STEVEN MARCUS
49
to overlook the apprehensions about social contingency and fragility
that these writings often dramatize. The inheritance plot is, among much
else, a means for dramatizing both upward and downward social mobil–
ity, for achieving perspective on the relations and differences among the
classes, for asserting friendly identification between the comfortable mid–
dle and disadvantaged lower classes on the one hand, and for the reassur–
ing devices that sustain the substantial and harsh distinctions between
them on the other. In
Down and Out in Paris and London,
in
The Road to
Wigan Pier,
and in
Homage to Catalonia,
as well as in some of his great
essays on English society and culture, Orwell demonstrated that he was
one of the supreme masters of these forms of social and literary represen–
tation and its last important modern practitioner.
What I have just summarily referred to may be taken as a preliminary
sketch of Orwell's awareness of a cultural tradition of representation, and
of his own situatedness in it, as well as of the kind of analysis that might
do justice to the dense convergence of material from a variety of con–
texts that is to be found in his writing. As a finishing touch in such an
exercise, one might add that it was for the publication of
Down and Out
in Paris and London
that he changed his name from Eric Blair to George
Orwell. That decision too was dense with confluent determinations.
Blair/Orwell had, he said, always disliked the name he was given; he was
also slightly ashamed for his family's sake of some of the disreputable
material in the book (which may also be part of the reason he appended
to it the extraordinary and entirely unbelievable subtitle, "A Novel"). At
the same time, he hit upon one of the happiest pen names in English, al–
though there is no evidence known to me that indicates how much he
was aware of what was entering into this behavior.
Similar kinds of analyses are needed for
all
of Orwell's work, includ–
ing its final phase, the writing of 1984 and his terminal illness, second
marriage, and death . Shelden's biography does supply us with more ma–
terial about Orwell's relations with women than any previous study. In
particular, Orwell's conduct toward the end of his life, his relations with
and marriage to Sonia Brownell on what was virtually his deathbed, and
his unconstrained, destructive abandonment of himself in his urgent need
to finish 1984, all bring into play personal inner forces and cultural cir–
cumstances perceptible in much of his earlier work. On this latter occa–
sion, however, they are displayed in a different set of configurations, as
he completes his writer's life's work on a simultaneously grim and tri–
umphant note in 1984, and dissolves his personal existence into the neu–
rotic and self-mortifying components that the written work had for the
most part rendered into less destructive forms . That life, as I have sug–
gested, has an extraordinary integral impetus to it. Part of Orwell's sin-
