A Biography that Sets a Dangerous Precedent

One of the many delights of immersing oneself in the World of Orwell is to dip regularly into the main biographies – Stansky and Abrahams (1972), Crick (1980), Shelden (1991), Davison (1996), Meyers (2000), Bowker (2003), Taylor (2003), Lucas (2003), Colls (2013), Sutherland (2016) – and discover fresh insights into the man, his writings and his times. Sadly, a new biography of the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four by Richard Bradford is profoundly depressing and offers little really original or useful to the ever-expanding Orwell canon. I am unlikely to return to it.

Given the global interest in Orwell, publishers are clearly keen to promote new studies. But since the Orwellian canon is already so vast, writers (lacking any new primary sources) are increasingly forced to search out unusual angles. Bradford sets a potentially dangerous precedent by using Orwell simply as a sounding board for his own views – about Brexit, alleged anti-semitism in the Labour Party, the British working class, Trump, Boris Johnson. Jeremy Corbyn. Tony Benn, Seamus Milne, ISIS, Downton Abbey, the Channel 4 series Benefits Street and so on. This is supposedly all tied to the notion (embedded in the title) of Orwell: A Man of Our Time.

Let’s take one example. Bradford challenges the description by previous (all male) biographers of Dorothy Hale, the central character of A Clergyman’s Daughter, as ‘spinsterish, terrified of sex, unable to bear the physical presence of man, virtuous and frigid’ (p. 99). He writes: ‘Up to the late 1970s these same stereotypes informed the consensus of opinion on women who accused men of rape. Warburton is middle-aged, physically unattractive, egotistical and content with his position as a man who can treat women such as Dorothy much as a feral predator treats its prey’ (ibid). He goes on to compare Warburton with Harvey Weinstein and President Trump who is quoted on women: ‘Grab them by the pussy. … You can do anything.’ But then Bradford adds, extraordinarily: ‘Trump’s manner is certainly more crude and brutish than Orwell’s biographers’ in their treatment of Dorothy but they all belong in the same club’ (p. 100).

You may agree with Bradford views – or disagree. It certainly makes for a lot of very tedious reading. Perhaps these views could have been confined to a final, reflective chapter focusing on Orwell’s significance today. Bradford’s problem is that he does not have the depth of knowledge of Orwell to justify a new biography and is left padding out things with his polemics. How could the Irish Independent, as quoted on the cover, describe it as a ‘brilliant biography of Orwell’?

Bloomsbury are an excellent publishers. Their recent biographies have included the outstanding Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, by Frances Wilson, Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel (all 952 pages of it) by Rachel Holmes, Places of the Mind: A Life of Edward Said, by Timothy Brennan, and Dostoevsky in Love: An Intimate Life, by Alex Christofi. So how come Bradford’s text has fallen through the net of Bloomsbury peer reviewers, editors, fact-checkers and proof-readers? And how remarkable that, according to a report in Private Eye (26 November-9 December), Bradford has been ‘contracted as Chief Literary Biographer for Bloomsbury’.

There is the occasional interesting observation. Bradford describes Orwell’s prep school memoir, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, as ‘a masterpiece; its use of a gradual accumulation of detail to create a vividly grotesque image is the literary equivalent of Breughel’ (p. 13). On his family, he writes: ‘Despite living within a mile of his grandmother’s house for six months during his period in Burma, not once does Orwell refer to her by name in either his published or unpublished writing or in any recollected conversations thereafter’ (p. 40). And the focus on Orwell’s essay ‘Catastrophic Gradualism’ (1945) (p. 217) highlights for me a text I have clearly not properly considered.

Inevitably, given the superficial nature of Bradford’s research, errors abound. On page 25, he suggests Orwell disliked fellow Etonians: the reverse is the case, old-Etonians (the mysterious Andrew Gow, Richard Rees, L. H. Myers, Christopher Hollis, Cyril Connolly, Roger Senhouse, John Lehmann, David Astor, Steven Runciman) played crucial roles throughout his career and many were close friends. According to Bradford, ‘there is no evidence that Orwell wanted to join the circle of aesthetic radicals who flocked to Paris in the 1920’ (p. 62). But this is completely wrong as the research of Darcy Moore, carried in recent issues of George Orwell Studies, indicates. Just as he is wrong to suggest there is no evidence that Orwell attended the ILP summer school in Letchworth in 1936 (p. 132).

