Impact of Orwell hasn't waned

If George Orwell did not exist, would we, like God, have to invent him? Certainly, like God, we constantly find ourselves reinventing him.

D.J. Taylor's "Orwell: The Life" (Holt, 446 pages, $30) is the fourth full-length, formal biography in the past quarter-century of the man, born 100 years ago, who wrote "Animal Farm" and "1984."

In the 53 years since Orwell's death at age 46 in January 1950, there have been scores of memoirs, reminiscences, quasi-biographies and studies, including last year's "Why Orwell Matters," by Christopher Hitchens.

Clearly Orwell is someone who means something to us. As Taylor says, like Dickens he has been absorbed into our subconscious, and his most-famous utterances are quoted daily ("Big Brother is watching you"), even by people who have never read a line he wrote.

Exactly what he means is the point of all those biographies and studies. Again, like God, everybody wants to make him their own, or to make him into something of their own.

Three years ago, in "Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation," Jeffrey Meyers emphasized Orwell's dark vision of the world, and his twisted, guilt-ridden, masochistic personality. In 1991's "Orwell: The Authorized Biography," Michael Shelden expended effort in blackening the character of Sonia Brownell Orwell, the woman Orwell married almost on his deathbed (and to whose rescue Hilary Spurling rode in this year's "The Girl From the Fiction Department").

Taylor's work in a sense comes full circle to Bernard Crick's 1980 biography, the first complete one, in that it is not organized on any particular thesis or principle and does not have significant axes to grind (though he does attempt to dull axes wielded by others). It is the most objective -- or, better stated, least subjective -- biography thus far.

With the benefit of access to more materials than previous biographers, Taylor covers all the usual suspects: Orwell's birth as Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903; his attendance at Eton; service as a colonial policeman in Burma; down-and-out years of "tramping"; emergence as a writer in the 1930s; volunteer fighter against Franco in the Spanish Civil War (in which he was wounded); and brief window of fame and material success in the 1940s.

While Taylor's is not an overly tendentious work, it does have certain themes or emphases. Four interrelated ones, in particular, recur:

-- "The moral basis which Orwell thought inseparable from any form of art."

-- Orwell's naivete and lack of self-awareness, what his friend the writer Anthony Powell referred to as the "essential unreality" of his approach to life.

-- Orwell's belief that "the single most important crisis of the 20th century was the decline in mass religious belief and its corollary in personal immortality." Orwell, though far from being a religious believer, felt that something had to be found to fill that vacuum, else it would be satisfied by totalitarianism.

-- The "streak of paranoia that ran beneath the surface of Orwell's mind." He always maintained a lively interest in "the malign exterior forces whom he suspected of interfering in his and other people's lives."

The paranoia, in turn, is related to what the author calls "Orwell's trick -- one carried all the way through to '1984' -- of setting up a solitary anti-hero in opposition to a hostile world." Even in his nonfiction, such as "The Road to Wigan Pier," Orwell the reporter "moves almost alone through a hostile world" (which was contrary to his own life).

Like God, Orwell created his own world, though populating it not quite with images of himself but with the same people over and over. It is not a unitary world -- such as, say Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha -- but it is a remarkably consistent one.

So that his final novel, "1984," is like a palimpsest of his earlier novels: Winston Smith is George Bowling of "Coming Up for Air," is Gordon Comstock of "Keep the Aspidistra Flying," is Dorothy Hare of "A Clergyman's Daughter," is John Flory of "Burmese Days."

All of which, while filling in gaps of fact and interpretation, says nothing about why people around the world who love language and literature keep returning to, like a minor god, the man whom novelist and critic V.S. Pritchett called "the wintry conscience of a generation." This dedication, bordering on reverence, has more to do with his scruffy asceticism, idealism, self-sacrifice, independence and uncompromising intellectual honesty.

The quality that Orwell once saw in Charlie Chaplin might as appropriately be ascribed to him: His power "to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man, for the ineradicable belief in decency that still exists."

E-MAIL: Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer and reviewer for several publications, and a frequent contributor to the Deseret Morning News.

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