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A sublime essayist and author of the masterful political novels 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell is at least as relevant in the age of Trump and Brexit as he was in his own short lifetime (1903-1950). Both of his classic novels have been hot sellers over the past two years and his name is conjured daily on newscasts and opinion pages as pundits try to make sense of the strange political moment in which we live. In keeping with that moment, The Sutherland House brings back to print the definitive biography, George Orwell: A Life, by political scholar Sir Bernard Crick. Originally published in 1982, Crick's Orwell was the first biography of its subject written with the cooperation of his widow. It was immediately lauded for its wealth of detail and shrewd analysis of Orwell's life, literature, and politics. "Not only was it a pioneering biography," said the editor of The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, "but it remains the best one there is." Professor Crick's highly readable and clear-eyed assessment of Orwell's thought and personal development is as necessary to an understanding to the author and his work as that author and his work are to an understanding of contemporary life.… (altro)
In his will George Orwell, or perhaps it was Eric Arthur Blair, requested that there should be no biography. This was partly due to the immensely private, even secretive, nature of the man. Beyond this, and intriguingly for a writer who produced so much autobiographical work, Orwell was deeply distrustful of biography. In his essay on Dali he states that ‘autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats’.
Bernard Crick’s book was the first full length Orwell biography in what has since become a crowded field. Crick, at the time Professor of Politics at Birbeck College, University of London, was the first writer on Orwell to be given full access to his papers. When he wrote the book many of Orwell’s friends and colleagues were still alive, so he was able to interview and correspond with a wide cast of characters who knew him from his childhood onwards.
Crick makes no pretence that he can view his subject from the ‘inside’ and say what he felt or thought at any particular moment. His portrait of Orwell is built from the outside and centred around the public man and his work. For all Crick’s avoidance of psychological interpretation a clear portrait does emerge, albeit of a complex, highly reserved, emotionally guarded and enigmatic man who compartmentalised his friends to such an extent that, after his death, many of them they were often surprised to discover who also knew him.
Even in 1980, when Crick’s book first appeared, it was a commonplace that there was a great deal of autobiography in Orwell’s fiction, but Crick was perhaps the first Orwell scholar to contend that there was also a large amount of imagination in Orwell’s autobiographical books and essays - Down and out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Shooting an Elephant, A Hanging, Such, Such were the Joys, and so on. He demonstrates convincingly that these works are not straightforward documentary but an artful mixture of fact and fiction designed to make a polemical point about education, imperialism or poverty. Events are freely transposed and sometimes simply invented. Inconvenient facts, such as Orwell having an aunt in Paris who lent him money and provided other assistance when he was in need, are suppressed in the interests of dramatic shape and impact. Orwell was concerned with the truth but clearly made a distinction between truth and mere facts. These works are truthful to Orwell’s feelings and ideas rather than literally accurate documents of his experience.
Orwell’s widow, Sonia Orwell, took exception to what she saw as Crick’s attack on his honesty. From my own, more dispassionate perspective, I viewed it differently. Crick’s analysis of these ‘autobiographical’ works has deepened my appreciation of Orwell’s artistry as a writer.
In 1936 Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, commissioned him to write a book about unemployment in the North of England. What Orwell witnessed in his two months travelling around the depression hit parts of England finally converted him to the Socialist cause. But it was the culmination of a long process - he had been mixing with socialist intellectuals for a number of years and taking a close if critical interest in what they had to say - and not the Damascene conversion he presents it as in the book.
Having suddenly declared his commitment to socialism Orwell immediately set to work attacking the socialists. The second half of The Road to Wigan Pier is a prolonged, generalised, and spirited polemic against the very kind of middle class socialists who were likely to read the book, but who he believed were alienating large numbers of ordinary people from the socialist movement. Crick points out that Orwell’s argument reflects the limitations of his own, rather narrow, experience of the socialist world. Orwell argues passionately that liberty and justice should be the watchwords of socialism, but he also overestimates the influence on public opinion of Marxist intellectuals of the sort he was familiar with from Hampstead parties, and never mentions the most likely reason for the lack of popular support for socialism - the failure of the Labour Party and the Trades Unions to provide radical leadership.
