When George Orwell died in 1950 one of the stipulations of his will, made out just three days before his death, was that no biography of him be written. He might have saved his fading breath. Memoirs, tributes and critical studies apart, there are now four major Orwell biographies available, from Peter Stansky and William Abrahams's two-volume study of the early life in the 1970s to Bernard Crick's at the start of the 1980s, Michael Shelden's just over a decade later - and now Mr Meyers's.
And why is this? Well, there are two possible answers, not necessarily mutually exclusive: first, that there is money to be got from such writing and publishing; second, that there are insights to be gained from the study of Orwell's life, his non-literary writings, conversations and relationships with friends and family which importantly complement those to be derived from reading his fiction, essays and journalism.
That publishing is - and indeed almost always has been - a business before it is anything else is undeniable. This leads, of course, to the publication of much work that is rubbish - even pernicious rubbish - and much else that is, let us say, merely unnecessary. Jeffrey Meyers is an experienced literary biographer with studies of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson and D.H. Lawrence behind him, and on the whole he has the wit and taste to avoid outright rubbish. Whether his new biography adds anything that is finally of much significance to the study of Orwell is a different matter.
The publication history of lives of Orwell, and the controversies which have arisen between their authors, offer a neat illustration of the different paths that are open to the biographer. Bernard Crick, in 1980, warned against what he called "the good bad biography", which bridges the unknowable gaps with "intuition" and speculation. "Wyndham Lewis," he wrote, "once remarked that good biographies are like novels. He did not intend to let the cat out of the bag."
Michael Shelden in 1991, in the interest perhaps of justifying a new biography which, though intelligent and readable, was in every sense a lighter affair than that of Crick, attacked his predecessor's work as "a large collection of facts which relies heavily on the notion that facts speak for themselves if presented in enough detail". If dry facts, singly or in serried ranks, were a turn-off to Shelden, we are somewhat further down the road again with Meyers. Having little more to offer on his subject's politics than a competent - if incomplete - summary, Mr Meyers declares his intention to uncover not so much "Orwell the thinker" as "Orwell the man".
Man, as we sadly know, is not just mind or spirit but also frail and corrupting body, and it is Meyers's biographical innovation to offer exponentially more on below-waist matters than any of his predecessors had found either possible or wise. It seems that the man whom V.S. Pritchett called "a kind of saint" and whom Meyers himself acknowledges in his title as "the wintry conscience of a generation" was, not to put too fine a point on matters, always at it.
In this he may, of course, have been only following the example of his mother, Ida, who, in London to help the war effort in 1917, was, Meyers informs us, "perhaps involved with another man". ("Perhaps" and "may" are important words in this school of biography.) At any rate, St George was, it seems, something of a rotter when it came to sex, cheated on his wife and propositioned any young woman who appealed to him. Those who accepted were usually not keen to repeat the experience: Orwell appears to have had a rather traditional approach to the sexual act (definitely singular) as something which women could sometimes - alas too infrequently - be prevailed upon to allow men to do to them.
After his wife's sudden death, and increasingly ill himself, he became desperate not just for sex but also for the solider comforts of love and housekeeping, such desperation eventually prompting the following splendid proposal of marriage to the young and rather dashing Anne Popham: " . . . What I am really asking you is whether you would like to be the widow of a literary man."
It is difficult, I find, to get too morally exercised by any of this. The plain fact is that Orwell's behaviour was pretty standard for his sex at that time, and perhaps since. Certainly he was somewhat selfish, as well as gauche and clumsy, but in the war between men and women there are offences on both sides and heterosexuality is a virtually untreatable condition.
Meyers, of course, has things to say about matters other than sex and treats at length Orwell's tendency to self-destructiveness and his readiness to sacrifice, not just himself, but those who depended on him to the demands of his work or his ideals. He is less strong on what exactly those ideals were, referring at one point to Orwell's "disillusion with the Left". There is no evidence of any such disillusion. Orwell became a convert to democratic socialism in the mid-1930s and remained a supporter of the left wing of the Labour Party at his death. Communism he had never been illusioned with.
For all the psychological probing of the "novelistic biographer", it seems to me that the Orwellian quiddity, that engaging and often hilariously eccentric voice which is at the centre of his appeal, has best been captured by a plain novelist, his contemporary and friend Stevie Smith, in her fictional portrait in The Holiday of the Old Etonian radical firebrand Basil Tait.
He said that America would be the ruin of the moral order, he said that the more gadgets women had and the more they thought about their faces and their figures, the less they wanted to have children, he said that he happened to see an article in an American woman's magazine about scanty panties, he said women who thought about scanty panties never had a comfortable fire burning in the fireplace, or a baby in the house, or a dog or cat or a parrot. . .
Or a canary, I said.
Or a canary, went on Basil, and he said that this was the end of the moral order.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist