The Question of Turning Real Lives into Fiction

On Thursday at book club, I heard a question I’ve been asked before: Should fiction be written about real persons? This question, however, was asked without the vehemence I heard years ago in a course I taught on Julian Barnes. This British writer had borrowed the life of the Russian composer Shostakovich for his novel, The Noise of Time. Barnes had consulted an Oxford U. biographer of this famous composer and been given assurance of his accurate portrayal of Dimitri Shostakovich. Which is why I had trouble understanding the two students in the Barnes class who opposed what Sir Julian had done. I remember asking, “Do you watch the History Channel with their dramatic re-enactments of actual historical persons?”  I did not say then but say now, how much I appreciated the Grant miniseries because there was no way I was getting through the huge 2017 Grant biography by Ron Chernow. And I am pleased to say The Noise of Time helped me appreciate Shostakovich and listen differently to his music.

I might have asked those two students if Spielberg was wrong to produce the 15th movie about Abraham Lincoln. Who can forget Daniel Day Lewis as Abe? The performance earned Lewis his third ‘best actor’ Academy Award in 2013.  The movie was shot in Richmond, Virginia (hurrah) and declared the best film Spielberg ever produced. 

I think of other movies about famous persons. I greatly admired Patton, starring George C. Scott, with Karl Malden as Omar Bradley.  And decades earlier, as a ten-year old, I saw and have not forgotten The Robe, which was adapted from a novel. To hear and see Jesus made the required Bible study classes more real!  And even better, I was introduced to a young Richard Burton as the slave Marcellus. -😊 What an amazing actor Burton was until he did a Dylan Thomas (both of them Welsh drinkers) and died at 58. Who can forget Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  Think of all the movies you’ve seen about real persons, both famous and infamous ones.

Speaking of actors and films, I will not be surprised if Burma Saheb is made into a movie. Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast was made into one. The word ‘prolific’ fits this writer. Before his 2024 Burma Saheb, Theroux had written 33 novels and 19 non-fiction books. His latest novel depicts the life of Eric Blair during his five youthful years in Burma (see last week’s blog).  My gripe is not that Theroux took a real person and wrote a novel about him. It is this; that not much is known about those five years in Burma for Blair, soon to be known as George Orwell. What bothers me is that facing a void of actual information, Theroux filled it with whatever he desired.  Lots of sex especially, which will help sell the novel and entice movie moguls. Yet what bothers me even more is how Theroux raided Burmese Days, the novel George Orwell wrote years after his time in Burma. The novel Burmese Days was first published in the USA in 1934, and then published in Britain by Victor Gollancz in 1935.

Next week:  Orwell’s character John Flory, age 35, a timber merchant in Katha, Eric Blair’s fifth and brief posting as a policeman for the British empire.

My Fascination With George Orwell

Eric Blair became George Orwell after his five years in Burma, where he served as a policeman for the IIP (Indian Imperial Police). I knew of Orwell in college, but I had not read anything by him until I began teaching secondary school in the Napa Valley during the 1970s.  Both Animal Farm and 1984 were novels used in high school classes there. But Orwell’s essay, “Why I Write,” grabbed my attention when I taught the first ever Creative Writing class at Vintage High. I dreamed of being a writer, and Orwell in this essay convinced me I should stop dreaming and try to write. Yet my real fascination with George began in the late 1980s in Malaysia.

For three years I taught for Indiana University’s program for Malay students, which did not include those of Chinese and Indian heritage. A joke among diplomats was to ask: What country in the world has affirmative action for the majority? Ah, Malaysia. My students were primarily male and difficult to teach. Then I discovered two Orwell essays that engaged them: “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant.”  In Malaysia to be caught with a gun or drugs was a capital crime. First the lashes and then the rope. Students did not criticize their government, but from their journals I knew the two Orwell essays had spoken to them. “Shooting an Elephant” even resulted in animated conversation. I had the students draw and label a four-layer cake labeled Imperialism. This helped them move from being angry that the narrator shot the elephant to seeing how it was only one victim of Imperialism.

In Malaysia I had been fortunate to find in a Daedalus catalogue a two-part biography of George Orwell. The British writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams wrote The Unknown Orwell (1972) and followed it with Orwell: The Transformation (1979).  These biographies were invaluable to me then and still are. Two famous writers have testimonials on the covers: “Very searching, clearheaded, and patient,” V.S. Pritchett says of the first. “Compulsive Reading,” is Graham Green’s claim for the second biography.

For the past week I’ve read about Orwell’s time in Burma as preparation for the RCC-RILL book club discussion this coming week of Orwell’s Burmese Days and Paul Theroux’s Burma Sahib, a novel about Eric Blair’s five years in this country. No surprise, given a fascination with Orwell, that in my library I have three other biographies about this writer. What did each convey about Orwell’s time in Burma?   To be continued next week…

1991  Orwell (The Authorized Biography)

by Michael Shelden

2000  Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation  by Jefferey Meyers

2003  Orwell: The Life  by  D. J. Taylor

In Bed With George Orwell

For the past week I’ve been ill. Yet George has kept me company. I was with Eric Blair (George) in Burma Sahib, a novel that depicts Blair’s five years as a policeman in British Burma.

Next I traveled through 21st century Burma in Emma Larkin’s 2005 nonfiction work, Finding George Orwell in Burma. Author Larkin’s name is a pseudonym for a journalist, someone on a tourist visa in a country under military rule since 1962. She (or he) would not have been able to enter as an American journalist.

In the book, a reader will feel how controlled the country is and how fearful inhabitants are. No one is supposed to talk about 8-8-88, which is to say August 8th, 1988, when a nationwide strike was held that resulted in countless deaths and imprisonments. The numbers vary greatly (ten thousand downward) as to how many died that day and later in prisons.

In December 1989, I was in Rangoon (Yangon) with Mike and our daughters. We had been visiting Thailand, then gone to Burma to stay with the USAF attaché assigned there. From the time of our airport arrival and departure, we were followed wherever we went. During our visit we watched video footage taken from the U.S. Embassy on 8-8-88, and the military’s ruthless attack on protestors. At the time I had an image in my mind from Tiananmen Square in Beijing, of the tank and lone student protestor walking toward it. But until I saw the video in Rangoon, I had no images from the massive unrest in Burma.

This past week when I opened Emma Larkin’s book, I remembered that our friend Kent and wife Jan had read my copy and left notes in it. This was special because they lived in Burma when Kent was the Chargé d’Affaires from 1996 to 1999. This term is used for a Deputy Chief of Mission when a country has no ambassador. During Kent’s years at the U.S. Embassy in Yangoon he was in constant contact with Aung San Sun Kyi, who was under house arrest. The finest of diplomats, Kent was an expert on Asia and served as our country’s ambassador to Cambodia from 1999 to 2002. He died in September 2023, before our Orwellian times.

After reading Jan and Kent’s comments in Larkin’s book, I recalled a Latin proverb:  Verba volant/scripta manent: spoken words fly away/ written words remain.  

Kent M. Wiedemann

Yesterday I thought of Kent when I read the May Atlantic’s long article, “Everything We Once Believed In.” Author David Brooks writes, “Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on the trust in my country’s goodness….Earlier in the piece he had written, “All of my life…I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nevertheless a force for tremendous goodness in the world.”  I read those words and made a mental leap. I have not been sick since fall 2016, and now I am sickened.

Brooks starts his third paragraph with, “Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing.” In the same Atlantic, George Parker begins his short piece “The Hollow Men” by citing George Orwell’s 1984.

  Scripta volant, the Eton scholar Blair would say.

To be continued next week…