Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  The week before I had been to Scotland to see the ninety-five-year-old Sir Steven Runciman—the great scholar of Byzantium and the Crusades, who'd been to Eton with Orwell. (On the telephone he'd said: “I'd be delighted to talk to you, Professor Mayers, about Eric Blair. But I must warn you that I've not seen him for 77 years!”) Attended by two devoted retainers, Runciman lived alone in a huge castle on the Scottish border (“I'm a younger son and had to buy this place myself,” he told me). He still had vivid memories of their days at Eton and of their old tutor, Andrew Gow, a friend of A. E. Housman and, later on, Runciman's irritating colleague at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1969 Gow had written me that Orwell “could not go to University unless he got a scholarship … that there was not the faintest hope of his getting one and that it would be a waste of time to try.” “Not true,” said Runciman, who told me that Gow particularly resented someone like Orwell, who was capable of doing well in classics but was bored by the subject. I now realized that Orwell could have gone to university if he had wanted to. He was very good at exams, and as Michael Meredith assured me, could have walked into Oxbridge from Eton, which had generous scholarships for boys who could not pay their own way. He simply chose not to go, and in his teens took on the grave responsibilities of a colonial policeman.

  But Burma, where Orwell spent his crucial early adult years, was out of reach. Since travel was restricted to the area between Rangoon and Mandalay, I would not be able to visit Moulmein (southeast of Rangoon), where Orwell shot the elephant, or Katha (north of Mandalay), his last post and the setting of Burmese Days. Apart from his own writing very little is known about Orwell's years there, and colonial police records have been either transferred to London or destroyed in the war. I studied maps and gazetteers of India and Burma to recreate the atmosphere of his obscure birthplace—Motihari, India—not in the province of Bengal, but in Bihar, and placed Orwell's role as policeman in the context of colonial history. Once again, memoirs of other administrators and visitors, including Somerset Maugham, helped to flesh out the picture of conditions there. (In August 2000, just before my book was published, I did get to Burma. I lectured on an Orient Express cruise up the Irrawaddy from Mandalay to Bhamo, near the Chinese border, and with a month's visa was able to visit nearly all the places where Orwell had worked.)

  One obscure source, May Hearsey's privately published memoir of Burma, Land of Chindits and Rubies (1982), gave an interesting view of Orwell as policeman. She provides a telling snapshot of his kindness to a young Irish officer who had just been posted to Moulmein. When the new man confessed that he didn't know Burmese well enough to take on his new job, Orwell was sympathetic and advised him to transfer to the River Police, where the language was not essential. Decent and kind himself, he was very different from the type of martinet officer he satirized in Burmese Days.

  The journey to Orwell's house on Jura—in the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, where he lived in the late 1940s and wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four—is almost as difficult as getting to Burma. The train from London to Glasgow, bus to the coast, boat to the island of Kintyre, bus across Kintyre, boat to Jura and taxi from Craighouse to Ardlussa still takes forty-eight hours. The last seven miles—along a grueling, badly rutted cart-track, full of enormous potholes—has to be negotiated on foot. His old house, Barnhill—a cross between Wuthering Heights and Cold Comfort Farm—is closed up and there's nothing else to see when you finally get there. Since I went to Britain in November and December, when Jura is sometimes cut off from the mainland for weeks by stormy seas, I abandoned the idea and based my descriptions of Jura on travel books, Orwell's diary and accounts of friends who visited him.

  Susan Watson, who as a young woman worked as a nanny for Orwell's adopted son in London and Jura, recounted her bitter quarrels in Jura with Orwell's sister, Avril, about who would control his household. I went to visit David Holbrook, now a Cambridge don but in the late 1940s a young writer and, for a time, Susan's boyfriend. Holbrook made the trek to visit Susan on Jura, where Orwell and Avril, suspecting he was a Communist spy, treated him as an unwelcome guest. Holbrook gave me his unpublished novel, with an account of his visit he assured me was based on reality. I had always felt that Orwell's decision to live on the damp and dreary Jura virtually killed him. Talking to Susan Watson, David Holbrook, David Astor, who had first told him about the island, to Orwell's family, who'd spent summers there, and to two of his doctors, confirmed this belief.

  The important questions were: why did he go there? what was it like? why was he so reluctant to leave, despite the acute discomfort, the cold and the impossibility of getting secretarial help when he was working on Nineteen Eighty-Four? Jura is still unspoiled, very much as it was when Orwell lived there. He idealized the place, and gave it up reluctantly. He was not a very social person, and sought austerity and isolation. He was fleeing London, the grime and destruction of the blitz, and the struggle of life in the postwar years. The setting of Jura must have heightened the dark images of London that filled his mind when he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  Details of behavior, dress and speech help build the central character and the atmosphere surrounding him. His former pupil, Geoffrey Stevens, told me how Orwell, a conscientious teacher, would prod the boys’ stomachs while urging them to respond to his queries. His nieces and nephew—Jane, Lucy and Henry Dakin—visited Orwell on Jura. Lucy remembered her uncle's dour response when she first arrived at the house, exhausted after the rail journey, the ferry and the miles of rutted dirt track. “Ah, there you are, Lu,” he said, as if she had just come back from a shop round the corner. Lucy and Henry were with him when he misread the tidal tables, steered his twelve-foot dinghy into one of the most perilous whirlpools in Europe and came very close to drowning them all. After their boating accident he infuriated them by refusing their rescuer's offer to drop them off at Barnhill, and casually remarked, “That's all right. We'll walk back.” They had lost their shoes in the whirlpool and had to go barefoot over three miles of rough country.

