Orwell by Jeffrey Meyers

existence in Paris provided a striking contrast to the glittering bohemian life of American expatriates in the 1920s. This essay described how the quintessentially English Orwell had extensive personal and professional connections with France, which inspired his first book. Paris made him even more English and gave him a new angle of vision.
    The now extinct
World and I,
a high-paying hodge-podge of a magazine, let me write about many different subjects: graduate school in Berkeley in the 1960s, my work in an English auction house, the Greek idea of madness and art, my biography of Katherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, the pony express, my mother's physical and mental collapse, the attempt to murder my father, the futility of the war in Iraq (September 1998) and the impossibility of military victory in Afghanistan (January 2002). While the fact-checkers were sleeping at the switch, the editor published a misleading photo to accompany Berkeley in the ’60s, which was clearly taken in the ’50s. In this essay on Orwell he included a photo of “Henry Miller”—a thin grey man dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, wearing a goatee and looking like one of the Smith Bros. cough drop men. When I pointed out that this was
not
the notorious pornographer (whom he'd never heard of), the editor insisted that it
was
a man called Henry Miller and that no one would ever notice the difference.
I
    George Orwell, author of the satiric fable
Animal Farm
and the prophetic novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, created an image of himself as a quintessentially English writer in his choice of pseudonym, in the subject-matter of his novelsand essays, and in his political analysis of the English social scene. But his mother was wholly French in background, though from an expatriate family. His first published book,
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933), told the story of his extended stay in Paris in the late 1920s, his menial jobs and descent into poverty. One of his best essays, “How the Poor Die” (1946) is a vivid account of how he came close to death in a Paris hospital. “Marrakech” (1939) gives a piercing snapshot of life in Morocco, then a French colony. Though his education and upbringing made him English, at a critical juncture in his life he chose to live in Paris. Why did Orwell go to live in France, what did he expect to find there, and how did this experience change his life and influence his work?
    A schoolboy during the Great War, Orwell was taught French at Eton by the highly eccentric and rather miserable Aldous Huxley, who later wrote the influential utopian novel
Brave New World.
Half-blind, inexperienced and insecure, Huxley was treated by the boys with appalling incivility. But Orwell, unlike his classmates, saw beyond Huxley's physical disability and pathetic attempts to keep order, and disliked their cruel jeers. He appreciated the quality of Huxley's mind, and admired his use of unusual words and phrases. Always defending the underdog, a school fellow recalled, “he rather stood up for Huxley because he found him interesting.” Huxley must have taught him well, for Orwell mastered spoken and written French, and later taught French and English at the coeducational Frays School, west of London. He later corresponded in French with the translator of
Homage to Catalonia
, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War.
    On leaving Eton at eighteen Orwell had gone to Burma to serve in the British colonial police force, where he remained for five increasingly unhappy years. Both his parents had a colonial background, and the French side of his family had a long association with Burma. His maternal greatgrandfather, G. E. Limouzin, was born in France and became a prosperous shipbuilder and teak merchant in Moulmein. His grandfather, Frank Limouzin—spiky-haired and beetle-browed, with sharp nose, thin lips and severe expression—looked exactly like a rapacious miser in one of Honoré de Balzac's