A Life in Letters
Page 9
To Jack Common*
Thursday [16? April 1936]
The Stores
Wallington, Nr. Baldock1
[Herts]
Dear Common,
Thanks for yours. I have now seen my landlord and it is O.K. about the rent, so I have definitely decided to open the shop and have spread the news among the villagers to some extent. I should certainly be very obliged if you would find out about the wholesalers. I didn't know you had your shop still. I believe there are some wholesalers of the kind at Watford, Kingford or Kingston or some such name. I don't know whether, seeing that I shall only want tiny amounts at a time (apart from the smallness of the village I haven't much storage room), they will make any trouble about delivery. I intend, at first at any rate, to stock nothing perishable except children's sweets. Later on I might start butter and marg. but it would mean getting a cooler. I am not going to stock tobacco because the pubs here (two to about 75 inhabitants!) stock it and I don't want to make enemies, especially as one pub is next door to me. I am beginning to make out lists, though whether any one wholesaler will cover the lot I am not certain. I suppose what I shall start offdeg will be about twenty quids' worth of stuff. Are these people good about giving credit? What I would like to do would be to give a deposit of about PS5 and then pay quarterly. I suppose my bank would give me a reference. It is a pity in view of this that I have just changed my branch because the Hampstead branch were getting quite trustful and told me I could overdraw, though I never asked them. I shall want besides stock one or two articles of shop equipment, such as scales, a bell etc. There are some that go with this place but my landlord has them and he is the sort of person who takes a year before he hands anything over. I have got to tidy up the shop premises and repaint, but if I can click with the wholesalers I should be ready to open up in about 3 weeks.
Yes, this business of class-breaking is a bugger. The trouble is that the socialist bourgeoisie, most of whom give me the creeps, will not be realistic and admit that there are a lot of working-class habits which they don't like and don't want to adopt. E.g. the typical middle-class socialist not only doesn't eat with his knife but is still slightly horrified by seeing a working man do so. And then so many of them are the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell who go about spreading sweetness and light and have at the back of their minds a vision of the working class all T.T.1, well washed behind the ears, readers of Edward Carpenter 2 or some other pious sodomite and talking with B.B.C. accents. The working classes are very patient under it all. All the two months I was up north, when I spent my entire time in asking people questions about how much dole they got, what they had to eat etc., I was never once socked on the jaw and only once told to go to hell, and then by a woman who was deaf and thought I was a rate-collector. This question has been worrying me for a long time and part of my next book is to be about it.
I will get over when I have a bike or something. If you come over here, either let me know so that there shall be food, or take your chance--but there'll always be something, of course. The garden is still Augean (I have dug up twelve boots in two days) but I am getting things straight a little. It is awful to think that for nearly three months I have not done a stroke of work. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.3 However I have wads of notes which give me the illusion of not having wasted my time.
Yours
Eric A. Blair
[X, 300, pp. 470—1; typewritten]
1.T.T.: teetotal.
2.Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was a socialist writer and social reformer whose works include Towards Democracy (1883) and The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (1908).
3.Line 2 of Wordsworth's sonnet, 'The world is too much with us; late and soon' (1807).
To Geoffrey Gorer*
Sat. [23 May 1936]
The Stores
Wallington
Dear Gorer,
Many thanks for your kind offices re. Time & Tide. They gave me some novels to review. I would have written to you before only as usual I lost your letter with the address & it didn't turn up till this morning. I have had the shop open nearly a fortnight. I took 19/- the first week, this week will be 25/- or 30/-. That is turnover & the profit on it about pays the rent. I think the business could be worked up to PS3 or so. It is very little trouble & no hanging about like in a bookshop. In a grocer's shop people come in to buy something, in a bookshop they come in to make a nuisance of themselves.
I am getting married very shortly--it is fixed for June 9th at the parish church here. This is as it were in confidence because we are telling as few people as possible till the deed is done, lest our relatives combine against us in some way & prevent it. It is very rash of course but we talked it over & decided I should never be economically justified in marrying so might as well be unjustified now as later. I expect we shall rub along all right--as to money I mean--but it will always be hand to mouth as I don't see myself ever writing a best-seller. I have made a fairly good start on my new book.1
I was glad to see your book2 got such good reviews. I saw a very good one in the Times. The book itself I haven't seen yet. When you were in that part of the world did you go to Singapore by any chance? I have a great friend there at the Raffles Museum, Dennis Collings his name is, an anthropologist & very gifted in various strange ways--for instance he can do things like forging a medieval sword so that you can't tell it from a real one. I read your Notes by the Way3 with great interest. What you say about trying to study our own customs from an anthropological point of view opens up a lot of fields of thought, but one thing to notice about ourselves is that people's habits etc. are formed not only by their upbringing & so forth but also very largely by books. I have often thought it would be very interesting to study the conventions etc. of books from an anthropological point of view. I don't know if you ever read Elmer Rice's A Voyage to Purilia. It contains a most interesting analysis of certain conventions--taken for granted & never even mentioned--existing in the ordinary film. It would be interesting & I believe valuable to work out the underlying beliefs & general imaginative background of a writer like Edgar Wallace. But of course that's the kind of thing nobody will ever print.4
Thank God it has rained at last, after 3 weeks drought, & my vegetables are doing fairly well.
