Gordon Bowker

Gordon Bowker is among the most respected of biographers of his generation. His recently published George Orwell (Little, Brown, £20, pp.512), a biography penned especially to coincide with Orwell's centenary received rave reviews from major news dailies across the world. Bowker wrote feelingly about Orwell's family background; the enduring influence of Eton on his work and character; his superstitious splash and youthful flirtation with black magic. In an interview the acclaimed author tells Ashok Patnaik about the book, unarguably the fullest and most plausible portrait hitherto on Orwell. He unfolds the strange contexts of his first marriage and provides evidence of his experiences in Spain and their nightmarish consequences.

Besides, it sheds a beam of collateral light at his peculiar death-
bed marriage to a woman 15 years his junior. Earlier, Bowker has written highly acclaimed biographies of MalcolmLowry and Lawrence Durrell, and articles and reviews for the London Magazine, the Observer, the Sunday Times, the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement.

Q: What fascinated you to write a biography on a controversial literary figure like Orwell?

GB: All the subjects I have chose for biographies (Malcolm Lowry, Lawrence Durrell and George Orwell) are writers who have excited and gripped me in my youth. I read all of Orwell's books before I went to university, and his influence led me to choose Sociology as one of my degree subjects. So he has been a part of my life since I was barely twenty, and this was a wonderful opportunity to pay homage to a hero of mine from those years.

Q: How difficult it is to handle a complex subject called Orwell? Are you bewildered over the appalling differences you have unearthed during your research between what Orwell wanted to do and what he actually did?

GB: Any life is a mystery before one begins to think deeply about it and examine it in detail. One has to accept the complexity of the life and try to obtain a clearer picture as one works through the published work, the letters, the diary, the memories of old friends and so on. Once a clearer image of the subject emerges, it seems to me, in some mysterious way the complexity of the life begins to resolve itself. Patterns emerge and certain features of the life seem to stand out. No, I am not bewildered, because I learned a long time ago that human beings are never entirely what they appear to be - even people we think we know very intimately. That's because we can never read other people's minds directly, only through occasional confessions, reflections which we see in their writing, and shadows glimpsed in the memories of others. But Orwell thought biographers should at least try to explore what he called 'the landscape of the mind' of an author by means of 'the interpretive method', which means that he have to try to produce a picture of his mental world from all these fleeting elements. So, in discovering the contradictions in Orwell's life one is discovering a man who is many-faceted and so much an individualist that he refuses to fit into any conventional stereotype, or embody any set of orthodox ideas. That, I think, is a distinctive feature of the man. As to what he wanted to do and what he achieved, he was a victim of the times through which he lived. Political events in Europe inthe 1930 spoiled his ambition to be an essentially poetic writer of long novels. As Hamlet says, 'The times are out of joint./ O cursèd spite that ever I was born to set it right.' That could be Orwell speaking.

Q: Your discovery of Orwell's direct involvement in killing Philip Yorke in collaboration with Sir Steven Runciman is shocking. Can you shed some more light on your encounter with Sir Runciman ...

GB: I had gone to meet Sir Steven Runciman at his castle in Scotland. He was 97 and very frail but he welcomed me and made afternoon tea for me. He began talking about Orwell (Eric Blair as he had known him at Eton College between 1916 and1920). In passing he mentioned them having performed magic against an older boy who had insulted him (Runciman). I tried to probe him about the incident but he seemed reluctant to expand on the story. In two later letters which he wrote to me, he told me more. They were both fourteen and had a boyhood fascination with the occult and with black magic. Making a wax doll of the boy was his idea, but it was Blair's idea to stick it through with a pin. He thought that was too drastic so they broke off the leg. Shortly afterwards the boy broke his leg and then, three months later died. The boys, of course, felt sure they had cause the boy to die. Even at his advanced age, Sir Steven said it was a memory he still wished he hadn't got. At first he would not name the boy; then he told me that it was PhilipYorke. Five months after writing this he died. It seemed to me that he had wanted to confess the whole story to someone and happened to choose me. Runciman, I believe, continued to hold some belief in magic, Blair probably less so. However, the idea did seem to linger on - in the case of saying that people could take your name and work magic against you, and in having one of his fictional characters saying about people who had destroyed the home town of his childhood, 'I'll be a ghost…maybe I can work some black magic against some of these bastards.' He also, I think, continued to make effigies - not in wax but in words - and then skewer them through with his pen, as he did so memorably by depicting Stalin as a pig in Animal Farm.

Q: What could be reason behind Orwell's injunction that no biography of him should be written? Was he aware that his infamy acts would be uncovered one day?

