Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  Gauntness was the least of it. Orwell was prepared to undergo crucifying treatment for the lungs he was abusing. And still smoke – even after he was diagnosed, authoritatively, with TB, in 1947. Hilda Bastian notes that

  Orwell had been given treatments that were common for tuberculosis in Britain at that time: ‘collapse therapy’ and other painful surgical procedures to keep the lung disabled to ‘rest’ it, vitamins, fresh air, and being confined to bed. The hospital staff confiscated his typewriter and told him to stop working – but they didn’t seem to advise him to stop smoking!

  Why did Orwell smoke so self-destructively? He was addicted, of course. But also, I think, he smoked for tobacco’s deodorizing effect, and his morbid sensitivity about his own bodily smell. And, of course, because he loved the smell of tobacco.

  APPENDIX II

  The Smell Narrative of A Clergyman’s Daughter

  The opening paragraphs of A Clergyman’s Daughter describe Dorothy, the only child of the Reverend Charles Hare, Rector of St Athelstan’s, Knype Hill, Suffolk, waking at 5.30, saying her bedside prayers and taking her cold bath, to be ‘met downstairs by a chill morning smell of dust, damp plaster, and the fried dabs from yesterday’s supper’ (Knype Hill, like Southwold, is by the sea; fish smells abound).

  Having fetched her father his hot shaving water, Dorothy goes to church to prepare for ‘HC’, Holy Communion: ‘The church was very cold, with a scent of candle-wax and ancient dust’. There is only one communicant, as usual in mid-week, the decayed, well-off (but chronically mean) Miss Mayfill: ‘A faint scent radiated from her – an ethereal scent, analysable as eau-de-Cologne, mothballs, and a sub-flavour of gin’.

  Dorothy prepares her father’s cooked breakfast and is given a message about one of the parishioners’ children dying, of cholera: ‘Well, Miss, it’s turning quite black. And it’s had diarrhea something cruel.’ The rector is eating. He empties his mouth with an effort: ‘Must I have these disgusting details while I am eating my breakfast?’ he exclaims. Peaceful, post-prandial plumes of smoke float upwards from the rector’s pipe. He does not visit the dying child.

  Dorothy’s work day begins – ‘visiting’ parishioners. ‘She read chapters from the Gospels, and readjusted bandages on “bad legs”, and condoled with sufferers from morning-sickness; she played ride-a-cock-horse with sour-smelling children who grimed the bosom of her dress with their sticky little fingers.’ One visit in particular mines the pits of smell:

  Dorothy knocked at the Pithers’ badly fitting door, from beneath which a melancholy smell of boiled cabbage and dish-water was oozing. From long experience she knew and could taste in advance the individual smell of every cottage on her rounds. Some of their smells were peculiar in the extreme. For instance, there was the salty, feral smell that haunted the cottage of old Mr Tombs, an aged retired bookseller who lay in bed all day in a darkened room, with his long, dusty nose and pebble spectacles protruding from what appeared to be a fur rug of vast size and richness.

  The Pithers’ kitchen ‘was decently tidy, but oppressively hot, evil-smelling and saturated with ancient dust’. Dorothy goes to the bedroom to ‘anoint’ with Elliman’s embrocation Mrs Pithers’s ‘grey veined, flaccid’, naked legs: ‘The room reeked of urine and paregoric.’

  Having done the round of visits her father should have done, Dorothy, released into the fields, experiences nasal ecstasy. It is orgasmic:

  In Borlase the dairy-farmer’s meadow the red cows were grazing, knee-deep in shining seas of grass. The scent of cows, like a distillation of vanilla and fresh hay, floated into Dorothy’s nostrils.

