The Man and the Hour
Steve Foulger reviews
Orwell: A Man Of Our Time, by Richard Bradford
(Bloomsbury Caravel 2020 £20.00 294pp)
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Orwell! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee…
For somebody who definitely did not want a biography written about himself George Orwell has not really done very well, since several excellent biographies and even two “biographies” of Nineteen Eighty-Four have appeared in the seventy years since his death. So any new popular biography needs a unique selling point if it is to gain traction over other established serious and popular biographies. Bradford’s biographical work relies on the existing more academic works, especially Bernard Crick’s (“the most meticulously researched”) life, albeit that their authors are gently chided for not possessing post #MeToo sensitivities, for being (like Bradford) chaps, and for failing to fully appreciate some of Orwell’s output such as Inside the Whale.
Bradford’s Orwell is almost from birth a contrarian, oddball and misfit, never quite fitting in and never really wanting to, and that his reputation of being “an obstinate procrastinator – less a man who sits on a fence than one who refuses to accept that either side of it is satisfactory – is well established” Really? – Discuss!. But the USP is unveiled in the subtitle – a Man of Our Time. This is done by suddenly fast forwarding to the present day and examining a social theme that is either the same, worse, or a mutation of a problem Orwell confronted. So from Burma via A Hanging we look at regressive attitudes towards capital punishment held by…wait for it… Brexit supporters; from Wigan Pier to poverty porn exemplified by Channel 4’s Benefit Street programme. A Clergyman’s Daughter invites a discussion of the #MeToo movement, and a chapter on Was Orwell an Antisemite launches predictably into a potted history of the Labour Party’s recent problems with anti-Jewish bigotry under the leadership of “far-left” Jeremy Corbyn. Orwell grew up in a period when a ‘polite’ anti-Semitism (no pogroms here but..) was normal. The left railed about Jewish oligarchs and financiers building on well established Victorian tropes and the right complained about the immigration of poorer Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. But just as Orwell was able to transcend the orthodoxies about Empire and colonialism and see the realities of British Rule in Burma he also eventually mastered his latent anti-Semitism. Bradford quotes a telling extract from Orwell’s 1945 essay on Anti-Semitism –
“What vitiates nearly all that is written about antisemitism is the assumption in the writer’s mind that he himself is immune to it. “Since I know that antisemitism is irrational,” he argues, “it follows that I do not share it.” He thus fails to start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable evidence — that is, in his own mind.”
Needless to say Bradford concludes that here Orwell succeeded whereas the current Labour party leadership failed miserably. I have honed in on the Anti-Semitism topic because it reappears throughout the book and exemplifies Bradford’s approach. The projected Orwell of our time emerges as a severe critic of:- the far-left (read Corbyn and Momentum); communist (read China) and other totalitarian regimes; the continuing influence of the public schools over the establishment; and, Brexit. Bradford’s Orwell is a staunch remainer – why he nearly invented the concept of the European Union and has no truck with populists such as Farage and Co!
The biographical side of the book is workmanlike, bar a couple of slips I spotted: The Independent Labour Party – dismissed as being politically spent in 1936 (Orwell joined in 1938) – had four MPs and retained a parliamentary presence until 1950, and in 1955 the CIA did indeed use balloons to float books over the Iron Curtain in Operation Aedinosaur – but it was Animal Farm not Nineteen Eighty-Four that was dispatched.
Orwell is living at this hour – not as the provider of an infallible guidebook but the spirit behind people who write clearly and honestly about what they see and who detest and abjure falsehood and all forms of totalitarianism.
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Orwell Society members can obtain Orwell: A Man Of Our Time at a discounted price, please contact the Secretary, who has the details.
Uploaded 25 January 2020
There’s a disappointingly high number of factual errors in this book but I found, from the opening sentence, something not quite right with the way Orwell is portrayed:
“That Orwell became something of an oddball, a misfit, is not at all surprising given the first ten years of his life. During this period his father, Richard Walmsley Blair, was absent.”
It was hardly off in this era for Anglo-Indian families to be dispersed or boys of Orwell’s class to attend boarding school thus being away from their fathers.
I wanted to see the author’s sources/footnotes to try and understand where he was plucking his facts from in this book. For example, it is not possible for Blair to have travelled to Paris in April 1928 for a number of reasons (for one he was borrowing books from a library in London during May – Bowker). This is minor but there’s many of them. What’s the source for the “heavy woollen scarf” Henry Miller gave him? There’s no mention in Perles’ memoir.
All the way thru the book there are annoyances. What’s the source for this comment bout Eileen which counters everything I know?
“According to accounts by Orwell’s friends she was not the most attractive or intelligent of Orwell’s girlfriends.”
I could go on but it will suffice to say this is not a good book.
The description of Eileen may come from Rayner Heppenstall, but his account of Orwell’s girlfriends is dubious. Heppenstall ended his life as a very unhappy old man.