On Chapter Three of A Clergyman’s Daughter, where Orwell adapts the James Joycean stream of consciousness technique to his memories of being with the down-and-outs in Trafalgar Square, Bradford comments: ‘This is documentary realism, not modernism. The least authentic presence, the one he has clearly invented, is also the most amusing: a rambling defrocked vicar who endlessly recalls his past while betraying his perversions’ (pp 94-95). But, in fact, Orwell based his character Mr Talboys on the Rev. Harold Davidson, the scandal-prone, defrocked rector of Stiffkey, Norfolk, who became known as the ‘prostitutes’ padre’.

He wrongly mentions Goldsmiths University; it should be Goldsmiths, University of London (p. 109). On the same page he lists the members of the 1950s and early 1960s ‘roughhouse, kitchen sinker’ group of writers but they are all male: he forgets one of the finest, Shelagh Delaney, author of A Taste of Honey (1958). Richard Horatio Blair was adopted in London, not Newcastle as stated on page 200. Bradford says Orwell worked as a film reviewer for Time and Tide (pp 167-168); he also reviewed theatre productions. Indeed, Orwell’s life-long fascination with the theatre is completely overlooked. On page 169, he says Malcolm Muggeridge worked for the BBC during the Second World War – he didn’t.

The account of Orwell’s meeting with Ernest Hemingway in Paris in 1945 (p. 203) is drawn largely from the report provided by Paul Potts. But Potts wrote that they met at the Ritz, not Hotel Scribe as Bradford suggests, and one of the most interesting features of the event – Hemingway handing over to Orwell a gun – is not mentioned. Moreover, Bradford says Orwell was covering the final months of the Second World War for the Observer and the Manchester Guardian – in fact, it was for the Manchester Evening News.

Bradford says Orwell’s controversial ‘little list’ of alleged communist fellow-travellers, which he handed over to Celia Kirwan of the Information Research Department on his death bed, was first disclosed in the Independent in 1996 (p. 26). He changes his mind on this and later says news of the list first appeared in the Sunday Telegraph in 1991 (p. 269). He is wrong on both counts. In fact, biographer Bernard Crick earlier had recorded that there was a 1949 notebook of 86 names in the Orwell Archive at University College London while Michael Shelden’s 1991 biography also discussed the notebook and listed around a dozen of the most prominent names. Pearl Habor, Asimov and Eleanor Jaques are all spelled incorrectly. The index is sloppy: no mention of the Information Research Department or the essay ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ (page 168), for instance, while Stephen Spender and Sutton Courtenay are spelled wrongly.

Among the many vital texts ignored are ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, ‘Funny, But Not Vulgar’, ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’ and ‘Books v. Cigarettes’. Orwell’s work throughout his career as an activist journalist writing for countless left-wing, progressive journals is never highlighted. Indeed, the number of crucial facts missing are too numerous even to begin to mention. And some important secondary sources are absent. For instance, it’s difficult to discuss Orwell’s ‘As I Please’ columns in Tribune without reference to Paul Anderson (2006) and Alex Woloch (2016). Similarly, it is impossible to cover the IRD controversy without reference to James Smith’s British Writers and MI5 Surveillance 1930-1960 (2013) or Orwell’s attitudes to the working class without citing John Newsinger’s Hope Lies in the Proles: George Orwell and the Left (2018). The wealth of information on the websites of the Orwell Foundation and Orwell Society is similarly ignored.

Orwell asked in his will that no biography be written of him. Bradford is again wrong when he says Sonia, his second wife, followed his instructions until 1972 when she decided that the historian Bernard Crick could be trusted with the task. In fact, Malcolm Muggeridge was chosen by Sonia to write the first biography in 1955. Editor of Punch at the time, he posted numerous adverts in leading London newspapers and magazines asking for letters and memories of Orwell. But Muggeridge, though he received many fascinating responses (now buried in Wheaton College, in the US), became quickly bored and dropped the challenge.

Reading Bradford’s Man of Our Time, perhaps gives a hint of why Orwell was so suspicious of biographers. But then, reading a dodgy one helps remind us of the delights in reading Crick and Co…

*

Orwell: A Man Of Our Time, by Richard Bradbury (London, Bloomsbury, 2021 [2020])

• The author would like to thank Les Hurst for his help over this article. He remains solely responsible for all its contents.
• Richard Lance Keeble was chair of The Orwell Society 2013-2020. His latest book is Orwell’s Moustache (Abramis, 2021)

*