George Orwell: A Life in Letters

by Peter Davison

  4.George Riddell (1865–1934; cr. Baron 1920), Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and After, 1918–23 (1934). He owned, among other newspapers, the News of the World.

  5.O mihi praeteritos referat si Iuppiter ° annos: ‘O would Jupiter restore me the years that are fled!’, Virgil, Aeneid, viii, 560.

  6.By Mark Twain (1872): it describes the author’s experiences with silver miners in Nevada a decade earlier. An unsigned review in Overland Monthly, June 1872, said its humour was such that it ‘should have a place in every sick-room, and be the invalid’s chosen companion’.

  7.Dennis Collings and Eleanor Jaques married in 1934; he had been made assistant curator at the Raffles Museum in Singapore.

  8.‘On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory (X, 196, pp. 338–9).

  9.Ruth Pitter, CBE (1897–1992) had known Orwell since World War I, and he had stayed in her house from time to time in 1930. He later reviewed two of her books of poetry. In 1937 she won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and in 1955 was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. Her Collected Poems appeared in 1991. She ran the Walberswick Peasant Pottery Co. Ltd in the 1930s, illustrated in Thompson, p. 23.

  To Brenda Salkeld*

  Wed. night [early September? 1934]

  36 High St

  Southwold

  Dearest Brenda

  As you complain about the gloominess of my letters, I suppose I must try and put on what Mr Micawber called the hollow mask of mirth, but I assure you it is not easy, with the life I have been leading lately. My novel1 instead of going forwards, goes backwards with the most alarming speed. There are whole wads of it that are so awful that I really don’t know what to do with them. And to add to my other joys, the fair, or part of it, has come back and established itself on the common just beyond the cinema, so that I have to work to the accompaniment of roundabout music that goes on till the small hours. You may think that this is red ink I am writing in, but really it is some of the bloody sweat that has been collecting round me in pools for the last few days. I am glad to hear you enjoyed yourself in the peninsular, as you are pleased to call it. I shall send this to the London address you gave me, hoping they will keep it for you. The garden isn’t doing badly. We had so many cauliflowers that we couldn’t eat them up fast enough, so about twenty have run to seed. I have one marrow—the eighth so far—that is almost Harvest Festival size, and I am letting it get ripe to make jam out of. I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time.2 I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever. I also bought for a shilling a year’s issue of a weekly paper of 1851, which is not uninteresting. They ran among other things a matrimonial agency, and the correspondence relating to this is well worth reading. ‘Flora is twenty one, tall, with rich chestnut hair and a silvery laugh, and makes excellent light pastry. She would like to enter into correspondence with a professional gentleman between the ages of twenty and thirty, preferably with auburn whiskers and of the Established Church.’ The interesting thing to me is that these people, since they try to get married through a matrimonial agency, have evidently failed many times elsewhere, and yet as soon as they advertise in this paper, they get half a dozen offers. The women’s descriptions of themselves are always most flattering, and I must say that some of the cases make me distinctly suspicious—for of course that was the great age of fortune-hunting. You remember that beautiful case in Our Mutual Friend, where both parties worked the same dodge on each other. I wish you could come back here. However, if you can’t it can’t be helped. I could not possibly have come to Haslemere. I most particularly want to get this novel done by the end of September, and every day makes a difference. I know it sounds silly to make such a fuss for so little result, but I find that anything like changing my lodging upsets my work for a week or so. When I said that I was going to stay in a slummy part of London I did not mean that I am going to live in a common lodging house or anything like that. I only meant that I didn’t want to live in a respectable quarter, because they make me sick, besides being more expensive. I dare say I shall stay in Islington. It is maddening that you cannot get unfurnished rooms in London, but I know by experience that you can’t, though of course you can get a flat or some horrible thing called a maisonette. This age makes me so sick that sometimes I am almost impelled to stop at a corner and start calling down curses from Heaven like Jeremiah or Ezra or somebody — ‘Woe upon thee, O Israel, for thy adulteries with the Egyptians’ etc etc. The hedgehogs keep coming into the house, and last night we found in the bathroom a little tiny hedgehog no bigger than an orange. The only thing I could think was that it was a baby of one of the others, though it was fully formed—I mean, it had its prickles. Write again soon. You don’t know how it cheers me up when I see one of your letters waiting for me.

