Tag Archives: Biography

Book review

Orwell – the New Life by D J Taylor, 2023

It was a real pleasure to spend some more time getting to know the genial, flawed and very human genius that was George Orwell. I was broadly familiar with the structure of Orwell’s life – India, prep school, Eton, Burma and so on – but Taylor draws these events together into a coherent whole. So when I say this, it needs to be seen in that context: Orwell remains as much a mystery to me now as he ever was. This edition quotes John Sutherland on the dust-jacket as saying “He (Taylor) presents the ‘living’ Orwell as well as anyone will be able to”. That may be the case, but to me Orwell remains enigmatic, hidden, and incomplete. I’ll try and explain why.

There are so many aspects of Orwell’s life that remain puzzling to me. Some of the things we don’t really know about him include:

Why didn’t he go to university?

Why did he leave his post in the Burmese Imperial police, after more than five years of service?

Why didn’t he get a conventional job and write in his spare time?

What did he do for money – was he living off his parents, figures who also don’t really emerge into the light in this book.

Almost everything about his relationship with his first wife, Eileen

Let’s take those in order. The traditional explanation of his decision to join the Burmese Imperial Police instead of going to university is that his grades at Eton weren’t good enough. Certainly he wasn’t a star pupil and financial pressures to get a proper job, one following in the family traditions of Imperial service, would have been compelling. But that’s just speculation – we don’t really know for certain what led him to this decision. Having made it he stuck at the job for several years (five and a half) – this wasn’t just the equivalent of a brief period of national service – but on returning to the UK he made the key decision in his life – to become a writer. Where did that decision come from? Were there any signs prior to this that Orwell aspired to the life of an author? Had he been writing out in Burma? If so there’s no record of it. And what a strange way to start the life of a writer – instead of using the five years of experience in Burma (which he was later to use of course) he instead decides almost out of the blue to go tramping? Why? Even in the context of going ‘undercover in the under-classes’, something earlier writers had done, this still seems such a sudden and mysterious choice. Collecting material is something some writers feel compelled to do, but there seems few less promising areas to mine for content for a novel than tramps. Orwell did of course use this content, both in essays and in A Clergyman’s Daughter, but it still seems a very random choice.

When asked later in life about his decision to quit the Burmese police Orwell always cited his opposition to imperialism, and texts such as A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant certainly support that idea. I can’t suppress the suspicion that this was a simplification of his reasons (which is fair enough, most life decisions are complex and when explaining them to other people we often reduce them to one or two elements).

Orwell did have conventional jobs, lots of them. He worked in Parisian kitchens and hotels, he sold books, he was a tutor, briefly a headmaster (in a private school with a teaching staff of two, where his CV as an Old Etonian would have helped) and during the war he worked for the BBC. I think he never stayed in a job for much more than two years. Was this because he couldn’t settle at a job for any length of time, getting bored and disenchanted with the value of his work very quickly, or was it because work was always supplementary to his writing, something that paid the rent and kept the bailiffs away, always secondary to his ‘real’ work? Once again we simply don’t have any definitive evidence that explains this nomadic lifestyle which was reflected in his relentless moving from address to address, never staying in the same place for more than a year or two – a full list of Orwell’s residences would fill an address book.

Despite making a reasonable income from his journalism, his publishing, and his various jobs, I suspect Orwell often relied on his parents and wealthier friends for financial support. I admittedly have no real evidence for this, just another suspicion – he did keep going back to his parents’ house in Southwold when he first started out as a writer. Certainly he had that middle class carelessness with money, putting up with considerable hardship when necessary and always assuming that something would come up to help out. You really can only live that life if you know there is always some support available as a last resort – Orwell was never going to find himself homeless.

And finally there is the closed book that is his relationship with Eileen. They married in 1936 after a relatively brief courtship (their very modest wedding was held in Wallington, the hamlet where Orwell ran the village stores), she went with him to Spain to support him in the civil war, and she died in 1945 just after the end of the war in Europe, and very shortly after having adopted their son, Richard. Taylor speculates the marriage was reasonably happy although hints at affairs on both sides – other biographers have been much more categorical about their infidelities, and certainly Orwell left some deeply incriminating letters. Lots of people who knew the couple wrote about them, but none seem to have understood the real dynamic of the relationship, what attracted one to the other, what made them tick as a couple. Why did Eileen put up with being a junior partner in the relationship despite her many talents, indeed why did she put up with living in the cottage in Wallington for so long with its outdoor privy, no heating and cramped rooms.

