Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Fenwick's discussion of the composition and publication history of each book, though based only on published letters, is valuable. We learn that Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), out of print by 1938, was the most popular book in the library of Dartmoor prison. Two years later, Penguin printed a first edition of 55,000 copies. Burmese Days, written by “George Orwell,” was copyright under his real name, Eric Blair. The first printing of the English edition of Animal Farm was only 4,500. But, used for the teaching of English throughout the world, it was translated into exotic languages like Maltese, Persian and Vietnamese. The American Signet edition sold over 5 million copies by 1973 and continues to sell more than 350,000 a year. Orwell risked losing £40,000 when he refused to cut the Appendix on “The Principles of Newspeak” from the Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, though the Club eventually backed down and he got his money. Fenwick's Appendix on Payments and Royalties reveals that in 1925–27 Orwell earned £696 a year, plus bonuses, in the Burmese Police. As a writer, he did not exceed this income until 1941 when his BBC salary and literary fees (an average of £3 each for 18 articles) came to £706.

  Orwell constantly, perhaps defensively, ran down his own books. Burmese Days, he said, “made me spew when I saw it in print,” A Clergyman's Daughter was “very disconnected as a whole, and rather unreal” and he felt he “made rather a muck” of The Road to Wigan Pier. Nevertheless, his reputation has risen steadily since his death in 1950. Most of his books are still in print, and he is the most widely read and influential serious writer of the twentieth century.

  SEVENTEEN

  ORWELL

  A Voice That Naked Goes

  In 1973 I sent an essay on Roger Casement to Alan Ross—naval officer, racing and cricket enthusiast, poet and autobiographer, and excellent (if rather too casual) editor of the London Magazine. He rejected it, I rang him to ask why and he frankly said he didn't know anything about the investigator of atrocities in the Congo and Putumayo, and ill-fated Irish revolutionary. When he kindly agreed to send it to an expert and eventually published the piece, I established a permanent relationship with the magazine (surviving through three other editors) and since then have published twenty-seven essays (including this one) with them.

  This piece emphasized Orwell's violent streak, risky self-sabotage and dangerous invitation to his wife Eileen to visit him on the Aragon front and in Barcelona in 1939. It also showed how O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four was physically modeled on Georges Kopp, and noted the astonishingly accurate prophecies in Orwell's last novel.

  I

  The 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell (1998), brilliantly edited by Peter Davison, reveals as much about Orwell's life as about his books. In 1945 he noted the contrast in many writers “between the character which they display in private life and the character which seems to emanate from their published works.” But Orwell's life, like Chekhov's, matches the idealism of his writing, and reflects the literary and political history of the first half of the twentieth century. He had exemplary courage, compassion and honesty, and the more we examine his character, the more we like him. Even his crankiness and eccentricity seem endearing.

  Orwell could never remain in one place for long and was always an outsider: a chubby bed-wetter at St. Cyprian's prep school, a cynical rebel at Eton, a gentleman-outcast in Paris and London, a member of the defeated faction of the defeated side in the Spanish Civil War, a truthteller amidst the propagandists of the BBC, a critic of the Left on the Socialist Tribune. His appearance was also idiosyncratic. He was, like his contemporary and friend Graham Greene, unusually tall and thin. Greene dressed conservatively and looked like a man of the upper middle class while Orwell had a workman's cropped haircut, a Frenchman's thin mustache, a proletarian's clothes—and an invalid's furrowed face.

  Like Simone Weil, Orwell identified with and actually lived the life of the poor and oppressed. Both were committed, self-sacrificial writers who joined the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell went down and out, and investigated the lives of the industrial poor. Weil became a manual laborer on farms and in a car factory, and joined the Resistance movement in France and England. Orwell gave up part of his wartime rations so “others”—people he didn't know—would have more to eat. Weil, finally, refused to eat in order to show her solidarity with the victims of World War II. Both authors died of tuberculosis in an English hospital.

