Orwell: The New Life by D. J. Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Never Meet Your Heroes
A deeply researched and engagingly written portrait of arguably the twentieth century’s most iconic literary figure. Yet by the end, one is left with a troubling impression: George Orwell, the great defender of truth and decency, wasn’t a particularly decent man himself. D. J. Taylor does not avoid this reality, but for this reader the conclusion was unavoidable: Orwell is a hero I’m glad I didn’t meet.
What emerges most clearly from Taylor’s portrait is Orwell’s almost sociopathic tendency for fitting people into categories. Whether aristocrats, intellectuals, or working-class comrades, Orwell had a penchant for reducing individuals to ‘types’, often accompanied by a withering judgment. Which suggests a man more interested in ideas than in people, a contradiction that makes Orwell’s social commentary paradoxically astute and emotionally distant.
Orwell’s treatment of women is especially unsettling. His first wife, Eileen, is largely absent from his letters until her health declined, a silence that suggests emotional detachment rather than oversight. Even during their courtship, Orwell frequently misspelled her name – a small but telling sign of inattentiveness. Taylor subtly underscores this pattern, and the portrait that emerges is of a man either unable or unwilling to engage with the emotional reality of those closest to him.
More troubling still are repeated references to Orwell’s inappropriate sexual advances. Taylor recounts episodes where Orwell would often “jump” on unsuspecting female acquaintances, and his coy suggestions to “go for a walk in the woods” present little ambiguity. These incidents are disturbing not only in themselves, but because they stand in stark contrast to Orwell’s public posture as a principled critic of coercion and abuse of power.
Then there are the ideological inconsistencies. Orwell, the avowed pacifist “enjoying the fighting” during the Spanish Civil War; Orwell, the brilliant diagnostician of totalitarianism, predicting that the British Home Guard would rise up against its own government; Britain falling to the same working-class after WWII was won. Orwell’s dystopian imagination might have been unmatched, but his real-life foresight was clearly a miss.
And yet, despite these contradictions – perhaps even because of them – Orwell: The New Life is a compelling read. Taylor’s prose is elegant, if occasionally too clever for its own good. Words like “sedulous”, “amanuensis”, and “querulous” cropped up often enough to send this reader scrambling for a dictionary. It’s a curious stylistic choice, considering Orwell’s own disdain for obscure or pretentious language. As a biographer and admirer of Orwell, Taylor’s departure from that principle feels oddly inconsistent.
The book also reads like a literary Who’s Who of early twentieth-century Britain. Taylor name-drops nearly every major writer and critic of the period, reminding us that despite cultivating the image of a down-at-heel outsider, Orwell benefited from an elite connection well in keeping with his Old Etonian pedigree. It’s fair to ask whether Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four would have achieved such cultural permanence without the well-placed support of this rarefied circle.
Ultimately, Taylor succeeds in humanising Orwell, but at a cost. The more vivid and intimate the portrait becomes, the harder it is to ignore the great dystopian author’s flaws. You may come away from this book with a deeper understanding of George Orwell the writer, but continuing to admire Eric Blair the man is a different matter.