Animal Farm 2

15 Pages 3862 Words

/Write, he explains that from
the age of five or six he knew he would be, ^must be,^ a writer (Gross,
p.115).^ But to become a writer one had to read literature. But
English literature was not a major subject at Eaton, where most boys
came from backgrounds either irremediably unliterary or so literary
that to teach them English Literature would be absurd. One of Eric's
tutors later declared that his famous pupil had done absolutely no work
for five years. This was, of course, untrue: Eric has apprenticed
himself to the masters of English prose who most appealed to him,
including Swift, Sterne and Jack London (Gross, p.117). However, he
has finished the final examinations at Eaton as 138th of 167. He
neglected to win a university scholarship, and in 1922, Eric Blair
joined the Indian Imperial Police (Gross, p.118). In doing so he was
already breaking away from the path most of his schoolfellows would
take, for Eaton often led to either Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, he
was drawn to a life of travel and action. He trained in Burma and
served for five years in the police force there. ^In 1927,while home on
leave, he resigned. There are at least two reasons for this. First,
his life as a policeman was a distraction from the life he really
wanted, which was to be a writer. And second, he had come to feel
that, as a policeman in Burma, he was supporting a political system in
which he could no longer believe (Stringer, p.412).^ Even as early as
this, his notions about writing and his political ideas were closely
linked. It was not simply that he wished to break away from British
Imperialism in India: ! he wished to ^ ^escape from ... every form of
man's dominion over man,^ as he said in Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and
the social structure out of which he came dependent (Stringer, 413).^
Back in London he settled down in a gritty bedroom in Portobello Road.
There, at the age of twenty-four, he started to teach hi...