A Doubleplusgood Evening In The Company Of George Orwell's Biographer.

"We shall meet in a place where there is no darkness" - George Orwell (1984)

 

According to those who know these things, there are only seven people left alive in the whole world who have a coherent memory of having met George Orwell. None of them were present yesterday evening when I attended The Sohemian Society's The Life And Work Of George Orwell in their new home, The Fitzroy Tavern. A nice room but one they would have done well to not allow non-attendees into as some of them were chatting so loud it was, at times, hard to hear interviewer Travis Elborough and guest D.J. Taylor talk.

Which was a shame because the talk was absolutely fascinating. Even some feedback issues (which made me think of The Jesus And Mary Chain but saw Taylor quipping about Tangerine Dream instead) couldn't ruin it. If you're going to attend a talk about Orwell then D.J. Taylor is the man you want giving it. In 2003, he wrote the esteemed biography Orwell:The Life (which I had intended to read at the time but never did) and two years back he returned to his favourite author for Orwell:The New Life.

He certainly doesn't appear remotely bored of talking about the man born Eric Arthur Blair (born 1903, died, aged just forty-six, in 1950). He began by telling us how he first became aware of Orwell. Neither of his parents were particularly bookish but his mother's small literary collection contained a copy of Orwell's not particularly celebrated 1935 novel A Clergyman's Daughter and when he was about twelve years old Taylor found himself reading it.

 

He didn't find the story (about a clergyman's daughter - no shit - who has an attack of amnesia and joins a group of vagrants on a hop picking expedition in Kent) remotely relatable but the writing spoke to him like no writing had ever before. When Orwell read Henry Miller's 1934 Tropic Of Cancer he was blown away and had said "he wrote this for me". Taylor felt the same about Orwell and A Clergyman's Daughter.

The style, the humour, and the bitterness pulled him in and soon he moved on to the uncomfortable Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) which Taylor loved even more. He loved Orwell's way with words and he particularly singled out a scene where the grouchy protagonist Gordon Comstock talks about rejection letters coming through his door like "a pelican regurgitating flatfish". Although I've just read the book and can't recall that quote. The Internet doesn't seem to have much on it either.

Never mind. George Orwell had, in his younger life, been a brilliant scholar and had won a place at Eton but eventually he sacked it off and he never went to university. He considered himself, even at the age of thirteen, to be a failure except in practical matters. The irony being that when it came to these practical matters, DIY or map reading for example, he wasn't very good. Unlike the writing at which he was brilliant.

His writing, the likes of The Lion And The Unicorn, saw him become a kind of talisman of Englishness and, despite being a lifelong socialist, he was often quoted by Tory ministers. Yet, Orwell's family background wasn't very English at all. He was more French, more Scottish, and more Burmese. Like Gordon Comstock, his family had once been incredibly wealthy and though he was by no means poor he had a very real sense of being a member of a family in decline.

Also, like Gordon Comstock, he wasn't always the best (by our modern standards) when it came to how he treated women. It is believed he once sexually assaulted Jacintha Buddicom (something that was passed off as a "botched seduction"), Orwell's childhood sweetheart, yet she stayed in touch with him until he left for Burma to work as a member of the Indian Imperial Police. He had family there so he was not alone but he hated it and when he became ill with dengue fever he returned to Britain. It was 1927. He was still in his early twenties.

He returned with an engagement ring he'd purchased in Rangoon with the intention of proposing to Jacintha Buddicom (that name demands typing out in full I think) but she refused to meet with him. She'd recently given birth to an illegitimate child which, in the 1920s, carried quite a lot of shame and stigma.

Unable to settle down with his beloved, he instead focused his attentions on his writing and his parents went spare. As many parents have done over the years when their children announce their plans to become writers, pop stars, actors, or artists. Most, of course, don't succeed in making their dreams come true. But some do and that gives us all hope.

 

It was a time when the likes of W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, and Christopher Isherwood were having their first works published but Orwell did not move in the same, elevated, circles that those men did and it took him a full five years before had a book published, 1933's poverty and destitution memoir Down And Out In Paris And London. Orwell had seen how the labouring classes had been exploited in the East and he wanted to investigate, and write about, how they were exploited closer to home. Of course, the homeless people he met when writing the book identified Orwell as a toff immediately but they rather respected him for his work all the same.

