Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  GEORGE ORWELL, ironically (one hopes) justifying ‘bullying’ – that is, flogging – in The Road to Wigan Pier

  Anyone who has read Burmese Days remembers two scenes. Both centre on the odious club bigot, Ellis, who is given to such sage thoughts on colonial rule as: ‘Bambooing’s the only thing that makes any impression on the Burman. Have you seen them after they’ve been flogged? I have. Brought out of the jail on bullock carts, yelling, with the women plastering mashed bananas on their backsides.’ It goes, in the novel, beyond words. Ellis, his imperial cane swinging, meets five high-school boys and sees on them ‘a row of yellow, malicious faces – epicene faces, horribly smooth and young, grinning at him with deliberate insolence’. He suspects they are Nationalists. There has been a recent outrage. His blood is up. So is his cane: ‘There was about a second during which Ellis did not know what he was doing. In that second he had hit out with all his strength, and the cane landed, crack! right across the boy’s eyes.’ The boy is blinded. He will grin no more, greasy little babu.

  Orwell was observed, in November 1924, at a Rangoon railway station, crowded at 4 p.m. by high-school boys. He was on his way to the exclusive (‘white only’) Gymkhana Club. A Burmese witness recalled:

  The Gymkhana Club, Rangoon. Sahibs only.

  One of the boys, fooling about with his friends, accidentally bumped against the tall and gaunt Englishman, who fell heavily down the stairs. Blair was furious and raised the heavy cane which he was carrying, to hit the boy on the head, but checked himself, and struck him on the back instead.36

  This is nothing in comparison to what Ellis is described doing, but Orwell, in his ‘fury’, could well have overreacted with his ‘heavy cane’ (it was not a mere ‘swagger stick’). Perhaps on other occasions he did. He would not, one can be sure, have done it at Waterloo station.

  The Indian police were not universally firearmed; the cane was sufficient for crowd control, which was principally what worried the authorities. Riot too quickly mutated into ‘mutiny’. The police cane is used to this day on the subcontinent – one of the few respected legacies of Empire.

  Ritualized caning is interwoven with hierarchy in the British private and public (ill-named) school sectors. Masters routinely carried canes in Orwell’s day. With seniority, sixth-form ‘prefects’ were privileged to carry them (at St Cyprian’s, as well as at Eton). Orwell was known as a gentle flogger. But he wielded the cane, nonetheless.

  There were persistent rumours in the years after his death, usually whispered in drink (as it was to me), that Orwell was a flagellophile. He derived, that is, a fetishized sexual thrill from the whip and from being whipped – the English Vice, as it’s called. His astute remark about Dickens in the epigraph above is suggestive. Whatever the truth of it, there is an impressive rack of bum-whackers described in Orwell’s fiction and non-fiction. Prominent is Sambo’s riding crop, the horsewhip traditionally used by angry parents of dishonoured daughters. When it was broken on young Eric’s buttocks, Wilkes replaced it with a ‘rattan’ cane. More ‘whippy’ than the traditional willow cane, rattan lasted longer and the ‘cut’ it gave was sharper. Mr Simmons, the angry magistrate, threatened to ‘birch’ the young offender (Eric Blair, if he but knew it). The ‘birch’ was favoured in prison until the 1960s. It was made up of a bundle of twigs and, on the bare buttocks, was exquisitely painful. In Burma, it was the bamboo cane (‘the only thing that makes any impression on the Burman’, as the obnoxious Ellis says). In Orwell’s last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the whip is modernized into the rubber truncheon – whippier and more brutal. Winston Smith is truncheoned for days on end to soften him up for the electrified rack.

  Up with the Workers?

  The caning episode at the Rangoon station is dated, precisely, to 1924. Let’s shift scene, hypothetically, to May 1926. Had he been back home on leave that month, what would serving policeman Blair have done in the Great Strike? Would he, like his Etonian friends Connolly and Acton (and their Oxford chum Evelyn Waugh), have enrolled as a uniformed Special Constable to be armed with truncheons, and the right to use them, against bolshy mineworkers, their arms’ skill honed by their cane-swishing years in the sixth form? Or would Eric Blair, as an early manifestation of the ‘anarchist’ principles that would take him to Spain, march with the downtrodden masses, cobblestone in hand? Dreaming spires or Wigan Pier? Where would his loyalty have been?

