from telegraph
A compelling new book tells the life of GeorgeOrwell through the letters of the man himself , writes Simon Heffer.
By Simon Heffer
There is an adage that one always regrets the things one does not buy rather than the things that one does. The publication in the 1990s of The Complete Works of George Orwell, in its magnificent 20-volume edition, edited by Peter Davison, the foremost scholar in the field, coincided in my life with the arrival of two children and the rebuilding of a large ruin of a house. I made the rash decision that £750 was an extravagance that could not be justified at a time of higher priorities, and so did not buy a set. It now seems slightly easier to find a first edition of the Bible, autographed by all four Gospellers, than to secure the Complete Works. I have learnt my lesson.
Happily, Mr Davison continues his scholarship, and provides the underprivileged like me with occasional morsels of ripe Orwelliana. He has just published Orwell: a Life in Letters (Harvill Secker, £20), a companion volume to Orwell’s Diaries, which came out last year. Some of the letters will be familiar to those lucky beggars who have a Complete Works; some are new discoveries. Since I have never yet found an entirely satisfactory biography of Orwell – by which I mean one written so well as he would have done himself – the theme of Mr Davison’s new edition of the letters is compelling: a version of the life is told through the letters of the man himself.
There are inevitable gaps, though the editor bridges them with details of what was happening in Orwell’s life at the time (and there is a full chronology at the back of the book). However, unlike a conventional biography, the character of the subject comes through undiluted. In Orwell’s case, this uncovers a man as straight as an arrow, open, direct, but also at times naive. For those of us with an interest in politics, we see his transition from the communist who fought against Franco in Spain to the man who wrote 1984. We also witness the sectarianism of a party of the far-Left literary establishment against Orwell that followed the scales falling from his eyes.
But it is in Orwell’s simple humanity that we get the clearest picture of him. He expects people to be as direct and as straight with him as he was with them. He responds stoically to the death of his first wife and to his own mortal illness: he was carried off by tuberculosis at the age of 46. Above all, this is a man with no side. Seldom can there have been a more down-to-earth Old Etonian, who wrote about working–class people not to manipulate them for political purposes, but because of a genuine concern for and fascination with them.
In seeking to understand why Orwell remains so popular 60 years after his death, perhaps that last consideration leads us towards part of the answer. He is not quite Everyman, but he did succeed in reinventing himself from Eric Blair into a man that most of the British, at least, could understand: an extraordinary ordinary man. Orwell was a man hungry for experience and, once he had it and it had done what it could for his abundant sense of intellectual curiosity, he moved on. Hence his spell in the Burmese police; hence the menial work as a plongeur recounted in Down and Out in Paris and London; hence the journey to the music-hall joke that was Wigan Pier; hence the near-fatal excursion to the Spanish Civil War (he was shot in the throat); hence his joining the Home Guard; hence his dash to Europe as quickly as he could to witness the effects of the just-retreated Nazis.
He shared the prejudices of many of his fellow English of the time, but articulated them with a precision and in the context of an erudition that almost all others would struggle to match; whether it was his definitive ideas on how to make the perfect cup of tea, or his dislike of the motor-car, or his affection for English beer. Anyone who permeates beyond the obvious Orwell – 1984 and Animal Farm – will find simply the best window on everyday life in England in the 1930s and 1940s; not a bad achievement for a man who considered himself to have been born into the lower-upper-middle class.
Yet, whether one appreciates it with the eye of a seasoned literary critic, or simply absorbs it subliminally as a casual reader, the real lure of Orwell is his style. No one could be easier or more pleasurable to read. The directness of his character, laid bare by Mr Davison’s edition of the letters, is plain in the directness of his literary style. Take, for example, these lines from a letter to Anthony Powell, written just after the death of Orwell’s wife: “I tried to get in touch with you when I was in London last week, but failed. I don’t know whether you will have heard from some other source about what has happened. Eileen is dead. She died very suddenly and unexpectedly during an operation which was not supposed to be very serious.” It goes on in that vein: never a superfluous word, grammatically precise, unclouded by any distraction to its sense or meaning.
Fine though Orwell’s fiction is, I have always thought its genius rested upon the originality of its conceits – a point made clear from both 1984 and Animal Farm. His finest prose writing is in his non-fiction, and especially in his essays. This is not simply because of their sheer interest, but also because of the easy evidence they present of his technical perfection as a writer.
His essay Why I Write is not merely fascinating as a revelation of motive; it shines as an exhibition piece of English prose. It displays all the virtues demanded of the fine stylist in the essay Politics and the English Language, in which the master craftsman sets out his rules for writing properly (with the concluding injunction to “break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous”). Yet two other essays of his present, to my mind, the finest marriage of interesting material with exquisite expression: The Decline of the English Murder, with its amusing observation of the prurience of the British Sunday newspaper-reader settling down after his roast beef to read a juicy account of some wickedness or other; and Such, Such were the Joys, Orwell’s account of his life at a Spartan prep school a century ago.
The latter casts an interesting light on Orwell, the Siegfried-like speaker of truth. The essay was not published in his lifetime for fear of libel, and when it was, it outraged many of his contemporaries. This prototype for Colditz was not quite what Orwell would have had us believe, they protested. He had, horror of horrors, engaged in some elaboration. Ah, well: it is reassuring that the gods will still give us faults to make us men.
