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Twenty Reviewing the Orwellians I. Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, The Unknown Orwell (1972) This review began with an account of my unsuccessful attempt to penetrate the Orwell Archive in London University. Though Stansky and Abrahams made use of the Archive, what they called the “unknown Orwell” was in fact quite well known. They failed to show how an unremarkable youth became the man who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. A Personal Prologue: In the spring of 1968 I won a grant from my university to do research at the Orwell Archive in University College, London. I wrote in advance to the director of the Library asking if I could read Orwell’s unpublished letters and manuscripts, and I duly received his permission. But when I arrived that summer and certified in writing that I was not working on a biography of Orwell, I was icily informed by Ian Angus, deputy librarian, that the unpublished material was closed and that I could read only what was already in print (which I had already done). As I appealed to the English sense of fairness, and then expostulated angrily, tapping the letter with the backs of my fingers for emphasis, I was told first that only Sonia Orwell, who had married the tubercular Orwell in University College Hospital two months before he died, could grant me access to the papers, and second that she would never do so. Gradually I learned the reasons for this distressing volte-face. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus were just completing the four volumes of Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters that were about to appear with a splash in the 202 part iii. orwell after orwell fall and were not at all enthusiastic about what James called “a publishing scoundrel” prospecting in their gold mine. Even more to the point, Orwell had asked in his will that no biography be written. Between the time of my letter and my arrival, two Americans (one of them from Boston, where I had just come from), who knew that Malcolm Muggeridge had once been authorized by Sonia Orwell to write Orwell’s biography but had abandoned it because he could not be entirely candid about his friend’s life, protested their biographical innocence (so I was told), combed through the Archive and, like Lovelace in Richardson’s Clarissa, only revealed their intentions when it was too late to stop them. I could only admire the resourcefulness of Stansky and Abrahams and realized that a biography of Orwell, like that of Kafka and T. S. Eliot, was both inevitable and desirable. The four Orwell volumes appeared in the fall and, after the critics’ initial enthusiasm had subsided, I wrote a long review-essay in Philological Quarterly, based on my familiarity with Orwell’s eight hundred uncollected articles, on how much had in fact been left out of these deceptively incomplete volumes, which claimed to be a full revelation of Orwell’s life and a substitute biography. I continued to publish articles on Orwell, and eventually met William Abrahams, who was enthusiastic about my work and made several suggestions that never materialized. In the summer of 1970 I did some burrowing in the India Office Library in London and discovered some new information about Orwell’s constabulary career in Burma. The substance of my article on this subject, accepted in the fall of 1970 but not yet published, has been (quite independently) fleshed out and turned into the best chapter of The Unknown Orwell. This book and an unpleasant letter in TLS by Sonia Orwell appeared simultaneously last fall. In the letter Sonia Orwell states, ex cathedra, that the book “contains mistakes and misconceptions” and that it was “written without my cooperation and without my permission to quote from the work in copyright”—a considerable disadvantage for Stansky and Abrahams. She also states, with perhaps unconscious irony, that Bernard Crick, a political scientist, has been engaged to write the authorized biography. (This is quite in keeping with current publishing practice: a translator and indexer is editor of the entire twenty-volume Abinger Forster, and a history graduate edited T. E. Lawrence’s poetical anthology, Minorities.) This announcement is not only a free advertisement for Crick’s work, but also a staking out of territory that will inhibit publishers from bringing out books that might compete with it. When my review copy of The Unknown Orwell arrived, I was surprised to learn that the authors were “deeply grateful” to me as well...

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