STEVEN MARCUS
George O rwell: Biography as Literature
Orwell, like his favorite novelist, Dickens, has turned out to be one of
those writers who is worth stealing. Critical commentaries of virtually
all
ideological persuasions, right, left, and center, claiming him for them–
selves, have been steadily put forward ever since his early death in 1950,
and there is no sign that this inundation of secondary and by now even
tertiary matter - commentaries upon the commentaries - is going to
abate. One part of this explanatory-persuasive effort is primarily bio–
graphical in emphasis. In addition to the impressive array of memoirs and
personal recollections of Orwell at all ages, from earliest youth and
school days right up (or down) to his death from tuberculosis in a
London hospital, there have so far been three major biographical pro–
jects. The first of these,
The Unknown Orwell
and
Orwell: The
Transformation,
by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, took Orwell
through his experiences in Spain in 1937. This original work in two vol–
umes (published in 1972 and 1979) was undertaken without the consent
of Orwell's widow, Sonia Orwell; indeed, it was pursued against her ac–
tive non-cooperation and resistance. The second,
George Orwell: A Life
by Bernard Crick, was commissioned by Sonia Orwell as an antidote and
counterstatement to Stansky and Abraham's account. Crick's biography
is a relatively massive compilation and ordering of material, full of infor–
mation, and of great and lasting interest. But it did not please Orwell's
widow either, and she tried unsuccessfully to prevent its publication.
Now, a little more than a decade later, there has appeared another, as it
were, official life, "authorized" on this occasion by the London agent
who is Orwell's current literary executor (Sonia Orwell died in 1980)
and building usefully on the work done by its predecessors. There is no
reason to suppose that Michael Shelden's
Orwell: The Authorized
Biography
(HarperCollins, 1991), will not be superseded in due time by
further studies, but the story it has to tell, and the way that Shelden has
told it, is worth the reader's attention.
It
seems quite clear that in addition to the interest sustained by his
writings - novels, essays, reviews, documentaries, autobiographical exper–
iments, and accounts - and by his political writings in particular (which
appeared in
all
the foregoing forms and genres), Orwell's life itself gener–
ates and sustains an interest of its own. Every memoir and biographical
