaying their intricate connections but not conflating (or segregating) them more than is necessary or warranted. As the biography progresses, the production and reception of Orwell’s books and essays looms ever larger. Crick tends to treat each major piece of writing serially: focusing on the text as it is initially composed, then when it is published and first reviewed, and often, with the autobiographical texts, when the events actually occurred. The effect is to disperse the textual discussion across many points, once more emphasizing the granular interaction between writing and experience. As the biography proceeds, this procedure also works to foreground the sheer extent and intensity of Orwell’s activity as a writer. This is not just a question of quantity (as when Crick notes that in his routine workday in 1945 Orwell would stay at his desk until three in the morning) but also variety, the restless way that Orwell moved between fiction and non-fiction, literature and journalism, essays and reportage, often confounding and transgressing these boundaries altogether.
In this step-by-step account, the biography establishes some overarching trajectories in Orwell’s life and work as with the illnesses that come to engulf his final years or the gradually increasing circle of literary acquaintances as he gains more prominence in the 1940s. But it also makes room for many contingent moments where things might have gone differently. Most striking, in retrospect, is how Orwell was likely only days away from leaving for the (Communist-dominated) Madrid front before the May 1937 fighting broke out in Barcelona, catapulting this writer permanently into the anti-Stalinist camp. A projected book on Mark Twain (in 1934) and Orwell’s strong interest in moving to India (at the end of 1937) to take a job as a weekly journal editor present two fascinating roads almost taken. Orwell’s shifting positions about British entry into World War Two -- our surprise to see this champion of left-wing patriotism, in 1941’s The Lion and the Unicorn, writing acerbic anti-war polemics throughout 1939 – gives another illustration of the messy, contingent nature of Orwell’s lived, and written, experience.
Crick’s biography does a fine job of tracing Orwell’s political beliefs, trying to calibrate its striking fluctuations and equally strong points of consistency. Today, as I suggested above, Orwell’s work has been freed from the constraints of the cold war, a context that dominated decades of his reception and often drowned out Crick’s considered view of Orwell as a democratic Socialist. Going forward, Orwell might be read less as the talisman for a fixed ideological position (pro-Western and anti-Communist) and more in terms of a continuing process: the ongoing, writerly effort to maintain political values – judgment, perspective, hope – without shying away from the genuine difficulty, as well as the necessity, of realizing these values. As Crick sums up, “He was a moderate only as to means, not as to ends.” In 2019, as the idea of the twenty-first century as an “end to history” is daily disproven, Orwell’s work continues to generate fresh significance and attachments, speaking in powerful ways to our new and resurfaced uncertainties.
Alex Woloch,
author of Or Orwell,
Stanford, 2019