Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  So what was Orwell doing? He was not ordaining that ‘reduction’, but language appropriate to situation. One wishes that, as with Empson, he had sat at a desk alongside Bertolt Brecht. On his desk Brecht had a child’s toy donkey with a placard around its neck that read, ‘I too must understand.’ Over his desk was a ceiling joist, on which Brecht had written ‘Truth is Concrete’. In the windowpane of his study Orwell, had he been as witty as Brecht (which he wasn’t), might have scrawled, ‘Prose is transparent.’ Enough said.

  Smell: Conclusions

  Bookstink

  In the years between 1943 and 1946 Orwell came to some conclusions about how nasal hyperaesthesia like his interacted with the creative mind. His conclusions are spelled out in three works: ‘Politics vs. Literature – An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels’ (1946); ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali’ (1944); and, pre-eminently, Animal Farm (1945).

  Dalí

  For a man as cultivated as he, Orwell wrote very little on pictorial art. Excepting a piece on Donald McGill, his one extended cogitation on the subject is his essay on The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, a book not generally available in Britain in 1944 and which some bookshops would have been nervous about stocking. Orwell notes, fascinatedly, such Dalí-esque outrages on decency as:

  When he is about five he gets hold of a wounded bat which he puts into a tin pail. Next morning he finds that the bat is almost dead and is covered with ants which are devouring it. He puts it in his mouth, ants and all, and bites it almost in half.

  This, one recalls, is the Orwell who once, when a wasp was attracted by the jam on his plate (afternoon tea was an important ritual for Orwell), cut the insect in two and then watched with cold fascination as the front half of the wasp kept guzzling, and jam was excreted in a steady stream at its severed waist-pipe. (Orwell ruminatively munched his toast at the time, one surmises, for more orthodox excretion.) It was, he thought, an apt metaphor for the British ruling classes who, as Lenin said, would sell you the rope to hang themselves with.

  As the twig is bent, so the tree is shaped. Very bent in the Spaniard’s case. Sexual perversity and necrophilia are constants in his artistic and personal career. There is, Orwell notes:

  a well-marked excretory motif as well. In his painting, Le Jeu Lugubre, he says, ‘the drawers bespattered with excrement were painted with such minute and realistic complacency that the whole little Surrealist group was anguished by the question: Is he coprophagic or not?’

  One might as well ask if the Pope is Catholic. Orwell concludes, magisterially:

  It is a book that stinks. If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would – a thought that might please Dali, who before wooing his future wife for the first time rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat’s dung boiled up in fish glue.

  Dalí’s obsession with extreme smell is beyond the needs of even surrealism. But it fascinates. Particularly someone, like Orwell, who was never averse to having a fleck or two of goat dung on his shoes and was a passionate, hands-on angler. Was he too a coprophage?

  Swift

  Swift’s morbid obsession with smell reaches its mad crisis point in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels. There has been a long build-up – the hero’s swooning away at the unperfumed ‘natural smell’ of the vast armpits of the Brobdingnagian ladies, for example – an image Dalí would have relished. In Houyhnhnmland the humanoid Yahoo population lives in stink ‘somewhat between a weasel and a fox, but much more disagreeable’ (Orwell must have admired the fine discrimination of animal scent Swift makes). Gulliver, loathe them as he does, cannot separate himself biologically from his own species. His kinship is proven whenever he excretes, urinates or farts (as the adult does, on average, fourteen times a day). In hating the Yahoo, Gulliver hates Gulliver. He finds refuge from himself in the company of the calm, ‘rational’ horses (Swift, whose irony is wholly unstable at this stage of the fable, is thought to be attacking Deism, for its objectionably bloodless religiosity). Horse dung is tolerable. The Houyhnhnm pelts give off a sweet smell, as does their breath.

  When he is rescued by the kindly Portuguese captain, Gulliver recoils at the Yahoo stench of the man, and can only make the voyage back to his home country (Yahooland) towed behind the ship in a lifeboat. Smell has alienated him from his own kind and from himself. There is no refuge in teeming Yahoo-reeking London:

  During the first year, I could not endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was intolerable; much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room . . . The first money I laid out was to buy two young stone-horses, which I keep in a good stable; and next to them, the groom is my greatest favourite, for I feel my spirits revived by the smell he contracts in the stable.

  The Swiftian depiction of the human condition is diseased, Orwell grants. But it’s a disease he (Orwell) understands. Better than most, probably.

  Were his own years’ long retreats to Wallington and his flight to Jura the equivalent to Gulliver’s retreat to his sweet-smelling stable? Orwell’s conclusion about fellow-suffering Swift contrives to be both severe and fraternal:

  Swift is a diseased writer. He remains permanently in a depressed mood which in most people is only intermittent, rather as though someone suffering from jaundice or the after-effects of influenza should have the energy to write books. But we all know that mood, and something in us responds to the expression of it.

  Orwell was blessed, or cursed, to ‘know it’ better than most of Yahoo-kind.

  Animal Farm

  The only hope is to have a home with a few animals in some place not worth a bomb.

  ORWELL, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki

  I like animals.

