Orwell Up Close

Is there a college student alive who hasn't heard of George Orwell? Or his prescient novels Animal Farm and 1984 — at least in their Hollywood versions? Or any of those chilling words and phrases he gave us: Newspeak, double-think, unperson, cold war, Ministry of Truth, Big Brother is watching, some are more equal than others?

Fifty-three years after Orwell's death, his books have sold more than 40 million copies in 60 languages, and a million new readers discover him every year. His reputation as a champion of freedom, decency and clean prose has long outlived his era. The term Orwellian has become synonymous with the horrors of totalitarianism. Yet many of those students haven't a clue who Orwell really was. Oh, they may know that his name was actually Eric Blair, or that he was English and died pathetically young. But the sheer immensity of his work — 2 million words of fiction, reportage, essays, poems and reviews — and the tantalizing contradictions of his life are today largely unknown to the rising generation.

That may soon change. The centenary of Orwell's birth this week — he was born June 25, 1903, in Motihari, India, where his father was an opium agent for the British Raj — has brought a tide of conferences, articles and books on the man and his legacy. Chief among them are two engrossing biographies: George Orwell by British author Gordon Bowker (Little, Brown; 495 pages) and Orwell: The Life by British novelist and critic D.J. Taylor (Chatto & Windus; 466 pages). Also stoking the fire are two slimmer works: Why Orwell Matters by polemicist Christopher Hitchens (Basic Books; 211 pages) and an entertaining look at Orwell's second wife Sonia, The Girl from the Fiction Department by Hilary Spurling (Penguin; 208 pages). These additions to the mountain of Orwelliana provide new intelligence on one of literature's most puzzling figures.

Like the time he used black magic to kill somebody. In a minor literary scoop, Bowker reports that the teenaged Eric Blair made a wax effigy of a hated fellow student at Eton, contemplated sticking pins in it but settled for tearing off a leg. The victim, an older boy named Philip Yorke, promptly suffered a broken leg and was dead of leukemia within months. Orwell's remorse, Bowker suggests, reinforced his sense of guilt over a great-grandfather's Jamaican slaveholdings and his father's career in the service of opium and imperialism. Perhaps to expiate all that shame, he bypassed university and became a policeman in Burma. One day he was summoned to deal with an elephant that had reportedly killed its mahout. "Shooting an Elephant," his essay on that melancholy event, aches with regret at the taking of a life, albeit an animal's.

He resigned to become, as he informed a childhood sweetheart, "Eric the famous writer." His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, was a nonfiction account of several months in the late 1920s spent among hoboes and whores, picking hops and washing dishes. Worried about his parents' reaction to his stark life, he took the pseudonym George Orwell — probably from his hero Victorian novelist George Gissing and from the Orwell, a Suffolk river whose precincts the young nature lover hiked. It was a commercial flop, but it established him as a proletarian writer with an eye for detail. He began picking up commissions for essays and reviews, sometimes turning out four or five a week, earning barely enough to keep him in hand-rolled cigarettes.

Tall, gangly and socially inept, he flung himself at women, who usually retreated in terror. One who didn't was Eileen O'Shaughnessy, a London University graduate student. Feisty and willing to share his austerely bohemian life, she married him in 1936. She also joined Orwell in his formative experience, the Spanish Civil War. He went to write articles about the Republican cause, she to help edit a workers' party newspaper. He soon joined the party's fighting unit and saw some action, though he couldn't bring himself to shoot a fascist soldier running from a latrine with his pants down. Standing one day in the trenches built for shorter Spaniards, he was shot through the throat. As he recovered, the Soviets were double-crossing their Republican clients. Bowker reports that a Soviet spy had been tailing the politically unreliable couple for months. Moscow's betrayal of the Spanish revolution turned Orwell against communism and the manipulation of language: "In Spain, in fact, I saw history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines.'" His stinging 1938 memoir Homage to Catalonia brought him vilification from the left. The fearful Orwell borrowed a revolver from Hemingway. He and Eileen took a house on a remote Scottish island, raised goats and chickens, and adopted an infant boy they named Richard, after Orwell's father. Despite continuing infidelities, Orwell remained a devoted dad and husband. He was not, however, a healthy one, afflicted regularly with bronchitis and pneumonia. Eileen had her problems as well. In 1945, while Orwell was away in France, she had surgery to remove uterine tumors and died on the operating table.

Orwell was devastated. He set out to raise Richard alone, but proposed marriage to nearly every woman he met. He also finished Animal Farm, a fable about barnyard communism gone wrong that struck a chord in the postwar era. For the first time, he had royalties, though not the health to enjoy them. Lungs hemorrhaging, he embarked on a grand dystopian novel, 1984. When it was published in 1949 to global acclaim, the author was lying in a London hospital with tuberculosis. That didn't stop him from proposing to Sonia Brownell, a shapely, high-spirited literary editor 15 years his junior. They were married in his hospital room. There he died three months later, aged 46.

Brownell was a devoted if inept steward of his legacy. As biographer Spurling notes, Brownell redeemed herself with a lawsuit that won control of Orwell's royalties for son Richard, who grew up in Scotland, where he still lives, and became a dealer in farm equipment. Brownell also enforced Orwell's request for no biographies, though after her death in 1980 the gates opened. One former Orwell girlfriend told Taylor he was the eighth biographer to approach her.

There have been at least as many Orwell detractors. Hitchens spends his entire book ably rescuing the author from critics both left (E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams) and right (T.S. Eliot, Norman Podhoretz) who felt he slighted their causes or supported things — like virulent anti-communism — that he didn't. Hitchens has a more difficult time explaining away the list of 35 "crypto-communists" Orwell gave to British intelligence in 1948; the defense that no one was harmed by Orwell's revelations does not remove the stigma of naming names. In any case, such esteemed contemporaries as V.S. Pritchett and Anthony Powell have pronounced him nothing less than a "saint." That's a bit much for Hitchens, who prefers to say that Orwell "took some of the supposedly Christian virtues and showed how they could be 'lived' without piety or religious belief."

One virtue Orwell did not possess was an ear for good fiction. His early novels creak and groan with messages about the evils of imperialism, capitalism or middle-class respectability. Even Animal Farm and 1984 are memorable more for the power of their ideas than the gracefulness of their prose. Indeed, there are probably dozens of 20th century writers who took on Orwell's causes in that tumultuous time with more literary flair. But as the durability of his work attests — and as the pigs in Animal Farm might put it — one is more equal than the others.