  With love

  Eric

  [X, 205, pp. 348–9; typewritten in red]

  1.A Clergyman’s Daughter.

  2.Ulysses, which was printed in Paris, was liable to be seized by Customs & Excise.

  To Brenda Salkeld*

  Tuesday night [11? September 1934]

  36 High St

  Southwold

  Dearest Brenda,

  Many thanks for your letter. I am so glad to hear you have been having such an interesting time, and only wish I could reciprocate, but the most exciting things I have been doing are to plant out cabbages and make hurried trips into Lowestoft and Norwich in search of bulbs. Last time we were in Lowestoft we saw some Jews selling alarm clocks at sixpence each! Even if they had gone for a month you would have fairly good value for your money. My novel is due to come out in New York tomorrow—I don’t know that it actually will, but that is the day it is scheduled for.1 Please pray for its success, by which I mean not less than 4000 copies. I understand that the prayers of clergyman’s° daughters get special attention in Heaven, at any rate in the Protestant quarter. I suppose I shall get some copies in about 10 days and some reviews in about 10 days after that. I hope they haven’t put quite such a bloody jacket on it as they did last time. I hope to finish the other one2 about the end of the month, and then I must sit down and plan out my next before going up to London. I am pleased with parts of this one I am doing, and other parts make me spew. I don’t believe anyone will publish it or if they do it won’t sell, because it is too fragmentary and has no love-interest. When exactly are you coming back to Southwold? Be sure and let me know so that I can keep Sunday free for you, and please don’t go and tie yourself up with engagements for the whole of the first fortnight so that I never get a chance to see you. I have just been reading Huc’s Travels in Tartary and Thibet,3 which I can reccommend.° The garden is now looking very bare, as we have taken nearly everything up, but we are putting in bulbs etc. I have started taking snuff, which is very nice and useful in places where you can’t smoke. Please write soon and let me know when you are coming. Don’t forget what you are to tell me when you come back.

  With much love

  Eric

  P.S. Don’t forget to bring back my Roughing It,4 will you? I want it to look up some quotes.

  [X, 207, pp. 350–1; typewritten]

  1.Burmese Days was not published until 25 October 1934.

  2.Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

  3.Published in French 1850 and in English in 1851, by the French missionary Abbé Évariste Régis Huc (1813–60).

  4.See letter to Brenda Salkeld, late August 1934.

  The following is one of twenty letters and postcards exchanged between Orwell and René-Noël Raimbault regarding the translation of Down and Out in Paris and London into French.Three more will be found at 29.11.34, 3.1.35, and 22.12.35. All but two of the letters are in French. English translation only is prov
ided here. The sequence gives a fascinating insight into Orwell’s approach to his writing and into his translator’s concerns and reactions to Orwell’s writing (for example his contrast between a novel he has just translated and Orwell’s Burmese Days). The letters not reproduced here and the French originals will be found in The Lost Orwell.

  To R. N. Raimbault*

  9 October 1934

  36 High Street

  Southwold, Suffolk

  Angleterre

  Cher Monsieur Rimbault,°

  I will reply to you in French, hoping that you will forgive my grammatical errors.

  It has been a few years since I lived in France and although I tend to read French books I am not able to write your language very accurately. When I was in Paris people always said to me ‘You don’t talk too badly for an Englishman, but you have a fantastic accent’. Unfortunately I have only kept the accent. But I will do my best.

  I give below answers to the questions you asked me, and of the dashes on page 239, which represent words which it is forbidden to print in England, but which will not cause, we can hope, any scandal in France. As for the preface, I will be very happy to write it – in English of course – and will send it to you in ten or fifteen days’ time. I am unable to finish it any earlier because I am about to go to London and I will be very busy during the next week.

