Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me.

“Orwellian” has entered the vocabulary as a shorthand adjective for the abiding fear of the twentieth century, that we would all become unpersons at the mercy of Big Brother. A jackboot would be stamping on the human face for ever, in George Orwell’s unforgettable image. Franz Kafka is the only other writer to have given his name to a personal vision of our dehumanized age. We can only wonder yet again at the almost miraculous strength of imagination whereby two such unlikely individuals were able to envisage a totalitarian future with such clarity and brio that they also distilled antidotes.

Both writers were evidently defending themselves against victimization. Kakfa was perhaps born a victim, if only of his nervous system. Not so Orwell. With his gaunt face, wavy hair, and sergeant-major’s moustache, he was combative. He was often rude to people, sometimes to their face, glad to abuse the likes of Auden and Spender as “pansies,” brutally dismissive in print of books he judged worthless. He struck people—for instance once fighting with a drunken Rayner Heppenstall—and he nurtured fantasies about bayoneting the Burmese and Indians whom in his early career he was policing. Yet his imagination contradictorily placed him on the side of victims. He was outraged by bullying at school, by society’s indifference to the poor, by colonial repression, by the tyranny of fascism and Communism. The lesser cruelties wove seamlessly into the greater.

There was a side to him which enjoyed solitude, gardening, fishing, and do-it-yourself carpentry, but soon moral indignation got the better of him, and he was back at the typewriter for ten angry hours at a stretch. Never a natural storyteller, his early novels and books of reportage are about “[h]ardness and injustice, violence and oppression,” as Jeffrey Meyers puts it. Identification with victims everywhere and always is the mark of his singular nobility and greatness.

Where did the energy and sense of outrage come from? In his highly professional and readable new biography, Jeffrey Meyers draws on all the information left by those who knew Orwell in one context or another. [1] It supersedes the other biographies. Emphasis is placed on scenes of symbolic weight, as when after an air raid during the Blitz that destroyed his flat Orwell dug his books out of the rubble and trundled them in a wheelbarrow across London; or when, towards the end of his life, he and his companions almost drowned in a whirlpool off the coast of Jura. Meyers also provides fascinating detail, for example that throughout the war the BBC continued to pay Hitler royalties for quotations from Mein Kampf, and that for the French edition of Animal Farm the pig Napoleon was renamed César. Orwell’s one and only prize came from Partisan Review, and it was worth a thousand dollars. In the year of its title, by contrast, 1984 was selling a thousand paperbacks a day in the United States.

But where Orwell’s motivation is concerned, Meyers sticks to what has long been the orthodox opinion that Orwell was engaged in a revolt against his background, and especially its conventionality and privilege. The word “guilt” is a drumbeat through these pages. Guilt supposedly drove him to accuse and punish himself, becoming a tramp and outcast, not bothering with elementary precautions to protect his person or his health, but exposing himself instead to a bullet through the throat in the Spanish Civil War and death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-seven. Orwell’s masochistic frame of mind, Meyers judges, prompted “the inner need to sabotage his chance for a happy life.” A powerful fuel, guilt might certainly be the cause of the pattern of deliberate self-destruction which Meyers draws. But there is another possible interpretation, and Fred Warburg, the publisher of Animal Farm and 1984, may have put his finger on it when he said, “Orwell wrote without regard to being popular and without fear of being detested.” Is that not pride, a very different thing from guilt? To place oneself deliberately down among the victims seems the act of a free spirit, someone both humane and defiant, with no need to justify his actions to anyone except himself.

Biographers of Orwell, Meyers included, pooh-pooh Orwell’s parents as so limited and class-bound that he had to escape his background. But the family silver nevertheless accompanied him through life (sometimes he usefully pawned it), and he also liked to hang the portrait of an eighteenth-century ancestress, Lady Mary Blair, wherever he lived. Biographers, Meyers again included, depict him as an oddball at Eton, someone untouched by five years of education at that unique school. Eton gives its pupils the confidence to be themselves, which may be justified or misplaced—I am myself speaking as an Etonian—but in either case it carries a disdain for the opinions of others which qualifies as aristocratic.

