Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  Orwell, goat lover.

  The act of love was, apparently, not entirely compensatory for the domestic hardship that came with it. Eileen went so far as to speculate that George had had too much sex before marriage, making his performance perfunctory. ‘Urgent’ was the word other partners used. Like his recommended prose style, it was always to the point. What actually went on in the long, lonely, post-marital nights at The Stores is unknown. The Orwells (she took his professional surname and called him ‘George’) were capable of putting on a brave face. Much has been built on Geoffrey Gorer’s remark, when he visited, that ‘the only year in which he ever saw Orwell really happy was in the first year of his marriage to Eileen and living at Wallington’. A Hertfordshire Derby and Joan. Lydia Jackson, who saw more of them, thought he took her ‘very much for granted. Any man, I thought, ought to treasure such a wife.’ And an anything but happy life was disclosed by the discovery in 2005 of a cache of Eileen’s correspondence.76 It was, evidently, a short honeymoon. For some reason, the elusive Esperantist aunt Nellie had come to stay in the tiny cottage for an indefinite period (her partner, Eugene Adam, had belatedly married her, then gone round the world, never to be heard of again). There must have been a morning queue for the outside loo. The Orwells named a third goat after her.

  George, Eileen’s letters reveal, made it clear that his work must never be interrupted – even by wedding bells. He ‘complained bitterly when we’d been married a week that he’d only done two good days’ work out of seven’. A disappointing kind of honeymoon. He was writing, over those two good days, one of the finest of his essays – on shooting the Burmese elephant. It was a major part of her dowry that Eileen had been to typing school and had worked as a secretary. Fair copies assisted his publication chances and yielded precious time to write.

  Wallington, as the year moved on, got worse. ‘I forgot to mention’, Eileen wrote to her friend Nora, ‘that he had his “bronchitis” for three weeks in July & that it rained every day for six weeks during the whole of which the kitchen was flooded & all the food went mouldy in a few hours.’ In November, as the nights drew in, she wrote to Nora again, explaining her silence:

  I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage . . . because we quarrelled so continuously & really bitterly that I thought I’d save time & just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished.

  D. J. Taylor, who has given these letters thought, says that ‘Eileen’s characteristic amalgam of irony and jauntiness is very difficult to separate out, but the air of exasperation is undisguised.’ One could put it more strongly. Eileen’s close friend Lydia Jackson did: ‘Eileen did all the work, prepared the meals, and served them and answered the shop bell when it rang.’

  Eventually, it seems, the ‘bitter’ quarrelling died down and the Orwells settled on an open marriage. His door would always be more open than hers. He would be unfaithful (or ‘faithful in his fashion’); she could (and apparently did) take occasional lovers. They would, whoever else was in their beds, be companionable and comradely, but not strict with each other’s private lives. Love, within those rules, was just about possible. The mutual tolerance verged, at times, on the bizarre: his asking her permission, for example, to enjoy a ‘young Arabian girl’ when they were in Morocco;77 or her going along with his outrageous suggestion, three years after marriage, that they set up a ménage à trois with the ever-elusive Brenda Salkeld, for whom he had a lifelong yearning.

  The basic emptiness in the marriage was that children were expected but never came. It left Eileen dangling, emptily. She must have wondered what life would have held for her if she’d gone on and submitted her thesis at UCL rather than submitting to housework at Wallington. But there were rewards. He was evolving fast as a writer and thinker. She had influence over that evolution, particularly the political writing. Her family affiliation to the ILP was clearer cut and of longer standing. Her literary training was also influential. To compare Orwell’s clumsy obituary essay on Kipling in 1936 with that published in Horizon six years later is to see how far he had come in literary criticism.

  Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson, and Humphry House, the three greatest Dickensians of the middle and late twentieth century, were Eileen’s contemporaries at Oxford, doing the same classes. Orwell went on to write what is rightly regarded as a classic essay on Dickens in 1940. This turn to literary and cultural studies (as in ‘Boys’ Weeklies’) is latent from his schoolboy enthusiasms as a reader, but the discourse in the years after 1936 is sharpened and, frankly, better. A string of literary critical works distinguishes his ‘great phase’ (as Crick calls it) – long pieces on Raffles and Henry Miller and a mass of book reviews. Their literary-critical sophistication owes something, surely, to his silent partner and night-time chats with her under the light of the tilly lamp in Wallington.

  Orwell’s blood-curdled ‘last words’ as he lay shot through the throat, mortally as he thought, fighting in Spain, were, ‘Tell Eileen I love her.’78 One believes him. He had good reason to love her.

  Catalonia: Blood and Excrement

  I don’t quite know in what year I first knew for certain that the present war was coming. After 1936, of course, the thing was obvious to anyone except an idiot.

  ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940)

  I believe a writer can only remain honest if he feels free from party labels.

  ‘Autobiographical Note’ (1942)

  Every man, according to Orwell, has a Quixote inside him. His going, five months after marriage, to fight in Spain is Orwell the ‘Don’, the knight of the rueful countenance, lance en levée. It was not duty; it was a quest. What, though, did he think he could achieve? A cool look, in early 1937, would have confirmed the struggle was on the way to being won and lost, with Franco bombarding Madrid with German shells, corroding the besieged capital inwardly with his fifth column, and ‘non intervention’ starving the Republicans of any long-term chance of defeating the Fascists. Why would a sickly, prematurely middle-aged man, with no more military expertise than he could recall from cadet drills with ancient muskets at Eton, throw himself into the cauldron? Other literary men (particularly the ‘pansy’ contingent Orwell calumniated) went into second-echelon ambulance or media work, very seldom where the bullets were flying.79 Henry Miller, whom Orwell admired and praised publicly for his je-m’en-foutisme, told him frankly, on a stopover in Paris on his way to the Spanish front, that he was an ‘idiot’. Fuck that for a game of soldiers. Orwell never quite respected Miller thereafter. Orwell’s last recorded words before leaving for Barcelona in December 1936 (aided on his way with a £50 ‘sub’ from Victor Gollancz, another £50 overdraft and what the pawnbroker gave him for the family silver) were more hopeful: ‘This Fascism. Somebody’s got to stop it.’

  Orwell’s vague account of how he got to Spain – not sure whether he wanted to be a journalist or ‘fight’ (and under which factional flag – Communist, Trade Union or Anarchist?) – is blurry. Blurry too is his assertion that he accidentally became a POUM rifleman (without, for a disconcertingly long time, any rifle to put on his shoulder). One must suspect that he knew from the start where he was going, as a salmon knows it must swim upriver. POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) was Trotsky-sympathizing, loosely aligned with the local anarchist forces, but not over-strong on unificación.

  The anarchists were passionately regional. Orwell’s war memoir would be called Homage to Catalonia, not ‘Homage to Spain’. They were different things. Catalonia had always had differences with Madrid. POUM had ‘fraternal’ links with the British ILP, to which Orwell was loosely loyal in these years. The ILP was recruiting UK volunteers for the POUM in November 1936. It would take only hale, unmarried men, of whom it sent out a vanguard of 25 on 8 January 1937. Orwell, neither hale nor unmarried, had made his own way a fortnight earlier. The ILP intended to send out a larger contingent, but in January the British Government announced it would prose
cute anyone going to fight in Spain (journalists were permitted). Britain, as always, was skittish about its nationals fighting under foreign flags.

  It was murky, but Orwell got there. As do the salmon. It is feasible that Eileen, more dedicated to the ILP than he was, and with stronger links within it, was a driving force in her husband’s ill-advised Spanish quixotism. Having corrected the proofs of The Road to Wigan Pier, she left to join George as soon as British, French and Spanish bureaucracy permitted. Mrs Quixote made it to Barcelona in February. While the Orwells were away it was arranged that Nellie would take care of The Stores house, garden and animal stock. Doubtless she crooned to the goats in Esperanto as she milked them. ‘Estu singardaj bonaj kaprinoj’ (was it, when Nellie was there, Esperanto over the teacups? It would be quaint to think so). The shop was closed, its till never to ring again. It was killed by vans delivering fresher produce, cheaper, and at the door of Wallington customers.

