― Oscar Wilde, Lady
Windermere's Fan
“There is no such thing
as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”
— Oscar Wilde From the
Preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Answer not a fool according to his folly,
lest you be like him yourself.”
“ Answer a fool
according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”
Proverbs 26:4-5
This is a very bad book.
It is both tedious and confusing, which takes some doing. Funder’s main aim
seems to be to destroy the reputation of one of the greatest writers of the 20th
Century. The book is neither a biography nor a novel. Large swathes of the book
are completely made up, and her conclusions are predicated on using just six
letters written by Eileen O'Shaughnessy to a friend.
While stating Orwell was
her “hero," Funder uses him as a conduit for her attack on “the
Patriarchy, " which she does not define or offer any objective or
scientific evaluation of the term. Far from “fixing sexual relations”, Funder
and her allies in the #MeToo movement are out to destroy any progress made over
the last 100 years and further muddle one of the most complex relationships
among humans.
If this was not bad
enough, the book has encouraged an avalanche of articles[1] that
labelled Owell a sexual predator who preyed on vulnerable women, stole their
ideas and used them to write books.
Despite the tedious and
confusing nature of the book, Funder does, on a limited basis, rescue George
Orwell’s wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, from the condescension of history. O'Shaughnessy
was a highly intelligent and complex woman who has been largely airbrushed out
of history. Her relationship with Orwell, both sexually and politically, was complicated.
Their marriage was an “open “one, and both had affairs. According to Guardian
journalist Rachel Cooke, “When she (O'Shaughnessy) followed him to Spain in
1937, where he was fighting the fascists during the civil war, she had a fling
with his commander, George Kopp, while he was away at the front. Other affairs
would follow.”[2]
Funder has an unhealthy interest in the sex life of both Orwell and, to a lesser extent, O'Shaughnessy, much to the detriment of the complex political relationship between the two. It is no accident that Funder started her book in 2017, which was the beginning of the right-wing MeToo# movement. One of the primary roles of the book seems to be, in the words of Vladimir Lenin, “to shout down the truth,[3] to prevent a more objective account of Orwell’s work and his relationship with O'Shaughnessy from being heard. Funder and others drown the truth in a torrent of abuse and shouts to prevent an open elucidation of the facts.
As Rebecca Solnit points
out, “Being a moralist is a particularly fun and easy pursuit when it comes to
the past because pretty much everyone from the past comes up short when
measured by present-day standards. Virtually no one in 1973, let alone 1923,
had 2023 values about race, gender, sexuality and the rest, any more than they
had search engines or Twitter accounts. It’s not our individual virtue, but our
collective receipt of humane and egalitarian ideas worked out in recent decades
that gives us our presumably splendid present-day beliefs.”[4]
It seems clear that
Eileen shared a significant amount of Orwell’s political beliefs. Travelling to
Spain with him as both wife and comrade took enormous courage and political
agreement. In some respects, she seemed far more alert to the dangers of the
Fascists and the Stalinists when it came to their attempts to kill them both.
One of the more
outlandish accusations supported in the book and made by a few other writers is
that Orwell “stole” the ideas for his two major works, Animal Farm and 1984,
from Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Although you do not see this in the book, it would
appear that Orwell had a dialectical relationship with his wife. Like all great
writers, if someone has a better idea, you turn it into a piece of art or, in
this case, two of the greatest books of the 20th Century. If
anything, Orwell’s 1984 was heavily influenced by the novel We, written by the
Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1934, which Funder does not care to mention in case
it interferes with her hatchet job on Orwell.
In other words, it has
been standard practice for authors the “steal” from others. As Sir Isaac Newton
said, If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Orwell saw further than O'Shaughnessy and, for that matter, Yevgeny Zamyatin
One of the more
disturbing aspects of this slandering of Orwell is that it has gone largely
unanswered. Oliver Lewis from St Catherine's College, Oxford, is the only brave
soul to stick his head above the parapet. Writing on the Times Literary
Supplement’s (TLS) letter page, Lewis wrote, “Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s school
poem about an authoritarian future may have been a contribution to the concepts
in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it is not possible to argue that Orwell’s most
significant work was simply the genius of others. I am concerned that, by
assuming that the sum of Orwell’s work is ascribable to other people – who all
happen, in the view of Eileen M. Hunt (August 11), to be women – some observers
are depriving the author of the right to respect that he and his work deserve.
Hunt makes a plea for “argument and significance” in newly published works
about Orwell, but seemingly only when they comply with her theory-driven
narrative of the world. This is clearly one based on gender, namely her belief
in the “patriarchy” (of which, as a male, she accuses me of being a part, as
the author of one of the books under review, The Orwell Tour: Travels through
the life and work of George Orwell).[5]
Another disturbing
aspect of this book is the absence of any analysis by Funder of any of Orwerll’s
major works. Take, for instance, one of Orwell’s most important works, Homage
Catalonia. Aside from Funder intimating that Orwell had homosexual tendencies,
she says nothing of worth about this great book. As the Marxist writer Vicky
Short points out, “ George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an inspiring book by
a gifted and honest writer committed to exposing the truth. Written in 1937, it
is a moving account of the heroic revolutionary struggle of the Spanish people
against fascism and Socialism. Above all, it provides irrefutable proof by an
independent living witness to the crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy
in Spain and its betrayal of the Spanish Revolution. Orwell’s account was a
vindication of the analysis that had been made by Leon Trotsky and the
International Left Opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy, whose policies had by
then become utterly counterrevolutionary on a world scale.”[6]
Reading this book left a
bad taste in my mouth. Aside from it being both tedious and confusing, Funder's
main purpose seems to lead a right-wing attack on the work and character of George
Orwell using the cover of a biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She has merely
made a literary fool of herself and all those who have written glowing reviews
of a very bad book.
[1] See-The biography that destroys
George Orwell: from thief of ideas to sexual predator www.tellerreport.com/life
[2] Eileen: The Making of George
Orwell by Sylvia Topp – review- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/10/eileen-the-making-of-george-orwell-sylvia-topp-review
[3] A Partnership of Lies- www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/13c.htm
[4] George Orwell in an age of
moralists- Should we stop measuring the great English writer by today’s
standards?
[5] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/categories/regular-features/letters-to-the-editor/
[6] George Orwell’s Homage to
Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution
April
11 2002