  Dorothy pulled a frond of the fennel against her face and breathed in the strong sweet scent. Its richness overwhelmed her, almost dizzied her for a moment. She drank it in, filling her lungs with it. Lovely, lovely scent – scent of summer days, scent of childhood joys,

  The anthem to summer scent rises to a veritable rhapsody. But duty calls. Dorothy must go back to the church to make costumes, out of paper and glue, for the children’s annual play – on the execution of Charles I (Orwell had done something similar at the Hawthorns): ‘It was horribly hot in the conservatory, and there was a powerful smell of glue and the sour sweat of children.’

  After Warburton’s attempted rape Dorothy’s mind goes blank. She wakes up in a shabby London street eight days later, in ragged clothes. In ‘the strange, dirty sub-world into which she was instantly plunged’, she picks up with street companions, Nobby, Charlie and Flo. ‘Hunger and the soreness of her feet were her clearest memories of that time; and also the cold of the nights, and a peculiar, blowsy, witless feeling that came of sleeplessness and constant exposure to the air.’ The quartet decide to walk to the summer hop fields thirty miles away to find seasonal work: ‘After getting to Bromley they had “drummed up” on a horrible, paper-littered rubbish dump, reeking with the refuse of several slaughter-houses.’ By contrast, the hop fields and the camp around them are redolent with more salubrious odours:

  When the wind stirred [the hops] they shook forth a fresh, bitter scent of sulphur and cool beer. In each lane of bines a family of sunburnt people were shredding the hops into sacking bins, and singing as they worked; and presently a hooter sounded and they knocked off to boil cans of tea over crackling fires of hop bines. Dorothy envied them greatly. How happy they looked, sitting round the fires with their cans of tea and their hunks of bread and bacon, in the smell of hops and wood smoke! . . . the bitter, never-palling scent, like a wind from oceans of cool beer, flowed into your nostrils and refreshed you.

  The ‘unspeakable’ earth ‘latrine’ was not refreshing.

  When the picking season closes, at the end of September, Dorothy finds herself ‘dragged out and kissed by a young gypsy smelling of onions’ and thrown into a hop bin. It’s a ceremony, on the last day of picking. Back in London, virtually penniless, Dorothy takes refuge in a knocking shop, ‘Mary’s’. When she makes her way to her room, ‘A cold, evil smell met her.’ Soon she cannot afford to keep even Mary’s roof over her head. There follows a nightmarish interval sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square. For warmth, she and other vagrants huddle together on a bench:

  They pile themselves in a monstrous shapeless clot, men and women clinging indiscriminately together, like a bunch of toads at spawning time. There is a writhing movement as the heap settles down, and a sour stench of clothes diffuses itself.

  Mr Tallboys, a defrocked clergyman, rants about the noisome sulphur candles of Hell. ‘Don’t ole Daddy stink when you get up agen ’im?’ says Charlie. Next morning he is drawn to the nearby fishmongers: ‘Kippers! Perishing piles of ’em! I can smell ’em through the perishing glass . . . Got to fill up on the smell of ’em this morning.’ Smell is all they get.

  After ten days of the horrible communism of the Square, Dorothy is installed as a schoolteacher at the awful Ringwood House Academy for Girls, Brough Road, Southbridge (Hayes). She is rescued – gallantly – by Mr Warburton, who offers marriage, but she cannot surrender. It is the smell of sex:

  A wave of disgust and deadly fear went through her, and her entrails seemed to shrink and freeze. His thick male body was pressing her backwards and downwards . . . The harsh odour of maleness forced itself into her nostrils. She recoiled. Furry thighs of satyrs!

  What, then, remains for Dorothy at Knype Hill? ‘At that moment there stole into her nostrils a warm, evil smell, forgotten these eight months but unutterably familiar – the smell of glue . . . The smell of glue was the answer to her prayer.’

  APPENDIX III

  The Smell Narrative of The Road to Wigan Pier

  In the Brookers’ spare bedroom,

  All the windows were kept tight shut, with a red sandbag jammed in the bottom, and in the morning the room stank like a ferret’s cage. You did not notice it when you got up, but if you went out of the room and came back, the smell hit you in the face with a smack.

