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PARTISAN REVIEW
psychically more or less like almost everyone else.
From the very outset, there was much about him, apart from his
evident brightness and giftedness, that was strikingly different, although
these differences were not uniformly apparent or visible to every observer.
According to his own testimony, Orwell felt isolated and unattractive
from early childhood on. These sentiments and predispositions were most
clearly manifested in his generally non-gregarious behavior throughout
his life and in his extremely close privacy about his personal existence. He
was in addition from a very early age preternaturally sensitive - in both
responsive and resistant senses - to coerciveness, oppression, spiritual and
physical violence, unfair and unequal treatment, and to the emotions of
anger, rage, and resentment in himself as well as in others. Associated
with these characteristics was an acute preoccupation with bad smells,
with dirt, with alimentary and excretory functions, and an obsession with
rats - all of these pointing to unconscious psychic conflicts in certain
obvious developmental areas. Moreover, he was conscious from a very
early point of being at the same time exploited and part of an exploiting
class and system.
These strong and adverse conflicting forces, acting on young Blair
both consciously and unconsciously, worked among much else to pro–
duce something like a state of protracted depression in him that lasted
from at least late boyhood until at least 1936-37, when he was almost
killed in Spain. This angry, isolating, and guilt-ridden constellation of
emotions was mixed from the very beginning with both self-punishing
and sado-masochistic tendencies.
It
led, among other things, to Orwell's
irresistible inclination throughout his life toward situations in which he
would live in hardship, deprivation, and suffering. He even courted illness
right up to his death, which was at least in part a result of a lifetime
semi-conscious flirtation with the tuberculosis that eventually killed him.
The multitudinous details of how he elaborated and played these ten–
dencies out in the various phases and episodes of his life are to be found
prominently on display everywhere in his writings. Circumstances and
considerations such as these make Orwell's biography a perennial chal–
lenge, and it must be said that Shelden, taking the prudent course, steers
clear of most of them. As a result, his book, though interesting, is largely
pedestrian as well.
At the same time, Orwell usually managed to integrate what might
ordinarily and otherwise be neurotic choices and behaviors with cultur–
ally significant circumstances and moments. Burma; urban destitution
during the Depression; the lives of miners and other working-class people
in industrial Britain in the mid-thirties; doomed Republican Spain;
poorly-paid anti-Stalinist political journalism in the thirties and forties;
the accelerating, dreadful, and inevitable approach of the world's most
