Two days before he died, the author of 1984 left a will saying that he wanted no biography written. Like most novelists, he wanted his work judged for and by itself. This is ironic, since few novels reflect the author’s progress through lifeand the stormy political climate of his times- as clearly as George Orwell’s 1984.
Most Orwell scholars see the life as a logical “road to 1984.” Knowing about Orwell’s life, therefore, will help you know the novel.
Orwell began life with the name Eric Blair. He was born in India in 1903, the son of what he called a “lower-upper-middle class” family. For the author, this was an important distinction. The term meant that he came from the same social background as the landed gentry but was set apart by the fact that his family had very little money. His father worked for the British government in India, where he could live well on less money. Like most British officials, he sent the family back to England to spare them the hardships of the heat and of the monsoon season.
Growing up in Henley-on-Thames, west of London, Eric knew by the time he was four or five that he wanted to be a writer. Like his character Winston Smith in 1984, he thought of himself as an outsider and a rebel. He told one childhood friend: “You are noticed more if you are standing on your head than if you are right side up.”
At eight, he was packed off to boarding school at St. Cyprian’s, where he was more of an outsider than ever, as a lone scholarship student among wealthy children. The schoolmaster and his wife used kicks and caresses to keep the boys in line. This was Eric’s first taste of dictatorship, of being helpless under the rule of an absolute power. Orwell transfers these feelings to Winston, who in 1984 finds himself trapped in a harsh totalitarian system.
In an essay called “Such, Such were the Days,” Orwell writes about being beaten for wetting his bed. The masters were quick to point out, whenever he got into trouble, that he was a “charity” student. They found him difficult and unresponsive. Like most lonely children, Eric consoled himself by making up stories in his head, and holding imaginary conversations with himself.
Later Orwell wrote that during his first twenty-five years he was writing, and living, a continuing story in his head. He began as a Robin Hood-like figure, starring in imaginary adventures. Later he became the careful observer, trying to describe what was going on around him as accurately as possible. This seems very like Winston in 1984- a man who commits crimes in his head while outwardly obeying Party orders. At Eton, a prestigious public school (equivalent to U.S. private or prep schools), Blair wrote some verse and worked on school magazines.
Once again a scholarship student, he remained an outsider. In the years immediately following World War I, he was part of the antinomian movement at Eton, committed to overturning current standards and belief. Although he was against religion, Blair was confirmed in the Anglican Church, or Church of England,
along with the rest of his classmates. Later he would be married and buried in Anglican ceremonies.
When his classmates went on to Oxford or Cambridge, Eric was faced with a decision. He could not afford to go to a university and his grades kept him from winning any more scholarships. He may have been sick of studying. And so he decided to join the Indian Imperial Police, a British force assigned to keep order in British dependencies. This pleased his father, who had rejoined the family in England. With the blessings of the family, Eric went out to Burma for a five-year hitch.
Later he wrote of this experience, “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people....” Life must have been difficult for an aspiring writer, who was employed to keep order in a foreign country in the name of the British empire. Eric hated the police and everything they stood for; he often hated the people he was supposed to help, and he hated the things he was called upon to do in the name of his country. He felt isolated, lonely and deserted.
You’ll see how he uses this sense of guilt and isolation in portraying Winston Smith, who feels guilty about working for the ruling Party.
Orwell claimed later that his spell in Burma ruined his health. His lungs had always troubled him, and in 1927 he was sent back to England on a convalescent leave. That year he resigned from the police and dedicated himself to becoming a writer. His father never quite forgave him.
An avid reader whose favorite writers included futurist H. G. Wells (War of the Worlds) and satirist Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels), Blair began reading and writing in earnest. He was excited by The People of the Abyss, by Jack London, who had gone “down and out,” putting on rags and living among the destitute, the underclass, so he could write a book about them.
Blair decided to go “down and out” too- partly because he was trying to gather material, and partly because he wanted to erase the guilt and disgust he felt for serving in the Indian Imperial Police and for being a member of the privileged class. He bought tramps’ clothes from a second-hand store and began a five-year period in which he lived, off and on, among tramps in flophouses. He took odd jobs and lived on pennies, first in London and then in Paris. Although he had begun to write for periodicals, he eventually ran out of money. Broke and desperate, he ended up with pneumonia in the paupers’ ward in a French hospital.
