Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  BERNARD CRICK

  For Orwell, class was, above all else, a matter of smell. English society was arranged, hierarchically, from the toffee-nosed to the Great Unwashed, with the Lifebuoy-carbolic-washed middle classes squashed, uneasily, between underclass stink and aristocratic, Bond Street perfumer (or, for the male, Imperial Leather) fragrance. By their odour shall ye know them. I have wondered whether the phrase ‘toffee-nosed’ is a version of toff’s nose or a metaphor for the snot-swollen hypertrophic-turbinate-plugged nose that can smell nothing. The OED would clear it up, but I like to preserve the uncertainly double meaning. The toffee nose has a posture: ‘stuck up’, it’s called – the ostentatiously lifted English nose in the odoriferous presence of someone ‘low’. Their smell offends (in previous times a ‘pomander’ would be placed on a necklace to relieve the nostrils in the presence of a lower being – or the nose stuffed with some sweet-smelling herb, such as rue).

  Baked beans, postcard by Donald McGill.

  It’s too simple, of course. Working people’s ‘stink’ is, for Orwell, who thought about it a lot, a more complex thing than the mere lack of the gleaming sanitary facilities their ‘betters’ have. There is another dimension. One of the things that attracted Orwell, moth-like, to the working class (Jack London’s ‘abyss’) was the Great Unwashed’s positive relish of their ‘stink’. It was identity: not something to shed, but something aggressively to assert. That famous Donald McGill postcard which must have been in his private collection shows a family in gasmasks round the dinner table and the simple caption: ‘Haricot Beans Again!’ Or the even broader one depicted here. The expression on fatso’s face is not one of shame. The fart that follows his working-class blow-out is as important a part of the ritual as cooking smells. Salivation to flatulation.67

  For most of the twentieth century, the Bisto Kids were as well known in the UK as the Dead End Kids were to our U.S. counterparts. Look at their leggings in the ubiquitous advertisement. When, one wonders, was the Bisto Kids’ underwear last changed? When was the last ‘all over’ bath? Could one imagine young Etonians sniffing as lasciviously with all that toffee up their snouts? The ‘Eton collar’, like the puritan ruff, is a badge of supererogatory cleanliness.

  Alain Corbin suggests that the marked reluctance of the lower classes in nineteenth-century France to surrender their ostentatious stench, their stubborn adherence to the sweaty armpit, the public fart and garlic-powered halitosis, was political: a disinclination, that is, to lose their class authenticity ‘in the wash’. The French, as Corbin further notes, associated compulsory baths, delousing and ventilation with prison and shunned them accordingly. They wanted, literally, to get up the nose of their oppressive ‘betters’. Their motto, ‘I smell, therefore I exist.’ Or, as the English lower classes put it, ‘Up Yours.’68 That political defiance – the Great Unwashed’s refusal to wash itself into non-existence – was of lifelong fascination to Orwell. No one has wondered about it in purer English prose.

  Marriage

  Eileen is one of the larger silences in Orwell studies.

  D. J. TAYLOR

  To track Orwell’s route to marriage one needs to go back a couple of years. In March 1935 he was obliged to give up the Westrope room around the corner. He may have overdone Myfanwy’s female visitor permission. Mabel, ever helpful, arranged for him to move into a large communal boarding house at 77 Parliament Hill, with her Hampstead friend Rosalind Henschel Obermeyer. Unknown to George – falsely priding himself on, at last, paying his way as a writer – Mabel, as recent biographers have discovered, kicked in half the rent to Rosalind. The Fierzes had a spare bedroom but Francis, tolerant as he was about Eric overnighting, did not want to eat breakfast every day of the week with his cuckolder dipping into the same Gentleman’s Relish jar (Orwell’s favourite confection).

  Orwell’s manifest ease with the Jewish intellectual community of Hampstead, who clearly liked him, argues conclusively against the accusations of anti-Semitism that dogged him in later life.69 Obermeyer, amiably divorced from her husband, Charles, was studying under Cyril Burt at UCL’s Psychology Department. It was a dynamic academic unit, devising the IQ theory that would, in a few years, underlie the 1944 Butler Education Act and change British school education for generations. What the department was doing would certainly have interested Orwell.70 Charles Obermeyer was working on his major work, Body, Soul and Society: A Critique of Modern Psychology (1936). Rosalind Obermeyer ran one of the many Hampstead salons. Her house faced the heath. Orwell could work every morning in a room which, a fellow paying guest (never ‘lodger’) recalls, was ‘filthy’. Mice serenely shared his tins of mouldy biscuits. But it was ventilated by the freshest air in London and commanded a fine view of London’s open land.

