A Life in Letters

by George Orwell

  Jack Common (1903-68), a working man from Tyneside who worked for The Adelphi from 1930 to 1936, first as a circulation pusher, then as assistant editor, and from 1935-36 as co-editor with Sir Richard Rees. He wrote several books and Crick called him 'one of the few authentic English proletarian writers. In 1938 Orwell reviewed his The Freedom of the Streets (XI, pp. 162-3). He and his wife, Mary, lived in the Orwells' cottage at Wallington whilst the latter were in Morocco.

  Cyril Connolly (1903-74) was with Orwell at St Cyprian's and Eton. They met again in 1935 after Connolly had reviewed Burmese Days. They were associated in a number of literary activities, particularly the journal Horizon which Connolly edited with great distinction. See his Enemies of Promise (1938), which has references to Orwell; and The Rock Pool (1936), which Orwell reviewed (X, pp. 490-1) and which includes the critique, 'A more serious objection is that even to want to write about so-called artists who spend on sodomy what they have gained by sponging betrays a kind of spiritual inadequacy', a world that it is clear the author 'rather admires'.

  Lettice Cooper (1897-1994), novelist and biographer. She worked during the war at the Ministry of Food with Eileen, who looked after the 'Kitchen Front' radio broadcasts. Her novels include The Lighted Room (1925), and Black Bethlehem (1947), in which the character Ann is said to be based on Eileen. In her touching memoir of Eileen (recorded for the Orwell Archive) she tells how Orwell read each instalment of Animal Farm to her every evening 'and she used to come in and tell us next morning how it was getting on, she knew at once it was a winner' (see Remembering Orwell, pp. 116-17, 130-2, 144-5, and 196-7). She underwent psychoanalysis and Orwell's knowledge of this may have come from her.

  Stafford Cottman (1918-99) was the youngest member of the ILP unit which fought with the POUM in the Spanish Civil War. He and Orwell fought alongside each other and escaped together. He was initially pro-Communist but rejected Communism after the May Events in Barcelona in 1937. On his return home to Bristol he was expelled from the Young Communist League as an enemy of the working class and his house was 'shadowed' by its members. There is an excellent obituary of Cottman in the Independent, 3 November 1999.

  Humphrey Dakin (1896-1970) married Orwell's older sister, Marjorie in July 1920. He was a civil servant and worked for the National Savings Committee. Orwell stayed with them from time to time in Leeds when he was examining conditions in the Distressed Areas. Humphrey seemed to resent his brother-in-law, considering him a 'work-shy drop-out' (Orwell Remembered, pp. 127-30).

  Marjorie Dakin nee Blair (1898-1946), Orwell's elder sister. She served as motorcycle despatch rider for the Women's Legion during the First World War. She married Humphrey Dakin (1896-1970). Their children, Henry, Jane and Lucy, all stayed with Orwell on Jura.

  C.D. Darlington (1903-81), Director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution, 1939-53, Professor of Botany and Keeper of the Botanic Garden, Oxford University, 1953-71. He pubished The Conflict of Science and Society (1948), which Orwell read in May 1949. Although associated with J.D. Bernal and J.G. Crowther he was an anti-communist. He and Orwell were both concerned about the damage done to science (and the Soviet people) by the work of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, Director of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Science, who rejected Western genetics and was favoured by Stalin. Hearing John Baker lecture on Lysenko at the PEN Conference, 22-26 August 1944, was one of the motivating factors in Orwell's writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Orwell was working at the BBC, he engaged Darlington to give three talks to India.

  Yvonne Davet (c. 1895-?) was for many years secretary to Andre Gide. She and Orwell did not meet but corresponded before and after the war. Her translation of Homage to Catalonia was completed before the war and read and commented upon by Orwell. Orwell's instructions were later applied to the Complete Works edition. Her translation was not published until 1955, after Orwell's death. She also translated the work of Jean Rhys, Graham Greene, and Iris Murdoch.

  E. Rowan Davies When Orwell joined the BBC in 1941 Davies was listed as a Transcription Assistant in the Eastern Service. On 21 August 1943 he was shown on a staff list as Schools Broadcasting Manager in the Home Service.

