A different looking Orwell:

...Finally, his doctors hoped that the altitude of some magic mountain would relieve the pressure on his lungs...

...theykept the aspidistra flying...

...their standards, their inviolable points of honor...

...Lonely for England, disgusted with the arrogance and racism of the empire-caretakers at the officers' club, Flory seeks solace in walks through the jungle, a natural world, away from his ugly compatriots...

...Although he is pulled back into it - all of Orwell's people follow circular paths - he determines to reenter on better terms...

...On January 21, 1950, shortly before his chartered plane was to take off for Switzerland, he died of a hemorrhage...

...But his mother dismissed the local children as "common," their accents as "vulgar...

...THE BOY did win the scholarship - two of them - and went on to Eton, where, once the pressures were off, he coasted, reading widely what interested him and sloughing off the rest...

...In his next book, The Clergyman's Daughter (1935), the story of a patient drudge, Orwell comes closer to home...

...In the last years of his life, Orwell looked to the Hebrides island of Jura for the regeneration he longed for...

...But the awful present intrudes, catches up with the hapless resist-ers as Winston wonders if there is, "after all, a microphone hidden somewhere near...

...Nineteen Eighty-Four's Winston Smith, like George Bowling, has his brief, hopeless journey into his own past, a golden country of vague memory, back in his earliest childhood, before the Party's takeover of mind and body...

...by money-grubbing proprietors bent on getting a good return on their investment, the reduced rates at which he was enrolled...

...But Jura was cold in winter...

...In 1936, after his marriage to the ideal writing man's wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessey, the couple rented an old cottage that had once housed a failed general store near the village of Wallington, in Hertsford-shire...

...All of these episodes were efforts to live "if not of, at least with and among the oppressed...

...Years of self-neglect were catching up with Orwell...

...There were birds nesting in the rafters, mice rattling the dishes, and no running water...

...Upon graduation, instead of following most of his classmates to one of the great universities, he went off to Burma as a member of the Imperial Indian Police, later described by him as "five years in an unsuitable career...

...While he was engaged in "the dirty work of Empire," his old Eton classmates were building helpful networks and connections...

...Winston looked out into the field beyond, and underwent a curious slow shock of recognition...

...His friend George Woodcock said of him, "He was like the mythic giant Antaeus, unbeatable as long as he could touch ground and regain strength from his mother, the earth...

...Orwell, the name of a river he knew as a boy...

...Sometimes he failed to fool those he wished to encounter...

...Largely self-taught himself, he was impatient with organized, systematic, or doctrinaire groups...

...Bowling returns to his life in a dismal suburban rowhouse, in a development called Bellevue, where "there is no view and the bell doesn't ring...

...After a swim in clean, greenish water, he "feels happy and at peace...

...Years later, the Spanish War and the one that followed it over at last, his wife dead, his own health failing, he went back to Wallington and found that the Woolworth roses he had planted a decade earlier were alive and blooming still...

...He will try to share the values of the aspidistra-cultivators: . . . behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture . . . they continued to keep their decency...

...Orwell's documentary exploration of the lives of poverty-stricken miners and KATHARINE BYRNE is on the faculty of Munde-lein College in Chicago...

...The headmaster's wife regarded with suspicion these excursions into the real world, and natural history itself she dismissed as "a babyish pursuit...

...He defended the miners who turned down respectable council housing with its promise of indoor plumbing, if it meant giving up the right to keep and race pigeons...

...He must go to a boarding school that would help him win a scholarship to a good public school...

...One of Orwell's early protagonists is Flory, the British planter in Burmese Days (1934...

...From mainland hospitals he wrote letters describing Jura's white beaches, its lochs full of trout, his concern that Richard have milk from tuberculin-tested cows...

...Whenever he reaches the ford of a shallow stream "the sight heartened him...

...Thus it was that at the age of eight he was torn from a natural world he was never to forget...

...He will not follow the genteel snobbery of the university crowd...

...This other Orwell looked not forward to horrors of life under The Party, but backward to mythic values of earlier times, to virtues and pleasures of ordinary people, and to the earth itself as a source of regeneration...

