“I request that no memorial service be held for me after my death and that no biography of me shall be written.” Eric Blair, 18 January 1950
“…I have pulled together what he started, but sadly did not have a chance to finish…” Ramdei Bowker
Gordon Bowker (1934-2019) published a biography of George Orwell (2003) for the centenary of the author’s birth. As the story of Orwellian biography is nearly as fascinating as the story of George Orwell’s life, I am greatly pleased that Ramdei Bowker has edited and published her late husband’s unfinished memoir, Glimpses of a Biographer’s Diaries 1961-2000.
Bowker’s professional career as an academic, journalist and biographer bought him into contact with many literary luminaries of his time. It will not just be Orwellian scholars keen to scour the pages of this new publication as Bowker produced highly acclaimed biographies of Malcolm Lowry, James Joyce and Lawrence Durrell. Although Bowker’s ruminations about the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (there are nearly 500 references to “Orwell” in the 471 pages) were my focus, his small, everyday reflections – about writing, making his way in the world; books, theatre and the places of his life; exploring Paris; discovering the writing of John Berger while teaching in North London – may well be what rewards patient readers.
Orwell
One of the great intellectual pleasures of learning about Orwell has is grappling with the varying intellectual, literary and ideological approaches taken by his biographers. The first biographical writing about Orwell, undertaken by his friends and acquaintances in the guise of literary analysis, included books by John Atkins; Jacintha Buddicom; Laurence Brander; Cyril Connolly; Tosco Fyvel; Christopher Hollis; Tom Hopkinson; Richard Rees; and George Woodcock. Biographies have been written by Robert Colls, Bernard Crick, Peter Davison, Scott Lucas, Richard Bradford, Jeffrey Meyers, Michael Shelden, David Taylor, John Sutherland, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams. Several of these authors have written extensively about their philosophic approaches to writing biography and disagreements with each other (in prefaces, articles and reviews).
Bowker wrote in the preface to his biography of Orwell:
“There have been three previous major biographies of Orwell: Bernard Crick’s George Orwell: A Life (1980), Michael Shelden’s Orwell: The Authorised Biography (1991) and Jeffrey Meyers’ more recent Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (2000) – different biographers, different readings, different portraits. Crick’s book stressed the political context of Orwell’s life; Shelden’s concentrated on Orwell the literary man, Meyers’ acknowledged more the inner man.”
Original research into Orwell’s extended family and the period prior to 1933 is one of the strengths of Bowker’s biography. He was particularly interested in Eric Blair’s experiences in Burma and Paris in his reassessment of the writer:
“Another key aspect of Orwell rarely considered is the extent to which his intellectual life was affected by European ideas and events. He began publishing in France, and Paris gave him half the material for his first book. Spain transformed him politically and events in Germany and the Soviet Union dominated the last fifteen years of his life. To that extent he was a great European writer. And yet he had a profound sense of Englishness, which comes through in the best of his essays. This duality needs to be seen as central to his life as does the duality between the inner man and the literary-political man, the visionary romantic and the man for whom crystalline prose was an imperative.”
Bowker’s diary entries for 1996-2000 are a record of the Orwell trail he travelled: whom he interviewed; where he visited; reflections on what he was learning, along with the challenge of finding a publisher and the nature of biographical writing. Not all of his research made it into the biography. The following excerpts provide some interesting insights into Crick, Orwell’s father and finding a publisher:
9th. We arrived on time, were made very welcomed. Richard and his brother, Maurice, were supervised by Orwell in Southwold in the early thirties. Both had been interviewed by Bernard Crick, but were very happy to talk again about their old ‘tutor.’ Richard, who, strangely enough, had once been my philosophy professor, came up with one story not recorded by Crick. During his father’s absence (he was a policeman in India) old Richard Blair, Orwell’s father, came chasing after his mother, and whenever they saw him approaching their cottage, the boys and their mother hid behind the sofa till he went away. Orwell and his father, it seems, were not so very unlike. He gave me a good interview about Orwell and his parents. Also, he gave me his brother, Maurice’s address and telephone number. I would write with a view to interview him soon. Orwell was with the Peters’ boys of the comic book age – boys he perhaps enjoyed having around.
21st. We set off for Bournemouth, arrived at hotel around 5.30 p.m. After supper, we listened to my interview with Richard Peters. Would meet his brother tomorrow at 4.30 p.m. Next day, We visited Maurice Peters, a retired Naval Intelligence officer, thought Crick (who failed to use his testimony) had a left-wing axe to grind, and ignored what he had to say, because he regarded Orwell as an anti-Communist rather than a socialist. He told me that in 1935, he had visited Booklover’s Corner to consult Blair (Orwell) about joining the Navy, and the ‘pacifist’ Eric told him that it was a very good idea. Perhaps, it was the spirit of the good Captain Horatio Blair speaking. He told us many jokes about Orwell.
29th. …Michael Fishwick turned down the Orwell proposal. It turned out that another writer had a contract to write a biography of George Orwell. His wife worked at HarperCollins, and was present at the board meeting concerned. I felt a little crushed. Meanwhile, I kept on fervently with my Orwell research.
