Orwell by Jeffrey Meyers Read Free Book Online

trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
    The only writer who approaches Orwell in both highbrow political analysis and intelligent literary criticism is Edmund Wilson, though D. H. Lawrence's
Phoenix
essays and Dwight Macdonald's political polemics are also comparable to Orwell's. His best characteristics are a Conradian concern with human solidarity; generosity of spirit that extends to enemy prisoners, French collaborators and Fascist war criminals; intellectual honesty in admitting his own mistakes; balanced judgment; 4 and courage to speak out against any mean or cowardly attitude and to defend dangerous and unpopular views. As Orwell says, “To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”
    The dullest and most dated of the journalism are the “London Letters” and some of the more heavy-handed and repetitive political articles that often contain plodding uncharacteristic sentences like this one: “Though a collectivised economy is bound to come, those countries will know how to evolve a form of Socialism which is not totalitarian, in which freedomof thought can survive the disappearance of economic individualism.” The literary articles are much livelier and more original than the political ones; and the delightful “As I Please” column exhibits the uniquely random and miscellaneous quality of Orwell's mind (with some curious gaps—he has few philosophical or psychological interests), as he ranges from the New Year's Honours List to the ugliest building in the world, and seems to resemble his own description of Charles Reade: “a man of what one might call penny-encyclopaedic learning. He possessed vast stocks of disconnected information with a lively narrative gift.”
    The volumes also have very considerable biographical interest, especially since no life of Orwell exists. I believe one is now being written, and it will certainly be welcome despite Mrs. Orwell's assertion that “there was so little that could be written about his life—except for ‘psychological interpretation’—which he had not written himself…. With these present volumes the picture is as complete as it can be.” This is hardly true, for there is a vast difference between a mere factual chronology of a life and a full-scale interpretive biography of a man and his age, especially a man like Orwell who was deeply involved in all the political controversies of his time and whose life of art and action was equaled only by T. E. Lawrence, Malraux and Hemingway. Though the books and autobiographical essays (“Such, Such Were the Joys,” “Shooting an Elephant,” “A Hanging,” “How the Poor Die,” “Bookshop Memories,” “Marrakech,” “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” and “Why I Write”) tell us a good deal about certain periods in his life, there are many large lacunae.
    We know virtually nothing about Orwell's birthplace and earliest years. Like Kipling, he was born in India, spent his first years there, had an unhappy childhood, 5 and went to school in England; and Orwell is undoubtedly thinking of himself when he writes of Kipling, “Much in his development is traceable to his having been born in India and having left school early.” The first chapters of Kipling's
Something of Myself
describe an Indian childhood while “Baa Baa Black Sheep” portrays the horrors of early youth. Cyril Connolly's
Enemies of Promise
gives a rather different and more pleasant picture of their prep school, St. Cyprian's, than Orwell does, and he also describes their later life at Eton.
    The Burmese period is the next obscure phase of Orwell's life, and exactly why he chose the Burmese police instead of Cambridge or at least the political section of the Indian or West African Civil Service is, as Mr. Angus says, “not