CityReads│Such, Such Was George Orwell

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Such, Such Was George Orwell 

Orwell attacked imperialism in "The Burmese Days," capitalism in "The Road to Wigan Pier," Fascism in "Homage to Catalonia" and then communism in "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

Jeffrey Meyers,2000.Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation, New York: Norton.

Source: https://www.c-span.org/video/?162904-1/orwell-wintry-conscience-generation

Picture source: https://writingasiplease.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/facts-about-george-orwell/

Family

George Orwell was born with the name, Eric Blair, in 1903, the same year when Evelyn Waugh was born. Orwell was born in Motihari, Bihar, in northern India, where his father worked for the opium department of the British empire government of India. it was a kind of disgraceful job in many ways. He supervised the gathering and export of opium to China. Orwell felt a lot of guilt about not only things that were appropriate to feel guilty about, like his father's job, but also felt guilty about things that other people wouldn't feel guilty about: for example, having a superior education at Eton or even coming from a middle-class family.

Eric Blair, with his mother Ida, in the autumn of 1903

Marjorie, Avril, and Eric Blair circa 1909

Eric, Ida, Avril and Richard Blair circa 1914

And Eric Blair did not change his name to George Orwell until he published his first book, "Down and Out in Paris and London," in 1933, which was about six years after he came back from Burma. He took George because George is the patron saint in England, St. George and the dragon. And he took Orwell because Orwell was a river right near his house in Suffolk. It flows into the North Sea.

Orwell’s first wife Eileen and their adopted son Richard 

Orwell’s second wife, Sonia Brownell

School days

Orwell went to a prep school called St. Cyrian's, which is the subject of his very famous essay "Such, Such Were the Joys," an ironic essay. It comes from a poem by William Blake, and it's completely the opposite of joyful. In fact, it's utterly miserable.

After St. Cyrian's, Orwell went to Eton. Eton is the most aristocratic and oldest and finest school in England. Orwell was one of the few collegers in Eton, who were the scholarship boys, the ones who had got in on their brains and had their fees paid. Among the 1100 boys, only 70 got the scholarship. And the collegers and they lived right there at the school. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, taught French and English at Eton.

Orwell was a polyglot. He mastered eight foreign languages, two classic, Latin and Greek; three oriental, Burmese and two local dialects in Burma; and three European, French, Spanish, and Catalonian.

In those days, about 90 percent of the people who finished Eton went on to Oxford or Cambridge. A few went into the family business, a few went into the army. But Orwell did something that nobody in the 500-year history of Eton ever did, and that was to go into the Burmese police, which is a very strange thing to do.

Burmese Days

Orwell was in Burma for five years, 1922 to 1927, as a policeman. he had much more judicial responsibility in Burma, and he was placed in about five different towns after he was trained in--at the fort in Mandalay. And he had in some ways life-and-death powers over people

He had kicked, he had beaten his servants. He had ordered criminals to be beaten. He had attended executions. He had watched human beings lose their life.

Tramping and writing

Then he does another thing that's almost as odd as going to Burma. He comes back to Southfold on the east coast of England on the North Sea, where his father has finally retired. So he decided that he wanted to be a writer. The question is: What do you write about? He didn't seem to be able to deal with the Burmese material as soon as he got back from Burma. So he decided to become a bum, a tramp, a hobo. He went to Paris, and he worked as a dish washer in the kitchen of a luxury hotel. And he describes it with excruciating detail: the squalor, the horror, the filth, waiters resenting the customers, literally spitting in the food before they served it in order to get even with this high-class clientele. It’s the early 1930s, the Depression was taking hold.

He was literally a bum on the road. He just went from flophouse to flophouse. You weren't allowed to stay more than a day--and tramped around England. He picked hops in the summer, which is a very difficult job. And he did it for much, much longer than he needed to do in order to get sufficient experience to write the book.

Orwell had kept some manner of proletarian. Orwell had a proletarian haircut, very short over the ears on the sides, with this high, typically Orwell high crown of hair--not flat but high in front--and this extremely unusual mustache, which Englishmen did not wear in those days and even today looks much more French than English. And Anthony Pole points that out and says, `It must have been a lot of trouble taking care of that little mustache and cutting that--that space between the top of the mustache and the bottom of his nose.'

One of Orwell’s book, Wigan Pier, really was about life, especially among the coal miners during the Depression. And Orwell went up there and lived in incredible squatter. Basically, he investigated industrial conditions in the Midland English during the war, during the Depression, and it's a very grim kind of book, but it tells you, as no other book does, what it's like to be a coal miner.

He didn't really have big fame until "Animal Farm" was published in 1945. Orwell was just struggling through on subsistence wages and managing to exist by little bit of vegetable gardening, these animals, the shop. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949. People say the title of " Nineteen Eighty-Four " is the year he wrote the book, with the last two digits reversed, 1948, turning into "1984," which is probably as good an explanation as any that you'll find.

Orwell attacked imperialism in "The Burmese Days," capitalism in "The Road to Wigan Pier," Fascism in "Homage to Catalonia" and then communism in "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four." Orwell was virtually the only writer on the left in the 1930s who was not only critical of the right, as all the left writers were, but also critical of the left. And in "The Road to Wigan Pier"--in the second half of "The Road to Wigan Pier," he has a long autobiographical section about how he became a Socialist, going all the way back to his father and his elite education and his police experience in Burma, his working as a bum and so on--tramping as a bum, working in the hotel. But he also has a hilarious description of what he calls vegetarian, teetotalers, saddle-wearers, bearded cranks; you know, these kind of off-the-wall Socialists that he used to see in Socialist summer camps or at Socialist magazines. It's very healthy to be critical of your own side as well as the other side.

Early death

Orwell rejected the stifling English class system and the immutability of the British Empire. His crucial decision to abandon the Burma Police and become a writer enabled him to create a new image and forge a new consciousness. His desire to escape the respectable world—living down-and-out in repulsive slums and working in disgusting restaurants—made him seek out Spartan conditions, and most of his life was harsh and austere. Fighting in the Spanish Civil War, his risked everything and took personal responsibility for creating a morality based on humanistic Socialism. His constant disregard for his own health cut his life short. Orwell was only 46 when he died of TB.

Orwell also had human failings. He yearned to be rich, handsome and a devil with the ladies. He pursued women outside his marriage. His desperate longing for love—a theme in all his novels—lies at the core of his life and work, and was responsible for his strange deathbed marriage to his second wife, the model for Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell had a noble character, but was also violent, capable of cruelty, tormented by guilt, masochistically self-punishing, sometimes suicidal.

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