Orwell: The Life and George Orwell

Reviewed by Margie Thomson

For a man who requested in his will that no one should publish any biographies of him, George Orwell has had an awful lot written about him: three substantial Lives, many memoirs and many more studies of his work. Now, in the centenary of his birth (dying at 47, he's been dead more years than alive out of those 100) come these two large biographies, 500 pages apiece.

They navigate the well-trodden path, yet each offers something new to those curious about the man who wrote, among many other works, Animal Farm and 1984, giving us such conceptual maxims as "all animals are equal but some are more equal than others", and "Big Brother is watching you".

The evidence, gleaned from these two latest books, is that he would not really have minded either the biographical attention or the process. Orwell loved biography as a form, enjoyed reviewing them and thought them valuable in understanding writers and their work, as Bowker points out.

What's more, he didn't behave like a true biography-hater and destroy letters, diaries and notebooks. Quite the contrary: much of his extraordinarily prolific output was autobiographical, such as his examination of his public-school experiences in "Such, such were the joys", or his essay "Why I write", his experiences in the Burma police, as a tramp in the English countryside, or struggling in Paris and London (although it transpires that he was more bohemian than real pauper).

Bowker also says that this request was made only in his last will, not in previous ones, and could have been an agreement made with his second wife Sonia Brownell - possibly among the conditions on which she agreed to marry him.

The dam has been long broken, first breached by Bernard Crick's George Orwell: A Biography, published in 1980. Taylor recalls what must have been a humbling experience of writing to one of several women Orwell had diffidently asked to marry him, as he sought someone to look after him in his last tuberculosis-ridden years.

"I got a letter," Taylor recalls, "which amongst other information listed the seven previous researchers who had come to interview her. What more was there to be said? this lady wondered."

What strikes the reader of Taylor's biography is his passion for his subject, and how that passion shifts by book's end. Taylor, perhaps, did not like his subject quite so much by then, or at least saw him more clearly - and it's this shift, this process of discovery, that to my mind makes the Taylor biography the more interesting read. I have to add that there's not much to choose between the two, which weave around each other in a mostly complementary, occasionally contradictory way.

It's common in biographies to feel the subject slithering away from your grasp, their essence rather drowned by other voices, tireless detail, chronology and so on, but both these books make a fair fist of illuminating Orwell's "true nature".

Taylor had a lifelong love of Orwell's work and first read A Clergyman's Daughter as a teenager. Despite his feeling that "the contents of the Oxford history syllabus were as nothing compared to - say - the essay 'Oyster and Brown Stout' ... or the essay on Dickens", he is fearless in his approach to Orwell's fallibilities. And there were plenty of those, as both biographers make clear. This is indeed the era of the warts-and-all biography.

Bowker homes in on Orwell's complex sexuality and his deceptiveness, while Taylor devotes one of his innovative inter-chapter segments on summing up 'The Case Against': his unreliable reportage, political naivety, possible anti-Semitism and homophobia. Other segments discuss Orwell's face, voice, rats and Jews.

If we had any doubt about the obsessiveness and optimism required of biographers, Taylor dispels it with a vignette elaborating on one of his "finds" - a possible image of Orwell captured on film.

Surprisingly, given that Orwell lived until 1950, no recordings of his voice or film footage of him has turned up. However, Taylor, trawling through the East Anglian Film Archive in Norwich comprising years of "faltering two-tone" film from the 1920s and 30s, finally spotted a figure on a footpath watching a procession and believes (despite the fact that the figure is smoking a cigarette out of a holder, which Orwell was never known to do) that "it could be him".

Anyone who has been involved with the small parties of the far Left will appreciate Orwell's extraordinary ability to see through dogma, to recognise the threat to individual liberty from totalitarianism of both the left and right, and his perspicacity and courage in rejecting Stalinism while continuing to call himself a socialist.

The six months he spent in Spain, fighting for the Republicans as part of a tiny Trotskyite group, was the "defining experience of his life". The "blood, treachery and murder" left him "with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings", but the seeds of 1984 were sown when for the first time in his life he saw "newspaper articles that bore no relation to the known facts".

The Stalinist hit squads that hunted down, imprisoned and murdered people supposedly on their side turned him violently against Stalin's regime and totalitarianism in general. This led to his most controversial act - handing the anti-communist Information Research Department at the Foreign Office 135 names of people he suspected of being Soviet sympathisers.

"In identifying Russian Communism as the enemy and being prepared to fight it, he found himself fighting beside those he also hated," writes Bowker, who does a good job of conveying Orwell's motivations.

Orwell was a man of many of these contradictions, not least the fact that he was Eton-educated yet politically identified with the have-nots. He and his most famous works have been variously claimed and vilified by both the left and the right.

At the end of his short life, he was on the brink of real financial success, and today it's estimated that 40 million copies of his books have been sold throughout the world. Sick for many years with the TB that killed him so young, he retained his ironic sense of humour. Asked by a friend what the Marxists thought of him, he replied: "A fascist hyena. A fascist octopus. They're fond of animals."

Orwell: The Life - By D.J. Taylor, Chatto & Windus, $65

George Orwell - By Gordon Bowker, Little Brown, $80.93