A Life in Letters
Page 7
3.Annotated in Moore's office: 'Some have crossed this letter.'
To R. N. Raimbault*
29 November 1934
3 Warwick Mansions
Hampstead NW [3]
Cher Monsieur Raimbault,
I would have replied earlier to your very kind letter, but I have had a terrible cold for a few days, thanks to the poor weather that we have had recently. The fog was sometimes so thick that you could not see from one side of the road to the other. Princess Marina,1 who has just arrived to marry Prince George, must have a very bad impression of the weather of her adopted country. But now, thankfully, it is a bit better, and I feel well enough to write letters.
I was, as you can believe, very flattered by your opinion of Burmese Days. Let's hope that Mr Malraux will be of the same opinion. Regarding La Vache Enragee,2 if Mr Francis Carco agrees to write an introduction, I shall, naturally, be extremely grateful. When you told me that you had translated William Faulkner's books, I thought you must be 'the nonpareil,' among translators, as Shakespeare put it.3 Personally, I cannot imagine a more difficult author for a foreigner to translate; but of course, his style, however complicated, is truly distinguished. It seems likely to me that after a century, or even fifty years, English and American will no longer be the same language 4 - which will be a shame because the Australians and Canadians etc. will probably prefer to follow the Americans.
Having thanked you for your letter, what I should like to do is ask if you would be interested in seeing an article on Mr Malraux which appeared two months ago in the Adelphi (a monthly journal to which I contribute now and again). I can send you a copy without any difficulty. Also, the other day whilst I was looking through my books I found by chance a collection, Nursery Rhymes, and the idea came to me that it might interest you, assuming you don't already possess such a collection. Nursery Rhymes are usually total nonsense, but they are so well known in England that they are quoted almost unconsciously when writing and they have exerted a big influence on some modern poets such as Robert Graves and T. S. Eliot.5 If you think that the book would interest you, I will be very happy to send it to you.
If you have occasion to write to me, my address will be as above. At the moment I am working in a bookshop. It is a job that suits me much better than teaching.6
Veuillez agreer, Monsieur, l'expression de mes meilleurs sentiments.
Eric A Blair
[LO, pp.22-4; X, 216B, p. 359; typewritten]
1.Princess Marina of Greece married Prince George, Duke of Kent, on 29 November 1934. She proved with the public a gracious and very popular member of the Royal Family.
2.The title of the French translation of Down and Out. (See 22.12.35, n. 2.) 3.Shakespeare uses the word 'nonpareil' in five plays: Twelfth Night, 1.5.254; Macbeth, 3.4.18; Antony and Cleopatra, 3.2.11; Cymbeline, 2.5.8; and The Tempest, 3.2.100. The play to which Orwell refers is unclear. In three the reference is to a woman who is, as in Twelfth Night, 'the nonpareil of beauty'. Macbeth refers to one of the murderers as a nonpareil and Enobarbus so describes Caesar.
4.For English adopting American practices, see Orwell's complaint of the use in English of 'the American habit of tying an unnecessary preposition on to every verb' (XVII, 2609, p. 31).
5.Orwell continued to be interested in nursery rhymes and fairy tales. His dramatisation of 'Little Red Riding Hood' was broadcast in the BBC's Children's Hour programme on 9 July 1946. Writing to Rayner Heppenstall* on 25 January 1947 he described Cinderella as 'the tops so far as fairy stories go' (XIX, 3163, p. 32). And, of course, Animal Farm is subtitled by Orwell, 'A Fairy Story'.
6.Orwell had taught at Frays College, Uxbridge, Middlesex until December 1933, when he developed pneumonia. He then gave up teaching.
To R. N. Raimbault*
3 January 1935
3 Warwick Mansions
Hampstead NW 3
Dear Monsieur Raimbault,
I wonder if you will forgive my writing in English this time, as I want to make sure that I do not make any misstatements?
