If this month’s Reading group investigation of Nineteen Eighty-four has proved one thing, it’s that George Orwell is still of burning interest. Opinions may vary about his quality as a novelist, but there’s little doubt of the importance of what he said. He still matters - and there is still a great deal to say about him. So it’s a great pleasure to announce that on Friday 28 November at 1pm we’ll be running a Q&A with one of the foremost authorities on Orwell’s life and work.
DJ Taylor is a novelist, biographer and journalist. He recently told the Guardian that it wasn’t his original intention to fill all these roles. “’Never be a novelist and a critic,’ I was told. ‘Never be a novelist and a biographer.’ It’s actually very good advice and 30 years ago I indeed set out with every intention of just being a novelist. But then I got diverted … ’”
Which is good news for us, because it means that alongside his almost-dozen novels (including the Booker longlisted Trespass and Derby Day, and last year’s The Windsor Faction), he’s written a biography of George Orwell. When the late great Paul Foot reviewed Orwell: A Life for the Observer in 2003, he said that Taylor had “done him proud”. The Daily Telegraph described it as “definitive” and it won the Whitbread prize for biography.
Elsewhere, Taylor has also written a biography of Thackeray, and an account of the inter-war youth cult, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of A Generation 1918-1940. His short story collection Wrote For Luck will be released in January next year and he is in the process of writing The Prose Factory, which will tell the story of modern British literary culture from 1918 to the present day.
We are, in short, very lucky to have him. He will be answering questions from 1pm on 28 November – but do feel free to get yours in early. As an added inducement, we have 10 copies of that excellent biography to give away to the first 10 readers in the UK to post “I want a copy please” – along with a nice, constructive question – in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first 10 to comment, don’t forget to email Laura Kemp (laura.kemp@theguardian.com), as we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to her, too.
Follow the webchat live here
We’ll be posting your questions and David’s answers here for you to follow the webchat more easily.
Druitt asks:
I was intrigued by the section in your Orwell biography called The case against, in which you made some surprisingly strong arguments for why he is actually a much overrated figure.
Do you personally agree with any of these arguments or was that just an intellectual exercise?
Best wishes,
Druitt
Guardian contributor I thought I would have a little fun, as a great admirer of Orwell who is also conscious that there are points to be made against him, and put a contrarian argument. Sadly quite a few US critics and Amazon reviewers thought I was being entirely serious and lamented my negative view of him!
theorbys asks:
Is there any evidence that while writing 1984 Orwell was in any kind of exalted state, for example like that sometimes associated with tuberculosis especially near death, that he felt creative exhiliration and/or despair not usual to when he was writing? Is 1984 a final creative literary achievement far beyond his other writing?
Guardian contributor The pathology of advanced TB suggests that it does sometimes have a peculiar effect on the brain. Certainly there is a kind of lurid, and over-dramatic quality to much of the novel that I wonder would have been there had he not been such a state (see the diary entries fromn 1948 - 'pain in side very bad' and so on) when he wrote it. A doctor whose name I can't, alas, remember did write a chapter in a book about the pathology of literature along these lines.
samjordison asks:
I might also try to sneak a question in myself.
I’m really interested to hear about what Orwell did for fun. He’s such a serious and important figure that it’s easy to forget his humanity – but his books are also often bursting with joie de vivre and delight ... I also recently read a lovely passage from Anthony Powell about the pleasure Orwell took in trousers with those funny hoops under the feet ... So I was wondering if you could give us any more illumination on how he behaved in his down time.
Guardian contributor Orwell's sense of fun - he liked heavy-duty afternoon teas with a brew so strong the spoon would almost stand up in hit. He was addicted to boys' papers like the Magnet and the Gem, quite liked theatre, music hall etc. Collected comic postcards, which were inevitably mined for sociological import. But not one for group sing-a-longs or sport, except for fishing, although he confesses to a hopeless teenage love-affair with cricket.
YuanMei asks:
Congratulations for your Orwell.