On the evidence, Orwell rose above self-inflicted poverty and guilt to be a man who knew his worth and even to have been reasonably content within the limits of bad health and high ambition. Meyers does justice to the marriage with Eileen O’Shaughnessy, to whose devotion and sacrifices Orwell owed a great deal. Quoted here, she writes movingly to Orwell from her hospital deathbed that she was irritated with herself for being a model patient. He missed her badly. He loved the son they adopted. There is something wonderfully grave and gawky about his approaches to other women. On his own deathbed, he married Sonia Brownell, immortalized in 1984 as Julia, the sexy heroine of what was mocked in the novel as the Junior Anti-Sex League. Whether Sonia married Orwell for mercenary reasons or out of pity is a question Meyers leaves open.

Orwell’s enlisting to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War had set the course for the rest of his brief life. To the political innocent that he still was, the war at first had appeared as a clear-cut issue of democratic right versus fascist wrong. In the field, he saw for himself that the Communists were not the democrats or idealists they pretended to be, but cynics, power-maniacs, and murderers, out to kill those they could not control. Only the fluke that he happened to be in the hospital after his bullet wound saved him from the firing squad. Others had already reported the crimes and slave labor camps of the Soviet Union, but they were Russians or Eastern Europeans. Homage to Catalonia in 1938 was the first depiction of Communism in action from someone accessible and believable, an English witness with a prose style exactly suited to the truth he had to tell. In due course, contributions from Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus down to Alexander Solzhenitsyn were to complete the exposure of Communism as the criminal conspiracy of a self-chosen elite against the rest of mankind. But it was Orwell who began the immense task of changing the intellectual climate of the day.

“Why do we all, seeing a Red, feel small?,” the poet Cecil Day-Lewis asked (and Meyers quotes) in a tragicomic sample of the abasement of intellectuals before Communism. Under central instruction from Moscow, Communists and their sympathizers carefully crafted deceptions about themselves, poisoning the whole period. In particular, they maintained that Communism was the opposite of fascism. These totalitarian systems were not rivals, Orwell insisted, but two evils of a kind, to be resisted equally. His central position was that “totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.”

Seeing a Red or a Nazi, Orwell felt scorn and danger. A critic of conservative England and a declared socialist, he could not be convincingly smeared as reactionary or fascist. Indifference to the opinions of others was a prime expression of courage, and the best guarantee that the public would eventually accept the truth of his insights into totalitarianism. All the same, it was touch and go for some time, as Soviet sympathizers did what they could to suppress him. One such was Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, who refused to publish his articles about Spain. Seeing him in a restaurant, Orwell insisted on changing his place as the sight of so corrupt a face would spoil his lunch. Victor Gollancz and even T. S. Eliot rejected his books for fear of offending the Soviet Union and its appeasers. Unusually in someone so painstaking, Meyers does not refer to the systematic campaign of vilification which Communists everywhere waged against Orwell, labeling him in the media “an enemy of the people” who deserved to be shot.

Animal Farm and 1984 exposed the reality of Communism and its collaborators at the moment when the Cold War was taking shape, and the West had not yet decided on its response. Occupied by the Red Army, Eastern Europe was already in the Soviet bloc, and Communist revolution was a possibility in several Western European countries. Orwell projected what would then happen, the bloodshed and fear, the betrayals of lovers and friends and ideals, the substitution of lies for truth, the reordering of morality and manners, and the language in which to express these things.

Those who polemicized directly against Communism made little or no impact. Orwell’s two books succeeded because they are satires so fully conceived that they ring true, “beautiful” as he said of his work, often humorous, often sad, in defense of everything humane. Czeslaw Milosz, the future Nobel Prize poet then still living in his native Poland, was the first to wonder how Orwell could have known so well what it was like to live under Communism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, others testified that Orwell’s imagination and courage had inspired them too. One form or another of totalitarianism survives here or there in the world and probably always will, but art at this level is a lasting defense and saving grace.

Notes
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1. Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation, by Jeffrey Meyers; W. W. Norton, 320 pages, $29.95. Go back to the text.