Before anything else, I want to thank you very much for making such an extraordinarily good job of the translation of Down and Out. Without flattering you I can truthfully say that I am not only delighted but also greatly astonished to see how good it seems when translated. As to the Paris part, I honestly think it is better in French than in English, and I am delighted with the way you have done the conversations. Allowing for the fact that there are, naturally, a good many slang words that I don't know, that is exactly how I imagined the characters talking. Let's hope that the book will have a success proportionate to your efforts, and that we shan't get into too much trouble with the hotel fraternity - for we must expect at any rate some trouble from them, I am afraid. If I am challenged to fight a duel by any hotel proprietor, perhaps you will second me.1
I have been through the proofs with great care and have made my corrections in pencil, as you asked. I have made alterations or suggestions [references omitted here]. As to the quarrel between the stevedore and the old age pensioner, I enclose herewith a copy of it with the blanks filled in and the words explained.2 You will be able to use your judgement if you wish to rewrite that speech. In the one or two instances where I have written in the margin 'it would be better to write so and so,' I mean, of course, 'something to that effect,' as I know that what I suggest is not likely to be in perfect French. I have made my proof-corrections, by the way, in French. I hope you will be able to read and understand them.
I spoke to my agent, Mr Moore, about handing over the Italian rights of Down and Out and Burmese Days. He says that Mr. Amato may certainly have the Italian rights, only, in case of his finding any publisher willing to commission their translation into Italian, will he please communicate with Messrs. Christy and Moore Literary Agents 222 Strand London W.C. By the terms of my contract with him, I have to make all business arrangements through Mr Moore.
Thanking you again, and wishing all success to the book when it appears, I am
Yours very sincerely
Eric A Blair
P. S. I will send the proofs under a separate cover.
[LO, pp. 38-40; X, 221C, p. 367; typewritten with handwritten PS at head of letter]
1.Orwell was taken to task by M. Umberto Possenti, of the Hotel Splendide, 105 Piccadilly, London, in a letter to The Times (X, 159, pp. 301-2).
2.This does not appear to have survived. However, the French edition has a number of abusive readings which can be found in I, p. 226 at 138/11—16.
To Victor Gollancz [Ltd?]*
10 January 1935
3 Warwick Mansions
Hampstead NW 3
Dear Sir,
I am returning the MS. of A Clergyman's Daughter herewith. I think there is now nothing in it that could possibly be made the subject of an action for libel. None of the characters are intended as portraits of living individuals, nor are any of the names those of actual persons known to me. As to the localities described, they are imaginary. 'Knype Hill' is an imaginary name and so far as I know no place of that name exists; in the story it is mentioned as being in Suffolk, but that is all. In the hop-picking part (chapter 2) there is nothing whatever to indicate an exact locality. In Chapter 4 Southbridge is described as a suburb ten or a dozen miles of deg London, but there is now nothing to show which side of London it was. As to the reference to a shop called 'Knockout Trousers Ltd.' in Chapter 2, so far as I know there is no shop of any such name, and the house mentioned in the same part as being a refuge of prostitutes is again totally imaginary. It is stated to be somewhere off Lambeth Cut. Lambeth Cut is a longish street, but if this is still considered dangerous, I can easily change Lambeth Cut to a fictitious street in the proof. I enclose a note on the alterations, together with Mr Rubinstein's letter, herewith.
Yours faithfully
Eric A. Blair1
[X, 223, pp. 367-8; typewritten]
1.Orwell's list of changes required is omitted here. They include 'Barclay's Ban
k' which becomes 'the local bank'; a reference to The Church Times is cut; 'Lambeth public library' is changed to 'the nearest public library'. Gollancz's libel lawyer, Harold Rubinstein (1891-1975), a perspicacious literary critic, playwright and author as well as a distinguished lawyer, crossed out the statement that The High Churchman's Gazette had a 'remarkabledeg small circulation'. Orwell said he was not aware there was such a journal but changed the offending passage to 'a small and select circulation'. (See II, pp. 299-302 for pre-publication revisions, 1934-35.) New information about these changes has emerged and is included here in the appendix New Textual Discoveries.