What is all the more extraordinary about this mysteriousness of the real Orwell is that he was a journalist, was famous after Animal Farm, was interviewed many times and had many writers as friends who left memoirs. A surprising number of people he wrote to preserved his letters, even when he asked them not to. Yet no recording of his voice exists, and I believe there is no film of him either, despite his working for a year and half at the BBC!

Another point that comes across vividly in this text is the tragedy of Orwell’s early death. He published his first novel, Burmese Days, in 1934, and was dead less than sixteen years later. In that time he did an extraordinary amount of work, and living, for a man in such poor health. He published six novels and three full-length pieces of non-fiction, got married, fought in the Spanish Civil War, worked at the BBC, served in the Home Guard, wrote a prodigious amount of journalism, reviews, diaries and journals, essays, opinion pieces, and letters, finding the time somehow to adopt a child and then remarry in the final weeks of his life. Dying aged 46, it is striking just how incredibly truncated his life was – cramming all those novels and experiences into little more than a decade dominated by the rise of fascism and the second world war.

If you are not a fan of Orwell you probably won’t become one on reading this biography. Taylor is honest about Orwell’s shortcomings and flaws. What doesn’t emerge clearly from these pages is Orwell the politician. There’s no real account of Orwell’s personal political journey from Old Etonian and imperial policeman to avowed socialist. The Spanish Civil War was obviously a turning point, but the transition was much more complex than just changing his views after being shot at (and of course, shot). His membership of the Independent Labour Party, a left-wing off-shoot of the Labour Party, is barely mentioned, and although his friendships and acquaintances within the Attlee Government are referred to there is no sense of Orwell the political animal, which was such a central part of his identity.

The chronological narrative is broken up from time to time with short thematic chapters – Orwell on faces, rats, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and so on. These essays felt like a way of using left-over material (and many of them did appear in the original version of this biography) and felt strangely out of place. If I was editing this book I would have put a line through all of them and suggested they be sent to the Orwell Society for publication.

The attempt early on to draw comparisons with St Cyprians, Orwell’s prep school (a private, fee-paying school where the middle classes sent their children to prepare them for public school examinations) and Oceania are absurd. Similar ill-thought through comparisons could have easily been made between Oceania and the BBC or Eton or the Burmese Imperial Police Force – the idea that an author’s literary ideas must all have their origins in childhood experiences or institutions is as ridiculous as it is demeaning, undermining the ability of an author to – you know – make things up.

There were a couple of other things that bugged me about this book and should really be fixed in the next edition:

a) Eileen’s war-time job. See if you can spot why this paragraph irked me? Chapter 20 ‘The Melting Iceberg’ describes Orwell’s account to find a role in the overall war effort. On page 366 Taylor, quoting a letter from Orwell to his literary agent, tells us that

“The letter to Moore notes ‘my wife has already got a job in a government office’ as if Eileen’s rapid deployment were the most natural thing in the world. But it might be wondered just exactly how, in the paranoiac conditions that prevailed in Whitehall corridors circa 1939, the wife of a writer regarded as an ‘extremist’ by the India Office, suspected of importing contraband material and already on MI5’s radar, could have fetched up in such a sensitive part of the wartime bureaucracy”.

I reread this sentence several times thinking “What sensitive part of the wartime bureaucracy”? What was her job, and why was it such a matter of surprise that she was given it. It’s not until page 375 that we learn what it was – she worked in the Censorship Department. An editor should have caught this omission and made the minor changes required for the narrative to make sense. A similar thing happens in:

b) Chapter 26 ‘Pain in Side Very Bad’ is prefaced by two quotes dated 1948. The text itself then starts with this sentence:

“The Blair party left for Jura on the afternoon of 10 April, went by overnight train to Glasgow, and then flew on to Islay. By the evening of 11 April they were back in Barnhill.”

What year is this? We are in the closing years of Orwell’s life – every year matters. The previous chapter is one of the rather irritating filler essays – this one is on Orwell and anti-Semitism – so the reader can be forgiven for not knowing or remembering that Taylor is picking up where he left off the preceding chapter. It’s just unnecessary and irritating, when a year after the first reference to April would make everything clear.

These are minor, fixable points.

I opened this review with a comment on one of the observations from critics quoted on the book’s dust-jacket, so I am going to close with one as well. Hilary Spurling from the Daily Telegraph apparently wrote

“A persuasive and profoundly moving exploration of the ways in which Orwell’s work was constructed from the stones of a ruined life”.