I’d like to know who are the biographers you most admire and why.
Thank you.
Guardian contributor Thanks for this bouquet. Amongst the moderns, I esteem Hilary Spurling (though why won't she get on with Anthony Powell?) One of the best books I've ever read is David Newsome's biog of the admittedly rather minor writer A.C. Benson (1862-1925). Its excellence lies in the fact that Newsome uses Benson's diaries to get inside him and see him on his own terms rather than evaluating him by modern standards.
gorky1 asks:
Hello DJ
Orwell’s essays are also superb and I remember at University I read he admired and interested in ‘Working Class Literature’: specifically ‘tramp literature’ : London, Davies, Jack Hilton, Allsop’s work and Philip O’ Conor’s Vagrancy. Which do you think motivated him to write Down and Out in Paris and London? It was a brave thing to do after Jack London’s ‘People of the Abyss?
Cheers.
Guardian contributor I have to be honest and say that he was at this point in his career a journalist after a subject and the low-life angle was then becoming popular (this isn't, of course, to question the sincerity of his approach.) Interestingly, he seems to have been influenced by W.H. Davies's The Autobiography of a Super-tramp (1908), and Down and Out's opening scene seems to have been modelled on a similar incident in Davies's book.
tneigh asks:
Do you think Orwell had reached his peak when he died? As with certain rock stars, has the fact that he died young meant that we have not had to endure a lot of potentially substandard work and consequently we look on his existing work more benignly than we otherwise would have?
Guardian contributor I don't know about reaching his peak, but I think he would have gone on to write some very different books. When he died he was starting to write what seems a very old-fashioned sounding novel about a young man coming back from the East in the late 1920s - Maughamesque, and with the title of 'A Smoking Room Story.'
LittleRichardjohn asks:
Have you ever come across the source of the claim in an Orwell documentary of a few years ago that he would have swapped everything to have been press secretary to Aneurin Bevan as PM of a socialist government?
You must have watched the documentaries as well as the scholarly stuff..
Did H.G. Wells really take him to task for plagiarism (Coming Up For Air / Polly) even of his name (Henry George Wells)?
Why was he so contemptuous of Steinbeck?
Guardian contributor No, I can't confirm the Bevan story, though Bevan was a great admirer. I always wonder about the dislike of Steinbeck (who is on the commie sympathiser list) - one of those writers I automaticlly expected him to like - although in mitigation the transcripts of the radio broadcasts during the war show he made various attempts to include him in discussions of contemporary American writing.
nightjar12 asks:
Having re-read 1984 this month and then Coming Up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying I have been struck by a common theme of the individual being ‘trapped’ by society into a life that is at best frustrating and restrictive yet inescapable. Did Orwell feel like that about his own life? Do you think he would feel differently if he were living today? What do you think his ideal society would be?
Guardian contributor This is a fascinating topic - thanks. All the novels, including 1984, are to me Orwell projecting versions of himself. Each is about a rebellion that fails, a trapped man (or woman, in the case of A Clergyman's Daughter) with the walls closing in. And yet the contrast with the books and his own life is sometimes marked. Keep the Aspidistra Flying is about a ground-down and well-nigh friendless bookseller's assistant, but Orwell's own life seems to have been opening out at the time he wrote it.
Tarbatt asks:
1984 was written in very difficult circumstances, as Orwell lay weak and ill on his bed in Jura. Do you think it would have been a different, or a better book, if he had more time and comfort to re-write and edit it?
Guardian contributor I agree about the difficult circumstances and I think its rawness derives from the state he was in when he completed it.
theorbys asks:
I read a brief discussion of the roomie and something about a metal tipped cane. That is why I was wondering if there was anything systematic, however hidden it may have been. Animal Farm is vicious, but more about selfishness and indifference to others, but 1984 is vehemently sadistic for the sake of sadism.
