More tales of a fearless life

Biography: George Orwell was born 100 years ago this year

Biography: George Orwell was born 100 years ago this year. Enda O'Doherty reviews some of the new biographies out for the centenary.

'Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." So God put it, with His customary acuity, in Ecclesiastes, and I would not disagree. Biographies and studies of George Orwell now take up nearly a foot of my shelf space and weigh in at over a stone; and this is far from a complete collection.

In the 1970s there was Stansky and Abrams's two-volume work; then, in 1980, Bernard Crick's "official" biography followed by Michael Shelden's "authorised" one in 1991 and that of Jeffrey Meyers in 2000.

And now, for the centenary of Orwell's birth, we have two more full-length accounts of the life from Bowker and Davies and a short but densely argued study of the politics from Lucas.

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The story of Eric Blair, who became George Orwell, courted and overcame adversity, struggled for recognition, told the truth to shame the Communist devil, then found fame and even fortune only to die of TB aged 46 has been told so often it now seems to fall neatly into a set of tableaux.

Prep school at St Cyprian's was horrid but Eton rather fun. With Burma came an awakening to the evils of imperialism, while tramping round Essex and slumming in Lancashire showed all was not well on the home front. The Spanish Civil War left a bullet in the neck and taught the tough lesson that Commies could not be trusted.

Then came the big war, first a bad thing then a good thing, though it left Uncle Joe stronger than ever and nuclear war surely not far away. All along there were the books, botched jobs mostly hacked out with more passion than skill until finally, and somewhat mysteriously, out of all that pain and poverty and bitterness came two masterpieces, quickly followed by a bizarre deathbed marriage and an affecting exit into the higher reaches of the literary pantheon.

Crick laid the groundwork, emphasising Orwell's political values, the fabled "decency" and elusive democratic socialism to which his biographer felt close. Shelden concentrated more on the literary man, but expended rather too much energy in self-justification and bitching about his predecessor's supposed inadequacies.

Meyers, for his part, gleefully knocked down the straw man of Orwell the secular saint by uncovering George the philanderer. Bowker now ventures even further along this path, revealing the truly astounding number of his subject's sexual hits and near-misses, though he tells the story with considerable psychological insight and without Meyers's censorious prurience.

Taylor, finally, returns to a Crickian sobriety in an oddly muted work that raises but fails to chase down a number of interesting questions concerning the value of Orwell's work.

Each successive biographer can claim - and of course does - to have discovered something new or pursued a path neglected by others. But the accretion of knowledge and insight, one feels, is sometimes marginal.

It is mildly interesting to be reminded that Orwell was quarter-French and a considerable Francophile, if only to remind ourselves that the rather sentimental sense of Englishness he celebrated did not embrace xenophobia. Equally, Bowker finds it important to stress his virulent anti-Catholicism (shared by both his wives), but we are already aware of this from the essays. And to have to read yet again - twice on this occasion and at great length - that the early novels are no great literary shakes is indeed wearying of the flesh.

So what is there new to be said of Orwell? Of the man, and particularly of the private life, precious little, I would think. Of the work, possibly a good deal, the most important questions being "was he right?" and "was he honest?"

The issues which Taylor raises in a three-page section called 'The Case Against' are the subject of a short book by Lucas, a Marxist critic who is resolutely unimpressed by his subject's iconic status on the democratic left (and indeed on the right). And while the thesis is one I cannot agree with, perhaps not sharing the same ideological premises, Lucas's study contains more concentrated intelligence than a whole clutch of Orwell biographies.

Homage to Catalonia is read and admired by young socialists of succeeding generations who see in it an example from history of a revolution which was spontaneous and genuine and which might well have triumphed had it not been suppressed by the cynical authoritarianism of the Stalinists. But would the shambolic anarchist uprising Orwell reported on ever have amounted to anything anyway - could it possibly have lasted? - even had it not been put down, for a mixture of "good" and bad reasons, by the agents of the Comintern?

Let us take Animal Farm, a well-nigh perfect work of art, but is it really an accurate account of the Bolshevik revolution, a convulsion that from the outset was clearly orchestrated not by "the people" but by the party, that is not by the animals but by the pigs.

Then there are the essays, reams and reams of them and mostly wonderful stuff. But where is it exactly that this famous democratic socialist maps out what democratic socialism is, how it should be achieved, how defended, how reconciled with freedom?

What of his political judgment? Bowker reminds us of the rather uncomfortable fact that in 1938 a pacifist Orwell backed Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. Two years later he believed a socialist revolution in Britain was imminent and was convinced the war could not be won without it. Then, after 1945, the fiery revolutionary dwindled into a supporter of Attlee's rather mild Labour welfarism. Who knows what might have come next?

If, as I suggest, there are many questions to be asked about Orwell's politics - some of which no doubt can also be answered - what is it that remains of him that is valuable and still worth cherishing? Well there are the two towering literary/intellectual achievements, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. And there is the body of essays and literary journalism, still sparkling pieces dashed off in difficult circumstances at an incredible rate - up to three a week in spite of frequent illness in the mid-1940s. It is here above all that the splendid Orwell voice is found, clear, stubborn, truth-telling, sometimes cranky or even daft, but hilarious in its daftness: humour is the most underrated of Orwell's many literary virtues.

The voice, of course, and its related Orwellian "personality" of blunt plain-speaking, is not a natural one but a literary construct. This is a point which many of the critics and biographers go to great pains to labour; why some of them seem offended by it is a mystery.

"To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly," Orwell wrote in 1946, "and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox." Personal fear is something Orwell seemed to be almost entirely without, though his enormous affection for animals excluded the rat. Thinking fearlessly, letting the thought carry him where it would, was to take him all over the place politically. But unless our own minds tend to cleave to orthodoxy, we are all the better for his journeys.

Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist

Orwell. By D.J. Taylor, Chatto & Windus, 466pp, £20

George Orwell. By Gordon Bowker, Little Brown, 495pp, £20

Orwell. By Scott Lucas, Haus Publishing, 180pp, £8.99

By George/The Orwell Collection

Down and Out in Paris and London; Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays; Animal Farm; Homage to Catalonia and Nineteen Eighty-Four are all available at £5.99 each in Penguin paperback, as are Orwell's Victory by Christopher Hitchens, £7.99, and The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell by Hilary Spurling, £6.99