Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  Orwell had been making tentative moves to get transferred to besieged Madrid with the International Brigades. It came to nothing. He was lucky it did – the brigades were in the habit of covertly shooting nuisances. The writer John Cornford, whom Orwell admired, transferred himself from POUM to the IB and was, rumour had it, shot in the back, ‘in action’. Luckier still, Orwell’s active service came to an end days after he returned to the front for the second time. His 1.9-m (6 ft 3 in.) frame never fitted trenches dug for diminutive Catalans, any more than, in death, his abnormally long coffin fitted his grave. He was reckless about exposing his head above the parapet. A sharpeyed Nationalist sniper, with a much better rifle than Orwell’s, took a pot shot and got him in the throat. ‘The sand bags in front of me receded into immense distance,’ Orwell recalled. He felt a mild resentment at losing a life he suddenly realized he had rather enjoyed. It was assumed, as he himself assumed, that he was a goner. But he survived by a lucky millimetre, and by the actions of a comrade, Harry Milton, who staunched the flow of blood with his bare hands.

  Orwell was invalided back to Barcelona – and more danger. The purge of anarchism and POUM was now in full ruthless sway. These were the ironically termed ‘May Days’. POUM had been declared an illegal organization. They were neo-Fascist pests to be exterminated. The ‘necessary murders’ (Auden’s phrase, which always niggled Orwell) were cheered on by Harry Pollitt and his hacks of ‘international socialism’. There were reports of IB hardliners on the rampage killing more Trotskyists than Fascists, assuming the former to be the more fascistic. Paranoia ruled. By now Orwell had his discharge papers – necessary lest he be proscribed as a deserter and shot out of hand. The doctors certified him officially ‘useless’. It was a Blighty wound – but could he get back to Blighty? Eileen proved herself resourceful in throwing the police off his tracks. But the May Days, London friends would later testify, took years off her. She chain-smoked her way to an early grave, after Spain. George used his down-and-out skills to melt into the Barcelona streets. By now he looked Catalan and could sound like one.

  The POUM founder and leader, Andreu Nin, was arrested and tortured. One version of events suggests that he was flayed alive to make him confess to ulterior Fascist motives. Kopp was arrested, interrogated, tortured and starved. He survived (he survived everything), and was discharged in December, 45 kg (7 stone) lighter. Orwell, skinny as Rocinante and badly wounded, would have gone in days. Kopp may well have named names. If you did you were more useful alive than dead for propaganda purposes. Eileen took risks to see her lover, Kopp, in prison, for what she assumed was the last time. It wasn’t, it would transpire. He bobbed back up like a cork. Captain Georges Kopp lived on to fight in the Second World War, serve with the Resistance in France and spend his last days in England to die a peaceful death – by now married to one of Orwell’s cousins.

  Not all POUM veterans were as lucky as Kopp and the Orwells. In the ranks, George and Georges had befriended a young Glaswegian comrade in their centura, Bob Smillie. He was the namesake grandson of the Clyde working-class hero Robert Smillie, a miners’ leader. Bob had given up his university studies to fight in Spain. He was arrested and, it is plausibly suspected, kicked to death by the ‘comrades’ he’d given up everything to fight alongside. He reportedly refused to sign incriminating confessions and betrayals. The details, acquired by fellow prisoner Kopp from stolen files (and later passed on to Orwell), are sickening. After his socialist comrades had done with him his intestines were hanging outside his ruptured stomach. The boots had been aimed there because he was suffering from acute appendicitis, and the pain was therefore more acute. Bob Smillie’s ‘evil and meaningless death’ was, for Orwell, the last straw. The Orwells escaped, duping, dodging and bribing their way back across the French frontier as well-off tourists. Orwell carried a volume of Wordsworth’s poems as part of their disguise. It was the narrowest of escapes, but they made it. Thus ended what Robert Colls calls the ‘Orwellian small footnote to the history of the Spanish Civil War’.83

  Pariah

  Gollancz is of course part of the Communism-racket.

