George Orwell: A Life
Crick, Bernard
BOOK REVIEWS digging, sifting, hypothesizing, and juggling of relevant aad irrelevant facts or notions is that Qrwell was too inordinately private a man to be Very intriguing. He really lived only...
...The faults of the book first...
...Such men lend themselves, particularly among the godless, to canonization...
...the Socialists claim only that the world might be made better than it is...
...Without being able to say that his work was worth waiting for, I can vouch for Crick's having done a thoroughly competent and candid portrait of one of the most eccentric and remarkable writers of the age...
...In one of his "As I Please" columns written for Tribune in 1943, Orwell is defending the Socialists against the "pessimistic" charge that they are Utopians, who believe in human perfectibility...
...In the four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968), which contain over two thousand pages, there is ample evidence to support the claims of his admirers...
...after all, every man has the right to choose his own poison...
...But then I read this eye-popping, brain-boggling passage: The only claims the Socialist makes is that the "problem of man's place in the universe . . . cannot be dealt with while the average human being's preoccupations are necessarily economic...
...It is all summed up in Marx's saying that after Socialism has arrived, human history can begin...
...Henceforth he would do battle for democratic Socialism (he always used the lower case "d" and the capital "S" on the words) and against totalitarianism wherever it appeared...
...He really lived only in his writing, and it is there, as he himself informed us, that we should look for him...
...Considering his output during the 1940s, when he often wrote as many as a hundred reviews and articles a year, I find it astonishing that he was able to maintain so high a standard...
...Anyhow, as he tells us in his Acknowledgements, Crick was signed on in 1972 and given unrestricted access to all the Orwell papers...
...In his recollection of the punishment boys received from their schoolmasters, how much is fact and how much angry exaggeration...
...Crick's conclusion after GEORGE ORWELL: A LIFE Bernard Crick / Little, Brown & Co...
...Henceforth, he would be a patriot even though that might mean being called upon to support a war fought on imperialistic as much as anti-Fascist lines...
...So far I have no objection...
...in the final months he had to be forcibly restrained from using his typewriter in the hospital bed to which he was confined...
...In following his polestar, Orwell was to writing what Van Gogh was to painting...
...On the other hand, many think him one of the great writers of the twentieth century, a claim dependent largely, one must suppose, on his essays...
...Incidentally, following the death of his first wife, Eileen, in 1945, Orwell made two or three other such proposals while still on his legs, all of them rejected...
...Few readers today consider Orwell About the only thing Bernard Crick doesn't tell us about George Orwell in this meticulous, infinitely painstaking, somewhat dogged and even wearisome Life is something Crick surely must know but, of course, could not be expected to reveal-to wit, why an authorized biography has been so long in coming...
...But let it go...
...In any case, the most intensely personal matters, to me at least, are the least interesting of his life...
...What did Sonia Brown-ell, young, handsome, and popular as she was, see in Orwell, who was mortally ill when she married him three months before his death...
...How reliable is his own account, in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys," of that early period...
...Since the question is never answered, I see no reason for asking it...
...In making such an assessment, Pritch-ett elevates the man but limits the artist...
...Even better: Who cares...
...In a letter to Arthur Koestler he railed against the left-wingers who since 1933 "have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.' ' After the Hitler-Stalin pact, Crick notes, Orwell renounced his anti-militarism or crypto-pacifism for much the same reasons as many intellectuals renounced the Communist Party...
...What becomes clear from all this a great novelist, or even a very good one, despite Animal Farm, a masterpiece that Swift, Orwell's idol, might well have been proud to call his own...
...How accurate was Orwell in his description of the bed-wetting scenes...
...With few exceptions, and most of those belong to literary criticism, the essays are tied to the time in which they were written...
...Pritch-ett's remark, made shortly after Orwell's death, that he was "really an active moralist, a preacher who sees that oppression creates hypocrisy, and that hypocrisy corrupts...
...After all, Orwell's widow, the late Sonia Orwell, almost at once asked Malcolm Muggeridge to write the biography, and Muggeridge worked on the project for a time, half-heartedly he admits, before giving it up...
...In the end, Orwell stands there before us, a bit ragged and misshapen, a kind of secular saint, part Don Quixote, part Savonarola, and so utterly honest as to seem a bit weird...
...In a word, most of his work even now, and it will appear even more so as time passes, is periodical...
...The fact that Orwell had stipulated in his last will, written two weeks before his death at age 46 in January 1950, that "no biography shall be written" certainly has nothing to do with the delay...
...17.95 William H. Nolte several thousand words: Who knows...
...Crick is doubtless correct when he says that after 1937 and the Spanish Civil War, in which Orwell fought and was badly wounded, Orwell's political views were fixed...
...There is also plenty of evidence in those volumes to support V.S...
...Or rather let it serve as a warning to the moralists...
...He was indifferent to the food he ate, to drink (unlike most men of his profession he was a weak boozer), to clothing, to his lodgings...
...In effect, too much is made of what we cannot know...
...A final curious and revealing note...
...Besides, I think the answer to that question might be inferred from the context of things...
...Unlike the liberals, whom Orwell scorned, he was every bit as violent in his detestation of Soviet totalitarianism as he was of the Fascist variety-or of British imperialism, for that matter...
...There is no reason to believe that great art might not be created during an intensely political age, like our own (as a matter of fact, however, there hasn't been much), though there is every reason to believe that a man so politically and morally involved with the period as was Orwell will be unable to create work that will live beyond his age...
...Again and again Crick poses questions which he knows cannot be answered beyond a peradventure...
...Like many contemporary biographers, Crick constantly errs on the side of inclusion...
...It may, just barely may, prevent one or two of them from falling into a similar ditch...
...This stylistic mannerism, if that's the word, may be found throughout...
...Rather too much, for example, is made of Orwell's early school days-that is, of the possible though not very probable impact of those days on the man the boy later became...
...Did he or did he not suffer a psychic wound while attending prep school...
...There must have been others after that...
...Not so, Orwell argues...
...Economically, historically, and, above all else, biologically, that last sentence is insane...
...I don't know whether to blame Marx or Orwell...
...Crick notes, "At times he almost literally cared for his writing more than his life, certainly more than his comfort and physical well-being...
Vol. 14 • June 1981 • No. 6
