Customer Reviews

Orwell: The Authorized Biography

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Orwell's life was not very mysterious. He left ample traces in his early novels, his essays, journalism and published letters. Still, if you want it as a coherent story instead of a jigsaw puzzle, this book is the place to go. And you get some surprises into the bargain.
Like: I had not realized that what Eric's father did as a professional in the India colonial service throughout his life was the most obnoxious work that he could possibly have done: he was a minor official in the opium authority, which was in charge of maintaining the official opium cultivation and exportation to China.
That, combined with Eric's own 5 years as a policeman in Burma must have put a heavy load of guilt on the young man's mind and conditioned him towards his urge for self-destructiveness that led him to live as a bum and to volunteer for a civil war. Shelden writes that Blair/Orwell had a deep sense of inadequacy throughout his life. Sounds about right.
As an admirer of Orwell's prose, I found the tales of Blair's poetic struggles in young life quite enlightening. Orwell was a man who loved the sound of words. Much of his criticism was about poetry. May that be the foundation for the clarity and simplicity of his writing?
A nice little anecdote (not that many of them in the book): Shelden says Blair was always an aggressive critic, as demonstrated by his habit of using disliked books for target practice as a police officer in Burma.
This bio is the 3rd attempt to write a complete one (i.e. other than the ex-girlfriend's or younger sister's partial view). The first one was seriously hampered by Sonia's refusal to cooperate and even to let the authors (Stansky/Abrahams) quote Orwell's work. The second one (Crick) was 'official', i.e. approved by Sonia, but then it displeased her strongly. Shelden's was written after Sonia's death and with approval by the literary executor.
I am not sure it is the last word, it came out in 91, but it is not a waste of time.

George Orwell has become one of the literary icons of the 20th Century and, ironically, someone around whom a cult of personality has developed. I say "ironically" because like Franz Kafka -- and unlike, say, Ernest Hemingway or Rainer Maria Rilke or Jean-Paul Sartre (to name the three who first leap to mind) -- Orwell would not have embraced that development. He was too private . . . and too honest and decent. I don't know whether that makes the biographer's task more difficult in the case of Orwell, but for some reason I feel that the obligations of reliability and responsibility are greater for Orwell's biographer than for Hemingway's -- probably because truth is more important for Orwell. In the case of Michael Shelden and ORWELL: THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY those obligations become a tad more onerous because the biography is authorized by Orwell's literary executor. I have read a lot by Orwell, but this is the first biography of him that I have read, and I come away feeling that Shelden has commendably discharged the obligations of reliability and responsibility.

Unlike some authorized biographies, Shelden's does not seem to be an exercise in hagiography. To be sure, Shelden clearly admires Orwell. In many respects, of course, that admiration is justified. Orwell's cult persona is that of an eccentric saint, and while Shelden may downplay somewhat Orwell's eccentricities (which still take a distant back seat to those of Kafka), he provides plenty of support for Orwell's saintliness, at least among the pantheon of 20th-Century literary giants. The most obvious and commendable of those "saintly" qualities was Orwell's instinctual habit of backing his liberal political/social beliefs with action, as, for example, living among the "down and out" and voluntarily risking his life as a front-line soldier against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. In addition, Shelden's biography highlights two other senses in which Orwell deserves respect and admiration. He was a socialist in the relatively non-political sense that he was an advocate of the dignity of the individual regardless of social class. And he was an independent thinker, little influenced by cant and ever-vigilant for hypocrisy.

Here are several miscellaneous points that registered with me while reading this biography. One: Orwell's ambivalence towards success -- which contributed to his adopting, in 1933, a literary pseudonym (his real name being Eric Arthur Blair). Two: The extent to which English life during Orwell's time was permeated by various degrees of censorship, both public and private, and, similarly, the stultifying effect of Britain's libel laws, which necessitated revisions or watering down of most of Orwell's published works pre-WWII. Three: Orwell's admiration for Joyce's "Ulysses" (so different in style from Orwell's own work), particularly because it focused on "the life of the ordinary man in the street" and "the mind of a common man like Leopold Bloom." Four: Orwell's proposal to his American publisher that he write a short life of Mark Twain (unfortunately rejected) -- Orwell and Twain, of course, being so similar in their independence of thought and sensitivity to social injustice.

ORWELL: AN AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY is better than most biographies of literary figures that I have read, and having read it I don't feel any need to read any others. So why don't I give this one five stars? It is a close question, but two considerations militate against five stars. First, the biography is on the dry side (as, I admit, are most biographies). Second, I sense -- and I can't readily marshal any evidence to support this sense -- that somehow Shelden has not quite captured the real Orwell. Shelden quotes the following observation of Arthur Koestler, who became a good friend of Orwell's late in his life: "I don't think George ever knew what makes other people tick, because what made him tick was very different from what made most other people tick." Shelden probably comes closer than many would to identifying what made Orwell tick, but I sense that he did not quite hit the mark.

Professor Shelden's biography of Orwell is outstanding and well-researched. Prof. Shelden provides the important details of the molding of Eric Blair- boyhood, school, service in Burma for the Empire- and explains how each experience influenced young Blair yet he doesn't try to feed the reader psychobabble hogwash. Orwell's fitful rise as a writer is especially interesting. Prof. Shelden explains Orwell's various ideological wars and paints a portrait of a non-doctrinaire, humanist socialist who was a more astute critic of Stalinism or ideological socialism than anyone to his right. What I found refreshing about Prof. Shelden's account is that the reader finishes the bio without really knowing the writer's own politics. He allows Orwell to speak for himself.