He laughed often, but in repose his lined face suggested the grey asceticism of a medieval saint carved in stone and very weathered. He was the first saint of Our Age, quirky, fierce, independent and beholden to none. And a man of causes. In The Road to Wigan Pier , he ventured to socially submerge himself, he wrote, "to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants," tramping among the homeless, digging among the miners.
Then he fought the good fight in Spain against Franco, and when the Republican forces fragmented, he was forced into the other good fight against Stalin, finally returning to England--wounded from a Fascist bullet through the throat and dressed in a battered tweed jacket, a drab tie, and a new persona.
Did he act, and write, the way he looked? Joseph Epstein complained in The New Criterion a decade ago that "one still feels that nothing like a clear picture of the precise quality of George Orwell has yet to emerge. Fame--a great, billowy, international cloud of fame--has got in the way. Another, Michael Shelden's, came along in The rap on Crick's was that it was a bundle of facts that shed no light on Orwell's inner life.
The presumption after Shelden's was that Orwell was just a cold fish without much of an inner life and that he had no secrets to speak of beyond being unattractive to women and possessing a few dirty postcards. Now Jeffrey Meyers, in a masterful, melancholy new biography, has definitively exposed the saint, after all, to be human.
Maybe by the time someone writes the next Orwell bio, in 10 years, Meyers's book will have taken some serious knocks, but probably not. Meyers gives gracious credit to "the rich literary and documentary material" in Peter Davison's 8,page, volume edition of The Complete Works of George Orwell , and to "unpublished material in the Orwell Archive in London.