  The section on the 1926 cataclysm in Chapter Fifteen of The Road to Wigan Pier is, for Orwell, surprisingly hazy. The General Strike, he says, was the fault of the apparatchik trade union leaders, not the salt-of-the earth miners who, like the animals in Jones’s farm, are misled and bamboozled by their more intelligent, selfish leaders. It is not a satisfactory analysis and is uncharacteristically evasive. The best guess is that, had Eric Blair been in London in April 1926, he would have retreated into his habitually ‘cynical’ observation posture, and watch it pass to see what happened. Then decide what to do. And probably do nothing.

  Rangoon, c. 1923. Note the length ofthe canes, and tall Orwell.

  Sex

  There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me.

  RUDYARD KIPLING, ‘Mandalay’ (1892)

  The American firm Harper first published Burmese Days a year or so before Gollancz plucked up the courage to put it out in Britain. The Americans perceived that the novel reeks of sex. Male readers’ erections, not the grim analysis of British Empire, were what would make it saleable in the u.s. Perhaps issue as a drugstore paperback, in the Erskine Caldwell mode, would suit it best.37 Paperback covers for the drugstore market, barely the right side of pornography, were duly commissioned. For the drugstore trade sex, as much as you could get away with, was a prime selling point. For Orwell sex was a painful biological problem for which the ‘East’ was a solution. Burma was commonly regarded as the biggest brothel in the Empire.

  Still an angry ‘cock-virgin’, one guesses, Orwell had left for Rangoon, and six months’ training in Mandalay, in October 1922. He confided to his Eton friend Harold Acton in later life that in Burma he had got all the sex he didn’t get in England: from the ‘Jewish whores with crocodile faces’ in Rangoon,38 one supposes, to exquisitely aromatic doll-like live-in concubines in remote up-country stations. Bowker suggests that even the bored wives of colleagues may have been curious to sleep with an Etonian. Crick hints at a Eurasian child, which, if one is fanciful, may be an explanation for Orwell’s precipitate resignation (an act that lost him a sizeable amount of payment).

  Attractive boys were also of sexual interest to Eric Blair. He was, he recalled later, attracted by the androgynous beauty of the dominant Burmese race – the ‘Burman’. He came to relish the attentions of his young native servants (‘boys’) when they handled his naked body ‘intimately’ while bathing and dressing him. Their male bodies, golden, not boiled-beef red, were not disfigured by pubic hair (how did he know that?). ‘I felt’, he recorded later in The Road to Wigan Pier, ‘towards a Burman almost as I felt towards a woman. Like most other races, the Burmese have a distinctive smell – I cannot describe it: it is a smell that makes one’s teeth tingle – but this smell never disgusted me.’

  The White Man’s dominance in any sexual act was, over these exile years, ingrained into Orwell’s sexuality if one credits one of the women testifying to what he was like in bed. Like a ‘Burmese Sergeant Major’, was her verdict.39 She could at least have commissioned him. The first generation of biographers were skittish about Orwell’s half-confided sexual activities in Burma, suggesting that it was boastfulness. Later biographers grant that he did what he said he did, and possibly more.

  Sterility

  A question that is relevant here concerns Orwell and venereal disease. If he whored (as the evidence suggests he did), sometimes drunkenly, and was wholly averse to ‘French letters’ (one of his crotchets), the risk of infection must have been high. In a letter of 1934 – seven years after coming back from Burma – he confided to a gir
lfriend that he ‘“was incapable of having children” because he had “never had any”’. Orwell also confided his doubts about his fertility to Pamela Warburg, the wife of his publisher, and to his friend Rayner Heppenstall.40 It was a refrain with him. In a letter in 1945, to another woman friend, he wrote: ‘I am also sterile I think – at any rate I have never had a child, though I have never undergone the examination because it is so disgusting’ (it simply requires a sample of semen, onanistically produced). His disinclination to be examined and, if necessary, medicated leads one to wonder if lingering venereal disease was the reason. The pre-antibiotic treatment of such infections was genuinely disgusting.

