GEORGE ORWELL by Michael Ventura November 22, 1991
The following two articles appeared in the same issue.
THE DISAPPEARANCES OF GEORGE ORWELL All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. --George Orwell George Orwell’s life is a story of leave-takings and disappearances, some forced, some chosen. He put it a bit differently once, saying that “any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats”; but since he saw every one of his journeys as ending in some form of defeat, perhaps my sentence and his amount to the same thing. George Orwell was born in 1903 in Bengal. His father was what we would now call a dope dealer and what was then called a British civil servant in the then-legal opium trade. It’s never been clear why his mother, the flamboyant, intelligent Ida, married the rigid, unimaginative Richard, a man 18 years older than she. They had what seems to pass for love in middle-class English marriages, a careful consideration of each other, and an even more carefully kept distance. (“They had separate rooms and separate interests but got along quite amiably,” according to Bernard Crick in George Orwell: A Life [1980].) When Orwell was a year old, his mother moved with him and his sister to England. He didn’t see his father again for years. It was Orwell’s first important leavetaking.