Still, this kind of devil’s advocacy became Orwell’s trademark. In the early thirties he sometimes described himself, with characteristic use of paradox, as a Tory-anarchist and his socialism was invigorated by a healthy dash of both anarchism and individualism. ‘Liberty’, he once said, ‘is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’. Orwell spent a lot of time telling his socialist brothers and sisters things they emphatically did not want to hear.
He was something of a proto-environmentalist. He loved the countryside and disliked the city. When he lived in a small village in Hertfordshire in the 1930s he kept goats and chickens and was a keen gardener. He sometimes filled his column in the left wing publication Tribune with observations on the changing seasons, the mating habits of toads and the pleasures of Woolworths roses. This didn’t always go down well with his readers who failed to see the relevance to the socialist cause. One reader wrote in to complain that roses were bourgeois. But for Orwell there was clearly a connection between the simple life and the decent society he craved. Or perhaps it was simply another of those intriguing tensions, paradoxes even, which characterise Orwell’s thought and feeling. He accepted that a high degree of mechanisation was a prerequisite of the just society he wished to see but was simultaneously hostile to the highly mechanised society.
The comradeship Orwell experienced serving in the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War confirmed and strengthened his belief in Socialism (interestingly POUM was, in fact, anarchist dominated). He was, however, lucky to get out of Spain alive. A fascist bullet through the throat nearly did for him and then the Communists tried to get hold of him (POUM had been denounced, falsely, by the Stalinists as fascist collaborators who had betrayed the revolution). After Spain it was clear to Orwell that the Soviet Union was simply another form of dictatorship, which shared many features in common with Fascism, and the ideas that led to Animal Farm and 1984 began to take shape in his mind.
In his essay on Dickens Orwell remarks that Dickens is a writer ‘well worth stealing’. The same applies to Orwell who was stolen by, among many others, the Cold War warriors of the American Right. Unfamiliar with Orwell’s political background, and appearing to almost wilfully misunderstood the text in front of them, some American reviewers praised Animal Farm as anti-socialist and anti-revolutionary. It was neither. Far from being anti-socialist it is against tyranny and not about the tragedy of revolution but the tragedy of revolution betrayed. The book came out of Orwell’s conviction that if there was to be a possibility of transformative socialism the ‘Soviet myth’ had to be destroyed.
Similar misreadings continued with 1984 but, as Crick demonstrates, rather than being a repudiation of Orwell’s socialism (Crick provides ample evidence that he remained a radical socialist right to the end), or a prediction of a communist or fascist takeover of Britain it is, in fact, an imaginative extrapolation of existing totalitarian tendencies in all societies - including the Western democracies.
1984 and Animal Farm are works of enduring importance (Animal Farm is by some distance Orwell’s best work of fiction, possessing a lightness of touch quite absent from his other novels) but his greatest work is to be found in his essays, journalism and non-fiction books. His essays on Dickens, Kipling and Henry Miller mix literary criticism with sociological analysis. He pioneered the serious analysis of popular culture. His later essays explore the relationship between the corruption of language and totalitarianism.
The relationship between the plain-speaking Orwell of the essays and the diffident, socially awkward Blair of real life, is a fascinating one. Crick, however, puts on his anti-psychological hat and looks the other way. The name change, he avers, was made for practical reasons and there was no fundamental character split. George was simply an extension of Eric or his ideal self-image. True as far as it goes, but you can’t help feeling he has only brushed the surface of a complicated matter.
Orwell was a mass of contradictions and the deceptive simplicity of his prose style masks an extraordinary complexity of thought. The committed socialist who was profoundly sceptical about centralisation. The communitarian who was a natural loner. The radical who was temperamentally conservative. The patriot who wanted to turn English society upside down. He was a born contrarian and it is partly his sheer cussed and multilayered individuality that continues to make reading him so fascinating.