  R.R. Desai was a postgraduate student at Cambridge whose department had been evacuated to Aberystwyth. He translated into Gujerati forty-two English texts written by Orwell and re-cast two others. He would travel each Sunday night to London to read his versions, the BBC paying his rail fare and giving him PS1 14s subsistence together with a fee of PS5 5s. Later he wrote the newsletters himself. He was still living in London in 2004.

  Dr Bruce Dick, specialist in charge of the Thoracic Unit at Hairmyres Hospital. Much to Orwell's amusement, he thought that Dick had served with Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War. However, his junior doctor at the time, Dr James Williamson thought that 'bunkum'. Williamson's description of Orwell's treatment is reproduced in Remembering Orwell, pp. 197-202. In 1996 Professor Williamson told Ian Angus that for a while Orwell shared a room with the editor of the boys' comic Hotspur and Professor Dick had been interested to see how they got on. 'In the event they got on well together (as I think almost anyone would have . . .).'

  Kay Dick (1915-2001), under the pen-name Edward Lee, was co-editor with Reginald Moore of The Windmill, nos 1-12, which ran from 1944-48.

  Sergei Dinamov (1901-39), chief editor of International Literature, Moscow. He was an authority on Western literature and a leading Shakespeare scholar. He was arrested in 1938 and died in a Gulag, probably having been shot.

  Charles Doran (1894-1974) was born in Dublin but moved to Glasgow in 1915. He served in the First World War and then became active in the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation. He joined the ILP in the 1930s and served with Orwell in the POUM in Spain. His widow, Bertha, said her husband classed Orwell 'as a rebel - not a revolutionary - who was dissatisfied with the Establishment, while remaining part of it.' In 1983 Mrs Doran told Dr James D. Young that her late husband was impressed with Orwell's modesty and sincerity. 'I remember Charlie saying that Orwell was not an argumentative sort of person. He [Charlie] might voice an opinion about something, hoping to provoke Orwell into agreeing or disagreeing, but Orwell would just say: "You might be right, Doran!" '

  T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), poet and critic. Orwell commissioned Eliot to make half-adozen broadcasts to India and he reviewed The Four Quartets in 1944 (XVI, pp. 420-3). As a reader for Faber, he rejected Down and Out in Paris and London, and Animal Farm.

  Roy Fuller (1912-91), although a solicitor for the Woolwich Building Society, he was also a prolific poet. He became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1968, the year in which he was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. In 1969 he became Vice-President of the Building Societies Association.

  Tosco Fyvel (1907-85), his parents had emigrated to Palestine (as it then was) from Vienna and he became associated with the Zionist movement, working with Golda Meir. Orwell met him with Fredric Warburg in January 1940 the outcome of which was the Searchlight series of books, which Fyvel and Orwell edited. (Orwell contributed The Lion and the Unicorn.) Fyvel's George Orwell: A Personal Memoir (1982) is particularly helpful especially on the subject of anti-Semitism and Zionism (see pp. 178-82).

  Victor Gollancz (1893-1967), Orwell's first publisher. After Oxford he taught at Repton for two years where his introduction of a class on civics brought him into conflict with the headmaster, Dr Geoffrey Fisher, who would later become Archbishop of Canterbury. He was sacked in 1918, worked on minimum-wage legislation, and after working for OUP joined Benn Brothers, publishers of trade journals. His success there led to his establishing his own publishing house in 1927. In his first year he published sixty-four books. Although a member of the Labour Party and born into an orthodox Jewish family he would later describe himself as a Christian socialist. His major achievement was the formation of the Left Book Club, which brought out The Road to Wigan Pier. He was well-known for offering modest advances to authors ensuring the likelihood that there would be more to follow
after publication.

  Geoffrey Gorer (1905-85), social anthropologist and author of many books including Africa Dances (1935), The American People (1964), and Death Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (1965). He wrote to Orwell about Burmese Days, 'it seems to me you have done a necessary and important piece of work as well as it could be done'. They met and remained lifelong friends.

  A.S.F. Gow (1886-1978), Orwell's tutor at Eton. He was later appointed to a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. He and Orwell corresponded occasionally. His name was inverted to 'Wog' at Eton and Orwell wrote a doggerel verse when there starting, 'Then up waddled Wog and he squeaked in Greek: / "I've grown another hair on my cheek" ' (X, p. 52).