Guardian contributor He certainly went for Rayner Heppenstall with a stick. But if you read Heppenstall's account it reflects the latter's reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four, ie RH is using the latter to contextualise the former in a way that may not be entirely fair.
LordLuke asks:
What is more relevant today, 1984 or Brave New World ... and what does your answer tell us about Orwell vs Huxley?
Guardian contributor Off the top of my head, materially - Huxley, spiritually - Orwell.
daveportivo asks:
I know this question is impossible to answer in a sense as it involves asking you to guess what someone else’s opinion might be, but I thought as Orwell’s biographer you’d be the best person to ask - so here goes:
When Orwell wrote the very prescient 1984 he lived in a world that had experienced extreme political dichotomies between contrasting world views and brutalistic states that were putting these political ideas into (warped) practice. Even with WWII in the rear view mirror the Cold War was just beginning and I think its fair to say that politics in the UK didn’t feel settled.
(Prepare for the implausible question)
If Orwell were alive today do you - knowing his personal and political history - think he would still feel the need to write a book like 1984? Was the novel a product of extreme, dangerous times that we’ve subsequently used to critique government incroachment or do you think Orwell would have found today’s political climate just sinisterly inspiring?
As a kind of related follow up where do you think Orwell stood on the balance between security and liberty - 1984 is obviously a dystopian extreme, so I was wondering how Orwell might have reacted to more of a shades of grey scenario like the many Terrorism and Surveillance bills we pass today?
As someone whose new to Orwell it’s somewhat hard to get a handle on his actual position as historians of left and right persuasion tend to use him to wholeheartedly support their own opinions.
Guardian contributor It's so, so difficult to predict what someone might have written so long after their death and what views he or she might have taken. (For example Orwell's friend Anthony Powell reckoned he would have been anti-CND.) But the atmosphere of the late 1940s was extremely scary -terror of the bomb etc. One of the reasons Orwell gave in removing to Jura was that his adopted son would have more chance of surviving nuclear attack.
theorbys asks:
How did Orwell see himself as an artist? Few would argue the impact and social importance of 1984 and that it is still relevant today even in our world of triumphant capitalism. But did Orwell think he was writing a good novel too, did he aspire to that?
Guardian contributor The early writing is notable for its determined aesthetic flourishes (see Burmese Days and its luxuriant descriptions of scenery.) I think he aspired as high as he could get.
SpiritDitch asks:
It is often said that the Spannish Civil War shaped Orwell’s views of society ... In your considered opinion, what other life experiences influenced Orwell’s thoughts?
Guardian contributor Burma, naturally. But I think his political awareness was pretty limited until he went to Spain. It was there that he saw socialism working in practice, propaganda working its sinister effect and the awful consequences for liberty when different parts of the left fall out.
Dr. N. Fernandes asks:
Where is his son now is he a writer ?
Guardian contributor Richard is still going strong - now aged 70 - had a career entirely separate from writing, and is a great supporter - both morally and financially - of the Orwell Prizes.
Tablature asks:
At what point in time did Eric Blair begin to refer to himself professionally and personally as George Orwell? Do you think that when he submitted Animal Farm to Faber & Faber, he expected T.S. Eliot to overlook disparaging remarks Orwell had made about him earlier on, perhaps thinking that Eliot’s acceptance of his invitation to read on ‘Voice’ cleared the path?.
Guardian contributor 1932-3. Decided to call himself GO just before the publication of Down and Out. As for Eliot, Orwell always thought people he criticised were bound to take an objective view - he was puzzled when his friend Arthur Koestler complained about a bad review!
Logout asks:
I read a biography of Orwell this year and was shocked by many details of his personal life. My opinion now is that Orwell was a deeply selfish hypocrite who always craved Edwardian respectability and believed in his own innate middle-class superiority. He was obsessed with violence and sadism which spilled over into his real life, one aspect of which was his deep misogyny. A misogyny, even given the times, that was totally at odds with any idea being a progressive - with his obsessive use of brothels, driving his wife to an early grave, date rape and while abroad paying for sex with under-age girls who he chose because they looked like boys. Obviously, not enough space to elaborate. But, how wrong am I?