  Orwell's life, in essence, was a series of irrational, sometimes life-threatening decisions. He joined the Burmese police instead of going to university; washed dishes in Paris and tramped in England; tried to grow vegetables and run a small shop in Hertfordshire; fought with the POUM Anarchists in Spain, just after his marriage, and put his wife in great danger by encouraging her to come to Barcelona. He moved to London during the Blitz, when everyone else was trying to leave; and he made a suicidal sojourn to Jura when he was dying of tuberculosis. All these potentially disastrous moves, this risky self-sabotage, provided valuable experience that he transformed into art.

  Orwell had extensive military training, was fascinated by explosives and had a violent streak in his character. As he wrote at the beginning of the war: “At seven years old I was a member of the Navy League and wore a sailor suit with ‘H.M.S. Invincible’ on my cap. Even before my public-school O.T.C. [Officers Training Corps] I had been in a private school cadet corps. On and off, I have been toting a rifle ever since I was ten”—in the Burmese police, drilling recruits and fighting on the Aragon front, and training volunteers in the London Home Guard.

  “One of the greatest joys of my own childhood,” he wrote at the end of the war, “were those little brass cannons on wooden gun-carriages … [that] went off with a noise like the Day of Judgement…. Normal healthy children enjoy explosions.” And so, apparently, do normal healthy adults. His publisher Fredric Warburg, who served under Sergeant Orwell in the Home Guard, described how Orwell loaded a spigot mortar, an anti-tank weapon, with the wrong kind of fifty-pound bomb and then gave the order to fire. The man holding the mortar lost all his front teeth and another, standing nearby, was knocked unconscious for twenty-four hours.

  In his essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish” (1944) Orwell contrasted the gentlemanly, intellectual English detective with his violent and brutal American counterpart (though the author, James Hadley Chase, was actually English) and criticized Chase's portrayal of one of the American gang, “whose sole pleasure in life consists in driving knives into other people's bellies.” But the sometimes saintly Orwell had the same violent urge. In “Such, Such Were the Joys” (c. 1947), his horrific account of St. Cyprian's, he describes his swift revenge on an older boy who'd cruelly twisted his arm: “[I] walked up to Burton with the most harmless air I could assume, and then, getting the weight of my body behind it, smashed my fist into his face.” Quarreling with an elderly but contentious Paris taxi-driver, en route to Spain in 1936, he exclaimed: “You think you're too old for me to smash your face in. Don't be too sure!” When his flatmate Rayner Heppenstall came home drunk late one night and threatened him, Orwell punched him in the face and knocked him down the stairs.

  Later on, Orwell was haunted by memories of the Burmese servants and coolies he had hit with his fist in moments of rage. In “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) he recalled that during the endless provocations and torments in Burma, “I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.” In the dark months of 1940 he recorded in his diary: “one must above all die fighting and have the satisfaction of killing someone else first.” The torture scenes in Nineteen Eighty-Four were based not only on the ghastly medical treatments during the last years of his life, but also on his own deep-rooted streak of sadism.

  II

  When Orwell came home after five years in Burma, he horrified his family by throwing up his secure, well-paying job and deciding to become a writer. But he needed something to write about. So instead of working for a newspaper or p
ublisher (as Greene did at the beginning of his career), he became a kitchen slave and wandering bum. He knew how to get on with outcasts and quite enjoyed their company. He neither patronized nor scorned them, but showed real sympathy and interest—a considerable imaginative leap for an Old Etonian and imperial policeman. His desire for first-hand experience with the down and outs was meant to compensate, he said, “for the tragic failure of theoretical Socialism to make any contact with the normal working class.”

