A world seen through the eyes of a “warped bird”

Orwell, The New Life
D.J. Taylor
Oxford University Press
May 2023
540 pages
ISBN: 978-1472132963

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This lengthy biography by D.J Taylor, English award winning biographer, journalist and novelist is exhaustively researched and referenced. Its mass of detail delves into every aspect of Orwell’s personal life and work. Every surviving friend, colleague, relation or even acquaintance is sifted for memories and impressions. What emerges at the end is an enigmatic and elusive but intense character, defined largely by what first seem at first like contradictions but are in fact complexities.

The product of an upper middle class family, Eton educated, followed by a five year stint in the foreign service in colonial Burma, his speech, manner and many of his attitudes were in keeping with his background. Yet, he was avowedly and consistently socialist in his ideological declarations and he is described by contemporaries as shabby and unkempt, “three days away from a shave”.

He is described by several of those who knew him as “compassionate” and particularly good with children, lavishing tender care on his young adopted son, Richard. Yet, his devotion did not keep him from abandoning the child to the care of his ill wife in a damp, comfortless cottage so he could pursue literary and journalistic research. Along with the kindness that many remember him for are the stinging reviews of the books of close friends whom he was never remotely embarrassed to continue socialising with afterwards. Later in life, he was kind to the point of indulgence to young, aspiring writers. One associate described him “as humane but completely selfish”. It was as if he could compartmentalise his life into sealed off zones. A former flatmate described him as “a closet sadist”. A reviewer of one of his early works, Burmese Days, describes him as “steeped in gall” and another labelled the book “vitriol”.

Friends and acquaintances who shared school life and colonial life with him found him agreeable, sociable and “kind” and apparently as comfortable as anyone else in his milieux. Yet, his own reminiscences later of his schools, St Cyprian’s Preparatory School and Eton and of his five years in Burma read very differently. He recounts his school experience as poisoned by sadism, favouritism and belittling snobbery. According to a schoolmate, his sense of grievance was not grounded in the reality of school life but “in his imagination”. Writing of his time in Burma where he served in the police force, he said, “for five years I have been part of a regime that left me with a bad conscience”. According to those who served beside him there, “there was no evidence he was repulsed at the time”.

Interestingly, his declared views fluctuate back and forth. When Labour under Attlee came to power after the Second World War he urged “the instant abolition of private schools” yet, just one year earlier, when his adopted baby arrived home, one of his first comments was about “putting him down for Eton”. The man who emerges in this exhaustively researched biography becomes somehow harder to know and fathom the more we hear about him.

He emerges however as an extraordinarily sharp observer of human nature and obviously, on the testimony of his two most famous works alone, Animal Farm and 1984, astoundingly prescient, prophetic even. For him, all systems of government, whether right or left, tend to totalitarianism and the deception, lies and savagery that maintaining it demands. His experience fighting on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War proved disillusioning but his thoughts on left wing totalitarianism were well formed before then. He had already described the Soviet commissars as “gangsters”.

Though cynical about the motives of all sides in war which he described as “a racket” and believing that it only serves the interests of elites, he could never align fully with pacifism. For him there is a point when one has little choice but to “smash windows, blow out human entrails and burn holes in children with lumps of thermite” because the alternative is to be enslaved by people “who are more willing to do these things than you are yourself”. Such thoughts seem to speak to the unfolding situation today between Gaza and Israel and are reflected in both the words and actions of both sides in this conflict.

How did this bleak, rather misanthropic view of human nature and its capacity for evil form with such clarity, force and conviction in Orwell? From early on his comments on human beings are heavy with animalistic analogy and metaphor. In part, of course, this may be linked to his keen interest in nature generally and the habits of animals of all species in particular. Geese, moles, rabbits and rats were all used in his descriptions of human faces in his writings. One may ask if there was something more in his life experience to jaundice his view of his fellow humans?

A reader for the publisher Victor Gollancz who published his earlier work wrote, “I know nothing of Orwell but it is perfectly clear that he has been through hell and he is probably still there.” After meeting him, P.G. Wodehouse remarked that Orwell struck him as “a warped bird who never recovered from an unhappy childhood and miserable school life.” There is something in such assessments that rings true but the book with its extensive research can find little to say about the Orwell family dynamic between parents and siblings other than that it was “undemonstrative”, a word that crops up in a number of testimonies. What may or may not lie behind that word is anyone’s guess.

