Michael Sheldon's Orwell: The Authorized Biography

...This woman's favorite subject, apparently, was English, which, according to some of her pupils, she taught with "great sensitivity," preaching the "virtues of a simple straightforward style...

...Not because it was a homosexual influence—as it happened he greatly admired Oscar Wilde—but on political grounds...

...Look in Sheldon's index under the titles Keep The Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up For Air, even Animal Farm, and one finds, close by the invariable "reviews of" or "sales of," the little heading "plot of...

...Sheldon writes that the young woman he hired, Susan Watson, remembered that he asked her almost nothing about her background or experience with children: his sole test for her suitability was to ask her to help him give Richard a bath—and to ask, suddenly, "You will let him play with his thingummy, won't you...

...This is something that happens with a very few writers...

...In "Lost in Mandalay" and "Servant of Empire," we learn that the colonial functionary was far from being a weary, put-upon, friendless agent of a foreign tyranny facing down a sea of hostile Asians and equipped only with a derisory symbolic authority (to some extent the impression Orwell gives of the position of the Englishman in Burma in his writings...

...Interest picks up a bit in the sections on Spain, where Sheldon has uncovered a secret police report that Orwell and his wife were indeed in grave danger during their last weeks in Spain, wanted as "known Trotskyists," a charge that may not have been extraditable (as Orwell wryly observed) but that in Republican Spain meant jail or worse...

...And if it had been torn down in 1856 by a beer baron, and remodeled in 1893 by a steel magnate, I suppose Sheldon would tell us that too...

...The details of Orwell's contracts, his relations to the journalistic and literary world of London—none of it makes very enlivening reading...

...He thought Keep The Aspidistra Flying was "inferior" to Burmese Days, and said so...

...The judgments Sheldon does hazard are, frequently, absurdly timorous, or just plain absurd...

...So there is no particular reason not to suppose that he too may have had sexual thoughts for the boy he was "gone on," that that's what "gone on" meant...

...he says he has been too busy with yet another boy to look on him as "anything more than an exploitable sideline who might perhaps gratify my peculiarly sensual moods...

...There is a unity to the images...

...Michael Sheldon's long new biography tries to do this with Orwell...

...Since Boswell, one of the biographer's best claims to public notice has been the ability to humanize, to make familiar and personal whoever stood in need of such services, whether literary figures or statesmen or more ordinary persons...

...But wait—there is another tantalizing reference to Keep The Aspidistra Flying: FALL • 1992 • 543 in the index, under Burmese Days, Orwell's first novel, we find "Keep The Aspidistra Flying, compared with...

...Sheldon's narrative thread frays badly in the long middle portion of the book...

...Orwell tells us next to nothing about his early literary ambitions, and nothing at all about his passional life...

...Connolly makes it clear that his interest in the boy is sexual in nature...

...His publishers and editors do not...

...to which she gave the correct reply, "Yes of course...

...almost all of Homage To Catalonia, which unforgettably evokes both the elation of the Spanish revolutionary experience and its sickening betrayal by the communists...

...Sheldon, a professor of English at the University of Indiana, the author of a biography of the editor of Horizon magazine and writer Cyril Connolly, has produced an intermittently readable and informative narrative of Orwell's life, beginning with his birth in Burma in 1903 and ending in 1950 with his death, in a tuberculosis sanatorium, at the age of forty-six...

...For Sheldon lives in a world that no longer has the desire or the capacity to expect anything more from biography or from criticism than just the sort of thing that he abundantly and laboriously provides here...

...It is curious that Orwell achieves this effect while disclosing very little of his intimate or personal life...

...Orwell alludes to the erotic maneuverings of other boys and implies that he has felt attachments before to other boys...

...What is it that we know when we say we know Orwell, and know him well...

...Offering such charming, unexpected glimpses of Orwell at his most unguarded and human, especially in domestic contexts, is clearly part of Sheldon's goal...

...That is why more than a few of Sheldon's "discoveries," although interesting, don't convince the reader that Orwell's humanity is being revealed in any important way...

...The chapters on Orwell's early life present the little boy of "Such, Such Were The Joys" as more eager and better at forming relations with others—his school fellows but also the adults in his world...