  His revulsion from and guilt about his bourgeois background as well as his natural inclination toward austerity made it essential for him to live in extreme discomfort. Just after he married Eileen O'shaughnessy in June 1936, she abandoned her graduate studies and they moved into a little-ease cottage. “It's bloody awful,” he told the working-class writer Jack Common. “Still, it's more or less livable…. When there is sudden rain in winter the kitchen tends to flood…. The living room fire, you may remember, smokes…. There is water laid on, but no hot.” The crude toilet, of course, was outdoors. The six flights of stone steps leading to his wartime flat in Islington (which also had the requisite leaking roof) left Orwell, who also had to carry up a baby and pram, gasping for breath. His remote, wet and windy cottage in Jura—a cross between Wuthering Heights and Cold Comfort Farm—was down a deeply rutted road, without electricity or telephone, and six hours from the nearest doctor. A hemorrhage on Jura would have finished him off.

  In 1934 “gloomy George” (as Herbert Read called him) compared himself to an Old Testament prophet of doom: “This age makes me so sick that sometimes I am almost impelled to stop at a corner and start calling down curses from Heaven like Jeremiah or Ezra.” The event that profoundly sickened him, changed his life and transformed the nature of his writing was the Spanish Civil War. Orwell told Heppenstall (who'd provoked and then forgiven Orwell's violence) that “we started off by being heroic defenders of democracy and ended by slipping over the border with the police panting on our heels.”

  Davison includes the list of interrogator's notes about Orwell and Eileen (they were never formally charged), which were given to the Communist Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason in Valencia, three weeks after they'd barely managed to escape from Spain. Based on papers stolen from Orwell's hotel room while Eileen was being questioned by the police, these notes show that Orwell was well known as a writer and prominent member of POUM, and would certainly have been executed if they'd caught him.

  His heroic commander, Georges Kopp, was arrested and tortured in Spanish prisons, and Orwell bravely visited him and tried to get him out while he himself was being hunted. It's worth noting, as Orwell would say, that the powerful, bull-like Kopp appears as O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “In spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements…. A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards O’Brien…. When you looked at O’Brien's powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilised, it was impossible to believe that he could be defeated.”

  “Good war books,” Orwell said, “are nearly always written from the angle of a victim,” and Homage to Catalonia—his greatest book—was written with white-hot anger. He was disgusted by the way the Left-wing press in England had covered up or lied about the savage suppression of POUM by the Communists and was determined to reveal the truth about what had really happened in Spain. As he told his close friend Arthur Koestler, who had gone through a similar experience in Málaga (and been interned in both French and English prisons during the war): “The sin of nearly all leftwingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.”

  Orwell perfected a plain style that was part of his rhetorical arsenal, and persuaded his audience that he was both honest and sympathetic. As Wynd-ham Lewis wrote in One-Way Song: “These times require a voice that naked goes,/Without more fuss than Dryden's or Defoe's.” The striking openings of his major essays, for example, are uncannily effective and immediately hook the reader:

  —In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people.

  —As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

  —Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

  —Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

  The first two sentences portray Orwell as victim; the last two are paradoxical statements about human nature.

  Gloomy George could also be surprisingly witty in the supercilious Etonian mode. In a review of The Hamlet in 1940, he describes Faulkner's characters as if they belonged to a primitive tribe in a remote corner of the earth: “people with supremely hideous names—names like Flem Snopes and Eck Snopes—sit about on the steps of village stores, chewing tobacco, swindling one another in small business deals, and from time to time committing a rape or a murder.”

  Orwell—a conscientious, imaginative but severe schoolmaster for two years in the early 1930s—later mocked (millenarians take note) the mechanical way in which he was taught history at school: “in 1499 you were still in the Middle Ages, with knights in plate armour riding at one another with long lances, and then suddenly the clock struck 1500, and you were in something called the Renaissance, and everyone wore ruffs and doublets and was busy robbing treasure ships on the Spanish Main.”

  When describing the sexual habits of amphibians in one of his most charming essays, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1946), he combines close observation and unusual facts with tenderness for a repulsive creature, and ends with a comical twist: “All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad.”

