Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  There was a string of women who slept with Orwell once but preferred not to do it again. Eleanor is the first recorded. Sonia was the last – she, rather unwillingly, surrendered to him a single time before marriage, but not after, when sex was beyond him. One-timers seemed (like Eleanor and Sonia) willing to carry on ‘liking’ him. Those who did, as Jacintha puts it, ‘go the whole way’ found him, apparently, a graceless lover.

  The years he had been away (1922–7) had been socially tumultuous. He had missed the General Strike – the nearest Britain had come to revolution since the seventeenth century. Its repercussions were still shaking the country. His contemporaries at Eton, Children of Sun, the Brideshead generation, golden youth, were meanwhile rising like rockets. And Eric Blair? Those who saw him were shocked at how prematurely aged he looked. Time was wasting him. He was understandably nervous about revealing the decision he had made about his ‘career’, and put off for weeks telling his father that he could no longer wear the uniform of the ‘evil despotism’ Richard Blair had proudly worn for thirty years. Now captain (the highest rank he ever achieved) of the Southwold golf club (his name is still commemorated on its walls), Richard Blair did not regard himself as an evil despot, retd. He was, however, a double-dyed snob and above all else anxious to maintain appearances. Peter Davison turned up a recollection from a ‘high-class tailor’ in Southwold who – as a tradesman – was routinely cut dead in the street by 2nd Lt Blair (retd): ‘Old man Blair was terribly autocratic. If anyone got in his way at the golf course they’d get it in no uncertain terms! He felt his weight very much; he was full of his own importance.’ Not having a son ‘doing terribly well in Burma, thank you for inquiring’ would not augment Old Man Blair’s self-importance at the nineteenth hole.

  Disclosure was awkward. Blair told his mother first. During the ructions that followed he went on to inform his parents, and Avril (who didn’t count), that he was resolved to become a ‘writer’. Had he stated a resolution to shave his head, borrow a bed sheet and become a Buddhist priest they would doubtless, at this stage, have been less shocked – and less worried about ‘how it would look’ in Southwold. Orwell did not write directly about his family’s reaction, but there are bruising scenes in the most autobiographical of his novels, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, when Gordon announces his career change from a ‘safe job’ to what? A writer?

  Orwell and the Blair family dog Hector in Southwold. Cat unknown.

  Eric was cut out of his father’s will. It did not worry him for the moment. He had earned around £3,000 in Burma and had managed to save a nest egg. After he embarked on his new career, a gifted young poet and potter, Ruth Pitter, who had rather taken to him on first meeting him at a party, when he was an eighteen-year-old, helped him to find lodgings in London. In his garret Orwell wrote obsessively. And clumsily, Ruth recalled. She was a few years older, sophisticated, and getting known and liked in the London literary and artistic worlds. She and her girlfriends good-naturedly guffawed at samples he showed them of his work in progress (always an ill-advised thing for young writers to do). He was not ‘there’ yet. He may have tried it on with Ruth, but through life she seems to have preferred girlfriends. And the Orwell she had admired five years earlier no longer had the peach-bloom freshness he had at eighteen. But, with an effort, he could still photograph well, evoking his military bearing and Etonian hauteur. The fact that he liked to cut his own hair with kitchen scissors detracts a trifle.50

  A Cambridge Education (Second Hand. Southwold College)

  The word ‘writer’ (never ‘author’ – the distinction is important) did not clearly convey what was vaguely, and importantly, taking shape in Orwell’s mind. His career moves were invariably intuitive and impulsive. What he had in mind, while keeping his Burmese novel simmering in pre-publication fluidity, was to embark on an ambitious social anthropological project, modelled on the inspirational fieldwork of Bronislaw Malinowski, the pioneer ethnographer, and the work his disciples were doing in the academic powerhouse of British social anthropology – Cambridge University.