...Only in the natural world can Flory, who clearly speaks - often in little anti-imperialism essays - for his author, find relief from the intrigues of upper-class British colonials...

...He had entered the Spanish War on the side of the Republicans, joining a revolutionary militia soon discredited, disavowed, even hunted-down and destroyed as "fascist" by those Spanish Communists supported by Russia...

...Long afterward he recalls "the beauty of enormous dragon flies hovering over the tops of the grasses" and the joy of "tea in the parlor of a pub, with large slices of pale cake...

...the boughs of elm trees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in dense masses like women's hair...

...industrial workers, The Road to Wigan Pier, is an admiring defense of their strength and decency...

...As he says in his boarding school memoir, "Such, Such Were the Joys," he was "flung into a world of force and fraud and secrecy, like a goldfish into a tank full of pike...

...THE YEAR 1938 was a hard one for Orwell...

...Her essay "George Orwell and the American Character" appeared in Commonweal, Apr...

...His cough, the headmaster assured him, was caused by overeating...

...Later, as the Thought Police are about to close in on him, Winston stands at a window watching a prole woman hanging out a line of laundry...

...This may be the right moment, before the prospect of the year 1984 encourages a new rash of Orwell interpretations, to consider this "minor" Orwell, a man worth seeking and not hard to find, in his essays, novels, letters, diaries, and interviews with old parties still living, who knew-him-when...

...One of Bowling's fond memories is of warm, lazy days on the bank of a river, with a fishing rod...

...Jura, a wild place of natural beauty and few amenities, was the realization of an old dream...

...although he was very sick he would not leave the island until he had typed the entire manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four twice, without help...

...it was a happy time and place for Orwell...

...he was pleased when a man he helped to pick up a barrow he had upset said, "Thanks, mate...

...In a late essay," A Good Word for the Bishop of Bray," he speaks of planting a walnut tree as an act of contrition, expiation...

...His first book, Down and Out in London and Paris (1933) grew out of his tramping days, hop-picking experiences, and life as aplongeur in hotels and restaurants...

...Sick in mind and body, he turned to the past of his own childhood for the scene of his next book...

...Again, in the passage above, the familiar elements of Orwell's backward look to a natural world...

...Who was Eric Blair, the child who grew up to sign himself "George Orwell...

...Orwell admired its crofters, wanted to help with the haying and liked to cut peat...

...TWICE, in his own adult years, Orwell had the opportunity he longed for, ho renew his lost connection with the earth and the people who live close to it...

...This was the world of Crossgares, a school run...

...It is not until she becomes a victim of amnesia and finds herself in the hopfields of Kent at harvest time, among migrant workers (Orwell's first proles, someone has called them), that she meets decent and generous people...

...If there was hope, it lay in the proles . . . passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill...

...Often he was torn in this way between nature and necessity...

...He hoped that his own little boy, Richard, adopted shortly before the death of his wife, would grow and prosper on Jura - and become a farmer...

...A CONNECTION WITH THE EARTH & PEOPLE CLOSE TO IT A different-looking Orwell KATHARINE BYRNE THE FAMILIAR press card snapshot of George Orwell suggests a man haunted by the "Orwellian" future he has projected: the death of freedom, even that "final freedom within the few centimeters of a man's brain...

...But the Orwell Archive contains other pictures...

...In one he is feeding his goat, Muriel...

...And the people under the sky were also very much the same . . . people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world...

...There'll be no fishing this side of the grave...

...Beaten and prodded, "stuffed like a Christmas goose" with the answers to old examination questions, he lived for six years in this loveless place of cold baths, slimy food, and frozen playing fields dominated by "the gouging knees and trampling boots of older boys...

...His diary notes that his wilted seedlings are in need of rain, that the first columbines and Sweet Williams are in bloom, and that the health and productivity of their goat has improved...

...Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men these are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler...

...It was a place where it always seemed to be summer when I look back...

...Surely somewhere near by, but out of sight, there must be a stream with green pools where dace were swimming...