  Though Nineteen Eighty-Four is more a realistic projection of the present than a nightmare vision of the future, Orwell was acutely prophetic (in that novel and elsewhere) about the breakdown of the nuclear family, the fate of the homeless, environmental pollution, deforestation, the dangers of addictive drugs, fanaticism and violence in international sporting events, the decay of meaningful language, the treatment of political dissidents in mental hospitals, the sudden disappearance of people who oppose repressive regimes, the proliferation of atomic weapons and the endless small wars, backed by the superpowers, who threaten but never actually fight each other.

  Just as Orwell was almost captured and killed before he could write Homage to Catalonia and tell the truth about what happened in Spain, so he nearly died, during a boating accident in the dangerous Scottish whirlpool at Corryvrecken, before he could finish Nineteen Eighty-Four and radically change our way of thinking about modern politics. The grim letters about his rapidly declining health reveal the terrible struggle to finish his last novel (published seven months before he died). In the tuberculosis sanatoria he suffered weight loss, high fever, acute pain and a severe reaction to the streptomycin that might—in more moderate doses—have saved his life. Confined to bed, without a typewriter or even a decent pen, and with his right arm in a plaster cast, he heroically raced against death.

  Orwell's statement about Kipling applies with equal force to himself: he was “the only English writer of [his] time who has added phrases to the language.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four alone Orwell invented these vivid phrases: Big Brother Is Watching You, Two Minutes Hate, Thought Police, Thoughtcrime, Facecrime, Doublethink, Memory Hole, Vaporized and Unperson. He was, paradoxically, a Tory Anarchist, a Socialist in love with the past. The destruction of the past is a dominant theme in his last four books: the Communist lies about what really happened in Barcelona in Homage to Catalonia, Bowling's childhood village destroyed by developers and polluters in Coming Up for Air, the pigs’ constant alteration of the Seven Commandments in Animal Farm and Winston's rewriting history in the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  Though Orwell died fift
y years ago, we now need him more than ever. Had he lived, he would surely have commented on the squalid strife in western democracies. In April 1942, disgusted with wartime propaganda on both sides, Orwell wrote a scathing passage in his diary that seems to describe contemporary American politics: “You can go on and on telling lies, and the most palpable lies at that, and even if they are not actually believed, there is no strong revulsion. We are all drowning in filth…. I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth…. Is there no one who has both firm opinions and a balanced outlook? Actually there are plenty, but they are powerless. All power is in the hands of paranoiacs.”

  III

  Evelyn Waugh—the subject of Orwell's last, unfinished essay—was the same age as Orwell and came from a similar background. But Waugh delighted in snobbish society and indulged in all the luxuries that Orwell despised: a grand country house, a London club, hedonistic cruises, elegant clothes, fine wines and expensive cigars. Though Orwell wanted very few material things, he didn't get any of them—even when he became comparatively wealthy at the end of his life. He wanted a handsome pram, decorated with a gold line, for his adopted son (impossible to obtain during the war), a good pair of American shoes (which were sent but didn't fit), a van for the rough roads of Jura (which arrived in wretched condition and couldn't even be driven off the ferry), streptomycin to cure his tuberculosis (which caused a severe reaction and saved another patient) and a second wife (who married him on his deathbed).

  Though Orwell seems more puritanical than Byronic, this edition is full of extraordinary revelations about his love affairs. As a young man in Burma he slept with prostitutes and almost certainly had a mistress who inspired the vengeful Ma Hla May in Burmese Days. In Southwold in the early 1930s he had an affair (as I've recently discovered) with his married patron, Mabel Fierz. While seeing Mabel he was also courting Eleanor Jaques (engaged to his friend), who slept with him, and Brenda Salkeld (a clergyman's daughter), who did not. He then moved on to another love triangle: Kay Ekevall, with whom he had an affair, and Sally Jerome (who worked in an advertising agency, like Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Flying), who did not sleep with him. He dropped both women (Sally's still angry about his duplicity) when he met and immediately fell in love with the bright and attractive Eileen.