  Orwell made idiosyncratic remarks that people remembered all their lives. Connolly remembered him saying at prep school: “whoever wins this war, we shall emerge a second-rate nation.” William Empson heard Orwell, when he worked in the wartime BBC, arguing with an Indian colleague. In a self-consciously cockney accent he exclaimed through the thin partition of his office: “The FACK that you're black … and that I'm white, has nudding whatever to do wiv it.” (Oddly enough, the Indian did not reply: “But I'm not black.”) When Susan Watson prepared a particularly appetizing dish, Orwell, like the schoolboy he once was, would turn to baby Richard and remark: “Gosh, boys, this looks good!” David Astor captured the atmosphere of their weekly London lunches during the war. He recalled Cyril Connolly (alluding to a British general and their mutual friend Tosco Fyvel and imitating Arthur Koestler's strong Hungarian accent) asking: “The great kvestion iss: ‘Who vill vin ze desert var? Wavell, Fyvel or Orvell?’”

  Orwell—like Samuel Johnson and Anton Chekhov—was a great-hearted and admirable man. But he also had his human failings. He yearned to be rich, handsome and a devil with the ladies. Women were always important to him, and his weird proposals to Celia Paget and Anne Popham revealed the hopelessly romantic side of his character. His desperate longing for love—a theme in all his novels—lies at the core of his life and work, and was responsible for his deathbed marriage to Sonia, the model for Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Orwell who emerges from my book is darker than the legendary figure. He had a noble character, but was also violent, capable of cruelty, tormented by guilt, masochistically self-punishing, sometimes suicidal.

  EPILOGUE

  After writing twenty-two lives, I've formulated twelve principles of biography.

  This is how I think lives should be written and what they ought to achieve.

  1. Read everything in print and follow up every lead.

  2. Be persistent and see everyone who will talk to you.

>   3. Weigh all the evidence like a lawyer. A biographer is “an artist on oath.”

  4. Get the subject born in the first five pages. Nothing is duller than genealogy.

  5. Describe the subject's personal habits and tastes.

  6. Portray the minor characters as fully as possible.

  7. Illuminate the recurrent patterns of the life. Look at the big picture, not the small details.

  8. Keep up the dramatic narrative, employing the same techniques as the novelist, and concentrate on your readers’ interests rather than your own obsessions.

  9. Don't focus on the events of the life, but on what they mean.

  10. Be selective rather than exhaustive, analytical rather than descriptive. Aim for four hundred pages and remember that a shorter book, though much harder to write, is easier to read than a long one.

  11. Complete the book in a few years, at most, or you will begin to hate the subject for eating up your life.

  12. Always remember the responsibility of the biographer to do justice to his subject.

  NOTES

  1. ORWELL's PAINFUL CHILDHOOD

  1. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1939; London, 1962), p. 106.

  2. G. S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell: A Study (London, 1968), p. 31.

  3. William Thackeray, The Newcombes, in Works, ed. George Saintsbury (London, 1908), 14:66.

  4. Rudyard Kipling, “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” in Works (New York, n.d.), pp. 960, 975. Orwell considered “Baa Baa Black Sheep” one of the ten best short stories in English. Unlike Thackeray and Kipling, Orwell's description of childhood, though entirely subjective, has no self-pity or false pathos.

  5. Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939; London, 1962), p. 134.

  6. Orwell's father, who was fifty when Orwell was four, was separated from his family in 1907 and spent the next four years in India. See Gordon Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (New York, 1955), p. 62: “In later life Thackeray's recollections of his first years in his ‘native country’ were scanty. He ‘could just remember’ his father, writes Lady Ritchie, ‘a very tall, thin man, rising out of a bath.’”

  7. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 volumes (New York, 1968), 4:330–369.

  8. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p.104. See also Coming Up for Air, p. 46; “Boys’ Weeklies” (1940), 1:473; “Decline of the English Murder” (1946), 4:98; and Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York, 1949), p.96.

  9. The echo of Milton's Satan (“by fraud or guile / What force effected not,” Paradise Lost, 1.646–647), emphasizes the hellish aspect of the school.

  10. Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936; London, 1962), p. 42.

  11. Ibid., p. 46. This is surely not “the greatest cruelty one can inflict,” but it was the one Orwell suffered.

  12. Quoted in G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (New York, 1965), p. 37.

  13. See Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself (New York, 1937), p. 17: “afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.”

  14. Charles Dickens, “Preface” to Nicholas Nickleby (1839; London, 1964), p. xvi.

  15. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, p. 87.

