A Biography on Orwell & Huxley

Part Two: George Orwell as a Character

One of the best descriptions of Orwell comes from Canadian anarchist author George Woodcock who knew him for his last ten years of his life.

“When I remember GO, I see again the long, lined face that so often reminded me not of a living person, but of a character out of fiction. It was the nearest I had seen in real life to the imagined features of Don Quixote, and the rest of the figure went with the face. For O was a thin, angular man, with worn gothic features accentuated by deep vertical furrows that ran down the cheeks and across the corners of the mouth. The thinness of his lips was emphasized by a very narrow line of dark moustache: it seemed a hard, almost cruel mouth, until he smiled, and then an expression of unexpected kindliness would irradiate his whole face. The general gauntness of his looks was accentuated by the deep sockets from which his eyes looked out, always rather sadly. In contrast to the fragile, worn-down look of the rest of him, his hair grew upward into a kind of brown crest, vigorous and until the end untouched by grey.” ( Woodcock p.3)

From Peter Lewis, George Orwell, the Road to 1984:

“The deep furrows that scored his cheeks, the hard pencil line of his moustache and his upward-bristling hair gave him the look of an ascetic. But the impression of tight-lipped endurance was cancelled out by his eyes and his smile. ‘His eyes were made to glitter with amusement,’ wrote Cyril Conolly. ‘A hard, almost cruel mouth until he smiled,’ wrote another friend, George Woodcock, while V.S. Pritchett remembered how his bleak expression would become suddenly ‘gentle, lazily kind and gleaming with workmanlike humour.’ Although he was convinced that he was unattractive to women, many women friends have testified to the opposite – ‘he looked at you as if inwardly he was roaring with laughter,’ said one. Clearly the photographs do not give us the living man.
    How gloomy was he? ‘Cheerfully gloomy,’ said his publisher, Fredric Warburg. ‘Like gloomy people, he could have moments of great gaiety,’ said his widow, Sonia Orwell, ‘He was much funnier, in person and in print, than people imagine.’ According to his friend, Arthur Koestler, ‘He was a pessimist and so am I, so I found it stimulating, not depressing, to be with him.’
    Orwell was very tall and thin, six foot three with size twelve feet. His head and hands were equally large compared with the gaunt body. His clothes hung on him. Hey seemed chosen for the part of a writer up from the country, leather-patched tweed and corduroy trousers which maintained always the same degree of shabbiness. At the same time he managed to give a hint of being accustomed to patronize French working men’s cafés. His shirts were always dark, of khaki or navy blue, and beneath the French-style moustache would be a crumpled cigarette which he invariably rolled himself. He did not own a dark suit.
    His appearance has been compared to Don Quixote’s. ‘A frayed sahib’ – Pritchett’s description – seems much more apt. It conveys the style of a man used to command, someone who did not give a damn. Those who saw him in disguise as a tramp declared he was incapable of looking the part. He looked, as indeed he was, however faintly, an aristocrat, the descendant of an earl. There was a clumsiness about him too. ‘His sleeves always seemed to be halfway up his arms,’ said Symons, ‘You could not be with him for an hour without being aware that he thought of himself as a member of the awkward squad.’
    He was nearly robbed of his vocal chords by a sniper’s bullet through the throat in Spain, and his voice seemed oddly thin coming out of such a big man. ‘Rusty-edged,’ said Pritchett of his voice. ‘A curious rasp to avoid striking a public school note,’ wrote his friend, Anthony Powell. He spoke monotonously, in a flat, uninflected way.” (George Orwell: the Road to 1984, Peter Lewis, pp. 3-4)

Orwell as seen by a Mr.Heppenstall:

“He was ‘a tall, big-headed man, with pale-blue, defensively humorous eyes, a little moustache and a painfully snickering laugh’…..he seemed to Heppenstall a rather old-fashioned, circumspect fellow with a strange taste for useless bits of information on obscure subjects. He had peculiar prejudices and would expound on them at length in Heppenstall’s company, rambling on about the faults of ‘Scotchmen’, as he liked to call them, or English Roman Catholics, never making it very clear why such groups had earned his disfavour. Heppenstall concluded that Orwell was a ‘nice man, but confused’. Talking at any length with him was frustrating, because he often found that once Orwell began ‘his conversation’, the flow of ideas was so strong that interrupting him was not easy.”

“…Orwell’s modesty and his fondness for understatement, but it also reveals more than a little fondness for playing the part of the enigmatic, failed writer.”

“Playing the loser was a form of revenge against the winners, a way of repudiating the corrupt nature of conventional success – the scheming, the greed, the sacrifice of principles. Yet it was also a form of self-rebuke, a way of keeping one’s own pride and ambition in check.”

“He called himself a socialist, yet he was always pointing out weaknesses in socialism. He devoted enormous effort to writing his novels, yet admitted near the end of his life, ‘I am not a real novelist anyway.’ He was an intellectual who ran a small village shop and referred to himself as a ‘grocer’; he was an ex-policeman who lived among tramps; he was an inveterate reviewer who complained that reviewing damaged a writer’s soul.”

“Whatever the subject, Orwell was always tempted to look at it from both sides. And when he considered another point of view, he did not usually do it half-heartedly. He became immersed in it and used all the powers of his imagination to identify with it. This ability allowed him to see what others ignored and to challenge comfortable assumptions.”

“Orwell liked to joke about the letters he received from women readers in America, saying that they tended to be very earnest, and that they usually included a question such as, ‘What do you consider the most worthwhile thing in life?’ It amused him to write in reply, ‘The love of a good woman.’ This gentle mockery was typical of his comic remarks, which were aimed at himself more often than not….”

“What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing” (Orwell in ‘Why I Write’, 1946)

The following could be an important cue for the actors – unless we choose to ignore it:

“He was an aggressive, sometimes violent writer, but mild and tolerant in his personal dealings with people.”
“He was merciless towards himself. The closer you were to him, the more that harshness was carried over to you. On the other hand he was full of sympathy for the distant masses. …He had to be hard on himself because of his illness, the enemy within. He prided himself on facing up to unpleasant facts. ”

The following could be read as a criticism of Huxley:

“Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality.” (Collected Essays 2, Orwell, 95)