Yours
Eric A. Blair
[X. 311, pp. 481-2; handwritten]
1.The Road to Wigan Pier.
2.Bali and Angkor.
3.Properly, 'Notes on the Way,' Time and Tide, 23 May 1936.
4.In proposing study of this kind Orwell was well ahead of his time.
To Denys King-Farlow*
9 June 1936
The Stores
Wallington
Dear King-Farlow,
Of course I remember you. But have you changed your name back to King-Farlow? It was Nettleton most of the time you were at Eton. I only got your letter this morning. It was forwarded by Cyril Connolly*, who has been away. I'm afraid I can't possibly come along on the 11th, much as I would like to, first of all because it's always difficult for me to get away from here, secondly because like the chap in the N.T. I have married a wife & therefore I cannot come.1 Curiously enough I am getting married this very morning--in fact I am writing this with one eye on the clock & the other on the Prayer Book, which I have been studying for some days past in hopes of steeling myself against the obscenities of the wedding service. When exactly I'll be up in Town I don't know. This place as you see by the address used to be the village 'general' shop, & when I came here I reopened it as such--the usual little shop stocking groceries, sweets, packets of aspirins etc. It doesn't bring in much but it does pay my rent for me, & for a literary gent that is a consideration. On the other hand it makes it very difficult to get away from here. But if you are ever passing anywhere near, do drop in. It's not much off your track if you are going anywhere in a north-easterly direction or eg. to Cambridge. I should always be at home, except on Saturda
y afternoons & sometimes on Sundays, & should love to see you again.
I am not in touch with many of the Etonians of our time. Connolly came to see me once in town & he has been very kind in reviewing my books. I used to see Alan Clutton-Brock2 in 1928--just recently his wife was killed in a motor smash. It was sad about poor Godfrey Meynell.3 I went & stayed at Cambridge with Gow* when I came back from Burma at the end of '27, but though he was very kind it seemed to me I had moved out of his orbit & he out of mine. I suppose most of the others we knew are dons, civil servants & barristers. I hear you have been in the U.S.A. a long time & are very rich & flourishing. I have had a bloody life a good deal of the time but in some ways an interesting one. Please excuse this untidy scrawl.
Yours
Eric A. Blair
[X, 316, p. 485; handwritten]
1.Gospel according to St Luke, xiii, 20.
2.Alan Clutton-Brock (c. 1903-1976), a contemporary of Orwell's at Eton. He became art critic of The Times and was Slade Professor of Fine Art, Cambridge, 1955-58.
3.Godfrey Meynell, a contemporary at Eton, had joined the army and was killed on the North West Frontier of India leading his native troops in action. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
To Henry Miller*
26-27 August 1936
The Stores
Dear Miller,
Many thanks for your letter. It made me feel rather bad all the same, because I had been meaning for weeks to write to you and had been putting it off. Well, Black Spring arrived all right and I liked part of it very much, especially the opening chapters, but I do think, and shall say in reviewing it1, that a book like Tropic of Cancer, dealing with events that happened or might have happened in the ordinary three-dimensional world, is more in your line. I liked Tropic of Cancer especially for three things, first of all a peculiar rhythmic quality in your English, secondly the fact that you dealt with facts well known to everybody but never mentioned in print (eg. when the chap is supposed to be making love to the woman but is dying for a piss all the while), thirdly the way in which you would wander off into a kind of reverie where the laws of ordinary reality were slipped just a little but not too much. You do this also in Black Spring, eg. I like very much your meditation beginning in a public urinal on pp. 60-64, but I think on the whole you have moved too much away from the ordinary world into a sort of Mickey Mouse universe where things and people don't have to obey the rules of space and time. I dare say I am wrong and perhaps have missed your drift altogether, but I have a sort of belly to earth attitude and always feel uneasy when I get away from the ordinary world where grass is green, stones hard etc. It is also, I know, pretty bloody when you have written one unusual book to be blamed for not writing another exactly like it. But I don't want you to think there wasn't a lot in Black Spring that I enjoyed. The quality of the prose is fine too, especially that passage I referred to before about the dung and the angels. When I read a piece like that I feel as you feel when you are galloping a really good horse over ground where you don't have to look out for rabbit holes. I will do what I can in the way of reviews. The Adelphi told me I could do a short bit on it, but they are soon going to become a quarterly, and I shall also do it for the New English, but they have shut up shop for August as they always do, so the reviews will be a bit late I expect, but I suppose in your case that doesn't matter so much as with the ordinary twopenny halfpenny novel that is genius for a week and then is sold off as a remainder. I have got to go and milk the goat now but I will continue this letter when I come back.