  Eileen would, she said, serve Franco as his personal manicurist if only it got her to Spain. As later events proved, there was a useful touch of Mata Hari in her personality. She got herself a post in the Barcelona office of the ILP. Her sister-in-law Gwen came out a little later, bringing supplies and medical expertise for POUM in her surgeon husband’s limousine. In March Eileen wangled a visit to the Huesca Front during an actual exchange of fire. ‘I have never enjoyed anything more,’ she said. One deduces the O’Shaughnessys were ILP/POUM body and soul.

  POUM along with the Trade Unionist party, before 80,000 of their young men were sucked to the Aragon front, were a dominating presence in Barcelona in 1936. The Spanish people’s (not the Spanish state’s) resistance against Franco’s invasion, village by village, fighting to the death town by town, had been inflammatory. Barcelona’s was a truly ‘proletarian’ resistance, enthused Trotsky. His praise (despite his later disowning POUM) was a death warrant. The founder of POUM, Andreu Nin, had once been Trotsky’s secretary. Moscow would eliminate Trotsky and POUM in their own good time. In Barcelona the people had opted for revolution, rejecting any restoration of the Republican status quo ante with all its feudal nonsense. When Orwell arrived, the largest anarchist experiment in history was being run. His euphoric description of Barcelona in December 1936 bears repeating:

  It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; every church had been gutted and its images burnt. . . . Every shop and café had an inscription saying it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal . . . In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.

  Behind the scenes the anarchists were less publicly ‘ceasing the existence’ of factory owners and any high-bourgeois Barcelonans beyond re-education. Bloodily. The Ritz became a hospital, grand hotels workers’ kitchens. Prostitutes were ‘liberated’ into a more comradely relationship with their clients; marriage was abolished in favour of unbinding partnership. In some places money was abolished, to be replaced by barter. How many silk stockings the famed ladies of Las Ramblas charged for their services is unrecorded. It was social quixotism run mad. Orwell’s enduring fame is as a dystopian writer. Barcelona in January 1937 is a rare glimpse of the Orwellian utopia. His land of milk and honey. And blood. And absurdity. It was an enduring dream. Even when forced to flee Spain, socialist murderers at his heels, in June 1937, he could write to Connolly, ‘I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.’ One recalls Anne Frank’s ‘In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.’ One should doubt both of them.

  POUM was an army without ranks, uniform or pay differentials. Or, more importantly, the weaponry of modern war or any skill in using it. They had no serviceable heavy artillery, no tanks and only one aeroplane, permanently grounded. A symbol. There was a chronic shortage of bayonets, which meant hand-to-hand trench fighting had to be done, disadvantageously, with dagger or cosh. What armament came to the Republican side went to the Communist Republicans, Moscow’s clients. But morale, POUM believed, could conquer all. The rifle Orwell eventually ended up with was a forty-year-old, ill-maintained Mauser. There were persistent problems with calibres and rusted rifling. A lot of the ammunition was ‘re-cartridged’, and unreliable. The first shot Orwell ever heard fired in anger was a dud. You were as likely to be killed by your rifle backfiring in your face as by a Fascist bullet. Assuming, that is, your homemade POUM hand grenade hadn’t killed you first. ‘Drill’ and ‘musketry’ skills (‘commands’?) were regarded as bourgeois. The truth was that you could no more run a modern army on anarchist principles than you could a brothel.

