George Orwell: A Life in Letters

by Peter Davison

  On the whole it’s a pity I found that letter because Spain doesn’t really dominate us as much as all that. We have nineteen hens now – eighteen deliberately and the other by accident because we bought some ducklings and a hen escorted them. We thought we ought to boil her this autumn so we took it in turns to watch the nesting boxes to see whether she laid an egg to justify a longer life, and she did. And she is a good mother, so she is to have children in the spring. This afternoon we built a new henhouse – that is we put the sections together – and that is the nucleus of the breeding pen. There is probably no question on poultry-keeping that I am not able and very ready to answer. Perhaps you would like to have a battery (say three units) in the bathroom so that you could benefit from my advice. It would be a touching thing to collect an egg just before brushing one’s teeth and eat it just after. Which reminds me that since we got back from Southwold, where we spent an incredibly family Christmas with the Blairs, we have eaten boiled eggs almost all the time. Before we had only one eggcup from Woolworths’ – no two from Woolworths’ and one that I gave George with an Easter egg in it before we were married (that cost threepence with egg). So it was a Happy Thought dear, and they are such a nice shape and match your mother’s butter dish and breadboard, giving tone to the table.

  We also have a poodle puppy. We called him Marx to remind us that we had never read Marx5 and now we have read a little and taken so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can’t look the dog in the face when we speak to him. He, the dog, is a French poodle, supposed to be miniature and of prize-winning stock, with silver hair. So far he has black and white hair, greying at the temples, and at four and a half months is rather larger than his mother. We think however he may take a prize as the largest miniature. He is very appealing and has a remarkable digestion. I am proud of this. He has never been sick, although almost daily he finds in the garden bones that no eye can have seen these twenty years and has eaten several rugs and a number of chairs and stools. We weren’t going to clip him, but he has a lot of hairs which are literally dripping mud on the driest day – he rolls on every cushion in turn and then drips right through my lap – so we thought we would clip him a little. But now we shall never get him symmetrical till we shave him. Laurence 6 (it is a dreadful thing that you have never seen Laurence) bears with him in a remarkable way and has never scratched even his nose.

  I went to stay with Mary.7 You will have heard about the domestic changes. She went to stay with that pregnant cousin and read a book on infant feeding, from which she discovered that everything Nanny did was wrong. So of course she had to come home and tell her so, because otherwise she would have killed the children. Now they have a Norwegian nurse. I think she is better but it’s bad luck for David who was hopelessly spoilt by fat Nanny and is not approved of by the Norwegian – who never raises her voice but puts him in the corner. Mary herself has become a good mother – when the children are there, I mean. She is perfectly reasonable with them. I don’t know what happened. David is very intelligent and makes me slightly jealous because I should like a son and we don’t have one. Mary and I summed up human history in a dreadful way when I was there – I was in the throes of pre-plague pains, which had happened so late that I was wondering whether I could persuade myself that I felt as though I were not going to have them, and Mary wasn’t having any pre-plague pains at all and was in a fever and going to the chemist to try to buy some ergot or other corrective. We had two parties – we went to see Phyl Guimaraens and the MAMMETT CAME TO TEA.8 She might just as well have been in Girl Guide uniform but now she organises play-readings, when all the old St. Hugh’s girls go to her house and read Julius Caesar. Mary went once but she thought they would be given something to eat and they weren’t, not even a bun or a cup of tea, so she is embittered and not being a good old girl any more. David and the Mammett had a nice conversation. David had told me earlier in the day that she was coming to tea and he knew her very well, so I repeated this to her and she was delighted. When he was brought into the room this happened:

  ‘Well, little David (holding out the hand), and do you think you know who I am?’

  ‘Yes – you’re granny’ (with complete confidence, allowing his hand to be held and stroked).

  ‘No (ever so kindly), I’m not granny.’

  ‘Oh? What are you then?’

  Phyl is just the same as she used to be in her most charming moments. It was fun seeing her again. I think perhaps we might have a proper reunion some day. Couldn’t you come and stay with her and while she is at the office eat potato crisps at the Criterion (Mary and I did this as much for old times’ sake as because it was cold)? It seems to me superlatively clever for anyone to keep herself on the Stock Exchange, as she says she does. I wonder about it all the time I’m with her.

