Inside George Orwell: A Biography [Hardcover]

Gordon Bowker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 6, 2003

Big Brother, Newspeak, Room 101, Doublethink. Few writers can boast the brilliant legacy of George Orwell, both in his numerous additions to the English language and in his profound influence on world literature. This book attempts to bring to life the man behind the words. It explores the influence of his childhood and Eton education, his experience as a policeman in Burma, his deliberate plunge into poverty and his experiences in the Spanish Civil War in the creation of the consciousness of the man who produced Animal Farm and 1984. The book includes new material on Orwell's complex and sometimes reckless sex life, new evidence of his being hunted and spied on in Spain, his paranoia about possible assassination, the strange circumstances of his first marriage and his deathbed wedding to a woman fifteen years his junior. This new material enables this biographer to cast new light on Orwell, the inner man, as well as on Orwell, the great author.

(20030614)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bowker's centenary biography is the best of the many since Orwell's death at 46, of tuberculosis, in 1950. Whether in memorable essays on contemporary culture or in novels in which the bleak Orwellian landscape remains consistently familiar, George Orwell-born Eric Blair-was a moral conscience of his age. He seemed to forget nothing of his experiences, exploiting them vividly and imaginatively, and the texture of his childhood, adolescence and young manhood, as well as their impact upon his writing, has never been better or more fully told. An Etonian who slipped social caste to become a policeman in colonial Burma; a tramp in London and a dishwasher in Paris; a radical, soon-wounded volunteer in the Spanish Civil War-he never made a living until, as a medical misfit during WWII, he wrote for the BBC: his education in bureaucracy. But he needed none of that, he explained, to understand the fragility of human decency. "The brutal side of public-school life, which intellectuals always deprecate," he explained, "is not a bad training for the real world." Bowker, biographer of Malcolm Lowry and Lawrence Durrell, has a retentive eye for striking Orwellisms, and one can have no more effective model for lucid prose than the writer of "Politics and the English Language." Orwell's life also never lacked drama. Rarely a deskbound author, he always pushed himself beyond his limits. Dying by degrees, he ignored the symptoms of tuberculosis recklessly, even scratching out a living on a desolate island in the Hebrides that had nearly no amenities. Finally, he wed his long-lusted-for second wife at his hospital deathbed, having promised her a wealthy and famous widowhood. In all his complex contradictions, Orwell comes to energetic life. Illus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"...superior...exhaustively researched and packed with telling detail."--Cameron McWhirter, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"[a] substantial, fine achievement..."--John Banville, The New York Review of Books
"...add[s] much to our understanding of Orwell..."--Carl Rollyson, New York Sun
"Bowker's centenary biography is the best of the many since Orwell's death..."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Bowker covers the now familiar terrain of Orwell's short life in fascinating-and sometimes controversial-detail."--Library Journal
"...the great strength of his book is its original research and revelations."--Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Prospect Magazine
"...shrewd, readable, well-researched... largely favourable to their subject without being blind to his shortcomings."--Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books
"...magisterial biography..."--Roger Lewis, Sunday Express
" ...he has the ability to select the right detail and let it speak for itself."--Jonathan Bale, Sunday Telegraph
"[Orwell is]...a voice that speaks as urgently to our times as it did to his."--The Economist"

"[Orwell is]…a voice that speaks as urgently to our times as it did to his."--The Economist

(The Economist )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1 edition (September 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031223841X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312238414
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,379,593 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars REVIEW OF GORDON BOWKER'S INSIDE GEORGE ORWELL BY JOHN CHUCKMAN, June 22, 2005

By 

John W. Chuckman (Citylights, Ontario) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Inside George Orwell: A Biography (Hardcover)

This book is the best of the newer Orwell biographies, but it still falls short in some respects. Bowker does a far better job than D. J. Taylor at creating a sense of continuity and purpose in Orwell's life. Bowker is a good writer, occasionally showing bits of inspired analysis, but still there are passages of utility-grade stuff.

The two biographies, Bowker and Taylor, published in the same year, offer readers an opportunity to compare two quite different treatments of the same life, treatments that both use previously unknown materials. Taylor's treatment is more episodic and seems to lose no opportunity to highlight something dark, unflattering, or unpleasant about Orwell.

Bowker gets at Orwell's quintessential Englishness. I was happy he used exactly that word, Englishness, which I think is an important and appealing aspect of Orwell. It is a word I've always associated with Orwell much as I do with figures such as Dickens or Graham Greene. This is a quality virtually ignored by Taylor, unless you accept his references to old-boy school snobbery as a rough substitute, references I believe are clear distortions.

Bowker is sympathetic to his subject without ever being servile or sentimental, a position which is right for a biographer. While Taylor makes some effort to convince us of his old admiration for his subject, his words ring false. Taylor displays strong antipathy towards his subject, releasing it slowly through the book, and to my mind this is never the correct position for a biographer. Moreover, the clash between Taylor's claims of admiration and his clear antipathy introduces a howling note of falseness that warns of the author's intent.

Bowker does an excellent job of summarizing the saga of Orwell's widow (his second wife) Sonia and his literary legacy - a tale in which the new Cold War becomes an important element - an interesting topic with which Taylor doesn't do much. Bowker also does a nice job of explaining why a biographer would write about Orwell despite the author's well-known wish that he wanted no biography.