  16. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; New York, 1956), p. 50.

  17. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 127.

  3. THE ETHICS OF RESPONSIBILITY: BURMESE DAYS

  1. Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in A Collection of Essays (New York, 1954), p. 247.

  2. Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” p. 249. In the same essay Orwell writes: “To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned foods, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders” (223).

  3. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, 1943), p. 356.

  4. See Stephen Spender, World Within World (Berkeley, 1960), p. 202: “We were divided between our literary vocation and an urge to save the world from Fascism. We were the Divided Generation of Hamlets who found the world out of joint and failed to set it right.”

  5. Brombert, The Intellectual Hero, pp. 143, 147, 220.

  6. Orwell wrote about imperialism in his essays “Shooting an Elephant,” “A Hanging,” “Rudyard Kipling,” “Reflections on Gandhi” and in the last half of The Road to Wigan Pier.

  7. Orwell, “Review of The Sword and Sickle by Mulk Raj Anand,” Horizon 6 (July 1942), 71.

  8. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 126, 129.

  9. Ibid., p. 130.

  10. Quoted in Christopher Hollis, A Study of George Orwell: The Man and His Works (London, 1956), p. 29. In “Why I Write,” A Collection of Essays, p. 315, Orwell suggests the limitations of this novel: “I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.”

  11. Compare this with Orwell's “Shooting an Elephant,” A Collection of Essays, p. 159: “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys”; and with Orwell's “Travel Round and Down,” Time and Tide, October 17, 1936, p. 1453: “When a subject population rises in revolt you have got to suppress it, and you can do so only by methods which make nonsense of any claim for the superiority of western civilisation. In order to rule over barbarians, you have got to become a barbarian yourself.”

  12. Compare Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900; New York, 1931), p. 259:

  Doramin was one of the most remarkable men of his race I had ever seen. His bulk for a Malay was immense, but he did not look merely fat; he looked imposing, monumental. This motionless body [was] clad in rich stuffs, coloured silks, rich embroideries … the flat, big, round face [was] wrinkled, furrowed…. When he walked, two short, sturdy young fellows … sustained his elbows; they would ease him down and stand behind his chair till he wanted to rise … and then would catch him under his armpits and help him up…. It was generally believed he consulted his wife as to public affairs;

  with Burmese Days, pp. 5, 13:

  unblinking, rather like a great porcelain idol, U Po Kyin gazed out into the fierce sunlight. He was a man of fifty, so fat that for years he had not risen from his chair without help…. His face was vast, yellow and quite unwrinkled … he wore one of those vivid Arakanese longyis with green and magenta checks…. [His wife] had been the confidante of U Po Kyin's intrigues for twenty years and more.

  13. See Orwell, “England, Your England,” A Collection of Essays, pp. 277–278: “By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilised men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.”

  14. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Notes” (1874), The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1954), p. 48.

  15. Orwell, “Why I Write,” A Collection of Essays, p. 316.

  4. ORWELL: THE HONORARY PROLETARIAN

  1. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 volumes (New York, 1968).

  2. John Wain, “The Last of George Orwell,” Twentieth Century 155 (January 1954), 72.

  3. The editing and the index have been highly praised and deserve commendation. But I would like to note the following errors, which can be correc
ted in future printings. The editors claim the “War-time Diaries” have never been published; in fact, about half the 1940–41 Diary was published in World Review 16 (June 1950), 21–44; the book jacket says Orwell wrote ten books (excluding essays) during his lifetime while the Introduction says he wrote nine (which is correct); “said” in 3:31 and “there” in 4:146n1 are both misspelled; in 3:358 “José” lacks an accent; in 4:48–49 the quotation from Herbert Read is garbled. The references to Samuel Johnson in 3:6 and to D. H. Lawrence in 3:166 are missing from the index; and the index references to Talking to India in 3:428 are incorrect.

  The annotations are inconsistent. R. H. Tawney and William Empson get explanatory footnotes but Frank Buchman and Lord Rothermere do not. The lines in Orwell's footnote on 2:4 from Marvell's “The Garden” are not identified, nor is the mysterious reference to “18b” in 3:80. The note on Rayner Heppenstall in 2:18, “their friendship continued until Orwell's death,” is misleading in view of the denigrating and destructive portrait of Orwell in Heppenstall's Four Absentees (1960). And the “backward boy” (1:546) whom Orwell took care of in 1930 is called a “congenital imbecile” in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933; New York, 1961), p. 84. He is probably the subject of Orwell's lost short story, “The Idiot.”

  4. But not always balanced. In a letter of July 1940, he writes, rather perversely: “I actually rather hope that the [German] invasion will happen. The locale morale is extremely good, and if we are invaded we shall at any rate get rid once and for all of the gang that got us into this mess” (2:34).

  5. “My early childhood had not been altogether happy…. I knew very well that I merely disliked my own father, whom I had barely seen before I was eight and who appeared to me simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying ‘Don't’” (4:334, 360).