STEVEN MARCUS
45
for the BBC's India service during World War Two. He finally threw
up
this work as intolerably opposed to the intellectual, as well as the
political, principles that had directed his writing life.
All of these developments were accompanied by his steady stream of
writings as an independent essayist, reviewer and journalist and were fol–
lowed by his two most popular
work~,
the anti-Stalinist satire and fable,
Allimal Farm,
and the prophetic dystopia, 1984. The only thing he
missed was the long playing-out of the Cold War, but he had already
distinctly imagined the two most plausible possible endings to it.
Orwell's 1984 was an extremely dark warning of what might happen if
the West were to succumb to bureaucratic and totalitarian tendencies -
it would be Stalinism, the thought police and brutality without foresee–
able end. At the same time, he envisaged quite unambiguously the weak–
nesses that are entailed in representing the historical future as only a con–
tinuation of the most dire aspects of the political present, and in a great
essay on James Burnham he made his dialectical counterstatement to
1984 unimpeachably clear. Those who are excessively attracted to
power, like Burnham, he remarks , have blurred "political judgment, be–
cause [the attraction to power] leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief
that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment
will always seem to be invincible." And, he goes on to conclude, after
having witnessed and lived through the rise and fall of Hitler's Germany,
"The Russian regime will either democratize itself, or it will perish." He
was right both ways.
Orwell's life as a combined writer, participant, and observer in the
historical and cultural worlds of the twentieth century is hence excep–
tionally compact and of a piece - which is not to say that it was with–
out many contradictions and disparate tendencies. Such a life makes for
attractively coherent biographical constructions and for cultural history
read through works often directly produced by the experiences of that
life; in turn, such works helped to further sustain that life, to move and
urge it on to its next stages of evolution. Shelden is aware of these cir–
cumstances and realizes that a good biography has to be an interesting
narrative as well, though his own narrative is relatively light on the anal–
ysis of Orwell's work and on its placement within the contexts of twen–
tieth-century literature, modernism, and international cultural life.
It
also
contains one large and consistently apparent flaw. It tries continually to
"normalize" Orwell, to make him seem like some ordinary, sensible per–
son, distinguished from others only by his gift for writing, when this is
clearly not the case. As a writer, Orwell in part identified himself for spe–
cial purposes with ordinary "decent" English rniddle- and working-class
people and values, but that is very different from asserting that he was
