Most Orwell biography is, at heart, an exercise in teleology: a reverse journey through his life and times that begins with the achievement of Nineteen Eighty-Four and then works backwards, in an attempt to establish exactly what it was about the intervening years that impelled him to write it in the way that he did. In this highly astute study, Dorian Lynskey locates the origins of the novel – now celebrating its 70th anniversary – in the six months its author spent in the first half of 1937 fighting on the republican side in the Spanish civil war.
It was here in Catalonia, Lynskey argues, that the stanchions of Big Brother's nightmare world – the disregard for objective truth, the rewriting of the past and the routine suppression of dissent – slid inexorably into place. And, as he makes clear, the “Spanish Beans” that Orwell spilled in his essay of 1942 affected their spiller personally. Having enrolled in the Trotskyist Poum militia rather than the Marxist International Brigades, he was immediately suspect: when the war descended into faction fighting and the Soviet hit-squads arrived in Barcelona, he barely escaped with his life. If the corruption of the left is such a feature of his later writing it is because he was a victim of it himself.
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Spain left an indelible mark on a man who had hitherto taken only an anthropological interest in the Depression-era Labour party. According to his friend Richard Rees, it was only when Orwell left for the war that Rees began to realise “how extraordinary he was”. Homage to Catalonia, the record of Orwell's Spanish experiences, appeared in 1938, yet it took another half-decade for Nineteen Eighty-Four to take root in his consciousness – the decisive prompt came when he read reports of the Tehran conference of late 1943, at which the allied leaders sat down to carve up the postwar world – and another five-and-aâ??bit years to bring the book to print. One of the most obvious questions to ask about the novel's gestation is simply procedural: what took him so long?
Set in the wider context of Peter Davison's 20-volume edition of the complete works, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a flaring exception. The prewar Orwell had been known for his fluency: most of the books he wrote from 1932 to 1939 had occupied him for less than a year. A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), written while he was convalescing from a bout of pneumonia, took a little over six months. Animal Farm (1945) – only 30,000 words long admittedly, but tricky from the point of view of plot – was finished in half that time. Compared with these high-speed surges to the finishing tape, Nineteen Eighty-Four was a marathon: a few pages written by the end of 1945; a first draft not completed until the end of 1947; a second draft not wrapped up until December 1948. What went wrong?
The answer, as Lynskey shows in detail, lies in a combination of personal-cum-professional road-blocks, a series of obstacles strewn across Orwell's life in the mid-1940s that stopped a once-prolific author from working on the book he burned to write. One of them was a file of personal traumas that began with the death of his first wife, Eileen, on the operating table and continued through his unavailing efforts to find a replacement. Another was the worsening ill health that led to a full-blown tuberculosis diagnosis and long periods of hospitalisation. But a third can be found in what Lynskey identifies as “a paper trail thousands of pages long”.
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