This book was a recent purchase, bought only a couple of weeks before reading. After being deep in Orwell-land for the last month, I felt I had to read a biography. This was recommended in various places as one of the best. I knew nothing of D.J. Taylor before ordering this book, but he is apparently a well-respected journalist, novelist, and writer. He’s a self-confessed Orwell obsessive, coming back repeatedly to the same subject. This book is a 2019 rewrite of his original 2003 biography. Several new collections of correspondence, particularly between Orwell and various girlfriends, have come to light in the intervening years, shedding new light on Orwell the man, and particularly his romantic life.

The book opens with Orwell’s family, childhood, and much hated prep school in Eastbourne. Orwell’s health problems go back to his very earliest childhood, but otherwise he seems as though he was a smart gifted boy. Many of his contemporaries say that he was unfairly hard on his school; that it was the usual mixed bag, not as unremittingly awful as Orwell paints it. No hint of his later socialism appears at this stage in his life; he seemed a typical product of the British upper middle class, even writing patriotic poems during WWI. But what is clear is that, even as a schoolboy, he was independent-minded and had a strong anti-authoritarian streak. He went on to Eton after winning a scholarship, which he seemed to have enjoyed, although he did the bare minimum of effort once there. Taylor also relates Orwell’s relationship with Jacintha Buddicom, his childhood sweetheart, whose book, Eric and Us, is apparently one of the best sources on Orwell’s childhood. Their relationship ended when Orwell tried to force himself on her during a walk in the countryside, after which they didn’t speak until shortly before his death. It seems she had no idea that the famous author George Orwell was her childhood friend Eric Blair, until it was pointed out by a friend.

Orwell decided not to go on to university, probably because of lack of funds, and instead secured a post with the imperial police in Burma. He had Burmese connections on his mother’s side; his maternal grandfather was a French merchant who had settled there. Taylor complains that it is hard to find much about Orwell’s time in Burma. Orwell himself only left two short essays, A Hanging, and Shooting an Elephant, and some short stories, later collected as Burma Days. How much of himself is in any of these is hard to know. Taylor speculates about Orwell’s sex life in Burma. It was quite common for the British administrators to take Burmese mistresses and use the services of prostitutes, but we have no proof that Orwell did the same, although as Taylor points out, the author of Burmese Days seems to know plenty about both. On his return to the UK Orwell intended to propose to Jacintha Buddicom, but she was in hiding having a baby by another man, so he assumed he’d been rejected. It seems it was at this point that Orwell decided to become a writer, much to the horror of his parents.

After a spell living with his parents in Southwold, Suffolk, Orwell moved to Paris. He was a quarter French and fluent in the language, so he found it far easier to integrate into working class Paris than many of his fellow expatriate authors. Unlike most of those other 1920s writers, he didn’t mix in the literary scene and seems to have associated primarily with poor Parisians. He had a relationship with a prostitute named Suzette until she ran off with his money, an episode that notably doesn’t appear in his book about the period, Down and Out in Paris and London. Back in the UK Orwell again lived mostly with his parents in Southwold, living as a rather eccentric member of the small middle class community there. He pursued several love affairs, none very successfully. It was also at this time that he made several forays into the London underworld, where he posed as a tramp. Down and Out portrays this as a continuous period of extreme poverty, but in reality he collected the material for the book on shorter forays and returned to comfortable middle-class life in between.

After the publication of Down and Out Orwell worked for various 3rd division private schools in West London. He wrote Burmese Days and A Clergyman’s Daughter during this time. Again there were unsuccessful courtships, Brenda Salkeld and Eleanor Jaques being the subjects of this period. I suppose at that time he wasn’t much of a catch; an awkward tall lanky man who had given up a well paid imperial job to live with his parents and pursue a, so far, profitless career as a writer. In 1934–35 Orwell worked at Booklovers’ Corner, a second-hand bookshop on the border of Hampstead and Camden. This period was the subject of his third novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. During this time he was introduced to the literary society of London and made many new friends including his future wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy. At last a successful courtship!

In 1936, Orwell gave up the job at Booklovers’ Corner to take up a commission from Victor Gollancz, a left-wing publisher, for an expedition to Lancashire and Yorkshire to report on conditions among the industrial working class. This eventually appeared as The Road to Wigan Pier. Taylor notes that there were quite a few writers doing very similar work at the time. One wit commented that one could barely get any work done down a mine in those days for middle-class scribblers getting in the way. On his return south, Orwell married Eileen O’Shaughnessy and the couple moved into a tiny ancient cottage called ‘The Stores’ in Wallington, Hertfordshire, where they ran a loss-making village store. The ceilings were so low that there was nowhere inside the house where the 6ft4 Orwell could stand up straight.

