The Godfather: Peter Corris on literary biography
I’ve been reading biographies of two writers I admire in part – Norman Mailer and George Orwell. Literary biography is something I enjoy and the best examples of it, such as Richard Ellmann on Oscar Wilde and Norman Sherry on Graham Greene, have given me enormous pleasure as well as insights into the writing life and process.
On the surface, J Michael Lennon’s Norman Mailer: A Double Life and Robert Colls’s George Orwell: English Rebel, both published last year, could not have had more different subjects – the brash beat-generation American and the dour ex-Etonian gent – but there are important similarities. Like Mailer, Orwell was a better essayist than novelist. Both fought short, life-changing wars; both were unfaithful to their wives and both pulled off two outstanding successes, amid some very ordinary stuff, which have been associated with their names ever since.
Mailer became famous with his first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) but never produced a fiction to equal it. But he won the Pulitzer Prize with the journalistic The Armies of the Night (1968) and what he eventually called his ‘true crime’, The Executioner’s Song (1979), won him his second Pulitzer, restored his reputation after some ill-received efforts in fiction and non-fiction and was a bestseller.
Orwell’s literary output was similarly varied and variously received. His documentary books like The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938) are still admired, while his early novels, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), are generally regarded as unreadable now. His reputation rests on his magnificent journalism and on two oddities – the satire Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
The similarities go deeper than their literary careers and brief but testing military experiences – Mailer in the Philippines and Orwell in Spain. Mailer was a non-observing Jew who was bar mitzvah’d and respected Jewish traditions, while Orwell was a non-believing Anglican, confirmed and married twice in the church, which he praised as a cohering force in English life.
These similarities became clear to me as I read the books but what struck me most was the difference in the approaches of the two biographers. Lennon knew Mailer well and collaborated with him on various projects. Mailer emerges as a cantankerous, egocentric bully-boy, a Hemingway wannabe. This is documented by Lennon without a word of evaluation. About the only note of criticism sounded is Lennon’s remark that Mailer was ‘a serial philanderer’ in each of his six marriages.
More importantly, Mailer’s nutty ideas about karma and an existential god (whatever that might be), contraception and the causes of cancer are noted without any assessment of what they meant for his writing.
By contrast, Colls’s book is a critical biography par excellence. There is so much to approve of in Orwell and Colls nails it: ‘Theology is a subject without a fact and therefore not something to catch Orwell’s attention’.
But he also ruthlessly picks apart Orwell’s vacillating political views and attitudes and his blindness to certain realities such as the appeal of sport and the intricacies of party politics. He attempts an overall judgement in a torturous passage that urgently needed rewriting:
The truth is this most famous of political writers did not have a consistent – let alone a symmetrical – politics, and the strain of trying to be true to the situation as he found it, and true to the natural justice as he believed it in the situation as he found it there and then and thereafter, sometimes long after when he decided finally to write about it, produced in him a sort of ‘doublethink’ almost from the start.
There is too much of this sort of writing in Colls, partly redeemed by some quirky and even funny speculations, such as how Orwell might have reacted to ‘swinging London’ and ‘cool Britannia’. Lennon steers a more conventional course but spends too much time recounting plots. Good books both; but one author perhaps liked his subject a little too much and the other not quite enough.