I know he had health issues, died early, and lost his first wife, but despite all that I never thought of Orwell’s life as ruined. There are sad moments in his story but it is not a tragedy – he lived, wrote and achieved more in his 46 years than many of us manage in 70. And while his early works draw upon his life experiences, the idea that Animal Farm and 1984 are in any way autobiographical (or ‘constructed from the stones’ of his life) is preposterous. This instinct, to try and find the seeds of a writer’s creativity in their life stories, actually ends up diminishing their ability to tell stories and work with ideas. That’s one reason why Orwell was so dismissive of his early novels in later life, to the extent of not allowing them to be republished on the back of the popularity of Animal Farm in particular. What led to that late blooming of creativity and inventiveness remains yet another mystery about this extraordinary author.

Orwell – the New Life by D J Taylor, 2023

Aside
Book review

This incredibly authoritative not to say weighty biography of Britain’s greatest novelist left me with a renewed respect for Dickens the author, but some of the revelations left me equally disappointed with Dickens the husband and father.

Slater’s biography follows the traditional format of all such works. Dickens’s early life is recorded in detail elsewhere, not least by Dickens himself in an autobiographical fragment published soon after his death by his close friend and first biographer, John Forster. Slater claims that the period when Dickens’s family went through hard financial times and had to withdraw him from school and send him to work, aged 14, in a blacking factory, was a key turning point in his life. It, Slater argues, haunted him for the rest of his life, and he constantly returns to it in his work, letters, and personal life. That point felt overstated, although I obviously defer to the author’s infinitely more detailed knowledge of Dickens’s life and work. Once these years are over, the text is focussed on composition of Dickens’s 14 novels which provide a structure for the text, although there is a vast amount of other works to be included, recorded, referenced and analysed.

Even if you know Dickens well this book will probably contain some surprises. I didn’t know for example that his early novels – including Pickwick, Oliver Twist, & Nicholas Nickleby – were essentially improvisational. While writing them Dickens had no clear plan where the plot was going, nor in the case of Pickwick whether the text was ever going to be printed as a novel at all, rather than remain as a serial, comparable to modern-day soap-operas. The idea of turning this series of stories with a common theme into a novel seems to have occurred to Dickens quite late in the day. As his work matured Dickens planned his novels more carefully with detailed notes on characters and plot-lines, but he rarely wrote more than a few weeks ahead of publication, sometimes cutting things very close indeed. Publishing his work in this way had an important impact on his plotting decisions. Any large scale editing is virtually impossible. Novelists who prepare their whole work prior to publication (i.e. virtually all of them today) can make substantial changes up until the last minute, deleting characters, going back to the beginning of the novel to provide subtle clues to the outcome, etc. While Dickens could fine tune his choice of words when the novels were published in volume form, major plot changes were impossible. (Authors who publish series of novels face a similar challenge – J K Rowling must surely have wanted to be able to go back to Philosopher’s Stone and add some more clues about Harry’s scar or tidy up the messy timeline of the first chapter, The Boy Who Lived?). This feature of his way of working imposed a discipline on Dickens’ plotting which he never seems to have worried about, but it would be interesting to read the novels in this light and look at his technique for avoiding painting himself into too many corners. One example which Slater points out is the strange opening to The Old Curiosity Shop, which begins in the voice of an unnamed first person narrator (“Although I am an old man, night is generally my time for walking” who quickly fades out of the text to be replaced by an omniscient narrator. According to Slater this is because the story started as a magazine sketch intended for only one or two editions, and when Dickens decided to adapt it as a longer form novel the switch in narrator was made at that point. The reader doesn’t really notice this switch in voice, but in retrospect is does appear unusual.

Dickens’s prodigious work ethic is another prominent feature of this biography. There was no point in his adult life when Dickens wasn’t working virtually flat out, at several points writing two novels at once. His novels are only a small part of his output: his collected journalism and letters run to many volumes, and he seems to take on major new projects even when he is completely overwhelmed with work. His was also a prodigious travellers, criss-crossing the country for his readings and popping over to France to see his young lady friend several times a month. In addition of course he also managed two major tours of the USA.