  I am sending you at the same time as this a copy of Down and Out, which I have signed with my pen name, ‘George Orwell’. This is a copy of the American edition. I don’t have a copy of the English edition and given that the book was published eighteen months ago, it would probably be impossible to obtain one without some delay. When the French version is published, I shall, of course, send you a copy.

  You must have faced many difficulties in translating a book such as Down and Out and it is very kind of you to propose a translation of my next novel. It is called Burmese Days, and it is about to be published by Harper’s in New York. It is a novel which deals with the lives of the English in Burma (in India) and it is being published in New York because my publisher (Gollancz) would not dare publish it in England owing to the observations I made regarding English imperialism. I hope, however, to find an English publisher soon who has more courage. It doesn’t seem very likely that such a book would interest the French public, but in any case I will tell my literary agent to let you see a copy as soon as we receive some from New York. You will be able to judge for yourself whether a translation might have any success in France.1 By the way, you told me that Mr. André Malraux wrote the preface to a book by William Faulkner that you had translated. If I am not mistaken, Mr. Malraux wrote novels which deal with China, India etc. In this case it is possible that Burmese Days would interest him and if he would also be so kind as to write a preface for me, that would without doubt ensure the success of a book that bore the name of such a distinguished writer.2 But you will be able to judge better after having seen a copy of Burmese Days.

  In conclusion, it only remains for me to thank you for the great service you have done me by translating my book into French and to hope that, when the book is published, you will receive recompense appropriate to your efforts. I also hope that in writing in French I have not imposed on you an even worse translation task than the other!

  Recevez, cher Monsieur, l’expression de mes meillieurs sentiments.

  Eric Blair (‘George Orwell’)

  For Orwell’s notes the identical paginations of Complete Works I and the Penguin Twentieth-Century editions are given within square brackets after each reference.

  Page 228 [170, line 7]: ‘…tum – a thing to make one shudder’ etc. In Hindustani 3 there are two words for ‘you’ – ‘ap’ and ‘tum.’ ‘Ap’ is the more respectful word. ‘Tum’ is only used between close friends or from a superior to an inferior. To say ‘tum’ is nearly the same thing as addressing someone by ‘tu’. An Englishman in India would therefore be very angry if a Hindu addressed him with ‘tum.’

  Page 159 [118, 4 lines up] and 240–241 [179, 6 lines up]: ‘Bahinchut’ etc. ‘Bahinchut’ is a Hindustani word that one should never address to a Hindu but which, unfortunately, one uses rather often. It is quite difficult to translate. ‘Bahin’ means ‘sister’ and ‘chut’ means the sexual organ. By saying ‘Bahinchut’ to a man, you are saying ‘I am very familiar with the sexual organs of your sister’ – in other words, I have slept with her. One would perhaps be able to translate ‘bahinchut’ as ‘brother-in-law.’ The English soldiers brought this word home from India in the form ‘barnshoot’, which has been accepted as quite an innocent word in England.

  Pages 238–239 [178, lines 12–13]: ‘The current London adjective’ etc. This adjective is ‘fucking.’ ‘Fuck’ means ‘to fuck,’ and ‘fucking’ is the present participle.

  Page 239, line 19 [178, lines 27–28]: ‘For example -----.’ The word is ‘fuck.’ The English no longer use this word in the sense of ‘fornicating,’ which was its original meaning, but simply as an expletive.

  Page 239, line 23 [178, line 31]: ‘Similarly with----.’ The word is ‘bugger’.

  Page 239 line 25 [179, lines 1–2]: ‘One can think etc.’ These words are ‘fuck’ and ‘bugger.’ ‘Fuck’ which takes its origin from the Latin ‘futuo’ originally meant ‘to fornicate,’ but workers use it as a simple expletive in such expressions as ‘I will fuck the lot of them,’ ‘we’re fucked’ etc. etc. The word ‘bougre’ is the same as ‘bugger,’ both being derived from ‘Bulgare’ or ‘Bulgar,’ because in the sixteenth century the Bulgarians, or even the Cathars, were suspected of practising sins against nature. But although the Parisian workers sometimes use the word ‘bugger,’ they do not know, according to my observation, what it originally meant.