  POUM was organized in ‘militias’ – military communes. They were called ‘centuras’ – eighty men (despite the name) and company strength. There was no internal structure of unit (squad/platoon/company). Orwell’s centura was in the Lenin Division, housed in the Lenin Barracks. It was a former stables, a grand building, still smelling of oats and horse piss – smells to Orwell’s taste. His comrades’ anarchic defecations and urinations wherever there was a quiet corner, less so. It was, he concluded sadly, an army of ‘eager children’. Orwell was lucky in that the leader of his centura was an adult called Georges Kopp – Belgian (perhaps), vastly corpulent, rootlessly cosmopolitan, an inveterate liar, charming and an unscrupulous womanizer. Kopp claimed to be an old warhorse. In fact he had no military background at all. He was a world-class bluffer.

  Orwell picked up sufficient Catalan and Spanish with the ease with which he picked up any language. He was promoted, first to corporal and, by the end, after the rank had been restored, to lieutenant. After interminable delay his centura was sent upline to the Aragon front to be met by (for the first time in Orwell’s life) the smell of war: ‘a smell of excrement and decaying food’. Oddly, given the bloodiness, winter cold, lice, scampering rats and palpable, long-term damage to his lungs, Orwell found active service to be something of a tonic. As Eileen observed, with her usual wry sting in the tail: ‘The Spanish government feeds George on bread without butter and “rather rough food” and has arranged that he doesn’t sleep at all, so he has no anxieties.’80 About his wife, for example. He even put up with having to shave and brush his teeth in wine. All for twopence (10 pesetas) a day. Pneumonia was, as ever, his real enemy. But even that seemed to be keeping its distance. The half-dozen full-life biographers have done a thorough job in chronicling Orwell’s brief military career. He himself is typically dismissive: ‘No aeroplane ever dropped a bomb anywhere near me, I do not think a shell exploded within 50 yards of me, and I was only in hand-to-hand fighting once (once is once too often I may say).’

  The government-controlled high command had fears about POUM. Its manpower was placed in quiet sectors with no responsibility but to be there with a vague ‘¡ No pasarán!’ command. Besieged Madrid was the fulcrum. There was, history has revealed, an ulterior motive. Away from Barcelona, in distant trenches, the shock troops of anarchy were out of play. Castilian Madrid has never trusted Catalonia, with its separate language and culture and its breakaway tendencies. Certainly not with large numbers of armed, chauvinistic, anarchists walking ‘their’ streets thinking of independence.

  Orwell had two spells at the front. It was mainly ‘waiting’ in entrenched positions. In winter the excrement-flavoured mud froze, in spring it melted, in early summer it stank. So feeble was their weaponry, and so thin was the defensive line extended, that a troop of boy scouts with airguns could have overrun them, Orwell thought. There was some trench fighting and night patrols for the domination of no-man’s-land. Orwell may have killed a Nationalist ‘bastard’ o
r two with a lucky grenade. He was frightening to friend and foe, comrades testified, when his blood was up. He did not, he piously records, snipe a Fascist he spied crapping (assuming his aim and decrepit Mauser were up to a shot across 300 yards).

  There was a spell of leave in Barcelona, in late April/early May. It was dispiriting. The great anarchist experiment was being methodically rolled back in the absence of the centuras: waiters were taking tips again, prostitutes plying for trade for money, not soap, limousines cruising like sharks to luxurious places. The Ritz was ritzy again. Army ranks had been restored – even in the anarchist brigades. Militias were broken up. Auguries were bad for POUM. The idea of a ‘popular front’, ‘all together comrades!’, was the order of the day. In Orwell’s jaundiced view, a combination of POUM and Moscow had ‘about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity’.81 Behind the scenes a Stalinist purge was being mounted. Lists were being drawn up; the Orwells’ names were on them. Moscow had infiltrated a spy (aptly named David Crook) into POUM. His reports identified the Orwells as ‘rabidly Trotskyist’.82 Crook also reported (accurately) that Eileen was Kopp’s secret lover. That fact would be useful when Kopp and the unwitting cuckold were interrogated. (‘She betrayed you, Eric . . .’).