George Orwell’s voice comes alive again in a biography drawing on newly discovered letters
hough he worked for the BBC for two and a half years and often spoke on air, no recording of George Orwell’s voice has been found. Many friends and memoirists have described it, and his struggles to make himself audible , but their accounts vary: was his voice high-pitched or husky, old Etonian or a Cockney drawl? DJ Taylor settles for calling it deadpan, but its elusiveness seems apt.
But in a changing moral climate he has ceased to be Saintly George and become a murkier figure. His life was full of subterfuge and his fiction of stage management. He could be homophobic and antisemitic, too , and for all his leftist meliorism his first thought on having a son was about putting him down for Eton. One friend portrayed him as a violent sadist.
Some of the most rewarding passages are about the practical Orwell, homesteader and handyman, keeping hens and goats If finishing the novel was his priority , his second concern was to find a replacement wife. He’d been happy with the complaisant Eileen, though friends found it an odd match and it didn’t stop him pursuing other women, least of all old flames from Southwold, where his parents lived: “Eileen said she wished I could sleep with you about twice a year,” he wrote to one of them, “just to keep me happy.
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