When you do read Orwell you get a very strong impression of an entire personality. It is sometimes cranky and even objectionable (his homophobic sneering at ‘nancy poets’, for example) but there is also a generosity of spirit, emotional inhibition mixed with an understated but nonetheless real warmth. A dry yet very funny sense of humour. He detests orthodoxy of all kinds - including the orthodoxies of the avowedly unorthodox. Decent and decency are words which recur throughout Orwell’s work, almost as incantations, and there is something fundamentally decent about him. He retains a touching faith in the wisdom of ordinary people and is instinctively on the side of the oppressed.
Orwell’s life was so eventful and productive that it is easy to forget how short it was. He was just 46 when he died. The final pages of this book are unbearably sad. Having spent much of his life in relative obscurity, and on the margins of poverty, Orwell was suddenly famous and wealthy. He was also confined to a hospital bed and dying of TB.
Crick’s anti-psychological approach can sometimes be frustrating. Orwell is certainly a suitable subject for psychological analysis and there are times when you long for Crick to make a bold assertion about his motives in a given situation. What you tend to get, instead, is equivocation. Still, politics rather than psychology was Crick’s thing, and Orwell was essentially a political writer, so biographer and subject are in that vital respect well matched. This eminently readable biography enlarged my understanding of Orwell’s work and should be read by anyone seriously interested in this great writer and extraordinary man. ( )
A worthy biography, although I have always found Orwell's transparency and clarity of thinking-on-paper to be attraction enough for appreciating how his experiences shaped his ideas. ( )
Dati dalle informazioni generali francesi.Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
PRESENTATION DE L’EDITEUR, 2020- Edition française, Frédéric Joly)
Dans Orwell ou L’Horreur de la politique, sans doute le meilleur essai, avec Orwell, anarchiste tory de Jean Claude Michéa, consacré à la figure de George Orwell, Simon Leys affirme qu’il ne voit pas « qu’il existe un seul écrivain dont l’œuvre pourrait nous être d’un usage pratique plus urgent et plus immédiat ». [...]
PREFACE A L’EDITION DE 1982 / (Bernard Crick, Avril 1981)
La publication de la vie d’un célèbre et proche contemporain a inévitablement suscite´ une floraison de nouveaux éléments que je peux maintenant ajouter à cette édition revue et corrigée. [...]
PREFACE A L’EDITION DE 1992 / (Bernard Crick, Novembre 1991)
Un matériau inédit continue à être exhumé, suscité en particulier par le très médiatique non-évènement de 1984. [...]
Introduction L’ŒUVRE D’ORWELL
Quel genre de biographie ai-je tente´ d’écrire, et sur quel genre d’homme ? Les deux questions sont inséparables. [...]
Chapitre I « ET J’E´TAIS UN PETIT GARC¸ ON JOUFFLU »
Quelle sorte d’enfance pensait-il avoir eue ? Pendant sa brève période de gloire, vers la fin de sa vie, George Orwell se montra un peu moins acerbe et un peu plus tendre envers son passe´ qu’il ne l’avait été auparavant. [...]
Citazioni
Ultime parole
Nota di disambiguazione
Redattore editoriale
Elogi
Lingua originale
Dati dalle informazioni generali francesi.Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
A sublime essayist and author of the masterful political novels 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell is at least as relevant in the age of Trump and Brexit as he was in his own short lifetime (1903-1950). Both of his classic novels have been hot sellers over the past two years and his name is conjured daily on newscasts and opinion pages as pundits try to make sense of the strange political moment in which we live. In keeping with that moment, The Sutherland House brings back to print the definitive biography, George Orwell: A Life, by political scholar Sir Bernard Crick. Originally published in 1982, Crick's Orwell was the first biography of its subject written with the cooperation of his widow. It was immediately lauded for its wealth of detail and shrewd analysis of Orwell's life, literature, and politics. "Not only was it a pioneering biography," said the editor of The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, "but it remains the best one there is." Professor Crick's highly readable and clear-eyed assessment of Orwell's thought and personal development is as necessary to an understanding to the author and his work as that author and his work are to an understanding of contemporary life.
