Session I: How True to Life is Biography?
Edith Kurzweil :
Jeffrey Meyers has written thirty-nine books so far, most
of them biographies of twentieth-century writers-among them Ernest
Hemingway,
F.
Scott fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Wyndham Lewis, and
Edmund Wilson. He has also written about the art of biography. His
most recent book is
Orwell: Wil/try COl/science of a Generation.
jeffrey's
talk is titled "Writing Orwell's Biography: The Mystery of the Real."
Jeffrey Meyers:
Thank you, Edith. The impulse to write literary biogra–
phy begins in fascination with an artist's character, mind, and art.
George Orwell-a distinguished contributor to
Partisan Review-had
interested me since
1968,
when
I
went to read his unpublished letters
and manuscripts at University College in London. Unwittingly, I came
up against a classic stumbling block: the obstructive literary widow. The
curator had given me written permission, but Sonia Orwell had
abruptly closed the Archive
to
scholars. Orwell had left instructions that
no biography was to be written, and she was furious that Peter Stansky
and William Abrahams had deceptively used the Archive for that pur–
pose. To get even with them, Sonia impulsively asked Bernard Crick, a
professor of politics, to write an official biography. When Crick's book,
a dry compendium of facts that ignored Orwell's inner or emotional life,
appeared in
T980,
she naturally disliked it. The four-volume edition of
Orwell's essays, diaries, and letters which Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus
had brought out in
1968,
together with Crick's biography, remained for
some years the definitive word on Orwell.
[n
1991
Michael Shelden
published a third biography, authorized this time by the Orwell estate.
Orwell's life and works, then, had been thoroughly researched, but my
fascination with the complex personality behind the lucid prose had
lasted. For thirty years
I'd
been teaching and thinking about Orwell, and
I disagreed with all three biographies in matters of fact, emphasis, and
meaning. So [ took up the cha ll enge
to
find new material and to write a
better book than the previous ones. A biographer begins by asking ques–
tions. That's the essence of research. You ask questions of the novels,
essays, and letters; you look questioningly at a landscape and at a house
where he lived, as well as at the friends and family who've survived him.
What was he like? How did he look? What did he say? How did he
laugh? What did he eat? Why did he go
to
Burma and not to Cambridge?
Why did he leave Burma? What sort of socialist was he? Was he as