During his “down and out” period, Blair learned what life was like for the underclass- desperate people with little hope for a decent future. Unlike them, however, he had a comfortable home to retreat to. You’ll read in 1984 that Winston goes among the underclass, or proles, but can’t or won’t join them. Perhaps Orwell believed too strongly in class divisions to deny them completely.
Writing about his “down and out” experiences, Blair did what most good writers do: he transformed and fused what had happened to him to build a coherent story. The book went through several versions. He was about to give up on it when a friend took the manuscript to an agent who found him a publisher.
Down and Out in Paris and London was first published in 1933. Blair chose a pseudonym because, he said, “I am not proud of it.” On paper, at least, he became George Orwell. Although friends and family continued to call him “Eric,” he was George Orwell to everybody who read and wrote about him. In time he thought of having his name legally changed. If Eric Blair was the little boy who was lonely at school and who, in Burma, did things he was not proud of, George Orwell was the writer with a cause. That cause defined itself in the 1930s.
By this time he was teaching school. Though he attracted several women, he was a late-bloomer socially and apparently he was never quite at ease with women. According to those who knew Orwell, he neither understood nor liked women very well, a fact that may have influenced his drawing of women characters- including Julia, Winston’s lover in 1984.
This did not prevent his falling in love with Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1935.
As soon as he met her at a party, he knew he wanted to marry her. Schoolteaching was not for him, though, and he had moved to London and worked in a bookstore. He had just published Burmese Days, his first novel, and was at work on A Clergyman’s Daughter. (His novel about his bookstore days would be called Keep the Aspidistra Flying.) The year 1936 was perhaps the most important in Orwell’s life. In January, his publisher, a founder of the Left Wing Book Club, commissioned him to live among the unemployed coal miners in the north of England and write a book about their lives. The publisher hoped to awaken the English to their poverty and suffering so that people would act to change conditions.
According to friends, Orwell went north without preconceptions. In Burma he had learned what evils an absolute government can do even when it’s trying to help people. His “down and out” days had taught him about class divisions and the horrors of poverty. Living among the poor in Northern England, he underwent a socialist conversion. Recognizing the plight of the poor was not enough, though; he had to urge the public to do something about it. And so he wrote The Road To Wigan Pier, alerting the public to the harsh lives of these people.
That summer George and Eileen married and went to live above a country store in an English village. While Eileen, a trained psychologist, got stuck tending the store, Orwell wrote. Their honeymoon ended dramatically with the outbreak of civil war in Spain, where Francisco Franco and his Spanish generals were trying to overthrow the brand-new people’s government.
Idealists from all over the world were going to Spain to help the new government, which had only recently taken the place of a monarchy. They saw Franco’s fascists as threatening the cause of freedom and democracy everywhere. Meanwhile, in Germany, the Nazi party under Adolph Hitler was in complete power.
Hitler was rattling his weapons, preparing a bid to take over Europe. In Russia, the people’s revolution had done away with the czarist ruling class, but under Stalin, the Communist government threatened the freedom of the people. Stalin was engaged in purging his enemies from the party. Both these totalitarian powers were now aiding Franco. Orwell saw this as an opportunity to live out his ideals and went to Spain to fight for the “Popular Front” government.
The political thicket Orwell waded into was so complex that historians are still trying to untangle it. There were several parties fighting Franco; alliances kept changing. Orwell was excited by what appeared to be a classless society in Barcelona. To help preserve it, he joined one of the splinter parties fighting Franco and went to the front to fight.
By the time he returned to Barcelona six months later, everything had changed. The classless society had vanished; the rich were back in power. The party he had joined was out of favor and he was in danger of being purged. Riots and street fighting raged. History rewrote itself as he watched. Although it would be eight years before Orwell found the vocabulary to transform the nightmare into a novel, these experiences paved the way to 1984. Injured by a sniper’s bullet, Orwell left Spain disillusioned by the sad end of the Popular Front’s efforts: Franco would take over the country. Orwell was convinced that Stalinism, which purged political enemies for the “good” of the state, was as dangerous as Nazism.
