12
PARTISAN REVIEW
gloomy and pessimistic as his last novel? How often we read a volumi–
nous book that leaves us with no clear impression of its subject. We may
get to know in excruciating detail everything he did on a certain da y, in
a certain city, but nothing of how he felt or what he thought.
In
J
998 Peter Davison published a monumental, brilliantly annotated,
twenty-volume, 8,500-page edition of Orwell's
COIl1/J/ete Works,
which
contained a great deal of new information, including several moving let–
ters from his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, written just before (really
minutes before) her unexpected death. The existence of new material
spurred me on. Peter Davison himself proved a marvelous resource. A
passionate researcher and generous colleague, he couldn't quite let go of
Orwell and helped me answer many questions. He even trekked out to
the British Newspaper Library to search for unsigned articles by Orwell
in the
Rangoon Gazette.
He didn't find any because Orwell couldn't pub–
lish under his own name, but he did find another case of shooting an ele–
phant, which showed that it wasn't all that rare in Burma at that time.
The intervening years had brought new hooks, articles, memoirs,
interviews, oral history, radio and television material. The Orwell
Archive had grown, and family members and friends were still alive.
Though dead for fifty years, Orwell's language and ideas still permeate
the culture. Vivid phrases like "Big Brother is Watching You," "thought
police," "vaporized," and "unperson" uncannily expressed the
thoughts and feelings of people forced to live in totalitarian societies.
Other new documents had surfaced as a result of political changes.
The Soviet Secret Police report on Orwell, dated July 7, '93 7, is now in
the Central Party Archives in Moscow. This NKVD report shows that
he was well known to the Communists and had played an active role in
the Barcelona battles between the factions on the Left. By labeling him
a Trotskyist, the Communists signed his death warrant. Orwell was
wounded and on the run.
If
they'd caught him before he escaped into
France, they would have certainly executed him to prevent him from
telling the truth about the Communists' destruction of their former
allies in Spain-a major cause of their defeat in the Spanish Civil War.
Orwell's was the dominant voice of his age, and his moral and literary
influence has outlasted the political context of the '930S and 1940s.
John Ie Carre, in response
to
my query about what Orwell meant
to
him,
summed up how Orwell's life and works have fused into a noble ideal:
Orwell meant and means a great deal
to
me.
Burlllese Days
still
stands as a splendid cameo of colonial corruption. Orwell's com–
mitment
to
the hard life is a lesson
to
all of us.
I
taught at bon.
It
