Orwell's life, legacy and 100th birthday celebrated

By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post

Advertiser library photo George Orwell Born: Eric Arthur Blair, June 25, 1903, Motihari, India Died: At age 47 of a neglected lung ailment, in London Did you know? Orwell was educated in England at Eton College. After service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927, he returned to Europe to become a writer. He lived for several years in poverty. His earliest experiences resulted in the 1933 book, "Down and Out in Paris and London." Of all of Orwell's writings, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" has had the most profound influence on historical revisionism. Other books penned by Orwell include "Burmese Days" (1934), "AÊClergyman's Daughter" (1935) and "Animal Farm" (1945).

Social historian Noel Annan once described him as "the first saint of our age — quirky, fierce, independent and beholden to none."

Somewhere along the way, however, amid all the hero worship, the real man — the idiosyncratic, squeaky-voiced, tubercular Englishman who dressed like a pauper, rolled his own cigarettes, chased after women and practiced a wobbly but sincere brand of socialism — seems to have gotten lost, and perhaps the real writer has as well. Orwell has suffered the famous author's ultimate fate: He is revered and invoked more than he is read.

His 100th birthday falls this week, and a new round of sanctification has already commenced both in the United States and in London, which cherishes Orwell as a native son (even though he was born in India). Last month, 300 scholars gathered at Wellesley for a three-day centenary retrospective dubbed "An Exploration of His Work and Legacy." The Royal Society of Chemistry plans to mark the day by publishing the ideal technique for brewing tea, one of Orwell's obsessions and the subject of an essay he wrote in 1946. Two new biographies have just been published here, and Thomas Pynchon has broken cover to pen an introduction to a new edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four," Orwell's best-known classic.

But even while the orgy of praise and hagiography gathers steam, let's pause for a moment to remember the man himself, starting with all of the flaws that made him human. Based upon his self-critical writings and the accounts of those who knew him, Orwell was a strange and difficult person who had few friends, mistrusted foreigners and harbored a streak of self-righteousness. The characters in his novels are stiff and unconvincing, his portraits of women are one-dimensional and bear the distinct odor of unrepentant misogyny, and his occasional references to Jews are uncomfortable at best. And, oh yes, let's not forget this: As a prophet, he was almost always wrong; 1984, as we now know, looked nothing like "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

And yet the book still resonates in our nightmares and our lexicon. Big Brother, the infamous ministries of Love and Truth, the memory hole, the Thought Police and Hate Week all remain part of our vocabulary. And Orwell's own name has become the gold-standard adjective to apply when measuring the gulf between political language and moral reality.

"In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties," he once wrote. "As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer." And, indeed, it was the age that helped forge Orwell. He wrote his most compelling work during a 10-year span between 1938 and 1949 — one of humankind's most perilous decades, when the world experienced Hitler and Stalin and a cataclysm of warfare and slaughter.

Orwell viewed his own life as an endless struggle to escape humiliation, and his single-minded dedication to writing as a sort of sustained psychotic episode. "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness," he wrote in 1947. "One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

His most memorable works were his last two. "Animal Farm," published in 1944, was a savage Swiftian satire in which a Berkshire boar and an English barnyard stand in for Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Some thought it was too strange, and others deemed it unpatriotic to attack Stalin at a time when Uncle Joe was Britain's and America's loyal ally in the war against Hitler. But "Animal Farm" sold well, giving Orwell for the first time a steady income, which he spent on renting a farmhouse in the Hebrides and a nurse for his young son after his mother's unexpected death.

It was there he wrote most of "Nineteen Eighty-Four," his final and most enduring book. Orwell called it a satire, but it holds up best as a portrait of the power and psychology of totalitarianism, which he depicts this way: "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them."

He did not live to see much of either the success or the distortion. The struggle to finish "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in the drafty, unheated Hebrides cottage brought on a new round of the lung disease that had stalked him since birth. He died of a hemorrhage in January 1950 at the age of 46.

"A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying," he once wrote, "since any life when viewed from inside is simply a series of defeats." Nonetheless, for those of us celebrating the legend and his books from the distance of half a century, it seems more like a triumph.