He was also certain that he must fuse his politics and his art.
He would become a political reformer, trying to change the world through his writing. In “Why I Write,” he says, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
Orwell was a democratic Socialist who believed in a centralized government that would take over such things as medical care and running the railroads for the good of the people, bringing benefits to all. At the same time, he believed this government should be run by the people. This was, he believed, the fine line Great Britain must tread- doing what was best for the people without hampering their freedom.
At the time, he believed Britain could do this while staying out of the impending clash with Hitler. During this period in the late 1930s, Hitler prepared to make war, while in Russia, Stalin got rid of his enemies through a series of political purges. Hitler and Stalin were allied. Orwell finished his book about the Spanish experience, and called it Homage to Catalonia. Ill again, he went with Eileen to Morocco to recuperate.
Meanwhile, Hitler marched on Poland, on Holland, on Belgium, on France.
Britain’s entry into World War II in 1940 was inevitable and marked the end of Orwell’s brief period as a pacifist. He enlisted in the Home Guard because his health prevented his joining the armed forces.
Later Orwell wrote propaganda for the BBC, an education in how to know one thing yet say another for the good of the people. As you’ll see, this training foreshadowed Winston’s job in the Ministry of Truth. England was under attack by air, and buzz bombs, Nazi V-2 rockets, exploded on London almost daily until the war ended. Every day people lived with death and danger and shortages of food and clothing. Russia, which had begun the war as Germany’s ally, took up arms against Hitler, grappling with the Nazis at Stalingrad. History, then, laid the groundwork for 1984, in which major powers are always at war but the enemy keeps changing.
By 1944 Orwell was finishing Animal Farm, a parable about Stalinism. Because the Soviet Union was now a British ally, he had a hard time getting it published. Besides that, he was ill again. Eileen needed surgery but they put it off because of expense. In the final days of the war he went to Paris and Germany as a war correspondent. He was hospitalized again. While he was in Germany Eileen died in surgery, leaving him with an infant son they had adopted. Grieving and ill, he came home to begin another novel. This would be his last.
Publication of Animal Farm brought Orwell recognition and freedom from financial pressure. An enemy of totalitarianism, he saw what he thought were totalitarian tendencies in the British government. He took a country house on a remote island where he lived off and on while writing this final work, originally titled “The Last Man in Europe.” Sick as he was, he put off going to the hospital until he had a first draft finished. His doctor said, “If he ceases to try to get well and settles down to write another book he is almost certain to relapse quickly.” But Orwell had a mission. He wanted 1984 to be “a showup of the perversions to which a centralized society is liable, and which have already been realized in Communism and Fascism.” He feared for Britain. Struggling against enormous physical odds (as Winston struggles under torture), he went home to finish a second draft. “The striking thing,” he said of his increasing weakness, “is
the contrast between the apparent normality of the mind and its helplessness when you attempt to get anything on paper.” Once more he put off treatment in order to make a final typescript. He had broken his health but he had finished the novel that would outlive him by generations. Hospitalized, Orwell saw the novel published in 1949. It was widely praised in a postwar world that had awakened to the realities of the Cold War in which there are no friends, only friendly enemies. It was taken as a chilling warning by readers who lived with the daily possibility of absolute nuclear destruction, a possibility which had been raised by the explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in the last days of World War II.
Unlike his hero, Winston Smith, who was defeated by the society and by his own weakness, George Orwell ended his life with a triumph.
It is useful to remember that every writer uses real life for material, but only the best writers learn how to transform it into living fiction. With intelligence and skill, they take what they know to create what they don’t know, making something so real that it is truer than real life. In 1984, George Orwell has done this brilliantly. Because he was a wonderful novelist before he became a political reformer, he had the skill to make his message known all over the world.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, say the posters in Orwell’s novel. His warning has passed into the language.