George Orwell (1984 Aninal FarmHe was the son of a servant
of the Crown from a well-heeled South of England background, who shone at prep
school but proved something of an academic flop later on. A passionate
left-wing polemicist, he nonetheless retained more than a few traces of his
public-school breeding, including a plummy accent and a horde of posh friends
His cussedness became more
pronounced, Orwell chose to slave away in Parisian kitchens even when he was
coughing up blood, sleep in dosshouses while cadging the odd ten shillings off
his bemused parents, put in a spot of portering at Billingsgate, and ponder how
to get himself put in prison for Christmas. Like Brecht, he always seemed
exactly three days away from a shave, a minor physiological miracle.
Orwell
was a kind of literary proletarian who lived in dire straits for most of his
life, and began to earn serious money from his writing only when he was
approaching death
He was a stranger to luxury, and with heroic asceticism even
managed to enjoy BBC canteen food. It is hard to imagine this emaciated,
lugubrious, eccentrically dressed figure, with his faint resemblance to Stan
Laurel, swanning around Manhattan cocktail parties à la Hitchens.
Orwell never
seems to have taken the least interest in success, in contrast to those
contemporary literary pundits who pride themselves on being plain-speaking,
loose-cannon dissenters while cultivating all the right social contacts.
Failure was Orwell’s forte, a leitmotif of his fiction. For him, it was what
was real, as it was for Beckett. All of his fictional protagonists are humbled
and defeated; and while this may be arraigned as unduly pessimistic, it was not
the view of the world they taught at Eton
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