  He was now reviewing regularly for the New English Weekly as well as The Adelphi. And his books were toppling over themselves to get to press. ‘It was only from 1934 onwards that I was able to live on what I earned from my writing,’ he later recorded.71 He was, aged 33, what he had ‘known’ he would be when he was five: a writer.

  Obermeyer’s other paying guests were women. Wanting male company, Orwell moved on in August 1935 to a shared flat in Kentish Town with a couple of young men – writers on their way, like himself. He would spend six months with them enjoying easy access to Hampstead’s literary parties up the hill and Camden’s rowdy Irish pubs down the hill. He was at ease in both environments. Everready Mabel had again helped him with the move. His flatmates (‘junior republicans’) wrote for some of the same journals as he did, but their company was, for Orwell, eventually unsettling. Rayner Heppenstall and Michael Sayers were a decade behind him in years and a generation ahead in literary terms. It did not help that he looked ten years older, even, than his age. They would no more have sported toothbrush moustaches than bowler hats. Sayers was Irish, red-haired, Jewish and wild – a student of Samuel Beckett, no less, and a contributor to Eliot’s Criterion, a Faber nut Orwell would never crack. Sayers had written an intelligent review of Down and Out in The Adelphi (in the month they moved in together) and he was the first critic to apply the necessary word, in praise of ‘the lucidity – so to speak, the transparence – of his prose’. That hallmark ‘windowpane’ quality had, at last, been noticed.

  Heppenstall was a young man in a hurry from Yorkshire. Four years later, when Orwell was writing his Wellsian homage to The History of Mr Polly, Coming Up for Air, Rayner would be writing a pioneer roman nouveau: fiction of the future, not the Edwardian past. Orwell had met Heppenstall for the first time at a Fitzrovia party where he also met the twenty-year-old Dylan Thomas – the bard of Fitzrovia – whose poetry was talked about in advanced circles. The young ‘apocalyptic’ wasn’t much to Orwell’s taste. He himself was still writing verses in the Swiftian-Augustan style.

  Sayers lived until 2010 and dredged up faded, but doubtless much retold, recollections for Bowker:

  To Sayers and Heppenstall, Orwell seemed an odd fish with old-fashioned and low-brow literary tastes. While they preferred Yeats, Eliot and Pound, he preferred Housman and Kipling (‘He used to rattle off Kipling like a barrel-organ,’ Sayers told me, ‘but he did it with great feeling.’) And they were bewildered by his liking for detective stories and fascination with boys’ comics, like The Gem and The Magnet, which he discussed endlessly.

  The notion of going to Wigan(!) to look at half-naked coal miners – which Orwell was proposing to do – must have seemed to his flatmates well beyond odd fishery.

  Orwell pub-crawled with Rayner Heppenstall. In later years the younger man dined out on Orwell stories and liked to tell two in particular. One was about dragging a drunken Orwell away from the clutches of a tart in a Hampstead pub; the other was about himself coming back late, drunk and noisy to the flat and being attacked by a murderous-looking Orwell with a shooting stick, aimed like a bayoneted rifle, at his guts. There was, Sayers recalled, something ‘homo-erotic’ about the arrangement at 50 Lawford Road. It echoed Mabel’s sag
e verdict about the shooting-stick assault – ‘disappointed homosexuality’. The observation has been much pondered and taken very seriously by Bowker. No conclusion has been reached. None, probably, ever will be about Orwell’s sexuality.

  But one thing was clear. Orwell was no longer up for this rackety life with compartmentalized ‘girl friends’, one-off tarts, too much booze and the abrasive company of youngsters irritatingly more in touch with what was going on at the front line of literature than he would ever be. It was wearing him out. When Cyril Connolly saw him at this period, after years, he was appalled, Crick records, at the ‘ravaged grooves that ran down from cheek to chin’. He must, Orwell felt, settle down. As with Gordon Comstock, it would be a kind of selling out. But the alternative – a superannuated bohemian like those sozzled ‘subjects’, hanging around M. P. Shiel, the mixed-race science fiction ‘King of Redonda’, in his (Orwell’s) favourite Fitzrovia pub, the Wheatsheaf – was not to be thought of. (Shiel, incidentally, was very high on Orwell’s list of ‘Good-Bad’ authors.)