  Page 256 [191, 4 lines up]: ‘The one bite law.’ According to the English law, if a dog bites two men, its owner is obliged to kill it. The first time the dog is forgiven. This is where the expression ‘one bite law’ comes from.

  Page 259 [194, line 7]: ‘Bull shit’ is an expression which means bulls’ excrement. A man says to another ‘you are talking bull shit;’ in other words, ‘You are talking nonsense.’ It is a very impolite expression

  [LO, pp. 8–13; X, 210A, p. 353; typewritten]

  1.Burmese Days was published in France by Nagel, Paris, as Tragédie Birmane on 31 August 1946. The translation was made by Guillot de Saix. Orwell was paid a royalty of £5 17s 9d on 29 September 1945.

  2.André Malraux (1901–76). Novelist and leftist intellectual. He left Paris for Indochina and China when he was 21 and became involved with the revolutionary movements then stirring. Founding the Young Annam League, he later travelled to Afghanistan and Iran and returned to Indochina in 1926. His experiences led to the novels, Les Conquérants (1928), La Voie royale (1930), and then, and most successfully, La Condition humaine (1933). He did not write an introduction for Down and Out, nor for Burmese Days. It was later suggested that he might write a preface to Homage to Catalonia but, despite his having served in Spain, did not do so, perhaps because he moved to the Right, later becoming Minister of Information and then of Culture in General de Gaulle’s government after the war. From 1928 he was a member of Gallimard’s Reading Committee and, from 1929, its Artistic Director.

  3.Orwell had passed Indian Police examinations in Hindi, Burmese and Shaw-Karen.

  To Leonard Moore*

  14 November 1934

  3 Warwick Mansions

  Pond St

  Hampstead NW3

  Dear Mr Moore,

  Many thanks for your letter—I hope you can read my handwriting—I have left my typewriter down in the shop.

  I knew there would be trouble over that novel.1 However, I am anxious to get it published, as there are parts of it I was pleased with, & I dare say that if I had indicated to me the sort of changes that Mr Gollancz wants, I could manage it. I am willing to admit that the part about the school, which is what seems to have roused people’s incredulity, is overdrawn, but not nearly so muc
h so as people think. In fact I was rather amused to see that they say ‘all that was done away with 30 or 40 years ago’ etc, as one always hears that any particularly crying abuse was ‘done away with 30 or 40 years ago.’ As to this part, it is possible that if Mr Gollancz agrees, a little ‘toning down’ might meet the bill. I dont° want to bother you with details about this, however.

  As to the points about libel, swearwords etc., they are a very small matter & could be put right by a few strokes of the pen. The book does, however, contain an inherent fault of structure 2 which I will discuss with Mr Gollancz, & this could not be rectified in any way that I can think of. I was aware of it when I wrote the book, & imagined that it did not matter, because I did not intend it to be so realistic as people seem to think it is.

  I wonder if you could be kind enough to arrange an interview for me with Mr Gollancz? 3 I should think it would take quite an hour to talk over the various points, if he can spare me that much time. I don’t particularly mind what day or time I see him, so long as I know a day beforehand so as to let them know at the shop.

  I have seen one review of Burmese Days in the Herald Tribune. Rather a bad one, I am sorry to say—however, big headlines, which I suppose is what counts.

  Yours sincerely

  Eric A Blair

  P.S. [at top of letter] If you should have occasion to ring up about the interview, my number is Hampstead 2153.4

  [X, 215, p. 358.; handwritten]

  1.Orwell had sent the manuscript of A Clergyman’s Daughter to Moore on 3 October. Victor Gollancz must have read it quickly for on 9 November he wrote to Moore about his reservations. On 13 November Moore wrote to Gollancz to tell him that ‘in view of what you say I think you may like to know that when sending the manuscript to me the author pointed out that “in case the point should come up, the school described in chapter IV is totally imaginary, though of course I have drawn on my general knowledge of what goes on in schools of that type.”’ Moore must have sent Orwell details of this and other objections to the novel; this letter is Orwell’s response. For problems posed by A Clergyman’s Daughter, see III, Textual Note and Crick, pp. 256–8.