George Orwell: A Life in Letters

by Peter Davison

  It is apparent how hard he worked on his correspondence. It is easy to forget nowadays, when using a personal computer with its facility to copy, paste, and save, that typing letters on a mechanical machine could be hard physical work, especially if, as for Orwell, he had to type when ill in bed. There was a limit as to how many copies could be typed at a time. Thus, if he or Eileen wanted to pass on the same information to more than one person, each one would receive a separate letter and each of those would have to be typed afresh. (See the conclusion to Eileen’s letter to Mary Common, 5 December 1938.) Yet Orwell would patiently type and retype his news in letters to different friends.

  One very significant characteristic of Orwell’s letter-writing, telling something of his generosity of character, is how he would write at length to those he did not know, may never have met, and to whom he owed nothing. The letter above to Richard Usborne, and that to Jessica Marshall written from Hairmyres Hospital on 19 May 1948 are both letters on which he spent considerable time although a brief acknowledgement would have sufficed for most of us.

  Eileen’s letters are completely different in content and style. It is to Eileen we must turn to discover what it was like staying with her husband’s parents at Southwold, what it was like living in their almost primitive cottage at Wallington, and it is to Eileen we turn for irony. She had a fine sense of humour and although both she and Orwell were self-deprecatory, in Eileen this is put with delicious wit.

  Because so much has been published of Orwell’s work and because so many of his letters have survived, we know (or think we know) what to expect. Eileen so often comes as a surprise. There are the lovely letters written to her husband (then working as a war correspondent on the Continent) telling him how their little boy was developing and also her hopes for their future away from London (which Orwell would realise on Jura) and her anxieties about the operation which we now know would bring an end to her life. Eileen also lived a life that we did not know about until the batch of letters to Norah Myles was published in The Lost Orwell and reproduced here. It was known that she went to Chapel Ridding at Windermere in July 1938 but we have never known why – and still do not know. Something of this other side of Eileen is revealed in her letters. One thing that is certain from them is that she had a very affectionate nature.

  A small handful of letters by others than Orwell and Eileen have been included. Each one – such as Jennie Lee’s letter to Miss Goalby on page 68 – illuminates Orwell’s character or his medical condition (as does that from Dr Bruce Dick to David Astor on page 433). These few letters help to develop further our picture of Orwell – for example, the unforgettable image of his arrival in Spain just after Christmas 1936: ‘This was George Orwell and his boots arriving to fight in Spain.’ As Jennie Lee explains, ‘He knew he could not get boots big enough’ in Spain and he had come with a spare set hanging round his neck. The problem of getting footwear large enough for his feet came back to haunt him towards the end of his life.

  Taken together, this volume and its companion volume, Orwell’s Diaries, go some way to offering the autobiography that Orwell did not write.

  Peter Davison

  This edition

  Most letters are reproduced in full but their layout has been regularised. I have made a few cuts to avoid repeating what is readily available elsewhere in the selection (for example, Orwell’s instructions for making the journey from London to Barnhill, Jura). Where a cut is made, this is indicated within square brackets. A complete record with the original styling is available in The Complete Works. Addresses from which letters are sent are often shortened and standardised. After each letter is an inconspicuous reference to its source in Complete Works. Such explicatory notes to letters are provided as are deemed to be helpful in a volume of this kind. They are not exhaustive – but, again, Complete Works can usually be consulted for further information.

  Over ninety much-abbreviated biographies of many of those to whom letters were written are given in the Biographical Notes. This will save too-frequent repetition of biographical information and the need to search for such notes where the individuals are first mentioned. Those for whom biographical notes are given are indicated by asterisks after their names in the body of the book. ‘George Orwell’ as we tend to call him, was born Eric Blair. He continued to use his birth names throughout his life. Some of his friends knew him as ‘Eric’, some as ‘George’. His first wife, Eileen, was always Eileen Blair and his son is Richard Blair. In this book, ‘the Blairs’ refers to Orwell’s parents and family and ‘the Orwells’ to George and Eileen as a couple.

