Orwell: The New Life by DJ Taylor

Orwell: The New Life
By DJ Taylor
Pegasus Books 2023

DJ Taylor’s Orwell: The Life appeared in 2003 to choruses of praise, and some of the highlights of that praise now adorn the dust jacket of Taylor’s new update, Orwell: The New Life. All that praise was entirely justified; Orwell: The Life was a taut, quicksilver thing, an almost self-conscious counterpoint to the soggy bloat that characterizes so many literary biographies. And Orwell: The New Life preserves all the best qualities of its earlier counterpart while adding dozens of new layers informed not only by twenty further years of research and records becoming available but also by the ongoing cultural conversation with Orwell that’s only gained new urgency in all that time. “Upwards of seventy years after his death,” Taylor writes, “he seems more important than ever.” 

The observation is both true and a cliche, of course; it’s a tic of this author, visible even in his fiction — his 2012 novel Derby Day was one long and very successful marriage of comfortable cliche and marvelous readability. And whether he’s complacently calling Orwell “more important than ever” or “a man out of his time,” or saying his family life in 1944 was “shrouded in mystery,” Taylor is fond of the occasional easy phrasing, even with this most difficult of subjects. 

But he’s lived with Orwell in these last twenty years, as have we all, and this new version of his biography is wiser and more penetrating on some of the ways Orwell has “quarried his way down into the heart of the human condition and, by doing so, managed to colonise the mental world of both his own age and the ones that followed.” 

When attempting to write about a young Orwell’s time at Eton, Taylor mentions that “it is difficult to convey the effect [the place] had on the pupils who were educated there in anything other than symbolic terms,” and actually something of this same problem obtains for much of Orwell’s life, unless the biographer is willing to work that much harder to scrape away the patina under which this author is so readily transmuted into an allegorizing cautionary tale about everything from cell phones to 21st century Brazilian politics. For a figure who seems so inescapable, the essential questions are things such as “what was he like as a person? What was it like to be in a room with him?” Orwell the social observer we feel we know; we feel we’re increasingly living in a world he more than anybody else gave us the vocabulary to describe. Orwell the writer we likewise perhaps feel we know, although most of us are wrong about that (his copious deadline journalism usually reveals a cranky, dourly funny, fairly ordinary bookish man). But the personal Orwell? It isn’t merely that he tends to elude biographers — it’s that he tends not even to interest them.

Even in this much stronger second assault on the subject, Taylor doesn’t entirely succeed in avoiding this trap. When he writes that “Orwell’s own unhappiness seems to have manifested itself in an endless brooding about the injustices and inequalities he saw around him,” for instance, he seems unaware of the extent to which he’s talking about a literary construct. There’s an almost compulsive urge to read the books back into the man, and although we can grant that Orwell invites this more than almost any other modern writer, it still creates a bit of impatience, especially, ironically, when it’s combined with the level of fine prose Taylor always achieves. Take the omnipresent subject of the Spanish Civil War:

It is not an exaggeration to say that Spain had altered the way in which he looked at the world. He had seen ‘wonderful things’, as he put it in the letter to Cyril Connolly, and the tantalising prospect of a social revolution, only to watch in horror as malign autocracy set about suborning this golden dawn to its own short-term political ends. Undoubtedly, the seeds of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ were sown here in a world of organised lying, in newspaper stories of troops accused of cowardice whom Orwell knew to have fought valiantly and accounts of battles that had never taken place. 

But Taylor is very much nevertheless interested in what it was like to know George Orwell, to sit in a room with him. Orwell: The New Life regularly reverts to such quiet moments, some of them lifted mutatis mutandis from the earlier version, and they combine with a broad sweep of ancillary reading (Taylor’s “Further Reading” appendix is very generous) to make this an entirely first-rate companion to Peter Davison’s essential edition of Orwell’s diaries. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.