  ORWELL, to Rayner Heppenstall (July 1937)

  When he returned to England, there was a concerted attempt by ‘fellow socialists’ to render George Orwell a non-author. Not with an ice pick in the back of the neck but by covert denunciation, ostracism and the peculiarly effective mechanisms of English ‘soft censorship’. He would encounter it again, with Animal Farm.

  A degree of Orwellian eccentricity – ‘crankiness’ – had been tolerated. Socialism was a big tent. It became ‘heretical’ with The Road to Wigan Pier, when he threw back the accusation that it was the communists, not George Orwell, who were ‘cranky’. After some nervous toe-dipping (Orwell was obstinately unwilling to ‘revise’), Gollancz had taken the plunge and published the book in the Left Book Club. It sold in the orange club livery like hot cakes, as the subscribers’ half-crown offering for March 1937; 45,000 flew out, hot off the press. This despite Gollancz prefacing the volume (‘his’ volume) with ‘just a hint’ (in fact 5,000 words of mealy-mouthed blather) as to how ‘his’ members should read the book. They must bear in mind, members were solemnly warned, that Mr Orwell was not one of them but a ‘member of the middle class’. LBC’s membership was, in point of fact, not overwhelmingly from the horny-handed sons of toil smudging the pages of their treasured volumes with sooty fingers. Schoolteachers predominated. How does Orwell’s tirade against ‘Socialists’ go in The Road to Wigan Pier? ‘One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.’ ‘LBC subscribers’ could be added to the list of the faithfully gathered and sandalled under the Gollancz-LBC banner. And imprint.

  Nor was Orwell in possession of quite enough ‘middle-class’ loot to tuck in with the publisher at his daily lunches at the Savoy Grill, meditating how revolution could be achieved without destroying the omelette Arnold Bennett. Orwell, as Peter Davison records, earned a grand (if that’s the word) total of £246 in 1935. ‘Mr Orwell’ was still a victim of his ‘public school’ background, lamented Gollancz (himself St Paul’s, Oxford, family wealth from the wholesale jewel business). The foci of Gollancz’s ‘hints’ are, inevitably, Orwell’s comments on working-class ‘smell’ and the ‘odd’ allegation of socialist crankiness. It is curious too, adds Gollancz, that he refers to ‘Russian commissars as “half-gramophones, half-gangsters”.’ How on earth could he have come to that conclusion?

  Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (odd they kept the ‘Great’), reviewed the book in the Daily Worker. No ‘hints’ for Harry (as Gollancz addressed him in letters about Homage to Catalonia; his author was ‘Dear Orwell’). It was hobnails all the way:

  Here is George Orwell, a disillusioned little middle-class boy who, seeing through imperialism, decided to discover what Socialism has to offer . . . a late imperialist policeman . . . I gather that the chief thing that worries Mr Orwell is the ‘smell’ of the working class.

  Readers were urged to picture Mr Orwell in full IPS uniform – topi helmet, jingling spurs and all, rather than bundled in rags, against the freezing cold, dodging bullets in the Spanish trenches. And, of course, stinking to high heaven.

  Pollitt regarded the 1936 Moscow Trials, the highpoint of Stalin’s psychotic purge, as ‘a new triumph in the history of progress’. Had the Orwells, whose names were inscribed as ‘rabid Trotskyists’ on Party lists after the May Day purge, been brought to trial in Barcelona and shot, that would have been another triumph to be notched up in the Daily Worker.

  Harold Laski, one of the LSE’s ‘sleek’ professoriate, reviewed The Road to Wigan Pier with suave savagery and total dishonesty. Laski (with Gollancz and John Strachey) was one of the three paid ‘selectors’ of books on the LBC list. He was in de-sel
ection mood. The author of The Road to Wigan Pier, its co-publisher concluded, was the kind of socialist who is ‘not prepared to pay the price of socialism’. A bullet through the throat was too small a price. Laski himself was born into a family of rich cotton merchants (enriched by Indian exploitation). He lived, well above the level of his LSE salary, in a mansion in Kensington and enjoyed his feted trips to Moscow. He too had cheered on the Moscow show trials as not purge but purification. He is credited with the moral equation: ‘Basically I did not observe much difference between the general character of a trial in Russia and in this country.’ He was personally reassured, in a private conversation with Stalin, no less, that, when the Soviet Union took over Western Europe, Laski’s ‘British Socialism’ would be allowed to keep its own time-honoured privileges. Kensington, not Siberia. Laski, apparently, believed Stalin. Both Laski and Gollancz went on to suffer severe nervous breakdowns during the Second World War, under the pressure of doublethinking their way through the Russo-German pact. The price of orthodox socialism was indeed high.

