The Under-Read Memoirs of George Orwell

[English page]

June 25, 2015 

By Tobias Carroll

http://www.biographile.com/the-under-read-memoirs-of-george-orwell/...

When George Orwell’s name is brought up, it's largely in the context of his two most well-known books: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both continue to loom large in literary consciousness, for though the totalitarian societies that inspired them have come and gone, the authoritarian impulses they feature remain present around the globe. Nineteen Eighty-Four, in particular, has nestled deeply into certain avenues of culture. This is especially true in the past decade, as questions of surveillance have become more and more hotly debated. From summer blockbusters, to episodes of the television show "Black Mirror," to abundant dystopian fictions, Orwell’s incisive take on politics and control seems likely to endure for many years to come -- something both aesthetically understandable and politically chilling.

However, regarding Orwell only as a critic of totalitarianism misses out on another vital part of his body of work. Orwell’s nonfiction -- particularly his work in memoir -- can be seen as every bit as illuminating as his vivid fictional worlds, whether populated by an all-seeing state or headed by a revolutionary cabal of animals. Those two aspects of Orwell’s work converge most clearly in Homage to Catalonia, his account of the Spanish Civil War.

Perhaps some of this comes from the political complexity of Homage to Catalonia. For readers who came of age during the Cold War (or in its wake), Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four offered a lucid critique of the Soviet Union and communism as a whole. In a 1952 piece on Orwell’s book in the New York Times, Granville Hicks pointed to some of the reasons for the book's vitality.

Now, two years after the author's death, it has been published over here, and it is alive, whereas most of the books about Spain that were published in this country in the late Thirties and were read are dead.

Reading about the Spanish Civil War reveals to the reader a more complex landscape, one in which fascism, communism, and anarchism all clashed. (For another window on this period, Stephen Koch’s The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles is invaluable; George Packer’s review of it for The New Yorker also connects it directly to Orwell’s book.) Homage to Catalonia is a gripping account of the war. To American readers, however, it might provide an account of ideologically-minded conflict that doesn’t line up with an easy 'either-or' line of thinking. That’s all the more reason to read it. It’s the rare work of history that illuminates the past even as it raises more questions about all that's gone before.

Orwell's 1933 book Down and Out in Paris and London is gripping in a different sort of way. As in his later The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell explores working-class life. In Down and Out in Paris and London, it's in a style that juxtaposes memoir with certain fictional elements. Sometimes, the book is presented as a memoir; at others, it’s described as a novel. The book’s narrator does share enough qualities with Orwell that it seems safe to go with the former. That Orwell occasionally inserts fairly dry observations about economics and employment into the mix seems better-suited to a work of nonfiction with a sociopolitical aspect than a more traditional novel.

Orwell’s detailed treatment of working-class income and expenses are what make Down and Out in Paris and London still relevant. As the book chronicles life on the margins in the two cities in its title, the level of specificity that it involves is one that will likely resonate with anyone who's felt economic anxiety. In a 2014 review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kaya Genç wrote, "I think lack of money strengthens one's instinct for survival. You desperately want to write something good and succeed enough to make money for your words."

That urgency characterizes much of Orwell's work. Though deeply attuned to questions raised by specific events taking place around him, these works written over half a century ago continue to provoke readers and raise powerful questions without easy answers. Though they are not the books for which he is most remembered, George Orwell’s more personal works leave a vast and complex artistic and political legacy.