  The last candle is guttering, and there isn’t any good way out of this letter. But perhaps it has broken a spell. Does yours mean that June is at Oxford? I just didn’t know. Anyway she can’t be more than fifteen. Norman? John? Elisabeth? Jean? Ruth? Your mother? Your father?9 I don’t think I want any news of you and Quartus because I am quite sure I know all about you and it would be so dreadful to hear something quite different. The only thing I can do is to come and see. I am supposed to be having a holiday when the book is finished, as it will be this month, only we sha’n’t have any money at all, and we were so rich.10 When are you coming to the sales? Or are you? I don’t know whether I can get away even for a day because the book is late and the typescript of the final draft is not begun and Eric is writing a book in collaboration with a number of people including a German and I keep getting his manuscript to revise and not being able to understand anything at all in it11 – but if you were coming to the sales these things would all be less important to

  Pig.

  Did I wish you a happy new year?

  Please wish all your family a happy new year from me.

  Eric (I mean George) has just come in to say that the light is out (he had the Aladdin lamp because he was Working) and is there any oil (such a question) and I can’t type in this light (which may be true, but I can’t read it) and he is hungry and wants some cocoa and some biscuits and it is after midnight and Marx is eating a bone and has left pieces in each chair and which shall he sit on now.

  [LO, pp. 70–5; XI, 415A, p. 109; typewritten]

  1.Peace Pledge Union. Orwell has been said to have been a member but this is almost certainly not so. Orwell bought some of their pamphlets and a receipt, no. 20194, exists in the Orwell Archive for 2s 6d, dated 12 December 1937, from Mrs E. Blair – Eileen. That was thought to be a receipt for pamphlets but it seems to have been her subscription.

  2.George(s) Kopp* was Orwell’s commander in Spain. They were then very close friends but their friendship cooled in the late 1940s. It was Kopp who did much to care for Orwell after he was wounded in the throat. Eileen’s opening her heart to Norah here tells us much more than has previously been conjectured about their supposed relationship.

  3.Either Dellian for Delian, related to the Greek island of Delos, home of an oracle who posed obscure and convoluted responses to questions put to it; or an ironic reference to the romantic novels of Ethel M. Dell about whom Orwell is scathing in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, p. 3.

  4.Such operations give an impression of greater activity on the Huesca front than Orwell himself modestly suggested.

  5.There has been disagreement as to when Orwell first read Marx (see XI, pp. 65–6, n. 1). Richard Rees records in George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1961) that everyone at the Adelphi Summer School in 1936 was astonished by his knowledge of Marx (p. 147). (See Crick, p. 629, n. 49.)

  6.This must be Eileen’s brother, Laurence O’Shaughnessy. Laurence’s son, also called Laurence, was not born until 13 November 1938.

  7.Presumably Bertha Mary Wardell who had graduated with Eileen. (See 16.2.37 n. 11.)

  8.Phyllis Guimaraens read Modern Languages at St Hugh’s. Her father was a shippe
r of port wine; they lived at Petridge Wood, Redhill, Surrey. She married Harold Gabell 5 June 1926 at St Peter’s, Eaton Square, London. Jenny Joseph suggested privately that The Mammett was a one-time tutor at St Hugh’s or connected with the Senior Members’ Association.

  9.Norah had two sisters, Jean and Ruth. Jean married Maurice Durant and was the mother of John, Margaret Durant’s husband.

  10.Orwell took a second, carbon, copy of Homage to Catalonia to his agent, Leonard Moore, on 10 February 1938. Eileen’s reference to their being so rich may be ironic but could refer to royalties received for the Left Book Club edition of The Road to Wigan Pier – some £600 though much of that must have been spent in Spain. The ‘holiday’ to which Eileen refers might have been delayed because of Orwell’s illness and then spent at Chapel Ridding, Windermere, about the middle of July. Whom she went to stay with there is not known.