)
)
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1
Bernard Crick’s book was the first full length Orwell biography in what has since become a crowded field. Crick, at the time Professor of Politics at Birbeck College, University of London, was the first writer on Orwell to be given full access to his papers. When he wrote the book many of Orwell’s friends and colleagues were still alive, so he was able to interview and correspond with a wide cast of characters who knew him from his childhood onwards.
Crick makes no pretence that he can view his subject from the ‘inside’ and say what he felt or thought at any particular moment. His portrait of Orwell is built from the outside and centred around the public man and his work. For all Crick’s avoidance of psychological interpretation a clear portrait does emerge, albeit of a complex, highly reserved, emotionally guarded and enigmatic man who compartmentalised his friends to such an extent that, after his death, many of them they were often surprised to discover who also knew him.
Even in 1980, when Crick’s book first appeared, it was a commonplace that there was a great deal of autobiography in Orwell’s fiction, but Crick was perhaps the first Orwell scholar to contend that there was also a large amount of imagination in Orwell’s autobiographical books and essays - Down and out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Shooting an Elephant, A Hanging, Such, Such were the Joys, and so on. He demonstrates convincingly that these works are not straightforward documentary but an artful mixture of fact and fiction designed to make a polemical point about education, imperialism or poverty. Events are freely transposed and sometimes simply invented. Inconvenient facts, such as Orwell having an aunt in Paris who lent him money and provided other assistance when he was in need, are suppressed in the interests of dramatic shape and impact. Orwell was concerned with the truth but clearly made a distinction between truth and mere facts. These works are truthful to Orwell’s feelings and ideas rather than literally accurate documents of his experience.
Orwell’s widow, Sonia Orwell, took exception to what she saw as Crick’s attack on his honesty. From my own, more dispassionate perspective, I viewed it differently. Crick’s analysis of these ‘autobiographical’ works has deepened my appreciation of Orwell’s artistry as a writer.
In 1936 Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, commissioned him to write a book about unemployment in the North of England. What Orwell witnessed in his two months travelling around the depression hit parts of England finally converted him to the Socialist cause. But it was the culmination of a long process - he had been mixing with socialist intellectuals for a number of years and taking a close if critical interest in what they had to say - and not the Damascene conversion he presents it as in the book.
Having suddenly declared his commitment to socialism Orwell immediately set to work attacking the socialists. The second half of The Road to Wigan Pier is a prolonged, generalised, and spirited polemic against the very kind of middle class socialists who were likely to read the book, but who he believed were alienating large numbers of ordinary people from the socialist movement. Crick points out that Orwell’s argument reflects the limitations of his own, rather narrow, experience of the socialist world. Orwell argues passionately that liberty and justice should be the watchwords of socialism, but he also overestimates the influence on public opinion of Marxist intellectuals of the sort he was familiar with from Hampstead parties, and never mentions the most likely reason for the lack of popular support for socialism - the failure of the Labour Party and the Trades Unions to provide radical leadership.
Still, this kind of devil’s advocacy became Orwell’s trademark. In the early thirties he sometimes described himself, with characteristic use of paradox, as a Tory-anarchist and his socialism was invigorated by a healthy dash of both anarchism and individualism. ‘Liberty’, he once said, ‘is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’. Orwell spent a lot of time telling his socialist brothers and sisters things they emphatically did not want to hear.
He was something of a proto-environmentalist. He loved the countryside and disliked the city. When he lived in a small village in Hertfordshire in the 1930s he kept goats and chickens and was a keen gardener. He sometimes filled his column in the left wing publication Tribune with observations on the changing seasons, the mating habits of toads and the pleasures of Woolworths roses. This didn’t always go down well with his readers who failed to see the relevance to the socialist cause. One reader wrote in to complain that roses were bourgeois. But for Orwell there was clearly a connection between the simple life and the decent society he craved. Or perhaps it was simply another of those intriguing tensions, paradoxes even, which characterise Orwell’s thought and feeling. He accepted that a high degree of mechanisation was a prerequisite of the just society he wished to see but was simultaneously hostile to the highly mechanised society.