27.8.36. I am glad you managed to get hold of a copy of Down and Out. I haven't one left and it is out of print, and I was going to send you a copy of the French translation (I suppose it was the English version you saw) when I got your letter. Yes, it was published in America too but didn't sell a great deal. I don't know what sort of reviews it got in France--I only saw about two, either because the press-cutting people didn't get them or because I hadn't arranged to have copies sent out with flattering letters to leading critics, which I am told you should do in France. Some others of my books have also been published in America. My second book, Burmese Days, was published there before being published in England, because my publisher was afraid the India Office might take steps to have it suppressed. A year later my English publisher brought out a version of it with various names etc. altered, so the American edition is the proper one. That is the only one of my books that I am pleased with--not that it is any good qua novel, but the descriptions of scenery aren't bad, only of course that is what the average reader skips. My third book, A Clergyman's Daughter which came out in England about a year ago, was published in America last week. That book is bollox, but I made some experiments in it that were useful to me. My last book, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, won't, I imagine be published in America, because it is a domestic sort of story with an entirely English theme and the American public are getting restive about what I believe is called 'British sissy-stuff.' I noticed also when I worked in the bookshop that it is harder and harder to sell American books in England. The two languages are drifting further and further apart.
Yes, I agree about English poverty. It is awful. Recently I was travelling among the worst parts of the coal areas in Lancashire and Yorkshire--I am doing a book2 about it now--and it is dreadful to see how the people have collapsed and lost all their guts in the last ten years. I reviewed Connolly's novel for the N[ew] E[nglish] W[eekly], but though it amused me I didn't think a lot of it3. It surprised me that he should be in such a stew about the book 'dating'as though every book worth reading didn't 'date!' I see from the blurb on Black Spring that you got a pretty good write-up from Eliot & Co, also that I am mentioned among them. That is a step up for me--the first time I have been on anybody else's blurb. So no doubt I shall be Sir Eric Blair yet.3
Write if or when you feel inclined.
Yours
Eric A. Blair
[X, 323, pp. 495-7; typewritten]
1.Orwell's review of Miller's Black Spring appeared in the New English Weekly in September 1936 (X, 325, pp. 499-501). Miller wrote to Orwell to thank him for his 'amazingly, sympathetic' review.
2.The Road to Wigan Pier.
3.The Rock Pool (X, 321, pp. 400-1).
4.See Gordon Comstock's (incorrect) sneering bestowal of a knighthood on John Drinkwater in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (IV, p. 138).
Eileen wrote six letters to a friend she had made at Oxford, Norah Symes. Norah also met her future husband, Quartus St Leger Myles, at Oxford. They became engaged when he returned to Clifton as a General Practitioner. They had no children. She died in 1994 and these letters were in her bequest to John Durant. They passed to Mrs Margaret Durant who allowed their inclusion in The Lost Orwell. Recently, they were bought by Richard Young who has very kindly allowed them to be reproduced here. The letters give no indication to whom they were written, and, except for the initial 'E' at the end of the last letter, are always signed by the pet-name, 'Pig'. Possibly Norah's maiden name suggested the name for a character in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Only one of the letters is dated (New Year's Day, 1938) so dating is conjectural. Fuller notes are given in The Lost Orwell.
Eileen Blair* to Norah Myles*
3 or 10 November 1936
36 High Street
Southwold1
[no salutation]
I wrote the address quite a long time ago & have since played with three cats, made a cigarette (I make them now but not with the naked hand),2 poked the fire & driven Eric (i.e George) nearly mad - all because I didn't really know what to say. I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously & really bitterly that I thought I'd save time & just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished. Then Eric's aunt 3 came to stay & was so dreadful (she stayed two months) that we stopped quarrelling & just repined. Then she went away & now all our troubles are over. They arose partly because
Mother drove me so hard in the first week of June4 that I cried all the time from pure exhaustion & partly because Eric had decided that he mustn't let his work be interrupted & complained bitterly when we'd been married a week that he'd only done two good days' work out of seven.5 Also I couldn't make the oven cook anything & boiled eggs (on which Eric had lived almost exclusively) made me sick. Now I can make the oven cook a reasonable number of things & he is working very rapidly.6 I forgot to mention that he had his 'bronchitis' for three weeks in July & that it rained every day for six weeks during the whole of which the kitchen was flooded & all food went mouldy in a few hours. It seems a long time ago now but then seemed very permanent.
I thought I could come & see you & have twice decided when I could, but Eric always gets something if I'm going away if he has notice of the fact, & if he has no notice (when Eric my brother arrives7 & removes me as he has done twice) he gets something when I've gone so that I have to come home again. For the last few weeks we have been completely broke and shall be now until Christmas because the money we expected in October for Keep the Aspidistra Flying won't be paid until April and the next book won't earn its advance until December anyway and possibly January. But I must be in London for some days this month. Is there a chance of one of these Wednesdays? If so & if you tell me which I'll make my visit to fit it. I must see Eric (brother) a bit about his book, the proofs of which I'm now correcting, & also have some intelligence testing to do with Lydia.8 Could you come either on the 18th or on the 25th? I think they're Wednesdays - anyway I mean Wednesdays. I want passionately to see you. Lydia must have a bit of notice & indeed at any minute is going to descend on me in wrath (against Eric on social grounds not against me, for I am perfection in her eyes) & force me to go to London exactly when I don't want to. So if you were to send a postcard-------9