A Question of Authority

...Indeed, I have always felt the refusal to "authorize" a more formal work was related to the fact that nobody could ever write about Orwell so ably as Orwell himself, and he knew it...

...It is a reasonably arranged if somewhat prolix collection of facts about Orwell's life, gathered in a broad net but offered with little critical acumen or narrative sense...

...In the latter direction it has some claims...

...I see George's indelible face, a surprisingly sweet smile curving the narrow lips, and I hear a rusty chuckle emerge...

...I know something about the restrictions he imposed because, apart from being one of his friends, I wrote an earlier book on him, The Crystal Spirit (1966...

...Clearly not by Orwell himself, either in fact or in spirit...

...I know that Angus is collaborating on an even larger collection of this kind, to appear in the mid-1990s, and I suspect it will become the definitive Orwell "biography...

...Authorized biography...

...Readers approaching Orwell for the first time will find that it offers a clear and soundly organized introduction, complete with everything required to understand what he stood for...

...she allowed me to reproduce the considerable quotations I used in my study...

...From among the appellants she made the eccentric choice of Bernard Crick, an obscure British political scientist, and gave him permission—not authorization—to use whatever writings he needed...

...I find it extraordinary that a literary agent has presumed to counter Orwell's request in this way...

...His biography came out in 1982, and has served adequately, I think...

...I am, ironically, drawn straightaway to those concerns by Michael Shelden's life of Orwell, elaborately announced on the dust jacket, spine and title page as "The Authorized Biography...

...Or is it perhaps an acceptable compendium of what we already know about Orwell...

...Crick (whom he savagely dismisses as being too fact-oriented), Stephen Wad-hams and I located most of Orwell's surviving acquaintances and the bulk of the relevant little-known information about his life while preparing a five-hour New Year's Day 1984 radio biography for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation...

...Nor by Sonia, who up to her death in 1980 used every possible stratagem to avoid authorization...

...Eventually Sonia found the pressure to permit a full treatment too great to bear...

...But what about the book Shelden has written, whether "authorized" or not...

...It isn't strikingly innovative, either: Almost all of the views expressed can be encountered in one form or another in the many earlier books on Orwell?which Shelden usually refers to only in his footnotes, where they are bound to be skipped by general readers...

...The problems, moreover, are most acute when a book appears during the sensitive period shortly before its subject's friends die...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock As George Orwell knew very well, the process of criticism, even in a book review, often leads the critic away from the matter of literary quality to questions of factual accuracy and just claims...

...These are the customary deficiencies of a late-coming work, however, the limitations of an author who writes not as a witness but as, in some sense, a spokesman for a past he played no part in...

...I emphatically requested that no biography of me should be written...

...Shelden has entered the field late...

...Authorized by whom...

...Now Michael Shelden has presented his Orwell: The Authorized Biography, and we are back to George's likely question, "Authorized by whom...

...How is it, then, that Orwell's wishes have been blatantly disregarded and an "authorized" biography has appeared 41 years after his death...

...Suddenly, I hear a wheezing beside me, the labored breathing of someone with poor lungs who has just come up the three flights of stairs to either his or my own old London flat...

...Competing with him, the Sheldens and the Cricks are little more than well-intentioned apprentices...

...Does it offer new insights...

...But I find it even more extraordinary that a fellow writer like Shelden and a moderately respectable publishing firm like HarperCollins, in the apparent hope of selling a few extra copies, have lent themselves to what runs very near to deceptive advertising...

...Sonia, George's widow and originally his sole executor, interpreted his directive as best she could by denying authors the right to reprint copyrighted material when she thought their books crossed over the bounds of criticism and approached biography...

...Since Sonia entirely refused to let them use copyrighted work, their books are virtually skeleton biographies: helpful but unsatisfying sequences of events and facts with no personality to flesh them out...

...Nor, evidently, by any of his relatives, friends or close associates, who were sensitive to his wishes...

...Not by me...

...And that is where I can say my best for Shelden's book...

...The main victims of her judgment were a pair of young American scholars, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, who wrote two volumes of chronicle, The Unknown Orwell (1972) and Orwell: The Transformation (1979...

...As a source of information on his life, though, as well as a means of evoking his personality, I prefer the great four-volume compilation that is so largely autobiographical, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, put together by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus in 1968...

...Although Shelden has found a few additional acquaintances, a handful of neglected papers from the India office and a bit of evidence relating to Orwell's schooldays, this biography can in no way be regarded as factually revelatory...

...I and a dozen others who were close to Orwell are still around to challenge, to deny or, sometimes, to applaud...

...Had Shelden waited another decade or so until we all joined Orwell in the Hyde Park Corner of Eternity, he could have operated outside the morass of memory, loyalty and prejudice, and looked at the situation in a truly historic way...

...he reads...

...I was fortunate...

...As it turns out, the culprit was a certain Mark Hamilton, a literary agent whose only link to the matter is his inheritance of the literary executorship of Orwell's estate...