The Blairs had only been settled in Wallington for a short time before Orwell left for Spain and the Spanish Civil War. In Barcelona, and thanks to his contacts with the Independent Labour Party, he signed up to fight with the POUM militia. Eileen soon followed and while Orwell was at the front, she worked for the ILP offices there. Taylor speculates that she may have had a relationship with Orwell’s Belgian commander Georges Kopp. Orwell’s time in Spain is well documented in Homage to Catalonia, which I’ve already read and reviewed, so I won’t say any more about it here. Orwell had never been a well man and the Spanish expedition marked a severe downturn in his health. His tuberculosis got significantly worse, resulting in a long hospital stay after his return to England. After he was discharged an anonymous benefactor paid for him and Eileen to recuperate in Marrakech. Orwell, a lover of wet, green England, didn’t enjoy Morocco. He found the Arabs repulsive, and French colonial rule oppressive. It was quite a productive time though; he wrote most of Coming Up for Air, his final pre-war novel, while he was there. It’s interesting that, while Orwell is always seen as a political writer, he didn’t really have any strongly held political associations until after the Spanish Civil War when he declared himself an avowed socialist. His stance was strongly pacifist and anti-war until almost the outbreak, but in a Damascene conversion he U-turned and declared himself ready to fight against Hitler and the Nazis.

Orwell tried to join the armed forces at the outbreak of war, but was thwarted by his ill-health. His disappointment was somewhat alleviated when he became an active and enthusiastic member of the Home Guard; at one point writing that it could become a revolutionary people’s militia, an idea that didn’t survive contact with reality. He worked for the BBC’s propaganda department, where he formulated many of the ideas that would surface in 1984. He became a fixture of literary London, getting to know many of the big names of the time, including H.G. Wells, whom he told to his face that his best work had all been done prior to WWI! At the end of the war he was sent by the Observer as a war correspondent to newly liberated Europe, travelling first to Paris and then on to Germany. While he was away, his wife Eileen died in London during an operation, leaving Orwell solely responsible for their recently adopted baby boy, Richard.

In the immediate post-war years he lived as a single father in Dickensian conditions in London. He hired a housekeeper and nanny who helped look after Richard. It was the publication of Animal Farm that finally made Orwell an unambiguously successful author and able to live comfortably on the proceeds from book sales. With this new freedom from having to supplement his income with journalism, he finally realised his dream of retiring to a remote Scottish island to dedicate himself to writing. At Barnhill on the Isle of Jura in the Hebrides, with his sister and adopted son, he lived a primitive existence far from the literary London world he’d inhabited through the war years. It was here that he wrote 1984. All the while his health declined until he was admitted to a succession of sanatoriums. With the publication of 1984, his masterpiece, Orwell entered the last year of his life. On the one hand he was rich, on the other he was too ill to enjoy it. He had a bizarre death-bed marriage to Sonia Brownell, surely an epic bit of last minute literary gold digging on her part. In her favour, she did seem to do her best to manage Orwell’s legacy responsibly.

Orwell was one of those rare individuals, wholly immune to any need to join a group or fit-in. The kind of man who could happily raise his hand in a room full of people all convinced they are in agreement, and disagree. While a committed socialist, he refused to acquiesce in the British left’s reverence for the Soviet Union. The craven worship of that murderous regime has forever tarnished the reputation of the mid-century intellectual left. He was able to tell it as he saw it, and with his intelligence and insight, he often saw further and deeper than any other political commentator of the time. His description of totalitarianism was expert and timely. 1984 has probably done more than any other work to inoculate the west against totalitarian communism; we still use “Orwellian” to describe any restriction of freedom of thought or slide towards overt infringement on people’s freedom.

Taylor has done a superb job bringing Orwell to life. I read a review of this book that said, “never meet your heroes”, as if the recently unearthed details of Orwell’s rather inept attempts at courtship, and his occasional neglect of his wife in some way tarnish his reputation. I didn’t feel this at all. It was a privilege to get to know this genius better. The faults simply made him more human to me. I don’t get the modern requirement that great thinkers and artists must also be saints. Having read a large portion of his interwar reportage I am a bigger fan than ever. You don’t have to agree with everything he wrote, indeed he didn’t agree with everything he wrote, to appreciate one of the world’s most original political thinkers, and one whom we still refer to nearly 80 years later.