posted on 06 Feb 2023

George Orwell: A Life in Letters, edited by Peter Davison

Over the past three decades Peter Davison has established himself as the pre-eminent scholar in Orwell studies and in so doing has massively increased the amount of Orwell material now available to read. The collected works as edited and annotated by him now stretch to twenty-one volumes and Penguin has used these as the basis for all its more recent paperbacks, producing scholarly, annotated editions whose textual apparatuses to my mind sometimes run the risk of overwhelming the main attraction – Orwell’s own words.

I have written elsewhere on Letterpress about the exemplary (and sadly out of print) four-volume edition of Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, produced in the 1960s by his second wife Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. I still regard this as a high point of Orwell scholarship in that with the lightest and least intrusive of academic touches the pair integrated Orwell’s journalism, essays, letters and diary entries and produced books designed first and foremost to be read and read with pleasure. 

Instead of those four volumes Penguin now publish (in addition to the novels and essays) a single much-expanded one-volume edition of the diaries, simply called George Orwell: Diaries; and a similarly expanded one volume edition of the letters, called George Orwell: A Life in Letters. The latter is what this piece is really about. 

I have been reading A Life in Letters over the past few days and it has been an instructive exercise. I thought it would lead me to the unequivocal conclusion that less is more and that the letters, no matter how expanded and scrupulously annotated, are better read in smaller numbers and interspersed with other material, as Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus had them. In fact, a part of me does still think that this is the case, but the fuller picture is a bit more complicated.

A Life in Letters (and by extension the Diaries) claim to offer ‘the autobiography that Orwell never wrote’. Personally, I think this is a bit of an exaggeration: overall, the coherence off A Life in Letters is indeed very good, but it will still make greatest sense to readers who already have a rough idea of Orwell’s life. 

But that said, this expanded version of the letters, increased as it is by the inclusion of more recently discovered correspondence by Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaugnessy, is nonetheless a revelation. And if you are able to read over five hundred pages of letters, then it must also be said that it impossible to do so without being profoundly moved – especially in the later years following the couple’s adoption of a baby, Richard, Eileen’s sudden death during routine surgery aged thirty-nine and just nine months after Richard’s adoption, Orwell’s grief and loneliness, his preparations to move himself and his son to an impossibly austere cottage on the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides, and the final illness which would kill him aged just forty-six.

Along the way there is much to marvel at and a level of enthralling detail not previously available. After a life of abstemious poverty, illness and poor health, Orwell in his last years was set to become a very wealthy man – and he would have become even wealthier had he lived a few years longer. He went from reckoning his literary earnings in single-digit guineas (for example, the articles he wrote for The Manchester Evening News earned him eight guineas a week) to earning tens of thousands of dollars from the US publication of Animal Farm (and later, Nineteen Eighty-Four). The prevailing post-war relationship between the British government and Stalin made some publishers (and the Ministry of Information) reluctant to see Russia criticised, even in veiled terms, as Animal Farm did, and it took the best part of two years to get the novel published in England. The first US edition, however, which was a book club choice, ran to well over half-a-million copies and Orwell’s first royalty cheque was for the unheard of sum of $37,500.

I found that there were times when reading A Life in Letters seemed something of a chore and I countered this by breaking off periodically to read a favourite Orwell essay or two and found myself refreshed by that immediately recognisable voice and the transparent, unfussy beauty of his prose. (The letters have their moments but as I saw one reviewer point out recently they are generally practical rather than ‘literary letters’.) What is certainly true is that A Life in Letters would be far more readable if the typeface were larger and overall it didn’t look so grey and cramped. This may or may not bother you, depending on your eyesight and the degree to which poorly designed books annoy you. (There is incidentally a similar but much worse problem with Penguin’s one-volume Diaries.)

On balance, then, I do still think there is an argument to say that less is more. The increasingly scholarly paperback editions of Orwell’s work may mean that what we know of Orwell’s writing and our understanding of him as a man have increased exponentially, but sometimes it feels as if this may run counter to pure reading pleasure – and that more than any other single thing is what I return to Orwell for. I would hate to see academic rigour make his books appear dry or forbidding to prospective readers. 

Orwell loved fossicking in junk shops, and he loved old books and unloved pamphlets and bound-sets of boys’ and girls’ comics – indeed, anything that fuelled his odd interests and which could be picked up cheap in the poor, working class quarters of whatever town he might be in. We should remember this and be thankful that there is still plenty of Orwell available in ordinary, perfectly serviceable old paperbacks in secondhand bookshops, charity shops and online.

 

Alun Severn

February 2023

 

Orwell elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

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