To Brenda Salkeld*
Tuesday [15 January 1935]
3 Warwick Mansions
Hampstead NW 3
Dear Brenda,
Thanks for your letter. No, I cannot say that Havelock Ellis's signature, as I remember it, struck me as being at all like what I expected.1 I should have expected him to write a very fine hand and use a thinner nib. We bought recently a lot of books with the authors' signatures in, and some of them containing autograph letters as well, but they were all sold almost at once. One that pleased me was inscribed 'From Beverley Nicholls, in all humility.' There is a subtle humour in that. I often see autographed letters advertised among the lots at book-auctions. I remember distinctly that in one case a letter from Sheila Kaye-Smith was priced higher than one from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (the Queen Anne one.) You often see autographs of Napoleon advertised, but they are usually pretty expensive, and of course they are not letters, only documents signed by him. Towards the end of his life he never seems to have written anything except his signature with his own hand, and apparently his spelling was appalling. I haven't done much to my new novel,2 but I have written a poem that is to be part of it.3 Talking of choosing a new pseudonym, I think it would be rather amusing, as so many women writers have chosen male pseudonyms, to choose a female one. Miss Barbara Bedworthy or something like that. With portrait of the author on the jacket. I have been feeling horribly tired, as for a variety of reasons I have been keeping very bad hours lately. On Sunday night I came away from a friend's house late, found there were no sort of conveyances running, had to walk several miles through drizzling rain, and then, to crown all, found myself locked out and had to raise hell before I could wake anybody up and get in. Have you ever seen Fowler's Modern English Usage? 4 Fowler is the man who did, or at any rate contributed to, the small Oxford dictionary, and he is a great authority on syntax etc. He is very amusing about such things as the split infinitive. I was also reading a rather amusing pamphlet on Dr Watson, which proved among other things, from internal evidence, that Watson was married twice. Also one or two of D. H. Lawrence's short stories, also Max Beerbohm's And Even Now, also, for the I don't know how many-th time, Maupassant's Boule de Suif 5 and La Maison Tellier. I suppose you have read both of those? I must stop now. I hope this letter will be duly waiting for you when you arrive and that you will not be in too unbearably depressed a state. Try and come up to town some time during the term and we will meet. Good bye for the present.
Yours
Eric A. Blair
[X, 224, pp. 368-9; typewritten]
1.Salkeld was then collecting autographs and Orwell was finding them for her.
2.Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
3.'St Andrew's Day, 1935', printed in The Adelphi in November 1935 and in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, pp. 167-8, with two word changes but untitled.
4.A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, was first published in April 1926 and is still not fully superseded.
5.In September 1946 Orwell proposed to the BBC that he dramatise this story (XVIII, 3059, p. 386). The proposal was rejected (XVIII, 3095, n. 2, p. 448).
To Brenda Salkeld*
16 February 1935
Booklovers' Corner
Dearest Brenda,
Isn't it sickening, I can't keep the room I am in at present for more than a few weeks.1 It was let to me on the understanding that I should have to give it up if somebody offered to take it & another room that aredeg beside it together, & now somebody has done so. So I shall have fresh miseries of house-hunting, & probably shan't find another place where I shall be so comfortable & have so much freedom. My present landlady2 is the non-interfering sort, which is so rare among London landladies. When I came she asked me what I particularly wanted, I said 'The thing I most want is freedom.' So she said, 'Do you want to have women up here all night?' I said, 'No,' of course, whereat she said, 'I only meant that I didn't mind whether you do or not.' Not much is happening here.
Gollancz, who has re-read Burmese Days, wrote enthusiastically about it & said he was going to have it thoroughly vetted by his lawyer, after which the latter was to cross-examine me on all the doubtful points. I hope the lawyer doesn't report against it as he did last time. You notice that all this happened a year ago, & I do not know what has made G. change his mind again. Perhaps some other publisher has wiped his eye by publishing a novel about India, but I don't seem to remember any this year. Rees* got me a lot more signatures for you, which I will send when I can find them, but at present I have mislaid them. I am living a busy life at present. My timetable is as follows: 7 am get up, dress etc, cook & eat breakfast. 8.45 go down & open the shop, & I am usually kept there till about 9.45. Then come home, do out my room, light the fire etc. 10.30 am--1 pm I do some writing. 1 pm get lunch & eat it. 2 pm--6.30 pm I am at the shop. Then I come home, get my supper, do the washing up & after that sometimes do about an hour's work. In spite [of] all this, I have got more work done in the last few days than during weeks before when I was being harried all day long. I hope G. does publish Burmese Days, as apart from the money (& my agent has tied him down with a pretty good contract) it will tide over the very long interval there is going to be between A Clergyman's Daughter & the one I am writing now.3 I want this one to be a work of art, & that can't be done without much bloody sweat. My mother writes me that she isn't going away after all, so I will come down to S'wold for a week-end as soon as I can, but it will have to be when my employer's wife is up & about again. Write soon.
