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"Happy 1984." This concludes a New York Times editorial criticizing the U.S. invasion of Grenada and the "Orwellian arguments" for it given by the Reagan Administration. The implication is clumsy but clear: Nineteen Eighty-Four and its author stand behind the Times's position. But a week or so earlier, the same newspaper's Op-Ed page ran a defense of the Grenada action by Neo-Conservative Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary. And Podhoretz had by then firmly claimed Orwell for his camp of disillusioned liberals: "I believe he [Orwell] would have been a neo-conservative if he were alive today."
The impulse to hold Orwell's coat while sending his ghost out to battle now seems pandemic. A writer in the liberal Roman Catholic journal Commonweal proclaims: "Orwell, if he were alive today, would make a worthy opponent for the multinational corporation. He could have made an idea and a book on 'organization man' stand up and sing." The conservative National Review concludes an essay on Orwell with cosmic theatrics: "The forces of darkness have huge armies, a bigger and better arsenal, liberation movements, and the whores' allegiance. The forces of light have Orwell on their side and draw strength from it." On the other side of the barricades, the radlib Village Voice waves a special issue devoted to Orwell and his year. One headline: CHRONICLES OF A DECENT MAN.
Before Orwell's name becomes as muddled and mythologized as Nineteen Eighty-Four, the testimony of personal friends who would not have dreamed of predicting his views, on any subject, might be heeded. "I understood him up to a point," says Author V.S. Pritchett. "It was hard to define him because just when you had fixed on a view, he would contradict it." Novelist Julian Symons remembers "a quality of perversity" in Orwell: "He had a characteristic directness which upset people and made him a lot of enemies." Malcolm Muggeridge recalls a man "who utterly despised intellectuals and people he used to refer to, scornfully, as wearing sandals. And yet he was an intellectual."
He was also many other things: an astute critic of literature and popular culture, a journalist who turned political writing into an art form, the finest English essayist of his century. Those who know of him only as a grand bogey, a synonym for some terror that may go bump in the Western night, hardly know him at all. He made it his business to tell the truth at a time when many contemporaries believed that history had ordained the lie. Yet the very name that is now so often invoked, vaguely and in vain, is a fiction.
Eric Arthur Blair was born in 1903 in India, where his father Richard worked as a civil servant for the British Empire. Not long afterward, Eric's mother took him and his older sister Marjorie back to England, a common domestic arrangement at the time; India was fine as a place for husbands to work, but children were to be brought up in the homeland. Richard Blair joined his family during his infrequent leaves. A younger sister Avril was born when Eric was five.