The World of George Orwell

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Why has no one made this man's life into an Oscar-winning movie?

I don't often cry at the end of college lectures, but as I was driving to court this morning, listening to Professor Michael Shelden describe the death by tuberculosis of Eric Arthur Blair, also known as “George Orwell,” not knowing that his final book, “1984,” would be such a success, leaving behind his three-year-old adopted son, who had lost his mother, Orwell's beloved wife, I couldn't help myself. It didn't hurt that Professor Shelden's delivery is conversational and more than a bit intimate; one gets the sense that Shelden is sitting in front of a microphone instead of standing before a class.

Shelden's lecture takes us from Orwell's boyhood experience as a boarding school student, to his days as an Imperial Police officer in Burma, through is literary product, through Orwell's brief stint in the Spanish Civil War, to his pre-war and war years. I learned that my roughly sketched understanding of Orwell's life was inadequate, although I had read Homage to Catalonia. Professor Shelden makes the point that Orwell had a habit of recycling bits and pieces of his life into his novels. For example, Winston Smith's fascination with odd bric-a- brac from the past came from Orwell's love of antique stores and the useless oddments he would find.

Orwell died in January of 1950 at the age of 47. His literary life had not been financially successful; the memoir of his time in Spain, “Homage to Catalonia,” had sold only 700 copies. After his involvement in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Orwell had been fighting tuberculosis. However, “Animal Farm” had sold through the roof coming as it did at the beginning of the Cold War.

Even with “Animal Farm,” however, Orwell had to struggle. He was the victim of a Communist whisper conspiracy intended to protect “Uncle Joe” from criticism. Orwell's experience with the Communists in the Spanish Civil War had given him reason to hate Stalin. The year-long effort to prevent the publication of Animal Farm gave him reason to view domestic Communists as a potential threat to liberty and to himself.

Unfortunately, a certain amount of academic cognitive dissonance comes through when Professor Shelden discusses the circumstances in which Orwell permitted his a list he compiled of people who he suspected be Communists or Communist-sympathizers to be shown to a government agency. Shelden spends quite a bit of time talking about McCarthy and “witch-hunts” and Orwell's putative expectation that this list would never actually be shown to anyone in government before finally coming out and saying that Orwell was aware that there were Communists in positions of power and he was acting to defend himself. For example, Orwell listed as a potential Communist the actual Communist who was head of a newspaper department while being a paid KGB agent. This person, Smollet, had actually used his governmental influence to impede the publication of Animal Farm.

And, yet, in a lecture series about a man whose greatest work warned of the threat of totalitarianism, Professor Shelden seems hesitant to identify the agents of totalitarianism and apologetic at Orwell's minor effort to fight against totalitarianism?

It's an odd bit.

Nonetheless, the lecture series as a whole is informative and engaging. I recommend it.