  GEORGE ORWELL

  One can easily overlook a consistent feature in Orwell’s life – his desire to be a smallholding farmer of an old-fashioned, preagroindustry kind. It had its surreal aspects: keeping chickens out the back in a wartime London flat, for example (feeding them at daybreak was a chore Eileen hated); or going to Marrakesh to recover from TB and believing that a couple of goats in the yard would help.

  Orwell’s instinctive desire for the company and, clearly, the smell of farmyard animals is as pronounced an element in his makeup as his love of coarse fishing. He found in livestock, as in angling, upliftingly natural smells. It was, to adapt a Lawrence slogan, on the side of life. Human smells, so antisocial in ‘company’, could merge naturally with those of the land and livestock. Washing facilities were never good anywhere Orwell lived (in Wallington and Jura particularly) with animals outside. He smelled along with them. It somewhat redeemed the Yahoo in him, like Gulliver in his stable. Anyone who has gone into a stable, or cow byre, in the still of a warm summer night will know the strange comfort they offer. His sexual violence, triggered uncontrollably by the smells of nature (preferably heath, woodland or riverside in spring or high summer), was probably part of the same psycho-pathology. Bowker notes the vein of sadism in Orwell shooting animals and, sometimes dramatically, disembowelling them.107 He was not the kind of angler who sportingly threw his catch back.

  To put it at its simplest, old-fashioned farms – a foundation of the England Orwell loved and was prepared to die for – are smelly places: sweat, animal breath and excrement. But it is an ensemble sweet to the nose. And the excrement returns to the earth as fertilizer to make the most wholesome of smells – wild flowers and cornfields.

  Animal Farm began, like the first book of Gulliver’s Travels, as a tract with a political intent. Fables, like pamphlets and even ‘fairy stories’ (Orwell’s initial subtitle), can have political potency out of all proportion to their number of words or their verbal complexity. Farmer Jones’s Manor Farm is an Orwellian Lilliput satirizing the absurd optimisms of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and their prompt corruption by a new, more ruthless power elite. The farm was once owned by aristocrats – lords of the manor. Before the ‘Rebellion’ (the other R-word is avo
ided) it is the property of a gentleman farmer – in fact a drunken, philistine brute.

  The clever pigs make the political analysis that the animals slave, and are ‘harvested’, for the benefit of their owner. What right has he to exploit them, their labour, and their very flesh? The pigs mastermind a successful uprising. The animals take over the farm. Power then has its universal effect. Having ruthlessly secured their leadership, the pigs install a totalitarian state, complete with canine police, thought control, liquidation and purge. They reserve for themselves creature comfort and owners’ privileges. They are probably putting their piglets down for Eton. For the lower animals, life is, if anything, harder than it was under Jones:

  But if there were hardships to be borne, they were partly offset by the fact that life nowadays had a greater dignity than it had had before. There were more songs, more speeches, more processions. Napoleon had commanded that once a week there should be held something called a Spontaneous Demonstration, the object of which was to celebrate the struggles and triumphs of Animal Farm.

  In the fable’s controversial conclusion the pigs – now owners of a highly profitable enterprise (for them and the dogs) – make peace with their ‘fellow’ human farmers. The animals look, in perplexity, through the windows of the farmhouse: ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’ But the pigs’ farm, of course, is infinitely worse than Mr Jones’s. It will never be overthrown. The future? A pig’s trotter, stamping on the animals’ faces for ever.

  Like all the best parables (Christ’s par excellence) Animal Farm is enigmatic. Is Orwell thinking only about Stalinist Russia and the collective farming debacle? Or is it a statement about human society everywhere and at all times? Socialists, particularly, object to Orwell’s depiction of the working classes as irredeemably ‘lower’ animals. Their ‘betters’ are humans or porcine humanoids. Orwell, said Empson, his closest friend as he was composing Animal Farm, would give comfort to ‘evil stinking Tories’. The pig class. Within Orwell’s animal kingdom there is no equality and no potential for class aspiration among the lower orders: the sheep will always bray slogans mindlessly, the chickens will always run round in circles clucking senselessly, the horses (principally Boxer) will always work brainlessly. Only the pigs have higher mentality and a capacity to change, but into what? So many Joneses. Is the subtext that Trotsky and his followers (depicted as the assassinated Snowball) would have done better by the Russian people than Stalin? Via the ILP, the only party he ever belonged to, Orwell had a soft spot for Trotsky – although Emmanuel Goldstein, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is not a friendly depiction.108

  What is clear is that, as usual, Orwell was out of step with the times – and, perhaps, with himself. The core elements had formed embryonically in his mind after Barcelona. It was in 1936, he said, that he became a political animal. It is plausibly suggested Eileen may have had a co-authorial influence. The suspicion is that Mrs Orwell was always less wavering in her Trotskyist-ILP doctrine. Lettice Cooper, who shared a wartime office with her, recalled Eileen describing every morning how George tested the previous day’s writing on her after she got home from work. It would be nice to think that Eileen left her mark. For most of her life, as Mrs George Orwell, she was invisible.