...One of her favorite techniques was to use simple passages from the Authorized Bible as models, translating them into "bad oratory or journalese to illustrate the virtues of the original model...

...Paradoxically, it is this very humanity of Orwell's that has made him such a problem for the biographers...

...Not all of it is boring—it boggles the mind, for example, to learn that Orwell had once proposed to write a biography of Mark Twain for an American publisher...

...In fairness to Sheldon it should be said that he greatly expands the very little that had been known about Orwell's relation with women throughout his life and especially his first marriage, to Eileen Maud O'Shaughnessy...

...Sheldon is on very weak ground here, and he seems to know it...

...Where an author is obscure in his language an intelligent paraphrase can be invaluable...

...Whether he is representing himself as a cynical, overworked colonial functionary compromised by his work, an intrepid researcher into the squalid conditions of the very poor, a brave witness to the terrible history of his times, or as a lonely, fearful little boy who can't stop wetting his bed, the images impress themselves FALL • 1992 • 541 forcibly on the awareness...

...One cannot read a man missing the point over and over again without beginning to feel sorry for him...

...In any event, Orwell still awaits the biographer his stature requires...

...Before Sheldon has come George Orwell: A Life, by the English political theorist and historian Bernard Crick...

...About Keep The Aspidistra Flying, a minor novel of Orwell's (I'm deliberately concentrating now on lesser works, where one would think even a critic as cautious as Sheldon might feel free to say what he thinks) Sheldon ventures bravely that it will "always have a certain appeal...

...Further back there is George Woodcock's The Crystal Spirit, a fine book that combines reminiscence of the man, biography, and criticism of the entire oeuvre...

...Not surprisingly, he was turned down, but what a book that would have been...

...O'Shaughnessy herself emerges in Sheldon's account as an exceptional person, something that previous biographers have failed to do for her...

...Sheldon makes an attempt to give the episode resonance in Orwell's later life by suggesting that his guilt over his attraction to his own sex might go toward explaining his use of such opprobrious terms as "Nancy boys" for homosexuals, "particularly in the 1930s...

...That the tyrant Orwell pictures in his essay could have helped him "develop as a writer of English prose," and that he redeployed her trick of "translating" biblical verses in his great essay on the corruption of language, "Politics and the English Language," is very suggestive, among other things, of Orwell's relation to established authority...

...As all his biographers have noted, he was an unusually reticent man...

...It is an indication of its failure to even begin to do what a definitive study should do...

...Not much new is said about the painful end of his life, the race to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four, his deathbed second marriage to Sonia Brownwell...

...That he manages as well as he does comes as something of a surprise, given what I have said of the specialness of Orwell's standing with his readers...

...Not Sheldon's comparison, but Cyril Connolly's, in a review of Burmese Days...

...Sheldon offers glimpses of certain sides of Orwell's character that I think have never been brought to the attention of the public before...

...The last chapters suffer from the same diminution in interest...

...Or rather the image, singular...

...The presence in a book such as this of so much needless paraphrase is a scandal...

...his colleagues and his dean do not...

...Turn to the page indicated and what do we find...

...The main part of the hospital was housed in an enormous country house built in 1849 by a railway millionaire...

...The primary sources for this knowledge are few, but unique in literature for their revelatory power...

...Instead of judgments of the merits of Orwell's books, Sheldon offers paraphrase...

...it was like a mask only in the sense that it was a construction, a work of art continuous with his writing...

...But in a number of other important respects Orwell: The Authorized Biography is deficient...

...The trouble with this is that Orwell's public face was his human face...

...Yet readers feel they know him and that he is, in Lionel Trilling's words, "a figure in our lives...

...But there have been other witnesses to the crimes of communism, and other exposers of communist lies, who cannot be so described...

...In it Orwell, or rather the young Blair, speaks of being "gone on" a younger boy whom both he and Connolly found attractive, and pleads with Connolly not to be too "proprietary" with the younger boy...

...Orwell: The Authorized Biography shows that there is almost nothing modern American academic biography can do for George Orwell, except what modern American academic biography does for all of its subjects: accumulate and sort minutiae, document contract negotiations, summarize the critical estimate of others...

...Oddly, Sheldon does not explain that Orwell applied the term to the homosexual Auden and his circle of poets, at that time at the height of their influence, an influence he deplored...

