Orwell: A Biography.

THE painfully modest man who was Eric Blair led a life as interesting as the work he did under the pseudonym of George Orwell. The latest study of this enigmatic figure is Orwell: a Biography, by Michael Shelden, a professor of English at Indiana State University. Shelden has produced a far livelier account than Bernard Crick's ground-breaking biography. Although more information is available to Shelden, he does not turn his book into a dry catalogue of events. Rather he shows how Blair used the details of his life in powerful and subtle ways to turn political writing into art. One can only imagine that the subject of this study would approve the method, even while being uncomfortable about the abolition of privacy.

As a student at St. Cyprian's, young Eric Blair particularly disliked how history was reduced to a recitation of names and dates, ripped out of any context that might provide a point of view or appeal to the conscience. Blair created "Orwell" to express ideas. But the fact of human suffering was so real to him--expressed starkly in fiction and non-fiction alike--that his work contained an emotional power always just beneath the surface of his British reserve.

Shelden takes us through the stages of Orwell's life, each marked by violent likes and dislikes. He was a curiously proper rebel, educated in the Old Boy virtues of not letting the side down. His bad feelings about preparatory school and his later service as a policeman in the Indiana Imperial Police never prevented him from doing his duty. But when he walked away from something, his repudiation was final.

The resolute quality left his father dumbfounded as young Orwell resigned from a job that paid better than his own position in the Opium Department. The same values stood Orwell in good stead when he explored poverty and squalor firsthand in London and Paris, gaining in that effort his early reputation as a journalist. His courage took him into the Spanish Civil War (where he was shot in the throat), and was even more in evidence when he fought his lonely battle to tell the truth about how the Communists had betrayed the anarchists and everyone else. No one but a brave man could become the most famous left-wing opponent of Communism, or as he put in himself, he had "a power of facing unpleasant facts."

The best thing about this new biography is how the reader is made to feel each transitory pleasure Orwell would allow himself; each small victory against persistent self-criticism. Nor does Shelden shy away from the evidence that Orwell was as hard on others as he was on himself. Here was a man who couldn't stand bullies but had learned from his days serving the empire how easily one could slip into that role. As Sheldon observes concerning the background of Burmese Days, "It is also interesting to note that the author of 1984 was once in charge of an extensive surveillance operation."

It was during the war that he wrote Animal Farm, a difficult book to sell at the height of Stalin worship. Afterward, he used his experiences broadcasting propaganda to India as the basis of Winston Smith's job in 1984. If he hadn't been a man who knew about letting down the side, his criticisms of the modern state and dirty politics would have lacked the conviction he brought to them.

Orwell often reads like a novel itself. When disappointing his father, or some other authority figure, Blair feels almost apologetic. When describing Mrs. Wilkes who ran St. Cyprian's, he wrote, "At the first smile one's hatred turned into a sort of cringing love." At least he had a better time of it at Eton where he enjoyed its "medieval chaos." But his earliest school experiences lie heavily over his later work as he warns against, rather than predicts, what comes of final betrayals of the soul: "He loved Big Brother."

Eric Blair never completely put away the Old Boy's silk school tie. He was a better social critic in areas where he had kept faith with the past. Sheldon especially likes a statement from Orwell that compares favorably with Voltaire: "If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." At his most subversive, there was something about Orwell that commanded respect from the establishment. At the same time he could not help but run afoul of left-wing sectarianism. He described himself, half jokingly, as a "Tory anarchist"--but he might just as well have said that he was a man who sticks to his principles. A difficult man, yes. An emotionally repressed man if we are to believe the standard fare about his personal life. The ideal subject for a biography.

One of the best parts of this biography is the story of how Victor Gollancz, Orwell's publisher at the Left Book Club, cost himself the opportunity of publishing Animal Farm and 1984, two of the great best sellers of the century. This was the same individual who, from the safety of England, lectured Orwell on the correct way to fight fascism while Orwell "was in a muddy trench on a remote hilltop in Spain dodging sniper fire from a fascist army." Well, one has to grant Gollancz the credit of avoiding "thought crime," and remaining politically correct. Besides, the purity of his ideology wasn't corrupted by all the money he would have made if he'd remained Orwell's publisher.

Whether writing novels or journalism, science fiction or allegory, Orwell's work strikes the heart. Too modest to write autobiography, we meet the man through what he tells us about ourselves; and we see in his life the truth of Fitzgerald's definition of personality as "an unbroken series of successful gestures." Professor Shelden has a gift for selecting all the right quotations, including one which perhaps provides the best reason for reading Orwell: "Unfortunately I had not trained myself to be indifferent to the expression of the human face."

Mr. Linaweaver reviews books for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.