  In his essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’, Orwell hauls Laski over the coals as a virtuoso of the gramophonic-megaphonic style. The example he cites is one of the few passages of Laski that are still read. And this, of course, is the crux. Despite the anathemas, which continue to the present day, Orwell enjoys a mass readership, still growing ever more massively. Orwell’s inextinguishability puts his socialist critics in a quandary. The masses, with their perpetual Orwellian infatuation, are either congenitally stupid (so many ‘Boxers’) or wholly incorrigible – class enemies to their own class. Whither socialism with incorrigible masses? Ideally, to borrow Bertolt Brecht’s joke, the people should be dismissed and a new people appointed. There is no mechanism in the LSE for doing that. Stalin had one.

  Soft Suppression

  Was it really 700 . . . it struck me that it may have been a typist’s error.

  ORWELL, on getting the first sales returns for Homage to Catalonia

  On New Year’s Day 1938 (holidays seem to have been little celebrated at Wallington) Eileen wrote in a letter that George was ‘just finishing the book about it [Homage to Catalonia] and always having to speak about it’. If the English literary establishment had had its way, he would have been speaking to himself. The book was rejected, sight unseen, by Gollancz and Laski. Associated articles (one entitled ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’) were turned down by the New Statesman, the country’s leading socialist opinion-former. Beans were not to be spilled. Orwell came to loathe the very sight of the Statesman’s editor, Kingsley Martin. He would move tables so as not to see him lunching at the same restaurant. If socialism had a bad smell, Martin, parlour Bolshy, was that smell incarnate.

  The book was taken on by Fred Warburg, a long-time ILP supporter, through the good offices of ILP stalwart Fenner Brockway. It was brought out in a small edition, in April 1938, and sold, in three years, fewer than a thousand copies – a fiftieth of what The Road to Wigan Pier had sold. It was literary anoxia. Warburg would later do well by Orwell – but not with Homage to Catalonia. A pamphlet he wrote on ‘Socialism and War’ was submitted to the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. Bloomsbury, it transpired, did not want George Orwell either. The typescript is lost. If, as has been claimed, Orwell raised political writing to an art, that art would have to find an outlet in the (few) organs of higher journalism whose doors were open to him. Pre-eminently those connected to his pals from school days – Cyril Connolly, his backer Peter Watson and David Astor. Etonians all.

  Childish Socialism

  Dickens had the most childish view of politics.

  ‘Notes on the Way’ (1940)

  Orwell thinks that commonsense is socialism.

  TERRY EAGLETON (2003)

  The word that attaches itself magnetically to Orwell’s political thought is ‘naive’. He belongs to that English socialist amateurism, immortalized by William Morris’s bluff outburst: ‘To speak quite frankly I do not know what Marx’s theory of value is, and I’m damned if I want to know.’ But he was still, Morris maintained, a communist – in his fashion.

  It encourages condescension. Richard Hoggart, for example, saw himself (with justice) as the heir to Orwell’s ‘honest Joe’ credentials after his star performance in the November 1960 Lady Chatterley trial. He (Hoggart) had worked on a building site for a while, in emulation of what Orwell had done in the London spikes and Kent hop fields. But, Hoggart laments, Orwell ‘never quite lost the habit of seeing the working classes through the cosy fug of an Edwardian music hall’. There are many fugs in Orwell’s descriptions of working-class life. Few are cosy, one would object.

