A Portrait of Orwell as Eric Blair

AT BEST THIS IS half a book. The Unknown Orwell traces the development of a man into a writer, but does so without any real examination of what kind of writer he became. As far as it goes, it is interesting, informative and well-written biography including obscure bits of information about living in lower upper middle class England, or administering the Burmese. But it so completely ducks making any critical assessment of Orwell as a writer, political analyst or social commentator that it's negligible as criticism.

George Orwell was born Eric Blair in 1903, the child of an Anglo-Indian civil servant who qualified, but only barely for membership in the English Establishment. He was the descendent of a long line of younger sons and could, if he chose to, trace his ancestry back to an Earl of Westmoreland and an absentec of younger sons, most of the material advantages had disappeared and Blair felt his marginal status strongly. With a father who began his working life as Assistant Sub-Deputy Opium Agent, fifth grade, and ended it Sub Deputy Opium Agent first grade he had reason to. His childhood was oppressively dominated by the parental push to win a scholarship and get a public school diploma a passport to more secure membership in the upper middle class.

Blair went to Eton, had an undistinguished but adequate record, and, needing a career, went to Burma, at the time a part of the British Indian Empire. For five years he was an Assistant Superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He came back to Europe and for another five years tried to become a writer. He became a writer, and became George Orwell when Down and Out in Paris and London appeared in 1933. In making that transformation he escapes from this book, which restricts itself to the unknown Eric Blair.

Peter Stansky and William Abrahams follow Blair's life in considerable detail. Their attempts to convey the atmosphere of St. Cyprian's preparatory school, Eton, and Burma show they researched and wrote their account carefully. But that does very little to remedy their focus on the peripheral facets of Blair-Orwell's life.

BUT WHETHER the research is ill-done or well, one problem facing any account of Eric Blair's development is that Orwell has already done it, and with more style, Modern critics can harp endlessly on the Blair-Orwell dichotomy, inflating it to the point of benign schizophrenia in a way that Orwell himself could not have done but they won reach the point of diminishing returns.

In all fairness to Abrahams and Stansky, they don't dwell unduly on this marvelous transformation from Blair the pukka sahib to Orwell the socialist. Instead, they dwell on Eric Blair, and in the process do a bit of good social history. To describe the Indian Imperial Police they are forced to rely heavily on men who were Blair's contemporaries in it, who by and large remained imperialists, while Blair resigned. No one reads literary biography for information on the British Empire in its late decadence. But plenty of people interested in Orwell are also interested in the atmosphere of British India and social attitudes in early twentieth century Britain. For them this alternate focus may be worth their while.

Eventually Abrahams and Stansky come to the point where their subject resigns from the police and sets up to become a writer. Roughly the final third of their book is description of this process. It seems to have been an extraordinarily pedestrian affair. He lived with his parents, went to London, and there, went to Parts for shout a year and a half. It was almost a cliché. No one that Abrshams and Stansky use as a source will say that Orwell wrote anything very good during this time, and meet of them freely admit that what he wrote was abysmal. Apparently Orwell had the good sense to destroy almost all of it, in ones again Abrahams and Stansky can make no new critical or literary judgements.

THE UNKNOWN ORWELL suffers from one service internal flow It is just about impossible to discuss a writer in terms of his origins and development and then stop short of evaluating his performance as a writer, It is impossible to discuss how Eric Blair turned into a writer without considering what kind of writer he became.

Orwell's autobiographical essays are better written and more interesting than any biography. He was one of the finest prose writers in this century. Abrahams and Stansky may claim that in an essay like "Such, Such Were the Joys" or a book such as Down and Out in Paris and London Orwell picks and chooses his incidents to make points, distoring his own life to develop a theme. But it does not take an extraordinarily keen intelligence to recognize that any writer does pick and choose events, even biographers such as Abrahams and Stansky.

Orwell's primary autobiographical concern was the development of his socialist tendencies. Not unnaturally he looked to his marginal class background, and humiliating status as a scholarship boy at very snobbish schools. It is a vein that can be mined only so far, so Orwell generally diverts his energies from explaining his personal disorientation, disenchantment and dismay. Instead he evocatively and intuitively explores how the situations that affected him came to be. The man had a distaste for social theory that matched his descriptive ability, and the result was a socialist with politics based on "decency" and most often defined negatively. The product was powerful prose oddly empty of any overwhelming or pervasive theoretical insight.

Orwell's work needs no theoretical overlay mostly because he has an incredible eye for apt detail. He is convincing because he picks up on minor items that are perfect illustration of his points. The details may be improbable or commonplace, but are always appropriate. His approach is almost always tangential to his subject and his attitudes are implicit in what he writes. On occasion he publicly declared his bias, but even he relied mainly on apt illustration or pointed allusion to make his stance clear.

Unfortunately, the same techniques don't always work for his biographers. Abrahams and Stansky load their book with detail, but it is generally off the mark rather than tangential. It is a valuable book for what it tells of life on the outer rim of privilege, not for what it tells of Orwell. But since no one is likely to investigate the life of the lower-upper-middle class for its own sake, and since the party administrators of the world are more important and disgruntled than is regularly recognized, the book is worthwhile even if it sheds little light on Orwell. The Unknown Orwell is an intriguing book, though not a revealing one. But it is the first full-scale biography of Orwell, and perhaps in the future his students will analyze rather than imitate him.