Orwell remained consistently a socialist in terms of his expressed views but that never blinded him to the reality that the working out of good and evil is not determined by ideology or class or any other general marker. With power comes the common tendency to dominate and coerce and to corrupt. The reason he gave for his profound dislike of Catholicism was that it shared a lot with secular totalitarianism and “its orthodoxies were a form of mind control”. It is clear from some of his book reviews that he respected some Catholic commentators but his contemporary popular Catholic apologists Belloc, Chesterton, “Hilarie Chesternut”, and Ronald Knox seem to have greatly riled him. Perhaps it was their positivity and optimism in the transformative power of grace knocking uncomfortably against his hardened cynicism that so irked him?

Orwell’s disenchantment with humanity touched everything. Nothing was beyond the reach of the corrupting influence of power, no ideology, no religion, no institution, no individual and no academic discipline. Scientific freedom could never be guaranteed. One wonders what he might have to say about modern governments’ claims to be “following the science” across a wide spectrum of public policy and how such claims are used to discredit dissenting voices? He cites the case of the Soviet director of Agricultural Science, Lysenko, publicly rejecting the signal discovery of genetics of western biologists by declaring there was “no such thing as a gene”. For Orwell, science could not be equated with progress because it could be bent to serve, not just its master, the State, but to reflect the moral disposition of the individual scientist. The human brain was as capable of developing “race theory and poison gas” as it was penicillin or any other life enhancing discovery. He might have added that the human brain was also fallible and capable of making catastrophic errors.

Orwell also perceived that no ruling class can govern without some form of morality, even if it’s only a “quasi-religious belief in itself, a mystique”. He observed that “hedonistic societies do not endure” without the “vitality” of some framework of values. He believed that “at the heart of totalitarianism lay displaced religious sensibility”. Despite his scepticism, at best, about religion, he saw that “the totalitarian shadow that hung over the world had its origins in the decline of religious belief.” The challenge he saw was “to put displaced religious beliefs to work for humanist ends”, to renew the idea of absolute right and wrong “even though belief on which it once rested had begun to disappear”. He acknowledges that change cannot be prescribed but “must come from within”. Orwell never goes beyond diagnostics really in his social and political analysis. He remains a socialist while fully aware of “socialism’s totalitarian possibilities”. He rejects faith and religion yet clings to something of its mystery. He was buried at his request according to the rites of the Anglican Church, perhaps the final unresolved conundrum of a life of conundrums.

His bleak view of the world and its inhabitants may be traced to his rejection of the God of mercy and grace as much as the extraordinary acuity of his insight into the human psyche during a revolutionary period of history. Perhaps the same atheism and disenchantment are connected to, maybe even rooted in, the quality of his own moral life? He was a sexual opportunist, had multiple and simultaneous affairs before and after marriage without, it would seem from his correspondence and the testimony of those who knew him, including some of the women, any self-reflection, let alone self-reproach. Ill health dogged him from childhood and may have engendered the kind of selfish neediness and negativity that led him to say late in life after very many affairs and marital infidelity, “I have hundreds of friends but no woman who takes an interest in me.” He made proposals of marriage to women he could not have known well after his first wife’s death and did finally and bizarrely persuade a woman fifteen years his junior to marry him as he lay close to death in a hospital bed in October 1949. The status of being married again seemed to give him a boost of morale and for a short time his condition rallied. He died on January 21st 1950.

I am left at the end of this deeply researched, extensively referenced but well paced book with a simple question. Whose presence or perhaps absence in his life, or what defining experience made him the “warped bird’ P. G. Wodehouse encountered when Orwell’s place in literature and culture was already established, and his fame was beginning to overshadow that of Wodehouse himself whom he had so long admired and wanted to meet during the early years of his literary career? It’s a question D.J Taylor does not answer but neither does he ask it or not quite. Perhaps, whatever the reason, in the final analysis, it takes a “warped bird” like Orwell to penetrate so unflinchingly the warped tendencies of the human heart when enabled by unaccountable power and an absence of an objective moral authority.