The world after 1984

George Orwell revisited

by Michael Freedberg

ORWELL: WINTRY CONSCIENCE OF A GENERATION. By Jeffrey Meyers. Norton, 398 pages, $29.95.

We are 16 years past 1984, the year that served as the title of George Orwell's darkest, most warlike book. And even though 1984 is still a staple of high-school reading lists, and essays like "Politics and the English Language" and "Shooting an Elephant" are essential texts in any undergraduate rhetoric course, it's easy to forget that it was Orwell who created the terms "newspeak" and "doublethink," or the line "all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others" -- the summation, almost, of his equally chilling Animal Farm.

In Jeffrey Meyers's new biography, Orwell emerges as a warrior against a tyranny that has nearly faded from view -- that of Hitlerian Fascism and Stalinist Communism. You could almost call him the General Patton of 20th-century literature.

George Orwell was tall and handsome, attractive to women and a lover of many (but scornful of them). Educated at Eton, he was supremely well-read, but also immersed in the down-and-out life, a reportorial presence and a despiser of intellectual fraud wherever it could be found. A democratic socialist, he attacked socialist intellectuals -- many of whom had been his friends -- root and branch. Satire and overstatement were his chosen weapons, Swift and Rabelais his models. But he was equally affected by the passionate detail of Charles Dickens, the working-class sensuality of D.H. Lawrence, the brutal masculinity of Wyndham Lewis and T.E. Lawrence. Contradictory, perhaps. But, as Meyers writes, "Orwell never could -- perhaps never wanted to -- resolve the contradictions in his elusive character: Etonian prole, anti-colonial policeman, bourgeois bum, Tory Anarchist, Leftist critic of the Left, puritanical lecher, kindly autocrat."

This Orwell does not sound like "the first saint of Our Age," as one contemporary described him, but perhaps the lives of saints defy the attributes of sainthood. It is too bad that nowhere in Meyers's exhaustively factual biography is reference made to St. Augustine. For surely it is Augustine whose mind, conscience, and historical position the life of "George Orwell" -- his real name was Eric Blair -- closely resembles. As Augustine was almost the last significant writer of classical Latin, so Orwell was the most significant English author in the last generation in which writing mattered, the three decades during which movies, television, and the telephone gradually reduced the written word to a side effect. Augustine was the most developed conscience in his turbulent century of barbarian invasion; Orwell was the most active conscience in the age in which the barbarism of modern, industrial totalitarianism waged war on fairness and "decency," as he termed it. Augustine was a defender of the common man with all his faults -- he made his mark by opposing those who would limit the universal (Catholic) church to only the saints; Orwell, too, though aristocratically schooled, defended and identified himself with the "oppressed classes," wrote them as heroes and heroines into his books, sought their liberation both political and spiritual. Lastly, both Augustine and Orwell were driven by deep personal guilt, a swallowing force that tore Augustine away from every civic attachment and forced him to his confessions, and that pushed Orwell into physical hardship, deprivation, and illness. As Meyers sums up, "the writing of his books literally killed him."

The great ethical question that Augustine wrestled with was the problem of evil: why do men do wrong? His answer was that man knows what is right but does wrong because he wants to do it. Orwell, who, writes Meyers, was a violent man with a "warrior cast of mind," did not ask why evil existed: he observed it, pointed to it, described it, and combatted it in some of the ugliest, most violent writing ever published. He was also a dramatic essayist, one whose books and short pieces reward a re-read as much as if not more than a first read.

War memoirs move from crisis to crisis, drama to drama. So it is with Meyers's narrative. He takes the reader on an unembellished (sometimes too much so) ride where the details of his subject's life link to the personal recollections of those who knew him, as the reader encounters the writer's painful progress from boy Blair to man Orwell. We feel the hunger of Eric Blair's emotionally starved childhood; we endure the cruelty inflicted on his body and soul at St. Cyprian's, his first boarding school; we welcome, at last, the bit of freedom (and the intellectual challenges) he found at Eton. Having graduated from Eton, Blair went out into the world "ugly and certain he could never be anything but ugly." Yet there was clear purpose to Blair/Orwell's Progress. He made himself suffer, and by suffering he earned the right to speak for the oppressed people who were the subjects of his books. From the imperially policed Burmese whom he knew as a, yes, Imperial Burma policeman to the tramps and proles he wrote about in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, Blair -- now calling himself Orwell -- lived in and of the appalling oppressions he wrote of and excoriated.

But these books were prose in search of a voice, a voice in search of a theme, and that's what he found during his ill-fated months fighting in the Spanish Civil War as a soldier in the ILS/POUM (Anarchist) regiment. There, in May 1937, on leave in Barcelona after being wounded at the front, Orwell witnessed first hand the betrayal, torture, and murder of the Anarchists by the orthodox Communists. Indeed, as a member of the Anarchist militia, he was lucky not to have been murdered himself. He considered Homage to Catalonia his finest book, says Meyers, and for good reason: he had seen the inhuman consequences of blind totalitarianism, the poison that was Stalinism, and he had to tell of it. It was his personal revelation, his conversion, his Confessions, if you will. From that moment on, just as Augustine became the apostle of democratic Catholicism, so Orwell wrote as a prophet of doom. The "wintry conscience of a generation" knew his soul now. If Communism would mislead, betray, and murder ordinary working people, he would satirize, vilify, and expose it, its fatuity and dishonesty -- and his work would be all the more deadly because he was writing not as a "conservative" but from a democratic socialist ("non-Communist Marxist," Meyers calls it) point of view.

But each book he wrote cost him more of his health. Tuberculosis took hold, and by stages, as he progressed from Homage to Catalonia to his magnificent British essays to Animal Farm to 1984, the disease ate him up. The writing of 1984 killed him: it is impossible to not be gripped by Meyers's narrative, as Orwell, bedridden and wasting, fights to finish the book before the bacillus finishes him. And he does finish it, barely six months before his death day.

Augustine had died at age 80, with the Vandals besieging and sacking his beloved Utica; Orwell died in 1950, with Stalinism still on the move in both Europe and Asia. Cruelty, disappointment, and abysmal candor move dangerously through the writings of men who choose -- and know they are choosing -- a saint's hard fate.