Me and George Orwell: A Need For Failure

Not everybody wants to succeed in life. Some people are deeply-driven by a need to fail. I have had serious problems in life; I have suffered many disappointments and failures. I don't blame others for my problems. Yes, I do bear grudges. As President Nixon's friend, Leonard Garment, once said about the president: "He had a virtuoso collection of wounds and angers." I have many wounds and angers. But I am no more violent than President Nixon was. I just get ticked off when I am a victim of other people's unlawful conduct. Keep in mind: being angry at unlawful conduct is not a crime, committing a crime is unlawful. Like George Orwell, my concern is for truth and justice.

The psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold, M.D. has written the following about the author George Orwell. Orwell, according to Shengold, had a lifelong need to fail. Dr. Shengold writes:

There are many contradictory descriptions of George Orwell's behavior and personality. He showed different aspects of himself to different people; this seemed a conscious policy. Orwell's biographers cannot do more than sketch and speculate about the inner man -- what it felt like to be Orwell. He was secretive and solitary, and never wanted his biography to be written. His characteristic role in life, primarily defensive, was that of the observer, detached from pain and emotional involvement. In so many situations in his life he was the "odd man out," apart from the crowd and against the establishment. V.S. Pritchett perceptively describes Orwell's masochistic isolation: "Tall and bony, the face lined with pain, eyes that stared out of the caves, he looked far away over one's head, as if seeking more discomfort and new indignations."

Orwell had acquaintances and friends, but he avoided bringing together those who did not already know one another. Orwell kept parts of his life "in compartments." He made adaptive use of his detachment: even as a child he was determined to become a "famous author," and his compulsive need to be the observer became the vantage point for the journalism, essays, and fiction that finally emerged. I feel that he used his strong will and persistent determination to force himself away from some hated and feared part of his nature -- probably these were primarily his sadistic and dominating impulses. He remained able to fight and did so literally, and with conspicuous courage, in the Spanish Civil War. He is described as characteristically aloof and unruffled in crises, even under fire (perhaps especially so).

When Orwell was about thirty he published his first book under his pseudonym, and began to forge a new public identity: Eric Blair became George Orwell, the author bent on evolving a simple and honest prose, the fighter for truth and justice, or, more important, against lies and oppression. (We can speculate that his complex personality contained Big Brother and O'Brien as well as Winston Smith.) Chekhov wrote of having had to "squeeze the serf out of [himself], drop by drop", and George Orwell must have made a similar effort; both men come through in their writing as truly moral and virtuous.

Orwell's essay "Why I Write" (1946) documents his obsessional character defenses and their creative transformations:

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer . . . I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I rarely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding imaginary conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Together with early writings, I started carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous "story" about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents . . . my "story became a description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: "He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a matchbox, half open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window . . . etc., etc. This habit continued till I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years."

Even if the adult was exaggerating in retrospect, one feels that the essential truth is told here. A split of this magnitude between the observing ego and the experiencing ego (a vertical split) is not a "common habit of children and adolescents"; nor is it ordinary to be able to turn it to adaptive, creative use. (Note that when Orwell started to write for publication, the "split" receded.) The strength and pervasiveness of his isolative defenses do resemble what is found in those who have to ward off the overstimulation and rage that are the results of child abuse. It must have helped Orwell in his life that he was able to deal with the rat imago in his fiction. 1984 is about a world full of bad smells and sadism and infested with rats. His artistic success, which came late in his career, helped too, but a need for failure persisted to the end.

Leonard L. Shengold, M.D., Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation at 81-83 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).