Guardian contributor I think you are exaggerating elements in him that were certainly there but don't deserve this emphasis - any one can be turned into a monster if you go about it in the right way. Obsessive use of brothels? Where is the evidence? Ditto the deep misogny. Sure, he had some odd ideas about women. So did most of the public-school educated chaps of his time. Compared to, say, William S. Burroughs he looks a model of probity
RandomWelshGuy asks:
As a novelist yourself, what do you think writers of the 21st century can learn from Orwell’s work? How has studying Orwell so closely changed the way you write and create fiction?
Also, what do you think of Orwell’s time at the BBC? Would 1984 have been the novel it was if he hadn’t worked at the BBC, and if not, how do you think it would have been different?
Guardian contributor As a youngster I modelled myself on GO, but I don't think that in some ways he's a very healthy influence on a novelist! I think the BBC gave him a sense of bureaucratic claustrophobia, rabbit-hunch paranoia, which echoes through Nineteen Eighty-Four.
ID1150862 asks:
Do you think that any of the screen adaptions of Orwell’s work do it justice? What was Orwells’s favourite pub / place to relax, if no Moon under Water existed?
Guardian contributor The Newman Arms off Oxford Street was a port of call (may be the pub in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.) I steer clear of screen adaptations, but the original BBC 1950s version isn't bad, with Peter Cusing et al. The BFI are about to re-release, I believe, as someone's just asked me to do audio-commentary.
Malunkey asks:
I think a serviceable definition of a good writer is someone who writes compelling material. For me, Orwell has that quality in abundance (in his fiction and non-fiction). I’ve rarely read anything that gripped me as much as Homage to Catalonia. Presumably you agree that Orwell is a compelling writer. But where do you think that quality comes from. A sense of authority over his material? Artistic skill? Simply the voice of a unique individual who has thought the world through for himself?
Guardian contributor You're right to note the sense of authority and also personal connection. He wrote of Henry Miller that when he first read Tropic of Cancer it was as if it had been written for him alone, that he was being directly spoken to. I always feel this about GO.
Jericho999 asks:
Do you think that Orwell had a sense of his legacy by the time he died? Would it surprise him to learn that he is so widely read – and revered – today?
Guardian contributor He was an immensely modest man, so unvain as not to keep copies of his books. The 'legend' began on the moment of his death. Who knows what he might have thought? Reacting as he did to immediate perils I don't think he took much of a long-term view
Jericho999 asks:
Orwell’s often credited with foreseeing the surveillance state and seeing into Stalinism before many others did. Are there any other things he prophesised so accurately?
Guardian contributor Peter Davison, who edited the superb collected edition, once made a list of what he had 'got right' and it included everything from de-forestation to the dissemination of pornography
ZaraSilk asks:
Dear Mr Taylor,
An Egyptian student has very recently been arrested near the entrance of Cairo University for carrying a copy of George Orwell’s 1984. In which respects do you think Orwell is relevant to contemporary politics?
Guardian contributor Not sure my original response got through, but I noted that in the Zimbabwean troubles, Mugabe was lampooned as Napoleon from Animal Farm. As allegories of the totalitarian psyche, both AF and Nineteen Eighty-Four are as resonant as ever.
And this is all for today! Many thanks to everyone who participated and to David for his fascinating answers.
Guardian contributor It is now 1.56 and Elvis is preparing to leave the building as he has not yet had lunch and his fingers are throbbing. Thanks one and all for some great questions. Could I recommend Peter Davison's new selection of Orwell's journalism - Seeing Things as They Are - out next week, which is full of little-known gems? A fine introduction to the world beyond the novels and the better-known essays. Cheers everyone, DJT.
Looking forward to replying to these at lunch-time, but I note we've already had 50 comments and questions. I'll do my best but it may not be possible to reply to them all, alas. Apologies in advance.