  He came across the woman he would marry at a party of Rosalind Obermeyer’s in the early summer of 1935. Present was one of the hostess’s fellow postgraduates, also working under Burt. She was a clever young woman, two years younger than Orwell, with a ‘cat’s face’ and a pensive expression, caught on the few surviving photographs of her. Obermeyer recalls Orwell saying, as they washed up (plongeur again) after the party, ‘Eileen O’Shaughnessy is the girl I want to marry.’72 He courted her rather more carefully than he had her predecessors. Horse riding is recorded. Both were, at the time, ‘Hampstead intellectuals’. It is hard to believe that Eileen wouldn’t have shown him her poem, called ‘1984’, published in 1934 for the fiftieth anniversary of her Sunderland high school, it looked gloomily at what the world would be like, fifty years hence. A techno-dystopia:

  No book disturbs the lucid line

  For sun-bronzed scholars tune their thought

  To Telepathic Station 9

  From which they know just what they ought:

  Much has been made of the obvious coincidence.73

  They hit it off and seem to have been lovers at an early stage. When in autumn he proposed, she accepted. When asked by a friend why, she replied, jauntily: ‘You see, I told myself that when I was thirty I would accept the first man who asked me to marry him. Well . . . I shall be thirty next year.’ The prospect, as Orwell jested, of a wedding ring from Woolworth’s 3d and 6d stores did not put her off. They would, it was agreed, postpone the wedding until she submitted her thesis the following June. Orwell was still carrying on with at least one other woman. Anglo-Irish by background, and the daughter of a well-off customs official, Eileen had been brought up in Sheffield. The O’Shaughnessys were a high-achieving family. Eileen’s elder brother, Lawrence, would become a distinguished medical scientist and practitioner (specializing, usefully for his future brother-in-law, in TB). Eileen adored him. Lawrence’s wife Gwen was also a doctor.

  Eileen was, when she met Orwell, living with her brother and Gwen in Greenwich. Eileen was a grammar-school girl who made it to Oxford to read English, and got an ‘upper second’, but not quite upper enough to go on to research. A couple of marks more (on such things does life depend) and she would quite likely have been a distinguished academic in later life, like at least three of her Oxford contemporaries, whom she probably knew.74 After graduation Eileen had bounced around, doing a variety of jobs before, in September 1934, enrolling for a Master’s degree in the psychology department at UCL, then under Cyril Burt, a world leader in his field. Stansky and Abrahams interviewed Burt, who recalled finding in Miss O’Shaughnessy ‘more than professional aptitude’ – prof-speak for alpha-quality mind. This was confirmed by her best friend and fellow student, Lydia Jackson. Miss Jackson, a Russian émigrée, did not have much time for Orwell, whom she saw as a suppressor of clever women. Particularly Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

  Eileen and George: Marriage of Minds. No Children.

  We get our groceries at wholesale prices.

  EILEEN ORWELL

  What was being done at UCL, at the level at which Eileen was working, merits digression. MSCS were doctoral level in the 1930s and Burt required his postgraduates to base their dissertations on strenuous fieldwork, supportive of his great project. It centred on separated twins whose IQS, despite entirely different ‘nurture’ and life histories, were exactly the same. The results were, as Burt massaged them, overwhelmingly clear. Intelligence was innate. You were born with it as a constant – like the colour of your eyes. And intellectual capacity could be found, variably, in every level of society. Burt’s findings would revolutionize British school education for decades as the basis of the eleven-plus IQ test and the grammar school system, which dominated British education until the late 1960s.

  Eileen was interested in this and in something else – children’s ‘imagination’, as reflected in their school essays, writing and games (the subject would be developed, a generation later, by the Opies).75 The link to what was forming in one of the honeycombed compartments of Orwell’s mind – the essay on ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ (published by Connolly in Horizon, 1940) – is clear. Take, for example, the following in that admired essay:

  If one glances very superficially at some of these stories it is possible to imagine that a democratic spirit has crept into the boys’ weeklies, but when one looks more closely one sees that they merely reflect the bitter jealousies that exist within the white-collar class. Their real function is to allow the boy who goes to a cheap private school (not a Council school) to feel that his school is just as ‘posh’ in the sight of God as Winchester or Eton.

  This is miles ahead of the sledgehammer satire, and contempt for private school pupils en masse, in the pre-Eileen A Clergyman’s Daughter. Orwell (as he had been with Dennis Collings) was a master brain-picker. Eileen’s input is similarly deducible. Orwell must have attentively discussed her research, as he had done Collings’s anthropological scholarship. UCL, like Cambridge, came to him, extramurally.