  Orwell, concluded Stephen Spender in an obituary article, was ‘an Innocent, a kind of English Candide of the twentieth century’. He should, one infers, have stuck, like Voltaire’s hero, to his garden in Wallington. He was better with spuds and chickens than with the Marxist theory of value. Morris, on his part, was better with wallpaper. Spender’s ‘Innocent’ is foolish but has been much echoed. Orwell gave hostages to such condescension with remarks such as that about the awful May Days purge and massacre: ‘Throughout the fighting I never made the correct “analysis” of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of miles away.’ He did not, those with analytic minds believed, have the necessary intellectual equipment, any more than did Morris or Dickens. Strange that people still read the three of them.

  A book (Inside the Myth) was published in 1984 (meaningfully) to ‘de-mythologize’ Orwell. The ‘Honest George’ hoax, the editor proclaimed, must be ‘patiently deconstructed’. In the volume one finds a choric complaint from what he would have called ‘Bolshy Professors’ that Orwell simply did not understand the war he fought in. This by Robert Stradling, for example:

  His innocence [that word again] of Marxism-Leninism affected his judgment of all parties of the Spanish War, and since he was unaware of modern socialist dialectic and its tropes he was unable to examine them via a critical comparison with empirical reality.

  By that stern criterion, 99.99 per cent of combatants on every side in every war do not understand what they are prepared to die for. And what is the ‘empirical reality’ of war? As Orwell put it, ‘Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers.’ Trope that.

  Breakdown and Recovery

  The difficulty about Spain is that it still dominates our lives in a most unreasonable manner.

  EILEEN ORWELL (New Year 1938)

  It is a mistake to think that Spain was politically enlightening for George Orwell. On his return he suffered what would now be called PTSD. Every bush was a Fascist bear. The fascistic virus was entrenched, he firmly believed, in the working class (in their for-hire Muscovite Union leaders). ‘International Socialism’ was another name for it. And, of course, fascism with aristocratic gloss was always there in the English upper classes, those wrong members in charge of the great English family.

  The war was coming. Orwell foresaw it as a contest between British Fascism and German Fascism, with Russian Fascism waiting on the sidelines to see which victorious fascism to stab in the back. He would, he bleakly jested, complete his next novel in a concentration camp. Given the skills he had picked up in his down-and-out years, he might have survived better than most. Put bluntly, Orwell was temporarily maddened by Spain. And he felt ‘duped’. The wool had been pulled over his eyes. He joined the ILP in 1938, he said, because never again would he ‘be led up the garden path in the name of capitalist democracy’. It was ill conceived. The ILP was melting away and had become marshmallow pacifist and vague in its aims. Its raison d’être was that it was neither Communist nor Labour. Orwell’s membership lasted only a couple of years.

  On her side, Eileen was in emotional turmoil about Georges and George. In a New Year’s Day 1938 letter, she wrote:

  It was always understood that I wasn’t what they call in love with Georges – our association progressed in little leaps, each
leap immediately preceding some attack or operation in which he would almost inevitably be killed, but the last time I saw him he was in jail waiting, as we were both confident, to be shot, and I simply couldn’t explain to him again as a kind of farewell that he could never be a rival to George.84

  When, if ever, Orwell knew all the details of her adulteries is not clear.

  A breakdown in health, for both Orwells, was imminent. It was not long coming. No sooner had he got Homage off to Warburg than he was spitting buckets of blood. Eileen got her omnicompetent (‘something of a fascist’, she called him ironically) brother to examine him. And, more important, to take him in hand. It was not easy. A difficult patient, George regarded hospitals (ever since his Parisian experiences and before that the Saint Cyp’s ‘san’) as charnel houses. His nostrils could snuff the ‘sweetish faecal’ smell even in the best-regulated lazarets. His resistance, and pathological indifference (‘it always turns out to be not serious,’ he told Connolly airily), were, for once, overridden. ‘The condition’, ominously, was diagnosed as ‘tubercular’. As was usual, the truth wasn’t fully disclosed to the patient. It was revealed, apparently, to the carer, Eileen.