  Orwell was, if not a sexual predator, always on the lookout for anything going. Sleeping with his best friend’s fiancée while said best friend was away from ‘S’wold’ was, however you look at it, a bit low. More admirable was his plundering Dennis’s mind for the up-to-date theory and practice in Malinowskian anthropology. Eric Blair was a masterly brain-picker. Collings was an interesting and, by the end of his life, distinguished man. In 1923, aged eighteen, he had set off on his own initiative for Portuguese East Africa to study tropical plants. Herbal anthropology (ethnobotany) was in its infancy; Collings was a pioneer in the field.51 Eric had met Dennis before he left for Africa. Two years later he returned to Southwold. Around the same time, Eric returned from Burma and their friendship was renewed. In 1928 Collings went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, to study anthropology. Following his graduation in 1932, he took up a post with the Museum of Cambridge, whose displays he reorganized over the three years he spent there. Among other things, he set up the Southwold Museum. He married Eleanor in 1934 and the two of them went off to Singapore, where he took charge of the Raffles Museum. Many times Eric must have been told how well his best friend was doing. During the long, dull years of Eric’s Southwold residence, 1928–34, when Dennis was around (putting Eleanor temporarily off limits), the young men must have talked a lot about anthropology: what it was, who the current leaders of the discipline were. Eric never went to Cambridge, but Cambridge, via Dennis, came to him.52

  Malinowski published his inspirational Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922. It wholly reformed Cambridge anthropology. He was ‘in the air’ in the 1920s, known well outside his academic field, and was further popularized by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1928). Huxley was a disciple.53 Orwell read Huxley’s novel when it first came out, and disagreed with its ‘hedonism’ – disagreement that would become polemically explicit in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Malinowski believed that the social anthropologist – the ‘explorer’ or ‘argonaut’ – must plunge into the society they wanted to know about; they must become what they wanted to understand, whatever the personal risk. This ‘participant observation’, as it was called, was a version of Joseph Conrad’s ‘in the destructive element immerse’. The aim was to discover ‘the native’s point of view’ by ‘going native’. As V. S. Pritchett memorably put it, Orwell went native in his own country.54

  Orwell put his long, casual tutorial with Dennis Collings into practice. Down and Out in Paris and London, the work which came out of Orwell’s immersion, begins with a ritual divestiture: and with it a change of identity. It is one of the most arresting moments in the book – Orwell is not merely changing clothes; he is losing caste. He goes to a rag-shop in London where he sells his middle-class (sadly rumpled) outfit. He gets a shilling and some dirty looking rags. He discovers a new self as he emerges in his new togs:

  My new clothes had put me instantly into a new world. Everyone’s demeanour seemed to have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow that he had upset. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said with a grin. No one had called me mate before in my life . . . Clothes are powerful things.

  He has gone native and made his first discovery. England is still a sumptuary society – clothes maketh class. Suddenly those ridiculous uniforms at Eton and in the Burmese mess make sense. Top hats = top people. Rags = ragamuffins.

  In terms of its literary genesis, Down and Out shapes itself, sometimes close to plagiarism, along the lines of People of the Abyss. Jack London had been, since Eric’s Eton days, a favourite author. In the summer of 1902 London had come to his namesake city to anatomize the country in its coronation year. He spent six weeks in ‘darkest London’, disguised as a stranded American sailor. Jack did not love the English: his aim was to reveal the old country’s racial degeneration (something Max Nordau had recently popularized) and to argue that world leadership should pass to vital America. Vitality incarnate, of course, in Jack London. He s
pent nights in the ‘spike’ (workhouses for vagrant ‘casuals’) and in dosshouses. There is a striking description (which Orwell copied, almost word for word) about his divestiture from seaman’s garb and re-emergence, in the rags he has purchased, as a down-and-outer: ‘No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the difference in status effected by my clothes . . . The man in corduroy and dirty neckerchief no longer addressed me as “sir” or “governor.” It was “mate” now.’ Orwell and Jack London, ‘mates’ together. It is nice to see them eyeing each other matily, in some timeless literary dimension.

