Escaping Eric Blair
WOODCOCK, GEORGE
Escaping Eric Blair Orwell: The Transformation By Peter Stansky and William Abrahams Knopf. 302 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell,"...
...As evidence for the happy accident of choice, Stansky and Abrahams submit the fact that when Orwell decided in 1933 to publish Down and Out in Paris and London pseudonymously, he gave Victor Gollancz, his publisher, a list of four alternative names, and Gollancz picked "George Orwell...
...In 1961, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams set out on a "study of three writers of the 1930s, and the reasons for their involvement in the Spanish Civil War...
...One is that Orwell expressed in very sharp terms his detestation of both his Christian and surnames: Eric because it reminded him of the mawkish Victorian novel, Eric, or, Little by Little, and Blair because it was a Scottish name and the Scots were the subject of some of his most deeply held and most irrational prejudices...
...The present volume takes the reader through the 1930s to Orwell's flight from Barcelona after serving with the proscribed poum militia...
...That, of course, was why he got on well with the anarchists, to whom he was always temperamentally if not theoretically close...
...This is particularly unfortunate since Orwell was at his most outspoken in the period covered??the first half of his active writing life??and one longs to hear that hectoring voice giving resonance to the facts the authors present...
...They raise the Brocken specter of a "saintly" Orwell, for example, then claim to dissolve it with their factual objectivity...
...The first of these, The Unknown Orwell, had very little to do with Spain: It dealt with his childhood, youth and early manhood, up to and including his stint in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma...
...Corn-ford and Bell were crammed into one volume, Journey to the Frontier, and Orwell has been given two...
...Muggeridge played with the idea for years and produced nothing...
...The metamorphosis into George Orwell began the moment Blair published his first piece of writing, even though he waited for his first book before formalizing it...
...True, too, except that Gollancz' selection was hardly haphazard, for he knew this was Orwell's real preference...
...Although it does offer some new material about Orwell's first marriage to Eileen O'Shaugnessy and about the private schools where he taught, most of the information it contains can be gleaned from existing books on Orwell (very few of which the authors deign to acknowledge) and from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, whose four volumes (themselves possibly the best pre-biography to date) Stansky and Abrahams have assiduously mined for facts if not for quotations...
...the image of the man as he saw himself is hardly ever visible...
...The lack of quotations gives Orwell: The Transformation a kind of dry austerity...
...Vet it was Orwell himself who said there was no such thing as nonpolitical writing, and it would be hard to find among his works a more political piece than "A Hanging," which appeared in 1931 (five years before he took the road to Wigan) and massively condemned both imperialism and capital punishment...
...Where does this legend come from...
...A rather uneasy expectation hangs over literary London, for nobody knows what Crick has wrought...
...This has become part of Sonia Orwell's strategy: She has ignored her husband's wishes, while unfairly authorizing only certain persons to write a biography...
...Their second effort, alas, is less original in its research...
...Stansky and Abrahams fail to cite their sources, and I have not encountered the "saintly" Orwell in any of the considerable number of serious books and essays that have discussed him...
...Eric Blair had to go so that George Orwell could write books as solidly English as his bucolic name...
...The authors do make a number of specific points, however, that 1 would challenge...
...Instead, we get an outside view, a kind of surface biography seen through the eyes of others...
...Crick has labored for years and at last, 1 gather, has finished the manuscript...
...As for Orwell's "socialism," he defined this so meagerly that even when he was leaving Spain and declaring to Cyril Connolly that at last "I . . . really believe in socialism," one has no clear idea what he means...
...Why these particular writers were selected and other, equally interesting figures such as Ralph Fox and Ralph Bates, W. H. Auden and Ernest Hemingway were ignored is never satisfactorily explained...
...The first writer she chose was Malcolm Muggeridge...
...His misgivings about being biographized were due in part to the knowledge that his own creative persona had already reshaped the details of his life into writings with a deceptively autobiographical appearance...
...The other clue is that Orwell believed very strongly in the difference between the everyday personality and the creative persona...
...Then Orwell's publishers proposed Julian Symons as biographer...
...Stansky and Abrahams contend that Eric Blair's transformation into George Orwell was linked to his "conversion" to socialism, and that the pen name he wrote under was purely fortuitous in its origin...
...The authors were prevented from giving us a more thorough treatment by the curious way Orwell's second wife, Sonia, has administered his will, which specified that no biography be done...
...Orwell has confessed to me in a letter that he was given the nod because she knew he would never get around to completing such an exacting book...
...Stansky and Abrahams were caught in the middle of this predicament...
...He had known Orwell and could have been relied on for a sound and understanding narrative, but no sooner did he get started than Sonia lowered the boom and refused permission to quote...
...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell," "The Writer and Politics" This is the final volume of a trilogy planned with an eccentricity that Orwell himself would have appreciated...
...He had his intense political and personal concerns," they say of Orwell, "he was not abstracted, as the legend would have it, into a kind of saintliness...
...Nor was Stansky and Abrahams' original intention carried out...
...The writers were John Cornford, Julian Bell and George Orwell...
...Symons reluctantly abandoned the project and a good book was lost...
...He did not want anyone to spoil the results of this interplay between his two selves...
...Refused permission to use quotations of meaningful length, they visited as many places as they could where Orwell had lived, and searched out as many of his surviving friends and acquaintances as they could find...
...The truth is that to the end of his life Orwell more closely resembled a 19th-century radical-liberal than a doctrinaire 20th-century socialist...
...It is true that the assmption of a new name marked a personal transformation, but this was Blair's transformation into a writer, not Orwell's into a socialist...
...Indeed, the story of the various attempts to write Orwell's biography is itself stranger than most fiction...
...Stansky and Abrahams also maintain that Orwell's journey to Wigan in 1936 and then to Spain later that same year changed him from a "je m 'en fontisle to a militant socialist...
...The most an executor can do is refuse permission for the quotation of copyrighted material, including all letters, published or otherwise...
...Finally, the central thesis of the book is confused...
...And the change of name, far from preceding the transformation, as Stansky and Abrahams seem to think, actually followed and recorded it...
...Of course, no one can be prevented from writing the life of a dead person ??or even a living person, provided there is nothing libelous in it...
...I f anything, writers who knew him have been inclined to exaggerate his personal faults and foibles...
...Thus the authorized biography of George Orwell is soon to appear...
...Escaping from Eric Blair was a sustained project, and Stansky and Abrahams have missed two vital clues to understanding this...
...But Mrs...
...But, again, the blame must be placed largely on an interpretation of Orwell's will that says one thing for Symons, Stansky and Abrahams, and another for Muggeridge and Crick...
...until this point, they suggest, his writing had shown no political consciousness...
...She was right...
...To a great extent they justified the title of their initial volume, The Unknown Orwell, by unearthing facts about Orwell's childhood and youth that were not generally known...
...After that Sonia picked a dark horse, a political scientist named Bernard Crick, with no expertise in biography or literary criticism and no personal knowledge of Orwell...
...The Unknown Orwell and Orwell: The Transformation have their uses as a kind of pre-biography covering the first three-quarters of Orwell's life...
Vol. 63 • June 1980 • No. 11
