The Unmaking of a Gentleman

...Why did Blair, during his late 20s, deliberately go down and out every few months, changing like an actor into artfully soiled tramp's rags to spend a few nights, a week, once more than a month, with the indigent wretches of skid-row or in hobo camps on the road' As Orwell explained it in 1936, in The Road to Wigan Piei, he had returned from Burma with so deep a guilt at having been an agent ot imperial tyranny that 1 wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants " But Stansky and Abrahams do not altogether accept this reason provided by hindsight Orwell's motives tor his masquerade, they argue, were less clearly a logical stage ot his political development than he later chose to make them seem Going down and out was in part a search by the struggling writer for material to write about—the Burmese years were too raw and recent to serve Indeed, the idea ot looking for such material in indigent lodging-houses had originally come to him at Eton when he first read Jack London's The People of the Abyss Yet this timidly articulated conjecture is too abstract to cast much clarifying light on Orwell's character at that time Surely there were more inchoate psychological reasons, masochistic and troubling, for Orwell's slumming In one superficial sentence Stansky and Abrahams graze rapidly over "the deeper levels than the merely reasonable, where much of human behavior has its beginnings, levels that Blair was not willing to talk about, perhaps was not even wholly conscious of at the time " But instead of developing the potential analytic insight of these remarks, they leave it at that Granted that the biographer as psychoanalytic private eye can become an obtuse deceiver Still, the overcautious biographer can be equally remiss A more disconcerting flaw of The Unknown Orwell is the authors' occasional tone of flip condescension toward the young man and the struggling writer—who admittedly could at times be an awful prig, just as the older man and writer could often be an exasperating crank Recounting a hghthearted anecdote of Burma, they glibly conclude "Blair was still a young man capable of sometimes enjoying himself and was not always the anguished guilt-ridden protagonist in an anti-imperialist drama " Knowing full well that writers are notorious revisionists of their own history, they sometimes seem rather haughtily overeager to "correct" Orwell's version of the events that he transformed into art, instead of presenting a disinterested comparison of the life with the work But these jarring solecisms of tone in the long run seem minor next to Stanskv and Abrahams' very considerable achievement They have written as detailed and lively an account of the young Orwell as we can wish to have, and have shown us in the process how a great writer is not born but made...

...Writers & Writing THE UNMAKING OF A GENTLEMAN BY PEARL K. BELL Tn this last will and testament Eric Blair—who signed his first book, Don n and Out in Paris and London, with the hastily improvised pen name George Orwell?asked that there be no biographies His wish until now has been respected more in the letter than in the spirit, For Orwell, like D H Lawrence and Dylan Thomas, is one of those literary celebrities who generate biographical memoirs in extraordinary abundance Such a writer must die fairly young, and have a quarrelsome temperament that sets his friends at heated odds with each other Both his life and work must also lend themselves to the kind of symptom-haunted generality that raises reminiscences from the level of gossip to that ot cultural history Orwell met these requirements to perfection The reams of reminiscence about Lawrence and Thomas are usually scandalous rather than enlightening, but memories ot Orwell tend to have a more enduring significance, seeming always to move beyond the merely personal even when they cover familiar ground Though Orwell died 22 years ago, at the age of 46, soon after finishing the grimly prophetic 1984, he addressed himself in forthright journalism, criticism and fiction to chronic problems of his day—poverty, political repression, the corruption of intellectuals—that are no less urgent in our own Even more important to the continuing fascination he exerts is the point, made by Lionel Trilling, that Orwell stands for "the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one's simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have " Orwell's commitment was to the commonplace He defied the standard social, intellectual and political pieties, belligerently defended unfashionable virtues like responsibility and honesty, and celebrated ordinary actuality He remains a stubbornly plain-spoken and unpretentious moral spokesman not only for those of his contemporaries who survive but for the young as well Precisely because Orwell was not content with paying lip-service to his ethical and socialist principles, choosing instead to live them, often at appalling expense of spirit and body, the details ot his unorthodox life are intriguing and often puzzling A proliferation of memoirs by Richard Rees, Cyril Connolly, George Woodcock, Rayner Heppenstall, Malcolin Muggendge, and many others have made common currency of the bare facts Until recently, however, no one had undertaken the detached exploration that is now being done by two very able biographers, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams Their The Unknown Orwell (Knopf, 316 pp , $8 95) is the first volume of an authoritative work that will eventually come to several more Stansky and Abrahams arrived at their task in a roundabout way Originally, they had planned "to write a study of a number of young English writers of the 1930s, among them George Orwell, who had fought on the side of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War," but they narrowed their scope in Journey to the Frontier to Virginia Woolf's nephew Julian Bell and Darwin's great-grandson John Cornfoid both killed in Spain After finishing that book they leturned to Orwell, intending to investigate his life and work only in the 1930s Yet a nagging question persisted How and why did the man born Eric Blair, who wrote scarcely at all for the first 30 years of his life, become Georee Orwell, who published some 20 books and countless journalistic pieces in the remaining 16 years9 The Unknown Orwell attempts to answer this crucial and elusive question, and it ends where the authors originally thought to begin, with the publication in 1933 ot Down and Out in Paris and London In limiting their inquiry to Orwell's first three decades, Stansky and Abrahams have admirably demonstrated, as no memoir could hope to do, the complex double nature of Blair-Orwell's strange history and thorny sensibility "Becoming George Orwell was his way of making himself into a writer and of unmaking himself as a gentleman, [and] it allowed Eric Blair to come to terms with his world Blair was the man to whom things happened, Orwell the man who wrote about them " M or an Englishman, the definitive fact ot his life is his social class, and for Orwell this had inordinate importance As he wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, the book that in part traced his political development from imperialist to socialist "I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class a sort of mound of wreckage left behind when the tide ot Victorian prosperity receded " From India, where his father was a civil servant and Eric was born, the family returned to England to live in impecunious gentility on Mr Blair's inadequate pension But poverty in no way diminished their determination that Eric become a member of the ruling caste, one of those who counted " The road that led to the upper reaches of the British social hierarchy passed through the ancient public" schools—such as Harrow, Rugby and Eton—and Eric was thus enrolled at eight in St Cyprian's, a preparatory boarding-school of the sort memorialized as nightmare by countless victims like Orwell, Churchill and Cyril Connolly There he was crammed, drilled and beaten into shape for the public school entrance exams A shy and abnormally reticent scholarship pupil, Eric felt acutely humiliated at being a poor boy surrounded by the sons of the rich And 30 years later, when he wrote about St Cyprian's in "Such, Such Were the Joys," its snobbery and bullying inhumanity were still etched m his memory with morbid indelibility His five academically undistinguished years at Eton were on the whole much happier, but he chose, on becoming an Old Boy marked for life by his accent and manner, to leave the upper-class escalator whose next stop was Oxford or Cambridge In boldly eccentric divergence from Eton tradition, he became an Imperial Police Officer in Burma By the time he returned to England five years later, Orwell was unalterably certain of two things—that he hated the imperialism he had served, and that he was going to be a writer By far the most engrossing section of The Unknown Orwell concerns the post-Burma period For it is here that Stansky and Abrahams confront a perplexing aspect of the years before the writer emerged...