  Down and Out in Paris and London would be Orwell’s first book, published when he was verging on thirty, in January 1933. It narrowly escaped literary abortion. Substantially written three years before its publication, it drew on experience of four to five years earlier. The title suggests a misleading sequence. Before going to Paris, Orwell had made his preliminary ‘recce’ of the East End London underworld: ‘spikes’, ‘dosshouses’, even ‘clink’. He did it so well that one wonders if in Burma, like Kipling’s Kim, he had been trained to go undercover. Dates help. The years 1927 (when Orwell had his first overnight spike stay) to 1933 (when the book finally appeared) were historically tumultuous. The jazz age – that post-war saturnalia – ended in hours with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. Worldwide unemployment followed. Down and Out pivots, uneasily and accidentally, on that transitional historical moment in the twentieth century, when the whole world went down and out. The effect was to make the book, when it finally made it into print, somewhat out of date chronologically (particularly the Paris section) but, as a treatise on poverty and unemployment, more relevant.

  Initially he foresaw reportage as the ideal form for what he had in mind. But he could not raise serious magazine or newspaper interest in articles about darkest London. The project enlarged in February 1928, when Orwell took off for Paris. He would stay there eighteen months, lodged most of the time in a cheap hotel in the Latin Quarter. He spoke the language and could blend into his environment. He had a Limouzin aunt in Paris, an Esperantist of bohemian character but chronically straitened means, who was fond of him and helped as best she could. Whatever funds he himself had from his years’ service in Burma had melted away. Apart from the ten weeks later chronicled, with fictional embellishments, in Down and Out, and his fortnight in hospital (observing how the poor die), we know virtually nothing of what Orwell did during his Parisian period, other than writing a lot, only a tiny fraction of which saw print, or has survived, and getting by tutoring in English and working in kitchens.

  He already had a keen and intrepid journalistic eye. The first piece of writing Orwell ever seriously published was in Paris, in French, in October 1928: ‘La Censure en Angleterre’ (Censorship in England). England was notably censorious at this period. In 1928, Radclyffe Hall’s (feeble) lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was prosecuted for obscenity, and the criminal edition burned. These years were the harsh regime of ‘God’s Policeman’, ‘Jix’ (William Joynson-Hicks), home secretary, 1924–9. His Savonarola tendencies put English Literature back years. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and James Joyce’s Ulysses (and the worthless Well of Loneliness) could only be published, unexpurgated, in Paris. When eventually published in Britain, Down and Out suffered serious censorship at its publisher’s insistence, particularly as regards the realism of its street language and sex scenes. Had Jix still been in office, the cuts and watering-down might have been even more severe.

  America too was suffering a purgative wave of moralism, under Anthony Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The best literary energies in both English-speaking powerhouses were pushed overseas. ‘Published in Paris’ became a proud badge of literary freedom and quality. It was worn with pride by the ‘lost generation’ of American writers – Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein and e e cummings. Another, less glamorous, attraction was that the weak post-war franc meant a little dollar went a long way.55

  Culturally, 1928 Paris was at its interwar cosmopolitan zenith. As Eric Blair slummed it, George Gershwin immortalized the city with his symphonic poem An American in Paris. If Orwell heard Gershwin’s paean it was as alien to him as the island’s twanging melodies were to Caliban. Orwell, on the evidence of Down and Out, took not the slightest notice of the modernist artistic, musical, dance and literary ferment going on around him. He may have distantly glimpsed James Joyce once, he records. He would not read him (and realize what he had missed) until five years later. His interest was directed exclusively to how the Parisians lived, starved and died. The Paris ‘underneath’ Paris. What was on top, he sneered in ‘Inside the Whale’, was froth:

  During the boom years, when dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low, Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees, and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists must actually have outnumbered the working population.