...Only "very occasionally," he writes, "it was possible to escape from the barracks-like atmosphere of the school.'' One of the masters would take a couple of boys out into the country where they ' 'would charge back and forth in the sunshine after butterflies...

...When he returned to England he carried with him not only a sense of guilt toward all oppressed people, but a mistrust for university-trained intellectuals...

...by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader-worship...

...He could understand those who married and had children "on the dole...

...It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here...

...In an effort to learn more about the oppressed of his own country, he used to go into the East End of London or out into the country roads beyond, dressed as a tramp...

...Dorothy is the child of a vicar, a man of vast pretensions and no money...

...a rendering of good to those who will look upon it with pleasure long after the gardener is gone...

...Coming Up for Air, in spite of the exuberance of its fat, middle-aged salesman, George Bowling, is a sadly nostalgic book...

...In the following year, Keep the Aspidistra Flying appeared, featuring the seedy scion of a middle-class family who determines to reject the "money god" and live outside, below The System...

...Once, when he tried to get himself arrested for drunkenness, a police sergeant offered him a cup of tea and told him to go home...

...Orwell-like" is the term his meticulous and sympathetic biographer, Bernard Crick, uses to encompass those elements of life the writer sought for and cherished...

...An old, close-bitten pasture, with a footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there...

...its water clear, rarest of sights in this miry country...

...His old friend Malcolm Muggeridge says there was a fishing rod at the foot of his bed.s a fishing rod at the foot of his bed...

...in another he is pushing his adopted baby in a pram...

...He and his Julia dare to go out into the countryside together, in reckless defiance of Party rules...

...faintly plebeian...

...Although he was born in Burma, the middle-child and only son of Anglo-Indian civil servants, Orwell's early memories are of Henley-on-Thames, a small town in the south of England where he played with the plumber's children who lived down the lane, rode in the farmer's wagon, watched men plant turnips and shoe horses...

...His precarious social position - he pinpointed it precisely as "lower upper-middle class: that means upper-middle without money" - required that he take the only path open to the son of genteel and landless parents...

...Although the scene is Burma, Flory sees plants that remind him of home: aspidistra-like things and bergamot, the mint-flower of a Kentish countryside...

...the local farmers, survivors of times before advanced mechanization, may have reminded him of those turnip planters he had followed as a child...

...At the end of his failed effort to find a world long gone, he realizes, "You can't go back...

...Having won a little money his shrewish wife doesn't know about, Bowling sets off to rediscover the village he lived in around 1910, a place much like the one young Eric Blair loved when he was a little boy not yet packed off to boarding school: Bowling remembers that then, People had a sense of continuity and didn't feel the ground they stood on shifting under their feet...

...I can feel the grass round me as tall as myself, and the heat coming out of the earth - Streams weren't poisoned with chemicals or full of rusty tins and motorbike tires...

...The failure of his Homage to Catalonia left Orwell more than ever convinced of the duplicity, the power-worship, the elitist rejection of truth by British intellectuals...

...Although he later disclaimed these last two books as unworthy things he wrote to keep alive, they show his thinking about the class ladder and his affection for those on the lower rungs of it...

...He was, in fact, 6'3", wearing size 12 shoes, and looked more like Don Quixote than a Greek wrestler...

...It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful...

...George: a common English name...

...But there was room for a garden and a few farm animals...

...On the other hand, he was anxious to know and understand those close to nature, or at least not deprived of their "natural" good sense and decency...

...Born, alas, in an evil time," as he says of himself, Orwell was soon impelled by events to go off to Spain, leaving Eileen to tend the garden and sell the penny-candy...

...Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, singing and falling silent, pegging out more diapers...

...He knew it by sight...

...and it didn't help you pass exams...

...To one of his readers, a doctrinaire socialist who complained that his paean to Spring, "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad," had no class-angle, he replied, I think that by retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies, and . . .toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable...

...He came out of that war with two wounds, one from a sniper's bullet that went through his neck, the other inflicted by English socialists who refused to believe his truth about the war...

...12, 1974...

...He was often ill with a bronchial disorder...