‘MOST English critics, apart from publishers’ touts who review novels in the Sunday papers, are much keener to prevent one from enjoying the books they disapprove of than to add to one’s enjoyment.”
This is classic Orwell – pithy, gruff, a bit of a scold, always up for a scrap. See his belligerent use of “touts”.
Orwell, the outsider’s outsider, not giving a flying whatever. Note too he specifically says “English” – Scots critics writing for the Sundays are pointedly excluded; we aim to amuse.
Which is not to say Orwell was a fan of the Scots, or “Scotchmen” as he preferred, revelling in the immediate irritant effect of such usage. We hear he shared his snickering distaste of “the Scotch cult” with Anthony Powell, that crashing snob who delighted in pronouncing his surname “Pole”.
Taylor tells us Orwell “affected to despise the Scots”, that he was no fan of tartan flummery. Which in turn raises the question: Why is flummery invariably tartan? And yet and yet…
Orwell was “thinking always of my island in the Hebrides, which I suppose I shall never possess, nor even see”. This said in 1940, six years before he pitched up on Jura.
He was a Blair of course, before naming himself after the Suffolk river, descended, ironically, from Lowland Scots who were slave owners. His Gallic looks came from his mother, Ida Limouzin, who came from a family of Bordeaux shipbuilders. Study the photographs taken of the writer: he could be a tramp in a Jacques Tati movie.
And tramp he did, to his parents’ dissatisfaction, in Paris and London when he probably contracted TB.
Rather than go to Oxbridge after Eton, he made for Burma where he famously saw a hanging and shot an elephant.
By the Irrawaddy, Taylor has him realising he’s become “an imperialist stooge” as he witnesses nascent nationalism and how it was viciously suppressed by British forces.
After five years in colonial service, he settles back in Blighty, writes the early novels and despairs of his efforts; sales are modest.
Serious attention from the left arrives with his trips down the mines, his time on The Road To Wigan Pier. Then comes 1936, Franco and the Spanish Civil War.
Despite his ill health he signs on and fights alongside Scottish heroes. At the front, he’s shot in the neck with one of his carotid arteries missed by millimetres. In Barcelona, he’s witness to internecine fighting that kills hundreds.
Taylor theorises it was entirely possible that the Stalinists would have murdered Orwell. Meanwhile, in his head, Animal Farm and 1984 were brewing.
Even with his growing cynicism, there was a residual naïveté about Orwell. His idea of socialism was Olympian, fair-minded; his utter shock at the betrayals and terrors of the NKVD in Spain was real.
Anti-Communism now blended with his anti-Nazism, and he became the righteous diagnostician of global totalitarian menace.
Taylor’s updated biography is welcome precisely because we live in a world today where many such monsters are back in charge. Pundits are always asking: What would George say, what would George do?
Faced with war criminals like Vladimir Putin and Henry Kissinger, liars like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, neofascists like Giorgia Meloni and Marie Le Pen, home-grown blowhards like Nigel Farage and Douglas Ross, we need Orwell’s voice more than ever.
As for those earlier strictures about Scotland and “the Scotch”, he slowly mellowed.
As a theatre critic during the Phoney War Taylor tells us Orwell enjoyed such homespun entertainment as The Three Aberdonians, “who enliven a good acrobatic display with mild obscenities”. Sounds utterly allagrugous. And then, war over, he finally got his Hebridean home.
On Jura, he had a supply of fish, lobster, and freshly killed venison. The scenery was spectacular. But he was newly widowed and had to care for his adopted son, Richard. The lung haemorrhaging continued.
Norman Bissell’s recent novel Barnhill brilliantly captures Orwell’s isolation. It’s easy to visualise the author as a tragic figure on the island, struggling with his motorbike, a Cassandra in the wilderness.
Like Winston Smith, you might take him for the Last Man in Europe.
Lastly, there were the horrors of Hairmyres near East Kilbride, where his phrenic nerve was paralysed, his lung collapsed. All to no avail. His final bleed happened in London. He was only 46.