The weak copyright laws of the time meant that Dickens was openly plagiarised throughout his career, most typically in the form of stage adaptations. Slater tells us that “between March and December 1838 no less than five unauthorised adaptations of Oliver appeared in the London theatres.” (121 – for context, Oliver Twist was published in monthly instalments between February 1837 and January 1839). This issue only got worse – “no fewer than seventeen different stage versions (of his Christmas story The Cricket and the Hearth) appeared in London within a month of the book’s publication.“(239). There was an ironic twist to this plagiarism. In the rush to copy his work theatres would put on productions of his work before their serialisation had finished, forcing them to anticipate the novels’ endings. There is some evidence that Dickens used these versions of his works to give him ideas on how to end them – Slater cites evidence that in his composition of Little Dorrit Dickens “looked back for help with the plotting of an unauthorised dramatisation of the first part of the novel”.

This is an extraordinarily thorough account of Dickens’s life. Slater chooses to structure his text around his subject’s literary life, which his personal life less of a focus. His early romances, his marriage and ten children are all mentioned, as is the end of his marriage and his late romance with Ellen Ternan, but there is a sense of restraint in the narrative, a lack of speculation and a focus on the literary output and Dickens’s creative life. I did wonder whether the biography, structured as it is around the construction of the 14 principal novels, would have been such a compelling read if the reader was not familiar with Dickens’ work? But I guess no-one tackles a 600+ page biography without at least a certain familiarity with the novels.

I have written elsewhere about Dickens’ extraordinary consistency as a novelist. That comment was about his style – he seems to have landed on a discursive, dramatic and comic style of writing early on in his career and it remained with him largely unchanged throughout. My contention was that unless you knew the chronological sequence of his novels you would be hard pressed to tell, based on the writing alone, whether his work was early, middle or late period Dickens. But there is another way in which he was consistent, and that was in the length of his novels. All his novels were published in instalments – either weekly or monthly. The earlier novels did not have a predetermined plot nor number of instalments they were intended to fill, so their length varies significantly – Pickwick is almost twice as long as Oliver Twist. But once the format and number of instalments was settled down, the consistency of the length of the novels is extraordinary. Look at this list:

1.David Copperfield: 357,489
2. Dombey and Son: 357,484
3. Bleak House: 355,936
4. Little Dorrit: 339,870
5. Martin Chuzzlewit: 338,077
6. Our Mutual Friend: 327,727
7. Nicholas Nickleby: 323,722
8. The Pickwick Papers: 302,190
9. Barnaby Rudge: 255,229
10. The Old Curiosity Shop: 218,538
11. Great Expectations: 186,339
12. Oliver Twist: 158,631
13. A Tale of Two Cities: 137,000
14. Hard Times: 104,821
15. The Mystery of Edwin Drood: 96,178 (first 6 of 12 parts only)#

Yes, David Copperfield and Dombey and Son are almost identical lengths, to within 5 words in a total of over a third of a million. That’s an insane level of accuracy. Copperfield was published in 19 monthly one-shilling instalments, containing 32 pages of text and two illustrations, with the last instalment being a double-number (in other words, twenty instalments). Dombey followed the same pattern – 19 + 1 instalments, 32 pages, 2 illustrations. So it’s not surprising they are around the same length. But identical? The <10% variance in the top seven novels in this list can be explained by the length of the monthly instalments and the number of illustrations rather than any variation in Dickens’s plots or characterisations. Other authors were published in the same instalment formats as Dickens, indeed many of them in his magazines (Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell, to name but two) and I would imagine their word length would be similar given the circumstances. But I confess I haven’t checked in any detail. (A quick look at the number of pages shown on Collins’s Goodreads page gives a range of 528 pages for The Moonstone to 672 pages for The Woman in White and 748 pages for No Name). There must surely be a strong case for arguing that no other author would have had Dickens’ discipline, to produce content week after week, month after month across almost all his adult life, to such a precise degree of accuracy.

I mentioned at the beginning of this review that I came away from this book feeling a little disappointed with Dickens the man. He discarded his wife with whom he had ten children, and ‘took up with’ a woman twenty years younger than him. We can’t be certain about the precise nature of this latter relationship but we can have a pretty good guess! He estranged his children from his wife, characterising her as a bad mother, and disrespected her in his will. His politics, particularly in relation to the trade union movement and issues of race, were not as progressive as they are often characterised. Slater is very open on this point – he doesn’t try to sugar-coat Dickens’s weak-spots, but neither does he over-emphasise them. Dickens was capable of change, and his approach to the way Fagin is characterised in Oliver Twist is a good case in point. He goes from being an openly hostile anti-Semitic caricature to in later editions a much more nuanced portrait, with far less emphasis on his race.

I’ve some way to go before I can claim to have read all of his novels, but this biography has given me a renewed appetite for continuing my tradition of an annual Dickens.