Gordon Bowker, who was a great supporter of The Orwell Society, wrote The Trail That Never Ends: Reflections of a Biografiend which outlined the perennial challenge for the next biographer of any subject:
“… my next step was to find a publisher. My proposal was twice torpedoed after editors had expressed enthusiasm. The second one, a charming young man, at first eager to commission the book, wrote a few days after our meeting to say that he doubted there was anything new to be discovered about Orwell in the wake of Crick. ‘Great heavens!‘ I thought. Didn‘t he know that there‘s always something new to be discovered about any subject in the wake of anybody? So, pessimistic opinions about what might or might not be discovered could, I thought, quite happily be ignored and old fashioned sleuthing should serve just as well with this author as with any other. There was also the elusive inner man to explore through interpretation — the approach to biography rejected by Crick but favoured by Orwell.”
Glimpses of a Biographer’s Diaries 1961-2000
This kind of enterprise, preserving the memories of a man whose intellectual work so many admired, is inordinately important! It is wonderful that Mrs Bowker has managed to edit her husband’s work and published it. Thanks to her, I found myself re-visiting the important sites of Orwell’s life with Gordon as a guide.
Thank you!
Glimpses of a Biographer’s Diaries 1961-2000 may be downloaded as a Kindle ebook via the following links: Australia; United Kingdom; and in the USA. Hopefully, if there is enough interest, a print edition will follow.
Gordon also produced highly acclaimed biographies of Malcolm Lowry, James Joyce and Lawrence Durrell, along with numerous articles and reviews for The Observer, The Sunday Times, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement and academic journals. All of Bowker’s biographical output can be purchased here or accessed freely via Archive.org.
The online and newspaper articles Gordon wrote, in the years after his biography of Orwell was published, continued to be original forays into unexplored aspects of the writer’s life and work. One article Bowker published in The Guardian, ‘George Orwell: A paranoid rebel with tattoos on his knuckles‘, set me off on a grand research adventure. Bowker generously permitted the online publication of his work which had first appeared in literary journals. Several pieces published at the Orwell Foundation’s website are still particularly useful, especially: The biography that Orwell never wrote and Orwell’s London (checkout the accompanying map). His essay, Orwell and the Biographers, is essential reading!
Richard Keeble wrote an obituary for Gordon in 2019.
REFERENCES
Bowker, Gordon, Glimpses of a Biographer’s Diaries 1961 – 2000, edited by Ramdei Bowker, Kindle Edition, 2025
Bowker, Gordon (2003) Inside George Orwell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Bowker, Gordon (2003) George Orwell, London: Little, Brown
Bowker, Gordon, George Orwell, London: Abacus, 2004
Bowker, Gordon, “Orwell’s Library”, New England Review, Volume 26, Issue 1, 2005
Bowker, Gordon (2007) ‘George Orwell: A paranoid rebel with tattoos on his knuckles‘, The Guardian, 5 September
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John Rodden
Anyone who knows Gordon’s work–and/or knew the man himself–will look forward to reading Mrs. Bowker’s edition of his diaries. Speaking personally, I valued Gordon as an outstanding biographer and scholar as well as a wonderful colleague–truly a “decent” fellow, to borrow a term of high praise from Orwell. Darcy has justly given attention to a work that is valuable not only for Orwell scholars and readers, but also for anyone interested in the craft of the biographer. Readers are in debt both to him and to the Bowkers.
Guy Loftus
Unlike John Rodden, I didn’t know Gordon – I just came to know him a little bit through his memoire. Many of his encounters recorded in this book intersect with my own decades later, which offered me glimpses into the man he was, as well as the writer he became. It comes over as an authentic account of personal discovery in a society willing to experiment in finding an emerging identity after the Second World War, including notable successes and failures. Gordon’s account is intimate, demonstrating what it takes to be a biographer of note and the sacrifices needed to achieve that ambition. The book navigates his own life through the lives of Malcolm Lowry, Lawrence Durrell and George Orwell in breathtaking detail, as amplifications of his own political and spiritual development. If you want to know what a biographer’s biography reads like, look no further. But if you want to have some more context on the lives of Lowry, Durrell as well as Orwell, this book is an excellent source of anecdotal material.
Guy Loftus
… or, for that matter, how Harold Pinter came to be a screenplay writer…
Ronald Binns
I met Gordon in the 1980s when he first became interested in Malcolm Lowry. He was genial and generous, with a keen intellectual curiosity. Out of that literary passion came his wonderful anthology Malcolm Lowry Remembered (1985), which was an important contribution to the then rather sparse field of Lowry biography. Gordon had the perfect temperament for a biographer – his warm personality and enthusiasm were just right for extracting information from those left alive who knew Lowry. He also succeeded in tracking down Lowry’s elusive first wife, Jan, which was a major coup. His efforts resulted in Pursued By Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry, which was a stunning achievement, judicious in its evaluation of Lowry’s works and crammed with fascinating new biographical material. It became at once the definitive Lowry biography, and it is telling that there have been none since. It was, of course, the first in an impressive sequence of biographies of twentieth century novelists. Although all the George Orwell biographies have their merits I think Gordon’s is particularly acute, as are his subsequent contributions to biographical theory. Anyone who has not done so should certainly read his essay “Orwell and the biographers” in The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, edited by John Rodden.