The Heretic.

Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation, by Jeffrey Meyers (Norton, 380 pp., $29.95)

The title of Jeffrey Meyers's new biography of George Orwell comes from V. S. Pritchett, a literary critic who condemned Orwell when he most needed support, and who later, after Orwell finally reached success, tried to atone by showering him with unwanted praise. Indeed, during most of his lifetime, Orwell struggled to get published, had few readers, and was anathematized by most of the Left because he dared to be anti-Communist as well as anti-Fascist. Orwell had devoted himself to combating "the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls." Since these orthodoxies were maintained by some of the most powerful figures in the West, including editors and writers who could block his access to the reading public, serving as the "conscience" of an epoch took a great deal of personal courage.

Meyers is the first biographer to use the definitive 20 volume collection of Orwell's writings, edited by Peter Davison in 1998, as well as other new materials now available in the Orwell archives, and he provides much new information that helps us to understand how and why young Eric Blair became the writer known as Orwell. Born in India in 1903 to a doting mother and a "weak and passive father" who worked for the Opium Department of the British colonial government, Blair was sent to repressive British boarding schools, many of which later served as backdrops to sections of his novels. Following his father, he started out as a colonial policeman in Burma, a career that led the young man to resent and despise the role of the colonizer, and to develop a keen hatred of British imperialism. At 22, he resigned his commission, and despite fierce opposition by his parents, decided to become a writer by experiencing firsthand the lives of those at the bottom of Western society.

As Orwell explained in The Road to Wigan Pier, "I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate . . . I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man's dominion over man." To go from comfort to total squalor was something few would be willing to do for literary purposes, but for Orwell it was the only way to become a writer. For four years he tramped around, dressed in rags and washing dishes in the grimiest establishments. In Paris, living on a few francs a day, he suffered real poverty-and wrote, "It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out." The experience led to his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, published in January of 1933. Contrasting the life of the wealthy with that of the destitute, Orwell dramatized the condition of the bottom part of society and praised their dignity and pride in their ill-paid work. Coming out as the Great Depression hit in the West, the book "met the demand for social realism" and served as Orwell's introduction to the Left. Concerned that Down and Out might embarrass his family, and wanting to further distance himself from his past, he adopted the pseudonym George Orwell, after the Orwell River in Suffolk.

Orwell might well have become part of the mainstream left-wing crowd, were it not for his heterodoxy over the question of Spain. An exception among those who were not Communists, he saw the Spanish Civil War as the single most important battle of his generation; hence he volunteered to fight with the Loyalists instead of simply going as a sympathetic journalist or observer, like Hemingway, Auden, and others. Orwell wrote, "I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants."

Rejected by the British Communists, who sensed from the start that they could not trust someone with such an independent mind, Orwell went to Spain in 1936 under the auspices of the Independent Labour party, a far-left fringe group affiliated with the larger Labour party. They gave him the necessary credentials, as well as an introduction to the Spanish POUM (Unified Marxist Workers' Party), an anti-Stalinist revolutionary Marxist group that at the time had a scant 3,000 militants.

As readers of Homage to Catalonia know, it was in that center of anarchism and radicalism that Orwell saw the civil war erupting within the Civil War: Local Communist militia tried to seize the telephone exchange run by anarchists and syndicalists, and brutal fighting broke out. The POUM fought alongside the anarchists; as Orwell explained in an essay at the time, "We thought . . . that we were simply defending ourselves against an attempted coup d'etat." Here Orwell learned the full extent of Stalin's plan to destroy the Spanish revolution: He sought to use it as a bargaining lever with both the Western powers and the Nazis, while hoping to create a subservient client state akin to the "People's Republics" that sprang up in Eastern Europe after World War II. Strangely, Meyers endorses the Soviet view of the war and agrees with the historian Hugh Thomas, who has written that the anarchists and the POUM were to be faulted for not accepting such "realistic measures" as centralized war production, delaying the revolutionary process, and establishing a regular army. Such measures would have meant certain Soviet control, and in Orwell's eyes would have destroyed the entire project for which he had risked his life.

Having barely escaped being captured, tortured, and killed by Stalin's agents, Orwell spent the rest of his life trying to tell the bitter truth about Communism, at a time when the entire Left, as Meyers writes, "was sadly deluded by Communist propaganda."

Indeed, it was after his return from Spain that Orwell produced the most devastating satire about Communism ever written, Animal Farm. At the time, of course, both Britain and France were allied with Soviet Russia; even T. S. Eliot turned down the book for Faber & Faber, and it might never have been published had not a smaller firm, run by his friend Fredric Warburg, agreed to take it on.

While writing the book, Orwell held a job he truly hated (one that became part of the plot of 1984), writing propagandistic radio scripts for the BBC's Indian service, most of which were never heard by anyone. Nevertheless, a few years later, in 1949, Orwell gave his friend Celia Paget a list of political and intellectual figures he knew to be fellow-travelers or Communists. His concern, he told Paget, who worked for the British government's Information Research Department, was that they not worm their way "into important propaganda jobs where they [could] do us a lot of harm." This revelation, which surfaced a few years ago, has led many to condemn Orwell for trying to start a McCarthyite witch hunt. But as Meyers sensibly observes, "in the political context of 1949, his behavior seems necessary, even commendable."

Meyers relates in gripping detail Orwell's self-destructive path in his waning years, writing 1984 as he was near death in the cold, barren climate of Jura, an island 16 miles off the Scottish coast where he had chosen to live in retreat. Here we learn of his desperate attempts to find someone to marry and care for him, and his choice of Sonia Brownell, who (depending on whose version you believe) was either a sordid gold digger or a selfless angel who wished only to love and save the dying writer. Orwell did live long enough to complete his masterpiece, 1984. The book, published seven months before his death in January 1950, foreshadowed much of the postwar world and gave hope to thousands who read it secretly in the Soviet sphere during the bitterest days of the Cold War.

Orwell's work lives on as a model of political truth from a man who wrote that "the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential" for any revival of a socialist movement; though ironically his works helped to disenchant many in future generations with the idea of socialism itself. Never fully a part of any political movement, socialist or otherwise, Orwell was in Meyers's telling a man who spoke "in the English tradition of prophetic moralists." Certainly if he were alive today, Orwell would not be on the right. He continued to believe in the kind of revolutionary utopia he felt he had discovered in Barcelona before the Communist takeover. But unlike most of his contemporaries on the left, he boldly attacked progressives' hypocrisies and ridiculed their practiced bohemianism, as when he struck out at the legion of "sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like blue-bottles to a dead cat." And unlike Sartre and other intellectuals who felt the need to defend Stalinism even though they knew the truth, Orwell fearlessly stood his ground. He knew he had to choose the West, and stood with its leaders against the Eastern bloc.

Orwell's clear-sightedness made him a virtual pariah in left-wing circles. Yet through his writings he became a household name, a man seen by posterity as the rare prophet who saw the future and knew that it did not work. Conservatives may disagree with his adherence to the socialist faith, but owe him their respect for his firmness on behalf of the truth and for his desire to rescue the individual from the clutches of the all-powerful Behemoth. If we manage to escape what Meyers calls "the dark vision" of Orwell's 1984, it will be due in part to him.