  In Orwell’s marriage, Crick notes, although ‘it takes two to make a child’ he always blamed himself specifically for the lack of children. Other reasons for his sterility, linked to his lifelong pulmonary disorders, have been hypothesized by J. J. Ross.41 If someone as occasionally reckless as Orwell did not pick up a ‘dose’, he was lucky. But similarly, if he were promiscuous, unwilling to use condoms and, in his five years of marriage, desperate for children, his infertility is strange.

  Service

  The luxurious, waited-on hand and foot lifestyle that Orwell’s profession enjoyed would be available only after the two years’ training and probation at Mandalay. It involved learning smatterings of native languages (in which cadet Blair excelled; language bonuses would swell his salary) and familiarity with colonial law (in which he was conscientious). Indian clerks would do the hard grind. For ADS (Assistant District Superintendent) Blair, too, it would be mainly deskwork. Apart from the dubious elephant, there is no record of Blair’s shooting anything – other than literary magazines from England, which, when they were too ‘socialist’, like The Adelphi, he used for pistol target practice (that’s the best way to deal with Bolshies). Ironically, a few years later The Adelphi, under his friend Richard Rees, would be the first magazine to take some of his important early, anti-colonial non-fiction – ‘A Hanging’, notably, one of the two very fine articles to come out of his Burmese service.

  Orwell would spend four-and-three-quarter years in the tropics, in a service buoyed up by the Empire’s indelible sense of racial superiority over the Burmese ‘niggers’. They were, particularly the junior Buddhist priests, ‘evil little beasts’. And dangerous. To be alone in a Burmese crowd was, for a white man, to be glared at, spat at and cursed. The opening section of ‘Shooting an Elephant’ rings true on this score:

  In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress.

  Orwell never took well to baiting. And there is some truth in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s epigram: ‘Although he condemns imperialism he dislikes its victims even more.’42 Their own king had been taken from the Burmese people. They did not love the English king. There were no durbars in Burma. The best jobs open to ‘natives’ went to the more trustworthy Indians – whom the Burmese hated even more than they did the English. When, years later, Burmese Days was published, it would coincide with bloody anti-Indian riots.

  One of the things that does not ring true in ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is that ADS Blair would have leapt into his Ford car, Winchester rifle in hand, to go, like Tom Mix, to kill the marauding beast. He would in reality have organized a party, supervised by Indian subordinates, to keep the crowd in order with slashing canes while the disturbance was dealt with. One should not always believe what Orwell writes about Orwell.

  ADS Blair, Burmese Days suggests, could bear Indians. But he despised his ‘own kind’, the ‘sham’ English gentleman strutting among the ‘natives’ who could, thanks to the privilege of imperial power, pretend to be what it would take three generations, and a lot of money, for them to become in England. Orwell knew himself to be a cut above them. He had the old school tie to prove it. The more he saw of what they were doing, the more he hated the ‘Jews and Scots’ – merchants and industrialists who were raping Burma of its natural resources. Their legacy would be a desert when the last of the teak had been felled, the last drop of oil pumped out and the last rupee extracted from the British-owned rice cartels (they were largely run by Jewish merchants who were as British as Eric Blair). Scottish engineers built and ran the huge new oil refinery at Syriam. Steam and motorized transport, good roads, railways and port facilities in the Bay of Rangoon made Burma in the 1920s an efficient exporter of the other country’s rich resources. It was for that reason, principally, that the country’s transport system had been constructed – for the colonists’ pockets.

  Blair was revolted, at a more visceral level, by the ‘other ranks’, salt-of-the-earth Tommy Atkinses of whom he was, from time to time, in charge. There were two battalions of hugely bored British soldiers in Burma in his day (about half the manpower of Britain’s current army) and ten battalions of Indian troops. Lower-class smell, fomented by the damp heat and foetid barrack-room conditions, was their prime offence. The ‘steam of their sweating bodies’, he later wrote, ‘made my stomach turn’.