  The sources of these letters together with full notes are to be found in The Complete Works of George Orwell and its supplementary volume, The Lost Orwell. The first nine volumes of The Complete Works comprise Orwell’s books. These were published by Secker & Warburg in 1986–1987 and have been printed in paperback since by Penguin Books. Volumes X–XX were published in 1998 and then in paperback (with some supplementary material) in 2000–2002. The supplementary volume was published by Timewell Press in 2006. The facsimile of the extant manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1984 by Secker & Warburg in London and M&S Press, Weston, Massachusetts. These volumes were edited by Peter Davison and amount to 9,243 pages. It will be evident that this present volume offers only a small proportion of what is to be found in the whole edition to which, of course, further reference might, if necessary, be made.

  In the main the texts of letters are printed as Orwell wrote them. Slight oversights are silently corrected and titles of books and magazines and foreign-language expressions are italicised (something Orwell could not do on a typewriter). Occasionally (as in Complete Works) Orwell’s typical misspellings are retained but indicated by a superior degree sign (°). References to the Complete Works are given as Volume number in roman figure + item number + page(s), e.g., XIX, 3386, pp. 321–2. References to letters from The Lost Orwell are given similarly but preceded by LO + page numbers; their position in Complete Works follows. References to books listed in ‘A Short List of Further Reading’ are given by the author’s name + page number – e.g. Crick, p. 482, except for Orwell Remembered and Remembering Orwell, which are so designated followed by their page numbers.

  Initials such as ILP, sometimes appear with and sometimes without stops after each letter, e.g., ILP and I.L.P. Orwell’s practice is followed. Many are defined when used. Those that are not but which might be unfamiliar to some readers are:

  ARP: Air Raid Precautions

  CB: Commander of the Bath

  CBE: Commander of the Order of the British Empire

  CH: Companion of Honour

  CP: Communist Party

  FDC: Freedom Defence Committee

  GPU: Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenye

  (Soviet Secret Police)

  IB: International Brigade

  ILP: Independent Labour Party

  IRD: Information Research Department

  KG: Knight of the Order of the Garter

  Kt: Knight(ed)

  LCC: London County Council

  NCCL: National Council for Civil Liberties

  NKVD: Narodniy Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Dyel

  (Soviet Secret Police)

  NL: New Leader

  NYK: Nippon Yusen Kaisha (Japanese Mail Steamer Co.)

  OBE: Officer of the Order of the British Empire

  OUP: Oxford University Press

  PAS: para-amino-salycylic acid

  PEN: International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists

  POUM: Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Revolutionary (anti-Stalinist) Communist Party – under whose aegis Orwell fought in Spain)

  PR: Partisan Review

  RAMC: Royal Army Medical Corps

  TUC: Trades Union Congress

  YCL: Youth Communist League

  It is difficult to give precise equivalents of value with today’s prices because individual items vary considerably. How
ever, a rough approximation can be gained if prices in the 1930s are multiplied by forty; by thirty-five during the war; and by thirty between then and Orwell’s death. In pre-decimal coinage there were 12 pence to a shilling and twenty shillings to £1 – so 240 pence to a £. Sixpence in old coinage = 2½p; one shilling (12 pennies) = 5p; 10 shillings (10/-) = 50p. For the Orwells’ time in Morocco it might be convenient to refer to R.L. Bidwell’s Currency Conversion Tables (1970). He records the French franc as being 165 to the £ (39.8 to the $) in March 1938. In January 1939 he gives 176.5 to the £ (39.8 to the $). Thus, the Orwells’ rent for their cottage – 7s 6d per week – is approximately £1.50 for four weeks in 1930s equivalences and, say, £60 per month at current values. The rent for the villa in Morocco was 550 francs per month, approximately £3.25 then but, say, £130 at today’s values.

  Grateful thanks are due to The Orwell Estate, in particular Richard Blair and Bill Hamilton, and to Gill Furlong, Archivist, and Steven Wright, UCL Special Collections Library, for enabling these letters to be published. I am indebted to my grandson, Tom, for much technical support. The Orwell Estate and the publishers expressed thanks to copyrights holders of letters published in the Complete Works and The Lost Orwell and that gratitude is renewed here. Thanks are also due to those who have allowed letters not previously published, or for which the originals have changed hands, to be reproduced. I am immensely grateful to Myra Jones for her careful proofreading (once again) and to Briony Everroad of Harvill Secker for her courtesy and her splendid support.