  Orwell comes downstairs the next morning: ‘The smell of the kitchen was drea
dful, but, as with that of the bedroom, you ceased to notice it after a while.’ He reflects:

  On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me. It was not only the dirt, the smells, and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay,

  He concludes: ‘It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.’

  In the mine, Orwell sniffs a more honest smell: ‘Everything is grey with shale dust; there is a dusty fiery smell which seems to be the same in all mines.’ There are rich smells associated with the home deliveries of coal: ‘Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs.’

  Orwell moves to Peel Street, where he finds: ‘Indescribable squalor in downstairs room and smell upstairs almost unbearable. Rent 5s. 7 ½d., including rates . . . the smell, the dominant and essential thing, is indescribable.’ He moves on to Sheffield:

  It has a population of half a million and it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of five hundred. And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas . . . Many of the people in Sheffield or Manchester, if they smelled the air along the Cornish cliffs, would probably declare that it had no taste in it.

  He indulges in further reflections, among them the most famous:

  But there was another and more serious difficulty. Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West. . . . It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: ‘The lower classes smell’.

  Orwell expatiates further, and further afield, on the theme:

  In the West we are divided from our fellows by our sense of smell. The working man is our master, inclined to rule us with an iron hand, but it cannot be denied that he stinks: none can wonder at it, for a bath in the dawn when you have to hurry to your work before the factory bell rings is no pleasant thing, nor ‘does heavy labour tend to sweetness’ . . .

  Meanwhile, ‘do’ the ‘lower classes’ smell? Of course, as a whole, they are dirtier than the upper classes.

  He thinks back to his experience in Burma: ‘Like most other races, the Burmese have a distinctive smell – I cannot describe it: it is a smell that makes one’s teeth tingle – but this smell never disgusted me.’ The British ‘Other Rank’ soldiers in Burma were particularly distasteful: ‘All I knew was that it was “lower-class” sweat that I was smelling, and the thought of it made me sick.’ He is similarly sickened by ‘women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come nocking towards the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat.’

  Orwell loves horses – workhorses, that is: ‘Horses, you see, belong to the vanished agricultural past, and all sentiment for the past carries with it a vague smell of heresy.’ That past, with all its hope, is gone – for ever, perhaps:

  Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship, and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.

  A good note on which to end this book.

  References

  Preface

  1 Daphne Patai, The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology (Amherst, MA, 1984), p. 91. The ‘sandal-wearers’ diatribe is from The Road to Wigan Pier, and is much quoted.

  2 Schiller’s need for rotten apples was confided by Goethe to his scribe, Johann Eckermann. Goethe added that he, himself, preferred fresh air. Everyone to their taste.

  3 Adrian Stokes, ‘Strong Smells and Polite Society’, Encounter (September 1961), pp. 50–56, www.unz.org.

  4 Alain Corbin is authoritative on this subject in The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1986).

  5 George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940).

  6 See Gilbert’s post ‘The Biochemistry of BO’, on his olfactory blog, www.firstnerve.com, 30 April 2009.

  7 George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’ (1946).

  8 I’m grateful to my colleague Neil Rennie for pointing out Milton’s nasal sensitivity. Once pointed out, Paradise Lost is read differently, I suspect.

  9 The medical term osphresiolagnia rolls off the tongue less easily.

  10 By Richard Ellmann, ed., Selected Letters of James Joyce (New York, 2003).

  11 Simon Chu and John J. Downes, ‘Odour-evoked Autobiographical Memories: Psychological Investigations of Proustian Phenomena’, http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org, 30 September 1999.

  12 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, as is the following quotation with its curdled disgust for innocent Welwyn Garden City and his warm reference to the persuasive power of ‘one sniff of English air’.

  13 Robert Butler, ‘Orwell’s World’, Intelligent Life (January–February 2015).

  14 The first Penguin edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1955. I got hold of a Secker hardback from the public library.