With much love
Eric
[X, 235, pp. 374-5; typewritten]
1.By 'more than a few weeks' Orwell was not referring to a few weeks more, but to the total time he had been able to spend in the Westropes' flat.
2.Mrs Myfanwy Westrope, wife of the owner of Booklovers' Corner.
3.Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
To Brenda Salkeld*
7 May [1935]
77 Parliament Hill
Hampstead NW 3
Dearest Brenda,
I am afraid this will not reach St Felix 1 before you do, as I only got your letter this evening--I suppose the posts were late owing to the jubilee.2 I went down to Brighton, for the first time in my life, for Sunday and Monday. I went there with disagreeable apprehensions, but consoling myself by thinking that sooner or later I was sure to want to mention a trip to Brighton in a novel. However, I was rather agreeably surprised, and I didn't, in any case, spend much time by the sea shore, but went inland and picked bluebells etc. I found a number of nests, including a bullfinch's with four eggs, and by the way about a week ago I found a tit's nest, but I couldn't get at it, though I saw the bird go off the nest, as it was in the middle of a thorn bush. The crowds in Brighton weren't so bad, but of course it was an awful business getting back on Sunday,3 the train being so packed that people were hanging out of the windows. On Saturday night I was down in Chelsea, and it took me two hours to get back to Hampstead, the whole centre of London was so blocked with taxis full of drunken people careering round, singing and bellowing 'Long live the King!' What surprised me was that most of them were very young--the last people whom you would expect to find full of patriotic emotion; but I suppose they just welcomed the excuse for making a noise. That night I had been to see Rees,* really to borrow some money off him,4 as I had forgotten Monday was a bank holiday and had not got an
y money out of the bank, but he was at some sort of Socialist meeting and they asked me in and I spent three hours with seven or eight Socialists harrying me, including a South Wales miner who told me-- quite good-naturedly, however--that if he were dictator he would have me shot immediately. I have done quite a lot of work, but oh! what mountains there are to do yet. I don't know that I shall be able to let you have that piece5 to see in June after all, but I will some time--when it is fit to be seen, I mean. I am now getting to the stage where you feel as though you were crawling about inside some dreadful labyrinth. I don't know that I have read much. I read D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, which is certainly not one of his best. I remember reading it before in 1924--the unexpurgated version that time--and how very queer it seemed to me at that age. I see now that what he was trying to do was to create characters who were at once symbolical figures and recognizable human beings, which was certainly a mistake. The queer thing is that when he concentrates on producing ordinary human characters, as in Sons and Lovers and most of the short stories, he gets his meaning across much better as well as being much more readable. I have also been glancing into some numbers of The Enemy, the occasional paper Wyndham Lewis used to run, which we have in the shop. The man is certainly insane. I have hit on a wonderful recipe for a stew, which is the following: half a pound of ox-kidney, chopped up small, half a pound of mushrooms, sliced; one onion chopped very fine, two cloves of garlic, four skinned tomatoes, a slice of lean bacon chopped up, and salt, the whole stewed very gently for about two and a half hours in a very little beef stock. You eat it with sphagettideg or rather coquillettes. It is a good dish to make, as it cooks itself while you are working. I have been deriving a lot of pleasure from some numbers of the Girls'deg Own Paper of 1884 and 1885. In the answers to correspondents two questions crop up over and over again. One, whether it is ladylike to ride a tricycle. The other, whether Adam's immediate descendentsdeg did not have to commit incest in order to carry on the human species. The question of whether Adam had a navel does not seem to have been agitated, however.