  Rayner Heppenstall (1911-81), novelist, critic and crime historian. He shared a flat with Orwell in 1935 but the arrangement was not an unqualified success; they even came to blows. Nevertheless they remained friends and Heppenstall produced some of Orwell's work for the BBC, notably his script for The Voyage of the Beagle and a radio adaptation of Animal Farm. Orwell is one of those featured in his Four Absentees (1960), extracts from which are reproduced in Orwell Remembered.

  Inez Holden (1906-74), novelist, short-story writer, journalist and broadcaster, was a cousin of Celia Kirwan, twin sister of Arthur Koestler's wife, Mamaine. She proved a good friend to the Orwells lending them her flat in Portman Square after they had been bombed out. She and Orwell considered publishing their war diaries as a joint venture. The project fell through because she wanted to change anything Orwell wrote with which she disagreed. Her diary was published as It Was Different at the Time (1943).

  Lydia Jackson nee Jiburtovich (1899-1983), psychologist, writer and translator (using the pen-name Elisaveta Fen). She was born in Russia and came to England in 1925. She met Eileen at University College London in 1935 and they remained friends. She stayed at the Orwell's Wallington cottage when they were not there and visited Orwell at Barnhill and Hairmyres Hospital. She translated Chekhov's plays for Penguin, 1951-54. Her A Russian's England, 1976, gives good accounts of Eileen, Wallington, and Eileen and Orwell's relationship.

  Eleanor Jaques (?-1962) arrived in Southwold from Canada in 1921 shortly before the Blair family. They were for a time the Blairs' next-door-neighbours in Stradbroke Road. Eleanor and Orwell became friends. She is first mentioned in Orwell's letter to Dennis Collings of 12 October 1931 saying she might be allowed to read Orwell's 'narrative of my adventures' when hop-picking.

  Revd Iorwerth Jones, Minister of Pan-teg Congregational Church, Ystalyfera, Swansea. He wrote to Malcolm Muggeridge on 4 May 1955 enclosing Orwell's letter of 8 April, 1941. He had written to Orwell to 'raise queries about his comments on pacificism'. The minister thought this letter might be helpful to Muggeridge in writing Orwell's biography - a biography he did not, in the event, get round to writing.

  Dr Thomas Jones, C H (1870-1955), described by Crick as 'Lloyd George's famous Cabinet Secretary'. He was a prime mover in the establishment of CEMA, the forerunner of the Arts Council. Orwell had written to him about 20 March 1942 regarding the abysmal delay in the issue of ammunition to the Home Guard in a surprise call-out (XIII, p. 236).

  Denys King-Farlow (1903-82), a fellow Colleger in Orwell's Election at Eton. They produced The Election Times and co-edited College Days, nos. 4 and 5. He won scholarships to Cambridge and Princeton and worked for Royal Dutch Shell in Canada. For his reminiscences of Orwell, see Orwell Remembered, pp. 54-60.

  Celia Kirwan (1916-2002) was the twin sister of Mamaine Koestler. The sisters both suffered badly from asthma. She and Orwell first met when they travelled together (with Richard) to spend Christmas 1945 with the Koestlers at Bwylch Ocyn near Blaenau Ffestiniog. Orwell proposed marriage to her after Eileen's death. Although she 'gently refused him' they remained close friends. She worked as an editorial assistant for Polemic (which published 'Politics vs. Literature', 1946) but when that collapsed moved to Paris to work on Occident, a tri-lingual magazine. When she worked for the Information Research Department, she was, so far as her relationship with Orwell was concerned, far more a close friend than a government official. She visited Orwell at Cranham to ask him to write for the Information Research Department. He did not feel well enough to do so but suggested names of those who might help and also gave a list of those whom he thought could not be trusted. See XX, pp. 318-27 and The Lost Orwell, pp. 140-51.

  Arthur Koestler (1905-83), born in Budapest, joined the Communist Party in 1931, leaving in the late 1930s, and spent a year in the USSR. He worked as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War, was captured and condemned to death. He escaped and was interned in France in 1940 and then imprisoned as an alien by the British but later released. Among books describing his experiences are Spanish Testament (1937), Scum of the Earth (1941), and Darkness at Noon (1940), which Orwell reviewed (XII, pp. 357-9). He became a British citizen in 1945. Orwell's essay, 'Arthur Koestler', was published in 1946; see XVI, pp. 391-402. His second wife, Mamaine, was the twin sister of Celia Kirwan). He and his third wife, Cynthia, both committed suicide in 1983 although she was much younger than was Koestler.