  Paris, after he had taken up residence in the 5th arrondissement, he found to be peopled by the ‘fantastically poor’, eccentric, diverse and, frankly, disgusting:

  There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfish couple who plied an extraordinary trade. They used to sell postcards on the Boulevard St Michel. The curious thing was that the postcards were sold in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were actually photographs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too late, and of course never complained . . . The filth of their room was such that one could smell it on the floor below. According to Madame F., neither of the Rougiers had taken off their clothes for four years.

  Peter Davison is always at pains to remind us that Orwell is, when he cares to turn it on, a comic writer. As here, in Down and Out, he certainly is. But the observing Orwellian eye is cold and clear as ice.

  The journey into even lower sub-Parisian depths began with a happy disaster. Happy, that is, for Orwell’s first book. He was robbed of his money, as he records, by an Italian fellow lodger at his seedy hotel, the Coq d’Or (golden cock – a little Orwellian joke). In later life he disclosed, casually (to one of his other lovers), that the felonious Italian was actually a home-grown ‘trollop’ called Suzanne who was temporarily living with him (she would have been an interesting addition to his gallery of types).56 Suzanne was ‘beautiful and had a figure like a boy, [with] an Eton crop’. Floreat Etona. He had whored around in Paris, he later confided to an acquaintance. He may even have worked in a brothel, some hazard. It was not merely literary freedom that Paris offered. But he had to cut his literary cloth for his Southwold readership, his cautious publishers and prevailing English cultural timidity. Fig-leaved England was not yet ready for its Henry Miller. It was not pleasant to think of Richard enjoying a snifter in the ‘club’ and being asked ‘how’s that whoremonger of a son getting on, Richard? What a scamp, eh?’

  After the theft Orwell was, in very short time, a ‘down and out’. He did not, as he could have done, seek emergency help from his Parisian aunt Nellie, or his parents. He had lifelines. One telegram would have done it. But his ulterior motive was Malinowskian. To understand poverty, one had to be poor. The lifted wallet was less disaster than opportunity. He fell in with a series of low-lifes and came close to starvation, with his irrepressible, forever down-on-his-luck comrade Boris, a White Russian who had ridden with Cossacks, duelled and tasted the high life. He talked about it incessantly, as he picked bugs out of his bed and lice out of his underwear. Finally Blair (if that was what he was calling himself) found enough work to keep body and soul together as a restaurant plongeur (dishwasher); first at a good hotel, then a squalid restaurant. There are some appetitekillers of the kitchen-hand-spit-in-the-soup type in this section of the narrative. When the book was finally published, there were agonized letters of complaint to The Times by aggrieved Parisian hoteliers and restaurateurs about what this cur
sed ‘Orwell’ had done to their tourist trade.

  Down and Out’s Parisian narrative ends with a failed attempt at getting rich by smuggling cocaine and, finally, a mysterious offer of employment in England from ‘B’, which brings the narrator-hero back home. The ‘B’ business was a fiction devised to weld the two halves of the book together. Orwell, in real life, was of course free to return to England and middle-class amenities whenever someone loaned, or wired, him the travel money to do so. The cocaine and ‘B’ narrative is, to use Orwell’s robust term, ‘bollox’.

  There was one event that is not chronicled in the book but which would resurface, fifteen years later, as one of his most authentic essays: ‘How the Poor Die’. With his usual recklessness – hinting, as usual, at suicidal pathology – Blair had let his health run down catastrophically in Paris. He had chosen to come in February and live in a hotel that was dirty, cold and infectious. A year later, in February 1929, his lungs collapsed. He spat blood. He was dispatched to the hôpital Cochin, a pauper’s hospital whose therapies were medieval (‘cupping’, even in the state he was in, fascinated Blair; he was spared leeches). Inevitably, it was the smell that struck him first:

  When we got into the ward I was aware of a strange feeling of familiarity whose origin I did not succeed in pinning down till later in the night. It was a long, rather low, ill-lit room, full of murmuring voices and with three rows of beds surprisingly close together. There was a foul smell, faecal and yet sweetish.