The comradeship Orwell experienced serving in the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War confirmed and strengthened his belief in Socialism (interestingly POUM was, in fact, anarchist dominated). He was, however, lucky to get out of Spain alive. A fascist bullet through the throat nearly did for him and then the Communists tried to get hold of him (POUM had been denounced, falsely, by the Stalinists as fascist collaborators who had betrayed the revolution). After Spain it was clear to Orwell that the Soviet Union was simply another form of dictatorship, which shared many features in common with Fascism, and the ideas that led to Animal Farm and 1984 began to take shape in his mind.
In his essay on Dickens Orwell remarks that Dickens is a writer ‘well worth stealing’. The same applies to Orwell who was stolen by, among many others, the Cold War warriors of the American Right. Unfamiliar with Orwell’s political background, and appearing to almost wilfully misunderstood the text in front of them, some American reviewers praised Animal Farm as anti-socialist and anti-revolutionary. It was neither. Far from being anti-socialist it is against tyranny and not about the tragedy of revolution but the tragedy of revolution betrayed. The book came out of Orwell’s conviction that if there was to be a possibility of transformative socialism the ‘Soviet myth’ had to be destroyed.
Similar misreadings continued with 1984 but, as Crick demonstrates, rather than being a repudiation of Orwell’s socialism (Crick provides ample evidence that he remained a radical socialist right to the end), or a prediction of a communist or fascist takeover of Britain it is, in fact, an imaginative extrapolation of existing totalitarian tendencies in all societies - including the Western democracies.
1984 and Animal Farm are works of enduring importance (Animal Farm is by some distance Orwell’s best work of fiction, possessing a lightness of touch quite absent from his other novels) but his greatest work is to be found in his essays, journalism and non-fiction books. His essays on Dickens, Kipling and Henry Miller mix literary criticism with sociological analysis. He pioneered the serious analysis of popular culture. His later essays explore the relationship between the corruption of language and totalitarianism.
The relationship between the plain-speaking Orwell of the essays and the diffident, socially awkward Blair of real life, is a fascinating one. Crick, however, puts on his anti-psychological hat and looks the other way. The name change, he avers, was made for practical reasons and there was no fundamental character split. George was simply an extension of Eric or his ideal self-image. True as far as it goes, but you can’t help feeling he has only brushed the surface of a complicated matter.
Orwell was a mass of contradictions and the deceptive simplicity of his prose style masks an extraordinary complexity of thought. The committed socialist who was profoundly sceptical about centralisation. The communitarian who was a natural loner. The radical who was temperamentally conservative. The patriot who wanted to turn English society upside down. He was a born contrarian and it is partly his sheer cussed and multilayered individuality that continues to make reading him so fascinating.
When you do read Orwell you get a very strong impression of an entire personality. It is sometimes cranky and even objectionable (his homophobic sneering at ‘nancy poets’, for example) but there is also a generosity of spirit, emotional inhibition mixed with an understated but nonetheless real warmth. A dry yet very funny sense of humour. He detests orthodoxy of all kinds - including the orthodoxies of the avowedly unorthodox. Decent and decency are words which recur throughout Orwell’s work, almost as incantations, and there is something fundamentally decent about him. He retains a touching faith in the wisdom of ordinary people and is instinctively on the side of the oppressed.
Orwell’s life was so eventful and productive that it is easy to forget how short it was. He was just 46 when he died. The final pages of this book are unbearably sad. Having spent much of his life in relative obscurity, and on the margins of poverty, Orwell was suddenly famous and wealthy. He was also confined to a hospital bed and dying of TB.
Crick’s anti-psychological approach can sometimes be frustrating. Orwell is certainly a suitable subject for psychological analysis and there are times when you long for Crick to make a bold assertion about his motives in a given situation. What you tend to get, instead, is equivocation. Still, politics rather than psychology was Crick’s thing, and Orwell was essentially a political writer, so biographer and subject are in that vital respect well matched. This eminently readable biography enlarged my understanding of Orwell’s work and should be read by anyone seriously interested in this great writer and extraordinary man. (