  Eric Blair was at this stage of his life, he later said, ‘both a snob and a revolutionary’. There are times in his life when one would give anything to be near him, listening to him talk – when he cared to. This is a time when one would not much want the company of ADS Blair. Even less, of course, he yours. He was working towards a complex and unusual attitude, composed of complex dislikes and intolerances. You could loathe imperialism but you could also loathe the natives (‘evil spirited little beasts’) whom it tyrannized. And, most complicatedly, you could dislike yourself for being a ‘cog’ in this horrible, vastly efficient machine. As regards colonialism, Orwell was like those heroic doctors who, in the interests of medical science, infect themselves with, say, Ebola. There is, as at other times in his life, a perverse nobility to his actions. But one has to struggle to make sense of it.

  Police State

  Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments.

  KIPLING on Burma, ‘Mandalay’ (1892)

  I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which

  I probably cannot make clear.

  The Road to Wigan Pier

  The country of Burma, annexed piece by piece from larger India, was oddly undefined. It did not have behind it the centuries that had brought the British and Indians into a working relationship and which was like intermarriage writ large. Burma was ethnically a jigsaw, fragmented into cultural, tribal, religious and local sub-entities. It was ruled, after 1923, by ‘diarchy’. That is to say, it was run by Indian satraps and owned by the British. The 30,000 ‘whites’ and one million Indians comprised an oligarchic tier over twelve million Burmans who had no significant input into the way ‘their’ country was run. Indian labourers were manageable; Burmese labourers were rebellious. Similarly docile Indians dominated the lower ranks of the professions (Veeraswamy, in Burmese Days, would have been one of a host of Indian doctors), courts, hospitals, jails and police force. The British sahibs liked Indians: charming folk, McGregor says in Burmese Days, ‘provided they are given no freedom’. The whites and Indians detested the Burmese masses, who were regarded by their diarchic masters as surly, cunning and intractable.

  In the nineteenth century the IPS had been notoriously corrupt, ‘saturated with corruption from end to end, and . . . an instrument of private danger rather than of public protection’. Lord Curzon said that, and it was he, the viceroy of India in 1902, who set out comprehensively to reform the service as Peel had reformed the English police forces. Curzon’s first imperative was that it should be a ‘service composed of gentlemen’.43 Not, of course, the kind of gentlemen who became viceroys of India, but decent enough fellows. And it was Curzon who realized that if the su
bcontinent (which then included Burma) were to be kept orderly – to facilitate its efficient plunder by the mother country – it was a modern police force, not the army, which would do the necessary. During Orwell’s years of service there were twice as many police as boots-on-the-ground soldiers (called a ‘reserve’ force, to be used only in emergency).

  Burma was renowned as the least populated province of British India (apart from Assam) yet the most criminal. It was shaken by periodic ‘storms’ of crime. There was just such a storm raging when Orwell arrived. These eruptions were taken very seriously by the authorities as fore-tremors of rebellion. Despite the much-repeated slogan ‘we hold India by the sword’, it was the formidably efficient police force that did the necessary holding in the last four decades of colonial rule.44 The ratio of full-time police to population was one per 750. For comparison, the current UK figure is one per 60,000. In the last forty years of their colonial existence, India, Ceylon and Burma were police states – the first, and among the most efficient, the world has known. The techniques, if not inspirational (one suspects they must have been studied), would be refined in a ghastly way by the Gestapo and NKVD.

  It is a vulgar error to think that Orwell set out to be some oriental version of the local Southwold bobby or London’s Metropolitan copper. Those with a love of Good-Bad Books who gave the IPS a moment’s thought may have called to mind ‘Sanders of the River’, with his Maxim gun, bringing civilization to the grateful savages who survived his slaughter. It is pleasant – in an Edgar Wallace dream world – to fantasize about ADS Blair heroically bringing down with his trusty Webley some kris-wielding dacoit about to do his worst to a white woman; or pursuing criminals through the jungle. But as reformed by Curzon, the IPS was an intelligence service; at its heart was a unit known as the ‘Political Crime Department’. The Burmese police force, like its parent Indian force, was not primarily an instrument for maintaining law and order but one for gathering intelligence and nipping any possible uprising in the bud. Internal espionage (‘IPS is Watching You’) was its reason for being.