The portion of new material in either book dealing with Orwell's sex life does not shed a pleasant light on part of his character. I couldn't help thinking of passages in Benita Eisler's Byron dealing with the poet's grotesque servant-boy swapping and Mediterranean tours to buy boys in various countries - activities that would put him in prison today - passages that frankly left me feeling as though I needed fresh air. No, Orwell wasn't as twisted as Byron, but he was double-dealing in his sexual affairs and apparently sometimes found the charms of young girls selling themselves in exotic lands an irresistible purchase.

I very much agree with Arthur Koestler's observation, quoted in Bowker, "I don't think George ever knew what makes other people tick, because what made him tick was very different from what most other people tick." Orwell was in many ways what contemporary speech might describe as "out of it." He was, if you will, an authentic English eccentric. This may help explain why Orwell was such a powerful critic and observer while remaining a second-tier novelist.

In a way, something like this may be said of many incisive critics and great artists. The divine Mozart with his scatological letters and often buffoonish behavior. Beethoven's constant moving to new apartments, thunderous emotional storms, and self-destructive attachment to a worthless nephew. The ticks and quirks of the magnificent Samuel Johnson. Dicken's unbelievably obsessive, compulsive behavior.

At the more extreme end of the scale, we have Rousseau's bizarre temperament, always ready to attack friends and admirers. The strange Herman Melville who may just have murdered his wife. Marcel Proust's sadistic penchant for sticking pins into live mice.

Sometimes I think it is better just to enjoy the work of genius rather than digging too deeply into the lives of its creators. For this reason I am almost fearful of reading Norman Sherry's third volume on Graham Greene (reported to focus heavily on the unsavory aspects of Greene's life), one of my favorite twentieth-century writers and critics. But then again, we want to understand, and we find it almost irresistible to read about the lives of artists we have come to love. And whatever unpleasant we may learn, it remains the greatness of their work that drew us to them.

Orwell wrote some of the twentieth century's best essays and occasional pieces, and, in 1984, not long before his death, he displayed a kind of penetrating political insight rarely seen before or since. Since great writing is so often the work of mature people, we undoubtedly missed a great deal when he died at 46.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Absorbing Read, September 27, 2003

By 

Larry Triesman (NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inside George Orwell: A Biography (Hardcover)

I studied George Orwell years back in College and wish I had had this book to read then. It's the best I've read so far, not only well and clearly written and firmly-based in research (including some fascinating new discoveries), but also a real page-turner. I hadn't realized how adventurous Orwell's life was (not only as a man but also as a man of ideas) and how closely his writing followed his experiences. This book is very convincing in exploring Orwell's state of mind - as a down-and-out in London and Paris, as a fighter in Spain, living through the Second World War in England, and writing '1984' at the start of the Cold War. It also very good in showing just how his last two books were misunderstood in the US. I took this book to read on a plane trip and found myself absorbed in it completely till we landed.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Inside view of the GREAT author, March 15, 2006

By 

Mike B (CANADA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inside George Orwell: A Biography (Hardcover)

The title is indeed descriptive as the author probes the inner workings of the great author - Eric Blair (aka George Orwell). Bowker exposes the dualism of Blair/Orwell to describe many of the man's layers.
Blair, in his twenties, was a policeman for the empire in Burma. He came to loathe the job and what he did. Just what he did can only be conjectured - but one can imagine the power of a colonial authority in Burma in the early 1900's. In later years George Orwell would write about power in a far more pervasive atmosphere - notably in his two great twentieth century works - "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four".
While it is true, as Bowker says that his two major works were miss-interpreted, they are so substantial and multi-faceted in scope that they can be given many different interpretations. In their beauty, power and longevity they are multi-faceted. I feel that Bowker left out one for "Nineteen Eighty-Four" which is the cult of mediocrity (as seen through the proles). We certainly have been experiencing this for many years on TV, newspapers and magazines which constantly aim for the lowest common denominator.
Also, while Bowker explores Orwell's relationship to several British authors (Maugham, Wells), he has skipped over the American side. What about Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tools" which is the most popular book on the Spanish Civil War. As Bowker points out it was Orwell's participation with the Republicans in Spain that led almost directly to "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Also what of Sinclair Lewis whose social satire books were extremely popular during Orwell's era?
Nevertheless he does paint a portrait of an extremely troubled man - his many affairs, his constant health problems. His dualism to experience poverty with people who were barely literate I found perplexing and as Bowker says anthropological. His accent would immediately set him apart and made him ill-suited to assimilate with homeless people - even though it led to his `poverty books'.
Also Orwell could miss-read events - he sided with Chamberlain on the Munich appeasement. During the onset of war (the London Blitz) he predicted a forthcoming revolution to a classless society.
Bowker's description of Orwell's essay on Dali's paintings is illuminating. Was Orwell seeing something of his inner self in the surreal and underworld Dali paintings - perhaps getting an all to close glimpse of himself in Burma, his philandering and sexual mis-treatment of women (Orwell was not one to shy away from direct sexual approaches to woman).
Orwell died at age 46 - what other major works were hidden within him?