Even though there was a craze for this kind of investigative journalism that looked to shine a light on the treatment of the working class at the time. When Orwell wrote The Road To Wigan Pier in 1937, a contemporary joke had it that if you threw a rock down a mine it'd be more likely to hit a journalist than an actual miner. Nevertheless, Orwell's writing was so precise, so specific, and so powerful that his works, more than others, gained traction and, after his death, he became one of the chief inspirations for the next generation of writers and poets. People like Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin.

They admired the sparseness of Orwell's prose, the honesty of his writing, and its prophetic qualities. The latter of which we are, of course, still untangling. Orwell, following his premature death, was the totem pole in which the next generation danced around in search of some kind of divine inspiration. During his early life he could be, as we've learned, misogynistic and antisemitic but as he grew this changed. He made a point of writing very serious articles for Jewish magazines and when he married his first wife, the poet and psychologist Eileen O'Shaughnessy - who died at the tragically young age of thirty-nine, they adopted a son - Richard.

Richard Blair, now eighty years old, is still with us. His father, George Orwell/Eric Blair, died when he was five years old but Richard's life, of course, has often been defined by the old man, the old man who never got old. D.J. Taylor told an amusing story of dining with Richard Blair some years ago in a Spanish restaurant in New York. Richard went to talk to the staff at the restaurant about his father's time fighting in the Spanish Civil War (an episode that inspired 1938's Homage To Catalonia) for the republican and anti-fascist side. The staff at the restaurant however turned out to have been fascist Franco supporters. Awkward!

 

Orwell didn't like fascists (one example of his writing contains the quite bizarre line "all tobacconists are fascists") but he also had issues with communists who supported Stalin and during his time in Spain he became disillusioned with how the socialists spent more time tearing themselves apart than fighting against the right. An eternal, and recurrent, problem for those who align themselves with progressive causes and progressive politics.

He could also be pretty brutal in his book reviews too but he never seemed to take it personally and would remain on good terms with people whose books he had absolutely torn into. Even, sometimes, celebrating Christmas with them. He was a complicated man who demanded the end of the House of Lords and private schools at the very same time he was putting his son down for Eton.

Of course, his fame rests mostly on his last two novels. 1945's Animal Farm which the talk didn't really get into and 1949's Nineteen Eighty-Four (which I am currently reading, maybe I should have got D.J. Taylor to sign it) which the talk wrapped up on. Orwell had worked in Room 101 when he worked at the BBC so that bit was easy but the book had a much longer gestation than most of his work.

 

There's two reasons for that. Firstly, Orwell was ill, he was dying, and writing was becoming difficult for him (though reading the book that's hard to believe) but, also, the research, if you like, for the book was happening in real time. As he wrote his book about a dystopian future, elements of that dystopian future were developing in front if his very eyes - and they still are seventy-five years after his death.

George Orwell saw a future world that would no longer be run by generals with great armies but one that would bow down to the power of managers and technocrats. That was a scary thought when he died three quarters of a century ago. It's still a scary one now and it seemed like a very apposite note to end the talk on. 

The Q&A touched on GK Chesteron, JB Priestley, Lucian Freud, Gracie Fields, Charles Dickens (who Orwell believed as a man, and writer, "behaved decently" - and there could be no better accolade as far as Orwell was concerned, patriotism, liberalism, Englishness, and superstition (Orwell was very superstitious and, like my dad, would often throw a pinch of salt over his shoulder in public) and the talk also touched on such people, and subjects, as Somerset Maugham, Kafka, Soviet spies, Anthony Powell, Nigel Farage, ChatGPT, Alan Rickman, Alan Yentob, Tolstoy, Michael Foot, EM Forster, TS Eliot, Malcolm Muggeridge, Stalin, Alan Bates vs The Post Office, and the plucking of a goose with Orwell's sister Avril on the remote Scotttish island of Jura.

All of it was, like Orwell's writing, rather great. Thanks to the Sohemian Society (nice to meet with Mark, David, and Clive), thanks to The Fitzroy Tavern (though less background noise next time please), thanks to Travis Elborough, and thanks most of all to D.J. Taylor and, of course, George Orwell. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection. Instead one seeks out events, and people, like this because getting together, sharing stories, thoughts, and ideas is what makes life worth living. A doubleplusgood evening out.