George Orwell once wrote, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” And Orwell, who was shy and reserved and valued his privacy, nevertheless was intensely autobiographical. He used himself as raw material — whether as a colonial policeman in Burma, or in a coal mine in Wigan Pier, or living among the homeless, or manning a Loyalist trench in the Spanish Civil War — and was honest in his reactions to and conclusions drawn from his surroundings.
These reactions weren’t always palatable. He stated he personally liked Hitler, and that he often fantasized about driving a bayonet into a “coolie.” He was markedly homophobic, calling upper-class socialists “pansies” and “bun boys.” He blasted pacifists during the Second World War as closet fascists, (“fascifists”), even though, right up until war broke out, he intended to go underground and sabotage the British war effort.
But it has been his biographers who have done the heavy lifting on exposing his flaws, often to challenge the authenticity of his libertarian socialism.
Despite the subtitle of D.J. Taylor’s latest biography, Orwell: The New Life, Taylor offers nothing new. He recycles the same criticisms he made of Orwell in a previous biography published in 2003. Like the Western Stalinists in Orwell’s lifetime (Orwell stated it was because of their noxious effect on “democratic socialism” that he abandoned becoming a novelist like James Joyce and instead became a political writer), Taylor fixates on Orwell’s middle-class upbringing; his father was an official in the colonial opium trade, and Taylor
