HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
17
Orwell's copy of C. K. Chesterton's book of comic verse,
Greybeards at
Play
(1900),
with his pen-and-ink bookplate, "Eric Blair-His Book,"
and his drawing of a rocky, Middle Eastern landscape, with palm trees,
domed mosque, and fortified castle. The beauty of the College, its
atmosphere of learning and privilege, were overwhelming. As we talked
about Orwell we got on to the subject of his fateful choice, at the age of
eighteen, to go to Burma instead of to Oxford or Cambridge.
The week before I had been to Scotland to see the ninety-five-year-old
Sir Steven Runciman-the great scholar of Byzantium and the Crusades,
who 'd been to Eton with Orwell. (On the telephone he'd said: "I'd be
delighted to talk to you, Professor Mayers, about Eric Blair. But I must
warn you that I've not seen him for seventy-seven years!") Attended by
two devoted retainers, Runciman lived alone in a huge castle on the Scot–
tish border ("I'm a younger son and had to buy this place myself," he told
me.) He still had vivid memories of their days at Eton and of their old
tutor, Andrew Cow, a friend of A. E. Housman and, later on, Runciman's
irritating colleague at Trinity College, Cambridge.
In
1969
Cow had writ–
ten me that Orwell "could not go to University unless he got a scholar–
ship... that there was not the faintest hope of his getting one and that it
would be a waste of time to try." "Not true," said Runciman, who told
me that Cow particularly resented someone like Orwell, who was capa–
ble of doing well in classics but was bored by the subject. I now realized
that Orwell
could
have gone to university if he had wanted to. He was
very good at exams, and as Michael Meredith assured me, could have
walked into Oxbridge from Eton-which had generous scholarships for
boys who couldn't pay their own way. He simply chose not to go, and in
his teens took on the grave responsibilities of a colonial policeman.
But Burma, where Orwell spent his crucial early adult years, was out of
reach to me. Since travel was restricted to the area between Rangoon and
Mandalay, I would not be able to visit Moulmein (southeast of Rangoon),
where Orwell shot the elephant, or Katha (north of Mandalay), his last
post and the setting of
Burmese Days.
Apart from his own writing, very
little is known about Orwell's years there, and colonial police records were
either transferred to London or destroyed in the war. I studied maps and
gazetteers of India and Burma to recreate the atmosphere of his obscure
birthplace-Motihari, India-not in the province of Bengal, but in Bihar
(a tiny fact which I corrected), and placed Orwell's role as policeman in
the context of colonial history. Once again, memoirs of other adminis–
trators and visitors, including Somerset Maugham, helped to flesh out
the picture of conditions there. (This past August, I did get to Burma. I
lectured on an Orient Express cruise up the Irrawaddy from Mandalay
