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