SAINT GEORGE ON JURA.

Orwell
Wintry Conscience
of a Generation
Jeffrey Meyers
Norton, $29.95, 380 pp.

George Orwell, whose last will and testament in 1950 specifically requested that no biography of him be written, has been the subject of three biographies in the last decade. Michael Sheldon, an American academic, published his "authorized" version in 1991, which induced Bernard Crick the following year to revise and expand his 1980 biography. Now comes Jeffrey Meyers.

Is there really anything new to say about Orwell (1903-50), the author of Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), which between them have sold more than 40 million copies in sixty-two languages? Or is the continuing urge to chronicle his life a simple reflection of the booming biography business, what James Joyce referred to as the "cult of the biografiends"? As it turns out, Meyers has a lot that is new and interesting to say, and has a different set of emphases than the earlier biographers. For instance, he is less preoccupied with the transformation of the Etonian and Burma soldier Eric Blair into the writer George Orwell and devotes more attention to Orwell's last years, to the mixed motivations of his second wife (Sonia Brownell) for marrying him, to Orwell's psychology, and to his literary legacy.

The psychological emphasis has resulted in a much darker portrait. Meyers's key claim is that Orwell essentially destroyed himself because he had a fixed, distorted image of himself as a hardy man of action who could invariably take risks and survive them. In Meyers's view, that self-delusion accounted for Orwell's self-punishing behavior. In a kind of masquerade of toughness, Orwell practiced excruciating self-deprivation and tested his physical limits constantly.

Orwell's severity toward himself did have something soldierly and even heroic about it (and resembled that of T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a Lawrence of Arabia). But Orwell also had a masochistic streak that at times induced him to deny himself (and his first wife, Eileen) minimal creature comforts, even after he had achieved success, fame, and modest wealth toward the end of his life.

And so, in 1948, despite suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, Orwell wouldn't leave the bleak island of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides to get a typist in London for 1984 (he insisted on typing the manuscript himself). Instead, he subjected himself to Jura's horrible winters--after just having spent several months in a Scottish tuberculosis sanatorium for treatment.

This behavior prevailed throughout Orwell's life. In the 1930s, he insisted on living in a filthy, decrepit, run-down house in Wallington, outside London. He pushed himself constantly, never really took a rest (let alone a vacation), and collapsed numerous times from sheer exhausation and illness--and yet continued to go on, even enlisting in Spain as a soldier fighting in an anarchist militia against General Franco and the fascists. (He took a bullet in his windpipe in 1937, which left him voiceless for weeks and permanently weakened his speaking voice.) Although Orwell did not deny himself sexually--he had numerous affairs--I have the impression that sex functioned for him as a physical release rather than a sensual pleasure. It was less a loving act than a homeostatic pressure valve that enabled him to maintain his ruthless self-discipline. Sex was an outlet to balance the self-imposed tensions of constant work, the cheap housing, the poor diet, the lack of long-term self-care. At some level, Orwell was convinced that he wasn't worth spending money on.

Sad as all this is--and Meyers presents it soberly and convincingly--we must also marvel at the passion, determination, and creative drive that enabled Orwell to turn his neuroses and limitations toward artistic ends.

Lest this short review leave any doubt about the physical obstacles Orwell overcame, Meyers devotes an entire appendix ("A History of Illness") to Orwell's ailments, which began with bronchitis at the age of nineteen months and continued with repeated bouts of pneumonia, lung hemorrhage, and TB during his youth and early manhood.

Orwell died of TB at the age of forty-six, in January 1950. His final years in hospital were tragicomic and heart-rending. His friend David Astor, publisher of the London Observer, interceded to procure streptomycin from the United States (the U.K. still banned it in 1947), and Orwell could have been cured by this new wonder drug. Unfortunately, he was probably the first patient in Britain to receive this treatment, was given an overdose by the inexperienced doctors, and had severe reactions to it. (Ironically, Orwell gave the drug to two fellow patients, who were completely cured.)

Meyers dubs Orwell's last years, part of which were spent on Jura, his "Jurassic period." Betrayed by his self-image, Meyers believes, Orwell the tubercular patient succumbed to "a compulsion to live an arduous and exhausting existence on the the wet bog in windy moorlands," a "typically perverse and even suicidal" impulse. As Orwell himself admitted before his final relapse, he "had to finish the wretched book." Meyers concludes: "He'd never admit that he was a permanent invalid, too weak to live on Jura and that the whole way of life there had been madness."

That is the most controversial claim of this new biography. Meyers clarifies and corrects Bernard Crick's claim that Jura had a salubrious, mild climate. Instead, Meyers emphasizes not just the isolation of Jura from the mainland (the trip from London took forty-eight hours by train, boat, and hiking), but also that medical assistance was virtually unobtainable. (When Orwell's son Richard once got sick, after falling off a chair and gashing his forehead, it took six hours to get him to a doctor. If Orwell had suffered a serious hemorrhage on Jura, he would have died before receiving medical treatment.) As Meyers notes, the sea-level location, damp climate, and arduous life were also precisely the opposite of the high altitude, thin, dry air, and prolonged rest recommended for patients with lung disease.

The biography is at its best when dealing with Orwell's last years. Meyers partly attributes the darkness of 1984 to Orwell's declining health and the bleakness of life on Jura. He goes into excruciating detail discussing the treatment for tuberculosis in the 1940s and Orwell's physical agonies. This does explain Orwell's great novel better and, in particular, the suffering of his fictional hero Winston Smith during the torture scenes in Room 101. Meyers's point is well established: Orwell was living in that room. "The creation of 1984 virtually killed Orwell," Meyers concludes, "and the novel's vision of the future is correspondingly grim."

John Rodden is the author of The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of Saint George Orwell (Oxford University Press).