by Jeremy Lovell
Reuters, 25 June 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - Giant of 20th century political thought or sick and quirky loner -- the legend of British author George Orwell is coming under review 100 years after his birth.
The man whose incisive brain gave the world Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four, in the process embedding the terms Big Brother and Thought Police into the English language, has been generally deified since his death in January 1950.
But true to his own quip that "saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent," the Orwellian myth is coming under new scrutiny around the centenary of his birth in an Indian village on June 25, 1903.
Recently unearthed documents show that the Socialist Orwell handed a list of 38 "crypto-communists and fellow travelers" to the Foreign Office months before his death from tuberculosis.
Not only have some of the names on the list raised eyebrows, the fact that he handed it to a government department runs strongly counter to the anti-authoritarian reputation Orwell gained from both of his famous novels.
Historian Norman Mackenzie said recently the inclusion of his and several other names on the list was proof that Orwell had lost his grip on reality as the TB disease advanced.
"It's a very shaky list," he told the Guardian newspaper. "Tubercular people often get very strange toward the end. I am an Orwell man, I agreed with him on the Soviet Union, but he went partly ga-ga I think."
A Washington Post article accused Orwell of being an anti-Semitic and friendless loner who dressed working class but spoke distinctly upper class and who was torn between his own Socialist leanings and his detestation of Stalinist Communism.
Born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bengal to what he later described as a "lower-Upper-Middle-Class" civil service family, he was educated at Eton but instead of going on to university he spent seven years with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.
Returning to Europe in 1928 he spend the next four years delving into the underworld of tramps until, in an Orwellian quirk, poverty forced him to find a job as a schoolteacher.
He used these experiences in his mostly autobiographical first novel Down And Out In Paris And London which he published under the assumed name George Orwell in case it bombed.
Road To Wigan Pier was among the five novels which followed until Orwell went to fight in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.
A year later, shot in the throat and disillusioned by the feuding between the supposed allies -- the Communists and the anarchists -- Orwell fled to London.
During World War II he took various journalistic jobs including three years with the BBC whose bureaucracy proved a rich vein to mine for Nineteen Eighty Four, his last novel.