  Peter Davison

  An asterisk after a correspondent’s name indicates that that person

  will be found in the Biographical Notes. Cross references to

  other letters are emphasised in bold.

  From Pupil to Teacher

  to Author

  1911–1933

  Orwell left Eton in December 1921. He had applied to join the Indian Imperial Police and was coached for the competitive entrance examination. The results were published on 23 November 1922. He had come seventh of twenty-nine successful applicants obtaining 8,464 marks out of a possible 12,400, the pass mark being 6,000. His strongest subjects were Latin, Greek, and English. He just passed the horse-riding test and scored 174 out of 400 for Freehand Drawing (so he had advanced from the little drawings with which he embellished his letters to his mother from St Cyprian’s).

  He arrived in Burma on 27 November 1922. He learned Hindi, Burmese, and Shaw Karen and could converse in fluent ‘very high-flown Burmese’ with Burmese priests. He served in a number of stations and he did see a hanging and did shoot an elephant, about both of which he wrote important essays. For shooting the elephant (which had killed a coolie) he was despatched by an angry commanding officer to Katha on 23 December 1926, the basis for Kyauktada of Burmese Days.

  He left Burma on 12 July 1927 to take the six months’ leave he was due. Whilst on leave he resigned from the Police. He had evidently saved a fair amount of his pay and went to Paris where he attempted to earn a living as a writer. He did have six articles published in Paris in French and one that was published in England, but he failed to get short stories or a novel accepted and they were all destroyed. When he ran out of money he worked for a few weeks as a kitchen hand in a luxury hotel, either the Crillon or the Lotti. For a short while he was a patient in the Cochin Hospital with ‘une grippe’, an experience about which he also wrote.

  Orwell returned to England and, using the family home in Southwold as a base, made forays tramping and hop-picking. He began to get articles accepted (for very little money) and from April 1932 to July 1933 taught boys aged ten to sixteen at The Hawthornes, a private school in Hayes, Middlesex. He did not return for the autumn term at The Hawthorns, which had, in any case, run into financial difficulties, but went to teach at Frays College, a private school for boys and girls, in Uxbridge, Middlesex; it is illustrated in Thompson, p. 40. On 9 January 1933 Victor Gollancz published Down and Out in Paris and London.

  From Orwell’s letter to his mother, 15 October 1911

  To Ida Blair*

  2 December 1911

  St Cyprian’s School

  Eastbourne

  My dear Mother, I hope you are alright,

  It was Mrs: Wilkes1 birthday yesterday, we had aufel fun after tea and played games all over the house. We all went for a walk to Beachy-Head.

  I am third in Arithmatick.

  ‘Its’ very dull today, and dosent look as if its going to be very warm.

  Thank you for your letter.

  It is getting very near the end of term, there are only eighteen days more.

  On Saturday evening we have dncing, and I am going to say a piece of poetry, some of the boys sing.

  Give my love to Father and Avril. Is Togo alright, We had the Oxford and Cambridge Matches yesterday. Cambridge won in the first and third, and the second did not have a Match. I am very glad Colonel Hall2 has given me some stamps, he said he wold last year but I thought he had forgotten. Its a beastly wet day today all rain and cold.

  I am very sorry to hear we had those beastly freaks of smelly white mice back. I hope these arnt smelly one. if they arnt I shall like them.

  From your loveing son,

  E.A.Blair.

  [X, 8, p. 10; handwritten with original spelling and errors]

  1.Mrs Vaughan Wilkes, wife of the headmaster and owner of St Cyprian’s.

  2.Colonel Hall was a neighbour of the Blairs at Shiplake.