  15 The most robust explanation and defence of this ‘snitching’ – the source of much controversy – is given by Christopher Hitchens in Orwell’s Victory (New York, 2002).

  16 For some reason, the plaque is regularly defaced. By fast-food lovers, presumably.

  17 The surviving Westrope literary remains are held by Hull University History Centre, and a biography is given on the Centre website.

  18 One wonders whether the pathologically frigid wife of Winston, Katharine, is a bitter, possibly unfair depiction of Eileen. Something went wrong, sexually, with the marriage.

  19 Published in 2002, Spurling’s biography is a spirited defence of her friend Sonia, much maligned in her years as the Widow Orwell.

  20 An authoritative account of the founding and running of Horizon – and Sonia’s role in its spectacular success – is given in Jeremy Lewis, Cyril Connolly: A Life (London, 1998).

  21 Frank Kermode, ‘The Essential Orwell’, London Review of Books, III/I (22 January 1981).

  22 Orwell, ‘Why I Write’.

  23 Paul Foot, ‘By George, They’ve Got It’, The Observer (I June 2003).

  24 Notably The Unexamined Orwell (Austin, TX, 2011).

  The Life

  1 Orwell recorded this memory of his mother’s conversation in his journal, in the last year of his life. Bernard Crick was the first to draw attention to it in his biography George Orwell: A Life (1980).

  2 Bowker was the first to draw attention to this fact, in George Orwell (London, 2003).

  3 George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’ (1946).

  4 See the London tramping section of Down and Out in Paris and London.

  5 George Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ (1952).

  6 In what Orwell ironically calls the ‘unhappy’ (actually ‘happy’) ending, chronicled in ancient ballads, the dying Robin, having been treacherously bled to death by the nuns, forbids his outlaws from taking revenge on the priory.

  7 The quotation is from Orwell’s review of Arturo Borea’s The Forge, Horizon (September 1941). The would-be flogger was many years later (the fact clearly stuck in Orwell’s mind) identified as a Mr Simmons, a friend of Ida’s.

  8 The family moved into a larger house, in nearby Shiplake, when Richard retired in 1912, and downsized, moving again, in wartime 1915.

  9 Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (London, 1938).

  10 The admirable life achievement of the young Wilkeses is recorded on the anti-Orwell website www.st-cyprians-school.org.uk.

  11 This and subsequent quotations below from St Cyprianites, along with photographs and plentiful reminiscence – all favourable – about the Wilkeses, is recorded on www.st-cyprians-school.org.uk.

  1
2 Connolly, Enemies of Promise. Published when it was, 1938, it would be interesting to know what Orwell made of this unflattering pen portrait. The men nonetheless remained friends and colleagues on Horizon.

  13 St Cyprian’s website, www.st-cyprians-school.org.uk.

  14 This, and Orwell’s subsequent recollections of wretchedness at St Cyprian’s, are recorded in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’.

  15 Connolly, Enemies of Promise.

  16 Crick in his biography, from interviews with aged survivors of Orwell’s teaching (largely approved of by his pupils) at Hayes. See below for fuller account.

  17 See www.st-cyprians-school.org.uk.

  18 A scholarly summary of the evidence against Orwell can be found in Robert Pearce, ‘Truth and Falsehood: Orwell’s Prep School Woes’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, XLIII/171 (August 1992).

  19 There was mutual admiration between Mackenzie and Orwell in later life. And the other novelist, plausibly, inspired Orwell’s late-life love of Scottish islands. Mackenzie was fanatic about the joys of living on them.

  20 George Orwell, ‘Good Bad Books’, Tribune (November 1945); George Orwell, ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, Horizon (October 1944).

  21 George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941).

  22 George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946).

  23 The following account of Orwell’s (Eric Blair’s, as he was then) Eton career is largely taken from Crick’s biography.

  24 Bowker, who is the most diligent of the biographers on Orwell’s sex life, gives a full account.

  25 See Orwell’s honorific essay, ‘The Art of Donald McGill’ (1941).