"Eric Blair" suits him. The crisp syllables suggest a Briton of spare style and countenance. But he despised his real name; it smacked, somehow, of Aryanism and privilege. So he cloaked his origins in a common-sounding nom de plume. His disguise became him, and at last he became his disguise. Today the world remembers him only as George Orwell, seer of the future imperfect. Neither name nor reputation is quite correct.
Now, 25 years after his death at 46, Orwell is enshrined in the language as a cliché for apocalypse. Virtually every doomsday prophecy uses "Orwellian" to describe any impingement on freedom, from imprisonment to wiretapping. Yet the word derives from Orwell's least characteristic book, 1984.*
To remember him solely for this final volume is like recalling a life by its terminal illness. Indeed when he wrote 1984, Orwell was in the last throes of tuberculosis. The book's pervasive slogan, "Big Brother Is Watching You"; the portmanteau words "New-speak," "bellyfeel," "doublethink"; the inverted graffiti, "Freedom Is Slavery," "Ignorance Is Strength"—all these may be indelible. Nonetheless, if some of 1984's predictions have come true, most have not. If the book lives, it is more as a warning than as prophecy.
Properly, Orwell should not be commemorated for his novels, which he hoped would be enduring, but for his journalism, which he assumed to be ephemeral. It is his fugitive pieces—letters, critiques, articles—that Critic George Steiner justly calls "a place of renewal for the moral imagination."
The writer of those pieces never wasted a line. The only thing he seemed to squander was his life. The heir to a relentlessly middle-class colonial tradition, Orwell gained a scholarship to Eton, then made a false start as a policeman in Burma. Out of that five-year catastrophe came the embittered radical who could dissect his emotions and his country with pitiless surgery.
In the classic memoir, Shooting an Elephant, Orwell recalls the morning a behemoth ran wild and stomped a coolie. The animal might have been saved, but the psychology of the moment demanded a kill. "Here was I," recalled the ex-official, "the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind." After the ritual sacrifice, the writer confesses, "I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool." That is more than the bottom line of a 1936 article; it is the epitaph of the British imperial style.
Orwell was a master of exit lines. Yet it is his openings that remain in the mind: "As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me"; "Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing"; "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Where is the reader whose eye could rove from a page with those beginnings?