  To Steven Runciman*

  [?] August 1920

  Grove Terrace

  Polperro RSO1

  Cornwall

  My dear Runciman,

  I have a little spare time, and I feel I must tell you about my first adventure as an amateur tramp. Like most tramps I was driven to it. When I got to a wretched little place in Devonshire, — Seaton Junction, Mynors,2 who had to change there, came to my carriage & said that a beastly Oppidan who had been perpetually plaguing me to travel in the same compartment as him was asking for me. As I was among strangers, I got out to go to him whereupon the train started off. You need two hands to enter a moving train, & I, what with kit-bag, belt etc had only one. To be brief, I was left behind. I despatched a telegram to say I would be late (it arrived next day), & about 2½ hours later got a train: at Plymouth, North Rd, I found there were no more trains to Looe that night. It was too late to telephone, as the post offices were shut. I then made a consultation of my financial position. I had enough for my remaining fare & 7½d over. I could therefore either sleep at the Y.M.C.A. place, price 6d, & starve, or have something to eat but nowhere to sleep. I chose the latter, I put my kit-bag in the cloak-room & got 12 buns for 6d: half-past-nine found me sneaking into some farmer’s field, — there were a few fields wedged in among rows of slummy houses. In that light I of course looked like a soldier strolling round, — on my way I had been asked whether I was demobilized yet, & I finally came to anchor in the corner of a field near some allotments. I then began to remember that people frequently got fourteen days for sleeping in somebody else’s field & ‘having no visible means of support’, particularly as every dog in the neighbourhood barked if I ever so much as moved. The corner had a large tree for shelter, & bushes for concealment, but it was unendurably cold; I had no covering, my cap was my pillow, I lay ‘with my martial cloak (rolled cape) around me’.3 I only dozed & shivered till about 1 oc, when I readjusted my puttees, & managed to sleep long enough to miss the first train, at 4.20. by about an hour, & to have to wait till 7.45 for another. My teeth were still chattering when I awoke. When I got to Looe I was forced to walk 4 miles in the hot sun; I am very proud of this adventure, but I would not repeat it.

  Yours sincerely,

  E. A. Blair.

  [X, 56, pp. 76–7; handwritten]

  1.Railway Sorting Office, which acted as poste restante. Polperro had no station. The nearest was at Looe, three miles to the east. The Blair family spent most of its summer holidays in Cornwall at either Looe or Polper
ro. On this particular journey Orwell was returning from an Eton Officers’ Training Corps exercise and was therefore in uniform.

  2.Roger Mynors (1903–1989; knighted 1963) was a member of Orwell’s Election. He and Orwell produced the school journal, Election Times. He was a leading classical scholar; he became a Fellow of Balliol in 1926 and later a Professor at Cambridge and Oxford. He married Lavinia, daughter of Cyril Allington, Headmaster of Eton in his and Orwell’s time.

  3.From stanza 3 of ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna’ by Charles Wolfe, a poem parodied by Orwell at Eton in College Days (X, p. 69).

  Extract from letter to Cyril Connolly*

  Easter 1921

  The original and the complete text of this letter are lost. What survives does so because Cyril Connolly quoted part of Orwell’s letter when writing to Terence Beddard at Easter 1921; Connolly copied out this section for the Orwell Archive in June 1967.

  Another version, with interspersed ironic comments by Connolly, exists at Tulsa University, and that is given in Michael Shelden’s biography of Orwell (pp. 75–76). In a note added to the copy made for the Archive, Connolly explained that this extract was part of a letter to Beddard which Connolly printed in Enemies of Promise (1938), pp. 256–59. Beddard was dead by the time Connolly made this copy. It is impossible to be sure how reliable is Connolly’s copy. Beddard was a King’s Scholar in the Election before Orwell’s; he left Eton exactly a year before Orwell and was no longer there when Connolly wrote to him. Christopher Eastwood is described by Connolly in his notes as ‘an attractive boy with a good voice & rather a prig’.1 He went on: ‘The point of the letter is that Eastwood, being in my election, was bound to see much more of me than of Blair, in the election above us.’ E. A. Caröe2 was in Blair’s Election, and Redcliffe-Maud3 two Elections below Connolly’s. For something of the background to this letter, see chapters 20 and 21 of Enemies of Promise. Michael Shelden remarks that it would be unwise to assume that Orwell’s ‘adolescent affections for other boys ever reached an advanced stage of sexual contact. He may well have been as chaste in his relationships with boys as he was in his relationship with Jacintha. As his letter to Connolly reveals, he was awkward in romantic matters and was slow to assert himself.’