  A draft was finished in the summer of 1944 and submitted (at his request) to Victor Gollancz, who was still sufficiently a Stalinist to reject it by return of post. Other publishers were reluctant, post-Stalingrad, to launch something so virulently anti-Soviet. The British loved ‘Uncle Joe’. He was, as Churchill put it, tearing the guts out of the Nazi empire while the Allies were dickering about a second front. T. S. Eliot, at Faber, praised the limpid prose but felt in his usual oblique way that, since the pigs were the most intelligent beasts, they should indeed run things. What the farm needed was more benign piggery. It rhymes with Whiggery. Five American publishers were uninterested. Too English. Where were the McCormick combine harvesters? And a ‘fairy story’? Please. In the home market Orwell had run, yet again, into the peculiar soft censorship that had stifled Homage to Catalonia in the womb. As he had then, he fell back on Fred Warburg: he was never Orwell’s first choice, but always his most enterprising publisher. He saw a lot of money in the book.

  Animal Farm had to await the end of the hot war and the onset of the cold war (a term Orwell invented). It was finally published in August 1945, as the bells were ringing for VJ day. Once it was on the market money flooded in. So much so that within a few months Orwell had to incorporate himself to protect his income from the then punitive rates of British tax. George Orwell was now a limited company. That, too, was a fable. He put Richard down for Eton. If he was on a sinking ship he might as well go down first class.109

  Animal Farm was not merely a fable: it was destined to become a pre-emptive weapon in the Cold War and the Tory Party arsenal, something Orwell never intended. The book had positively sinister admirers. It was serialized by the CIA in Der Monat, its German newspaper in occupied Germany. J. Edgar Hoover himself was solicited for an endorsement. Over the following years, Animal Farm was disseminated behind the Iron Curtain as black propaganda. Successfully.

  In her study of the CIA’s Cold War culture war, Frances Stonor Saunders describes how the CIA covertly acquired the subsidiary rights from Sonia Orwell.110 Rather touchingly, what softened her up was the meeting the cunning Americans arranged with her idol, Clark Gable. The film of the book was produced in England and released in 1954, the ending radically changed to predict the eventual overthrow of swine-human totalitarianism by the unquenchable forces of Western democracy. It was nonsensically non-Orwellian, ranking with Nahum Tate’s happy ending of King Lear.

  Farmer

  A good deal of rain.

  ORWELL, in his Jura diary

  Orwell’s last years were, in two ways, his most fulfilled. He was a sage. He was listened to. David Astor had been primarily responsible for spring-boarding him to his eminence as a political commentator. And, alongside this new eminence, he managed to be what he seems most to have more humbly wanted to be.

  In previous years it amused him to describe himself, on supererogatory forms, as ‘Eric Blair: grocer’. He could as justifiably, in his last years, have described himself as ‘George Orwell: farmer’. This came about through Astor, who owned a chunk of a Hebridean island, Jura. He suggested his friend holiday there. Good fishing, he was told. Another Etonian, Robin Fletcher (Jura’s ‘Laird’), had a run-down property, Barnhill, at the remote end of the island. Barnhill would, once licked into shape, be a real farm with fields, cows, pigs, a horse (for Orwell the iconic agrarian thing) and poultry. Orwell leased it at a peppercorn rate, and prepared to invest in it. He was, for the first time in his life, in good shape financially: in the thousand-a-year class. The ever-increasing revenue from Animal Farm enabled him to resign from Tribune and begin his own animal farm. Wallington, its modest precursor, was wound up.

  Since Orwell ‘knew’ nuclear war was coming, Jura would be one of the best bomb and fall-out shelters in the UK, principally for little Richard. Barnhill was, however, no sanatorium for a man with collapsing lungs. There was no electricity, mains water or paved road. And civilization (shops, doctors, telephones) was twenty miles away. Although the Gulf Stream keeps the Hebrides warmer than London, summers are damp and cool. He recruited the ever-available Avril to keep the house straight and look after Richard. The canteen work she had done during the war had come to an end. To do the heavy work on the farm there was a local man, Bill Dunn, a war veteran, who would eventually marry Avril in 1951. Richard Rees, a friend to the end, gave the Dunns (and their adoptive Richard) enough money to set up their own farm.

  The End

  The tragedy of Orwell’s life was that when at last he achieved fame and success he was a dying man and knew it. He had fame and was too ill to leave his room, money and nothing to spend it on.

  CYRIL CONNOLLY (1961)r />
  Orwell was in a four-horse race. He had to get Barnhill in shape; write the ‘dystopian’ novel Warburg was champing for; find a wife; and get those three things done before the final collapse of his lungs. He now, at last, accepted that he was tubercular.111 He was still smoking heavily. Five-year-old Richard found one of his ‘disgusting old pipes’ and stuffed it with one of the many mountains of his father’s dog-ends. Then the little fellow coolly asked for a light: ‘What amazed me was that nobody seemed to notice what I was doing! The result was inevitable, I turned green and gave up smoking until I got to the senior school twelve years later.’112 It was one of the three things Richard remembers from his Jura years. Would that his father had also given up smoking.