GB: Some people have thought that Orwell had dark secrets to hide, or that he hated the whole business of biography. I see no evidence of this in what he wrote. He was always ready to supply biographical details about himself to publishers and magazines. He read literary biographies and had thoughtful ideas about them. He considered them a useful way of trying to understand the mental landscape of writers, and recommended what he called 'the interpretive method' for the purpose. He argued for new biographies of Josef Conrad and Conan Doyle, and was very happy to talk to a biographer about his old friend the novelist L.H. Myers. Just before he died he was urging his publisher to bring out Trotsky's biography of Stalin. In 1947 he wrote to his literary executor Sir Richard Rees saying that someone might want to write his biography and that Rees should be careful to choose the right person. He said he would send him a list of places and dates to help that person. My belief is that the clause about no biography in his will was part of the deal he did with Sonia Brownell at the time of their marriage. He agreed to it to spare her from people pestering her for information. She, after all, had a lot to hide in her own life and had very good reason to want it to remain unknown. I doubt whether Orwell himself cared.

: In 1996, Britain's Public Record Office had declassified certain documents in which Orwell was found to be an active informer for the British Government's anti-Communists outfit. Very well known political and literary figures figured in his list. Besides, he always presented himself as rational, was in fact quite unable to escape from his prejudices. For instance his anti-Semitic remarks, his unkind treatment to women and there could be a long list. Orwell, intriguingly, wore many hats ... (please comment)

GB: Orwell was hardly 'an active informer for the British Government's anti-Communist outfit'. He was asked to write for the IRD, which had been set up by the Labour Government which he supported, to counteract Soviet anti-western propaganda. He was too ill to do any writing himself - he died less a year later. But he did recommend some writers he trusted as being strongly anti-Stalinist - socialists who had been persecuted, imprisoned and tortured for not toeing the Moscow line. He also offered a list of people he thought were Communists or Communist sympathizers in disguise, saying he thought them unsuitable for this work. The long list found in a book after his death was his own peculiar list kept for his own peculiar purposes. We do not know which 35 from that list of 135 Orwell sent to the IRD. They certain could not have included Charlie Chaplin, as some people suggest, because Chaplin was not a writer. The list is still a state secret, so he may have given names which are not on that original list at all. He did, it is true, on his own list identify some people as Jewish or strongly pro-Zionist, but remember that at the time the Zionist Palestinians were at war with Britain, they were blowing up British buildings in Palestine, capturing and murdering British officials and British soldiers. For that reasons, I think, Orwell thought they might be unreliable to be asked to write in favour of the British way of life. Homosexuality was outlawed in Britain at the time and homosexuals were often blackmailed. In some cases the Russians had been able to force homosexuals in high positions to spy for them on risk of being exposed. Therefore, they too could be thought of as unreliable, given the Russians' method of exploiting them. One must also remember that when Orwell sent in this list it looked very likely that a war with Russia was looming. Orwell was very fearful of a possible Russian invasion because he thought he would be a list for arrest and thrown into a concentration camp. During an after the war he went around armed, first with a knife and then with a pistol. He thought the people he listed were those likely to support a Russian invasion as some Europeans had turned traitor and helped Hitler during the Nazi Occupation. Looked at like that Orwell's action takes on a quite different significance from how he has been portrayed by mostly extreme left-wing critics.

On the wider charge of anti-Semitism, I found that during the war, when he was writing war reports for the Indian Service of the BBC, he had direct access to the BBC Information Service where he was one of the first British journalists to hear of the systematic attempt to exterminate the German Jews. In one of his reports he condemned it outright in the strongest terms, so he was one of the first to bring the news to the outside world. I don't believe any other journalist at the time did as much. They did, but much later. On the question of homosexuality, I think he was far more tolerant than he often led people to believe. Many of his friends were gay and he was capable of having relationships with younger men which bordered on the homo-erotic,

Q: Finally, as a biographer, how important it is to remain unaffected, unexagerrated, impartial and truthful despite your proximity or likeness to the personality you are writing on? How important it is to remain detached?

GB: One tries very hard to remain as detached as possible, but when you love an author and want to get as close to him and his life as it is possible to do without having met him, you invariably find yourself understanding behaviour which from a different position you might condemn as immoral or consider saintly and commendable. I have tried to do neither, although I daresay a discerning reader can detect certain implicit moral judgements in what I have written. However, I take the view that a biography is a verbal portrait, a tapestry woven out of many strands - facts, judgements and interpretations and so on. Since I have been anxious to get, as Orwell enjoins the biographer to do, into the mind of my subject and explore his mental landscape, one has inevitably to depart from the cold language of detachment and engaged with the subject at a more intuitive level. Not everyone will agree with this approach, but then they would also have to disagree with Orwell, too.

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(As told to Ashok Patnaik)