A compelling new book tells the life of GeorgeOrwell through the letters of the man himself , writes Simon Heffer.
By Simon Heffer
There is an adage that one always regrets the things one does not buy rather than the things that one does. The publication in the 1990s of The Complete Works of George Orwell, in its magnificent 20-volume edition, edited by Peter Davison, the foremost scholar in the field, coincided in my life with the arrival of two children and the rebuilding of a large ruin of a house. I made the rash decision that £750 was an extravagance that could not be justified at a time of higher priorities, and so did not buy a set. It now seems slightly easier to find a first edition of the Bible, autographed by all four Gospellers, than to secure the Complete Works. I have learnt my lesson.
Happily, Mr Davison continues his scholarship, and provides the underprivileged like me with occasional morsels of ripe Orwelliana. He has just published Orwell: a Life in Letters (Harvill Secker, £20), a companion volume to Orwell’s Diaries, which came out last year. Some of the letters will be familiar to those lucky beggars who have a Complete Works; some are new discoveries. Since I have never yet found an entirely satisfactory biography of Orwell – by which I mean one written so well as he would have done himself – the theme of Mr Davison’s new edition of the letters is compelling: a version of the life is told through the letters of the man himself.
There are inevitable gaps, though the editor bridges them with details of what was happening in Orwell’s life at the time (and there is a full chronology at the back of the book). However, unlike a conventional biography, the character of the subject comes through undiluted. In Orwell’s case, this uncovers a man as straight as an arrow, open, direct, but also at times naive. For those of us with an interest in politics, we see his transition from the communist who fought against Franco in Spain to the man who wrote 1984. We also witness the sectarianism of a party of the far-Left literary establishment against Orwell that followed the scales falling from his eyes.
But it is in Orwell’s simple humanity that we get the clearest picture of him. He expects people to be as direct and as straight with him as he was with them. He responds stoically to the death of his first wife and to his own mortal illness: he was carried off by tuberculosis at the age of 46. Above all, this is a man with no side. Seldom can there have been a more down-to-earth Old Etonian, who wrote about working–class people not to manipulate them for political purposes, but because of a genuine concern for and fascination with them.
In seeking to understand why Orwell remains so popular 60 years after his death, perhaps that last consideration leads us towards part of the answer. He is not quite Everyman, but he did succeed in reinventing himself from Eric Blair into a man that most of the British, at least, could understand: an extraordinary ordinary man. Orwell was a man hungry for experience and, once he had it and it had done what it could for his abundant sense of intellectual curiosity, he moved on. Hence his spell in the Burmese police; hence the menial work as a plongeur recounted in Down and Out in Paris and London; hence the journey to the music-hall joke that was Wigan Pier; hence the near-fatal excursion to the Spanish Civil War (he was shot in the throat); hence his joining the Home Guard; hence his dash to Europe as quickly as he could to witness the effects of the just-retreated Nazis.
He shared the prejudices of many of his fellow English of the time, but articulated them with a precision and in the context of an erudition that almost all others would struggle to match; whether it was his definitive ideas on how to make the perfect cup of tea, or his dislike of the motor-car, or his affection for English beer. Anyone who permeates beyond the obvious Orwell – 1984 and Animal Farm – will find simply the best window on everyday life in England in the 1930s and 1940s; not a bad achievement for a man who considered himself to have been born into the lower-upper-middle class.
Yet, whether one appreciates it with the eye of a seasoned literary critic, or simply absorbs it subliminally as a casual reader, the real lure of Orwell is his style. No one could be easier or more pleasurable to read. The directness of his character, laid bare by Mr Davison’s edition of the letters, is plain in the directness of his literary style. Take, for example, these lines from a letter to Anthony Powell, written just after the death of Orwell’s wife: “I tried to get in touch with you when I was in London last week, but failed. I don’t know whether you will have heard from some other source about what has happened. Eileen is dead. She died very suddenly and unexpectedly during an operation which was not supposed to be very serious.” It goes on in that vein: never a superfluous word, grammatically precise, unclouded by any distraction to its sense or meaning.
Fine though Orwell’s fiction is, I have always thought its genius rested upon the originality of its conceits – a point made clear from both 1984 and Animal Farm. His finest prose writing is in his non-fiction, and especially in his essays. This is not simply because of their sheer interest, but also because of the easy evidence they present of his technical perfection as a writer.
His essay Why I Write is not merely fascinating as a revelation of motive; it shines as an exhibition piece of English prose. It displays all the virtues demanded of the fine stylist in the essay Politics and the English Language, in which the master craftsman sets out his rules for writing properly (with the concluding injunction to “break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous”). Yet two other essays of his present, to my mind, the finest marriage of interesting material with exquisite expression: The Decline of the English Murder, with its amusing observation of the prurience of the British Sunday newspaper-reader settling down after his roast beef to read a juicy account of some wickedness or other; and Such, Such were the Joys, Orwell’s account of his life at a Spartan prep school a century ago.
The latter casts an interesting light on Orwell, the Siegfried-like speaker of truth. The essay was not published in his lifetime for fear of libel, and when it was, it outraged many of his contemporaries. This prototype for Colditz was not quite what Orwell would have had us believe, they protested. He had, horror of horrors, engaged in some elaboration. Ah, well: it is reassuring that the gods will still give us faults to make us men.
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