  Biography has been occasionally condescending about Orwell’s first wife, with irritating time-wasting on whether the woman was ‘pretty’ or not. What is significant is that she had a mind better trained than his, in subjects that fructified his own thinking. Miss O’Shaughnessy did not leave her mind at the altar on 9 June 1936. With her Master’s under her belt she would, her friends thought (had that damned Orwell not got in the way), have gone on to do great things in social psychology.

  They married in the village church according to the forms of the Anglican service (despite what Orwell called its ‘obscenities’). Eileen’s family pastor officiated. The families were represented but Orwell was oddly worried they disapproved and might combine to prevent the ceremony from going forward. The omens were not entirely happy. As Eileen later recalled: ‘on the wedding day Mrs Blair shook her head & said that I’d be a brave girl if I knew what I was in for, & Avril the sister said obviously I didn’t know what I was in for or I shouldn’t be there.’

  These veterans of the ‘living with Eric’ experience knew what they were talking about. He was given a set of Blair family silver by way of wedding present. The newlyweds’ home was not one where silver would be required on a daily basis. Two months earlier, Orwell had, sight unseen, acquired a cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, called ‘The Stores’ – a former, unthriving village shop and post office. The rent was 7/6d. a week. Cash was required to start up the shop (not the post office) again and to stock a smallholding at the back. He had Gollancz funds for that, although the money dribbled in, over two years, more slowly than he would have liked. Sales in the shop yielded 30/- in a good week: enough, after costs, to pay the rent. ‘The Stores’ sold fresh garden produce from the back of the cottage, and other wares were bought wholesale.

  Comfortless Wallington. Orwell at gate?

  George Orwell the shopkeeper has inspired much scorn among Marxist critics. Could bourgeois be pettier? The scorn rather mis
ses the point. As in his last sojourn in Jura, it was the stripped-down Tolstoyan peasant life Orwell was aiming at. Wallington was an embryonic ‘animal farm’. And he could joke about the shop as readily as his critics. When he signed up for the POUM in Barcelona, it was as ‘Eric Blair, grocer’. His stock was mainly vegetables, acquired from Baldock, and harvested seasonally from the back garden. Livestock provided eggs (chickens) and milk (goats).

  As D. J. Taylor wonderingly describes it, Eileen might have been wise to listen to the Blair women:

  Even by the standards of the 30s [The Stores] was inconveniently remote – Baldock, the nearest town, was three miles away – and uncomfortably primitive, high on damp and low on modern amenities. ‘They didn’t even have an inside loo,’ one friend recalled. ‘You had to go to the bottom of the garden.’

  The cottage was centuries old and leaky. It had no electricity or inside water supply. Calor gas cylinders provided heat, paraffin tilly lamps light. They smelled. Even worse, the outside ‘lav’ was not always functional. If, economically, you used cut-up newspaper, as did the working classes with their ‘Mirrors’ and ‘News of the Screws’, the drain to the cesspool clogged and ‘backed up’. The only toilet paper that worked was the expensive scented ‘Bronco’ (it was, oddly, Princess Margaret’s required paper when she descended on often unwilling hosts). It was tightropes over the cesspit again. Orwell stayed at Wallington (on and off) long enough to make The Stores more habitable, with ‘mains’, and to see the trees he planted grow. But it was always primitive. Bathing was catlicks, with kettles of hot water heated on the gas and, presumably, visits to public baths in Baldock.

  Eileen had deliberately deleted the woman’s ‘obey’ vow from the wedding ceremony. But obey she most certainly did. Only a few months from submitting her dissertation, she withdrew from UCL. Wedding preparations had been distracting. School visiting and attendance at UCL with her supervisor, Burt, was impossible with chickens to feed and goat udders to tug on. And Eric’s boiled eggs to boil. The writer’s wife was not quite the clergyman’s daughter, but close. Lettice Cooper, who knew Eileen later, makes a rather bitter remark about her friend routinely washing up at midnight. Later submission of her thesis was perfectly possible, and would have led to more research and good things professionally. Perhaps George did not want that. Part of Eileen must surely have wanted it. Eileen accepted, instead, a hand-to-mouth existence, feeding animals, serving in a run-down shop, peeling home-grown ‘spuds’ for supper, boiling eggs (which made her sick, but were Orwell’s staple food) and making long, cold, nocturnal trips to the bottom of the garden via the garden goats, Kate and Muriel, washing her hands at the garden tap on the way back. If, as George dearly wanted, she had got pregnant, it would have inserted some point into it all. But either she was barren or he was sterile. They never discovered which, and he was adamant about not being tested.