#(I found these statistics on the internet, and I haven’t separately verified them. I did a spot check of Copperfield and the word count was very close, with a small variation explainable by how you count the index, chapter headings, etc. )

Charles Dickens, by Michael Slater, 2009

Aside
Book review

Citizen Clem – John Bew

This is a good time to return to the extraordinary story of Clement Attlee’s rise to the leadership of the Labour Party, his twenty-year long period as leader (1935-1955), Deputy Prime Minister (1940-1945) and Prime Minister (1945-1951).  Attlee won two General Elections, saved the Party from the electoral wipe-out of 1931, and governed during Labour’s almost mythical post-war period in office when the Welfare State was brought to fruition.

Attlee

It is timely because the legacy and spirit of the Labour Party is once again the focus for political debate in the UK. It is possible that the party’s much better than expected performance at the 2017 General Election will have quietened that debate for the time being, but few imagine that this will not break out time and again while Jeremy Corbyn remains leader.

Rigidly chronological in structure, this biography charts Attlee’s rise to senior positions within the Labour Party, without his ever really expressing much interest in doing so – he seems to have had an amazing knack of being in the right place at the right time, never more so when he became Deputy Leader after the whitewash of 1931, when the party was reduced to fewer than 50 MPs. After a careful narrative charting Attlee’s childhood, early military career, and his discovery of his social conscience, Bew focuses on the post-war Government which delivered such an amazing legacy of legislation and reform. while at the same time falling short of many of the aspirations generated by such a resounding win.

Despite having made my way through over 500 pages of this biography, Attlee remains something of any enigma. I can’t honestly say I know the man.  You could fill a short book alone with the collected insults offered to him. Nye Bevan is said to have called him ‘a desiccated calculating machine.’ Others compared him to ‘a little mouse’, ‘a poor little rabbit’, or as George Orwell put it, “a recently dead fish, before it has had time to stiffen’. American press said he was `the dullest man in English politics’. Churchill famously said that Attlee was not only a modest man with plenty to be modest about, but ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’. Even when people tried to say something supportive or positive about him, they almost always prefaced their comments with another veiled insult about his reserved nature, his modest talents, his poor grasp of economics, and so on.

Bew gives us little of Attlee’s personal life, leaving the reader to conclude that it was as dull as outer appearances suggest. He draws heavily on Attlee’s letters to his brother Tom which are referenced every few pages – as if they provide some unique and previously unknown insights into Attlee’s inner thoughts, when almost always they tell us what we already know and indeed have already been told.

This book won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2017. I have a sneaking suspicion that the author had half an eye on the prize when writing – the number of shoe-horned in references to Orwell’s work pile up, for example when comparing Attlee to Boxer, the shire horse eventually sent to the knackers’ yard. Boxer represents the ordinary Russian worker who continues to recite party slogans long after they lose all meaning, his faith in the Party unaffected by reality – in other words not at all like Attlee, who was a party faithful all his life but can hardly be described as a mindless functionary. The comparison just doesn’t work, and should have been cut – but the author obviously needed to keep every possible Orwell name-check to keep the book in the prize judges’ eyeline.

I can’t comment on whether this is the definitive Attlee biography, but I am glad I read it – I knew shockingly little about his background as a Major at Gallipoli and in France in World War one, for example, or the collapse of the second Labour Government 1929-1931, although his role in the second World War and the post war Government were naturally more familiar. I did have a couple of quibbles with the book that I can’t let slide.

First, it could have done with a closer edit. Over 500 pages there are always going to be mistakes, but this is not the first edition, and allowing sentences such as (page 144)

“For the moment, he shared the view that the obstacles to self government in India were, for the moment, insurmountable”

is unforgivable. Second, there are some moment of lazy writing. Can you spot what’s wrong with the following paragraph, for example?

(page 147) “The biggest challenge facing the second Labour Government was unemployment. Their task became extremely difficult because of events outside its control. In the last week of October (1929) the bottom fell out of the international economy, beginning with a monumental panic on the New York Stock Exchange that saw traders leap from windows in despair.“

Yes, it’s the cliched way of describing the Wall Street crash featuring those leaping traders. Five minutes on Google will tell you that it didn’t happen – suicides rates actually went down during the period of the crash. But even if they didn’t, and they did, why describe the crash in this way? Is the reader supposed to think “Oh that Wall Street crash in October 1929, the one which led directly to the rise of fascism and the resurgence of the National Socialist Party in Germany , I wasn’t sure which one you meant”. If the author can’t be relied on to get simple facts like this right, how reliable is the rest of his narrative?

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