...He drops the whole subject and makes no further allusions, either to homosexual inclinations or to what we would today call homophobia on Orwell's part...

...That's how those fellows talked in those days, before the availability of useful phrases like "a certain appeal...

...Later chapters contain findings of a similar nature...

...and "Such, Such Were The Joys," a posthumously published account of Orwell's deeply unhappy time at a pretentious private preparatory school...

...Sheldon's book, for all its goodheartedness, its charming glimpses and its clearly having been written from the laudatory impulse to honor Orwell, fails to qualify as a necessary book about Orwell, much less a great or definitive one...

...One could argue that it is the gravity of Orwell's subject matter, chiefly his deep insight into totalitarianism, that made him into such a figure...

...He is shown to have benefited more from what other people had to offer, too—one of Sheldon's most remarkable observations here is that the hated wife of the headmaster of his prep school, who is shown in such a fearful light in "Such, Such Were The Joys," actually may have fostered Orwell's writing talent...

...It arrives in a crowded field...

...A far more dismaying feature of the genre is the extraordinary unwillingness on the part of its practitioners to engage in literary critical judgments...

...Reading George Orwell tends to leave most people with an impression of knowing Orwell personally, even intimately...

...Perhaps more time needs to pass before such a book can be written...

...The single most revealing glimpse of Orwell in the latter 542 • DISSENT part of this book occurs after her unexpected death from routine surgery...

...Although Sheldon is clearly an industrious biographer, he often appears to have very little sense of the difference between pertinent and trivial information...

...portions of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, where he memorably describes experiences of voluntary privation and the atmosphere of his "shabby genteel" childhood...

...as he says, he will try to "provide some sense of the human character behind the public face...

...two volumes by the team of Stansky and Abrams, The Unknown Orwell and Orwell: The Transformation, and many other studies and recollections...

...Orwell's way of life did not change radically once he attained literary fame...

...Sheldon acknowledges that "it would be unwise to assume that his adolescent affections for other boys ever reached an advanced stage of sexual contact...

...Sheldon would probably be greatly surprised by anyone finding anything pitiable in his performance...

...It all begins to seem a fuss about nothing...

...They include "A Hanging" and "Shooting An Elephant," two savage but at the same time coolly ironic accounts of Orwell's police service in colonial Burma...

...It is unable to do more...

...Orwell decided to hire a nursemaid for his adopted son, Richard, then in his infancy...

...Sheldon shows us an ambitious young police officer whose immediate superiors were mostly Burmese and who, toward the end of his career, was district head of a police force "overseeing life-and-death matters for a population that was equal to a medium-sized European city," all at an age when "his old friends from Eton were still struggling to complete their university degrees...

...The little boy, the English officer in Burma, the adventurer in the slums, the reporter for the Left Book Club, the volunteer soldier, are all manifestly a single individual, fallible in recognizable ways and in other ways deeply admirable, in all ways deeply human...

...The public face was not a mask covering up his humanity...

...Sheldon makes much of a letter that Cyril Connolly received from Orwell when they were both at Eton...

...Trumpteting this letter as one of a series of "previously unknown" documents does not say much for Sheldon's powers of discrimination...

...Why...

...The contrast between the judgments—multiple, witty, severe—that sparkle and flash in almost everything Sheldon quotes of Orwell and Sheldon's own habits of thought would be comic were it not in the end somewhat painful to witness...

...Orwell, however, whose writings have always been esteemed for their lucidity, is not such an author...

...the reviewers of his book do not...

...When he mentions that Orwell spent time at a sanatorium in England called Preston Hall he can't resist the opportunity to go on and on about it: "Preston Hall was a progressive place with a first-rate staff and pleasant surroundings...

...For example, in his personal writings there is almost nothing about Richard Blair, his father, a minor retired colonial administrator, who all of Orwell's adult life lived on his pension in a sort of prolonged Edwardian twilight in Southwold...

...This mania for minutiae, for the verifiable fact however unimportant, is a recognizable feature of modern American academic biography, and I am afraid Sheldon has a bad case of it...

...On the other hand, there is not much reason to think that he did, and none at all to suppose that he acted on such feelings...

...and if, as they do not, most readers do not, who is to say, something better is needed, or to act on the demand...