  George(s) Kopp (1902-1951) was born in Petrograd and was Orwell's commandant in Spain. They remained friends thereafter. Kopp was a mysterious figure. He lived for a significant part of his life in Belgium and created various fictions about himself. It was certain that he was brave and skilful in war. He seems to have served for the Vichy Secret Service and also for MI5 (his handler being Anthony Blunt). Various claims have been made that he and Eileen had an affair, but Eileen's letter of New Year's Day, 1938, explodes that theory. He died in Marseilles. Bert Govaerts has done much to discover the truth of Kopp's background: see The Lost Orwell, pp. 83-91.

  Jennie Lee (1904-88; Baroness Lee of Ashridge, 1970), daughter of a Scottish miner who was chairman of his local ILP branch. She served in the Labour governments of 1964-70 and was appointed as the first Minister of the Arts, making a profound impression in that role. She married Aneurin Bevan in 1934.

  Captain Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart (1895-1970) wrote more than thirty books including History of the Second World War (1970). He had been military correspondent to the Daily Telegraph, 1925-35, and to The Times, 1935-39. In 1937 he was personal adviser to the Minister of War. Orwell wrote of him, 'The two military critics most favoured by the intelligentsia are Captain Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller, the first of whom teaches that the defence is stronger than the attack, and the second that the attack is stronger than the defence. This contradiction has not prevented both of them from being accepted as authorities by the same public. The secret reason for their vogue in left-wing circles is that both of them are at odds with the War Office' ('Notes on Nationalism', 1945, XVII, p. 143).

  Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1989-1976), Soviet advocate of Lamarckism (roughly, the ability in nature to develop acquired characteristics). His views were supported by Stalin. They dominated Soviet biology from the 1930s leading to the elimination of rival, and far sounder, biologists. In 1948 the Central Committee of the Soviet Union decreed that 'Lysenkoism' was correct. Lysenko and his theories were totally discredited following the fall of Khrushchev. The penultimate book Orwell read in 1949 was Julian Huxley's Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity (1949). Orwell was interested in Lysenko to the last. He pasted a cutting from the News Chronicle for 16 December 1949 into his Last Literary Notebook which quoted Lysenko as maintaining that 'Wheat can become Rye' (XX, 3725, p. 214).

  Dwight Macdonald (1906-82), libertarian critic, pamphleteer, and scholar. He was an associate editor of Partisan Review and later founded Politics of which he was editor 1944-49 and to which Orwell contributed, November 1944 and September 1946.

  Sally McEwan (?-1987) was Orwell's secretary when he was literary editor of Tribune. She stayed at Barnhill with her daughter in 1946 and Michael Shelden records that over forty years later she still had happy memories of her time there (Shelden, p. 449).

  John McNai
r (1887-1968), a Tynesider and indefatigable worker for socialism all his life. He left school when he was twelve, ran into trouble with employers because of his left-wing views, and went to France to find work. He stayed there for twenty-five years, becoming a leather merchant, founding a football club with eight teams, and lecturing on English poets at the Sorbonne. He returned to England in 1936, rejoined the ILP and was its General Secretary, 1939-55. He was the first British worker to go to Spain and was the ILP representative in Barcelona.

  Jessica Marshall (nee Browne) lived at Byfleet, Surrey. She heard Orwell give a lecture and thereafter read all he wrote. They seem to have had no personal contact. It is typical of Orwell's generous spirit that, even though he was ill, he took the trouble to write to her at such length.

  Michael Meyer (1921-2000), author and translator (most notably of Ibsen and Strindberg). In 1943 he wrote what he later described as a 'timid letter' to Orwell and received an invitation to lunch (see XV, p. 65). They met and became good friends. Meyer describes Orwell in Remembering Orwell, pp. 132-7.

  Henry Miller (1891-1980), American author who lived in Paris from 1930-39. His fictionalised autobiographies, such as Tropic of Cancer (1934), and Tropic of Capricorn (1938), were banned in the USA until 1961 for their explicit treatment of sex. For Orwell's essay on Miller, see 'Inside the Whale' (XII, pp. 86-115).

  Leonard Moore (?-1959), of Christy & Moore, became Orwell's literary agent in 1932 at the suggestion of Mabel Fierz. He succeeded in placing Down and Out in Paris and London and was throughout Orwell's life a patient and skilful supporter of Orwell and his work.