Orwell’s New Life Reviewed

For someone who famously wanted no biography to be written, George Orwell would probably be mortified by the extent of the literature about his life which has emerged in the 70 or so years since his death in 1950. At first there were tentative portraits by people who had known Orwell, rather than fully fledged biographies, including books by Laurence Brander, Christopher Hollis, Richard Rees and George Woodcock. The dam started to burst with the two works by Stansky and Abrahams looking at Orwell’s early life which appeared in the 1970s. Then finally Orwell’s widow Sonia permitted Bernard Crick to write the first full biography, which appeared in 1980. That book has in my view stood up well, but since then a steady stream of other authors have followed including; Michael Shelden, Peter Davison, Jeffrey Myers, Gordon Bowker and of course D J Taylor. Taylor and Bowker both produced biographies in 2003 to celebrate Orwell’s centenary. Bowker, alas, is no longer with us, but D J Taylor certainly is, and he has chosen to write an entirely new life of Orwell.

Taylor is an Orwell enthusiast and fan, and that shows all the way through the new volume. Taylor’s passion for his subject shines through this very readable account. Why, though, the need for another go at Orwell’s life when his first attempt in 2003 was so well received?

The reason given is the new material that has emerged since 2003. Principally this refers to newly available caches of letters which Orwell wrote to two of his female friends: Eleanor Jaques and Brenda Salkeld, together with half a dozen letters written by Orwell’s first wife Eileen which turned up in the mid 2000s. Credit for the discovery of the Eileen Blair letters goes to Peter Davison (who is also rightly one of the dedicatees of the new biography). These same letters were, of course, very helpful to Sylvia Topp for her recent biography of Eileen Blair, and I understand they are also crucial in the forthcoming book by Anna Funder – Wifedom. Ironic then that when they came up for sale in 2009 nobody bid on them at auction – a case of the typically mistaken stance of undervaluing the wife’s perspective.

All of these new materials are used to good effect (particularly the Eileen Blair letters), but what they provide is more of a shading in, rather than anything dramatically new in our understanding of Orwell. As Taylor admits at several points in the book, there are periods of Orwell’s life which remain (and likely will continue to remain) unknowable. This is especially true of his time in Burma in the 1920s, and for many aspects of his life in the late 1920s and early 1930s. There are even blanks in the early war and later war years. Some new research has been done on Orwell’s time in Paris in 1928 – 1929, but not much of this seems to have made it into the new work.

Aside from these difficult areas where information is thin or non-existent, there are some curious omissions in the new biography, such as no reference at all to Orwell’s Talking to India which appeared in November 1943. This was a book based on his BBC work which Orwell introduced, contributed to and edited. There are other works which Orwell contributed to which get no, or only scant mention; for instance, Betrayal of the Left – an important book and highly relevant to Orwell’s fraught relationship with Gollancz, his contribution to Victory or Vested Interest, his important essay in Junior in 1945, the introduction to Jack London’s Love of Life and Other Stories etc. I would also like to have seen more commentary generally on the process of publication and reaction to each of the major works Orwell produced.

The new life includes a series of essays on various themes which break up the narrative. These essays are often very good, but they frequently either refer back to things already covered or jump ahead. Their positioning in the text is sometimes not ideal either, for example the very sad chapter dealing with Eileen’s death in 1945 is followed immediately by an essay with the jaunty title ‘ Orwell and the Nancy Boys’, a rather abrupt change of mood which I personally found annoying. Perhaps the essays should have been placed in appendices.

Throughout the copy I was sent there are sentences with words missed out – a fault in the proof reading process I suspect – which really does need sorting out. [RY is the third person to notice this: Ed.]

The points I make above do not detract from my main observation that this is on the whole a very good biography. As Taylor points out the number of people living who actually knew Orwell is steadily diminishing, and he was lucky to meet many who have since passed on. So I don’t think we could expect or can expect more in terms of first -hand accounts in the future. Undoubtedly though there will be more to discover about Orwell, as occasional new materials emerge and new linkages are made by scholars. For now, though, Taylor has done sterling work in twice visiting his subject to materially advance our knowledge and appreciation of one of our most important writers.

*

Orwell: The New Life by D J Taylor (Constable: 9781472132963)