  11.There is possibly confusion of Eric/husband and Eric/brother here. Eileen may well be referring to the latter and a medical book on which he was collaborating.

  On 5 February 1938 Orwell wrote to the editor of Time and Tide, which had published his review of Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit, regarding its rejection on political grounds by ‘another well-known weekly paper’. Raymond Mortimer, critic and literary editor of the New Statesman and Nation wrote to Orwell on 8 February 1938 in protest, saying: ‘It is possible of course that the “well known weekly paper” to which you refer is not the New Statesman but I take this as reference to us, and so no doubt will the majority of those who read your letter.’ The offices of the New Statesman were bombed during the war, so all the correspondence of that time has been lost, but among his papers Orwell kept the originals of letters from Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman and Raymond Mortimer and a carbon copy, reprinted here, of his reply to Mortimer.

  To Raymond Mortimer*

  9 February 1938

  The Stores

  Wallington

  Dear Mortimer,

  With reference to your letter of February 8th. I am extremely sorry if I have hurt your or anybody else’s feelings, but before speaking of the general issues involved, I must point out that what you say in it is not quite correct. You say ‘Your review of The Spanish Cockpit was refused, because it gave a most inadequate and misleading description of the book. You used the review merely to express your own opinions and to present facts which you thought should be known. Moreover, last time I saw you you acknowledged this. Why then do you now suggest, quite mistakenly, that the review was refused because it “controverted editorial policy”? Are you confusing the review with the previous refusal of an article, which you submitted, and which the editor turned down because we had just printed three articles on the same subject’

  I attach a copy of Kingsley Martin’s letter 1. You will see from this that the review was refused because it ‘controverts the political policy of the paper’ (I should have said ‘political policy’ not ‘editorial policy’.) Secondly, you say that my previous article had been turned down ‘because we had just printed three articles on the same subject’. Now, the article I sent in was on the suppression of the P.O.U.M., the alleged ‘Trotsky-Fascist’ plot, the murder of Nin, etc. So far as I know the New Statesman has never published any article on this subject. I certainly did and do admit that the review I wrote was tendentious and perhaps unfair, but it was not returned to me on those grounds, as you see from the letter attached.

  Nothing is more hateful to me than to get mixed up in these controversies and to write, as it were, against people and newspapers that I have always respected, but one has got to realise what kind of issues are involved and the very great difficulty of getting the truth ventilated in the English press. So far as one can get at the figures, not less than 3000 political prisoners (ie. anti-Fascists) are in the Spanish jails at present, and the majority of them have been there six or seven months without any kind of trial or charge, in the most filthy physical conditions, as I have seen with my own eyes. A number of them have been bumped off, and there is not much doubt that there would have been a wholesale massacre if the Spanish Government had not had the sense to disregard the clamour in the Communist press. Various members of the Spanish Government have said over and over again to Maxton, McGovern, Felicien Challaye2 and others that they wish to release these people but are unable to do so because of Communist pressure. What happens in Loyalist Spain is largely governed by outside opinion, and there is no doubt that if there had [been] a general protest from foreign Socialists the anti-Fascist prisoners would have been released. Even the protests of a small body like the I.L.P. have had some effect. But a few months back when a petition was got up for the release of the anti-Fascist prisoners, nearly all the leading English Socialists refused to sign it. I do not doubt that this was because, though no doubt they disbelieved the tale about a ‘Trotsky-Fascist’ Plot, they had gathered a general impression that the Anarchists and the P.O.U.M. were working against the Government, and, in particular, had believed the lies that were published in the English press about the fighting in Barcelona in May 1937. To mention an individual instance, Brailsford* in one of his articles in the New Statesman was allowed to state that the P.O.U.M. had attacked the Government with stolen batteries of guns, tanks etc. I was in Barcelona during the fighting, and as far as one can ever prove a negative I can prove by eye-witnesses etc. that this tale was absolutely untrue. At the time of the correspondence over my review I wrote to Kingsley Martin to tell him it was untrue, and more recently I wrote to Brailsford to ask him what was the source of the story. He had to admit that he had had it on what amounted to no authority whatever. (Stephen Spender* has his letter at present, but I could get it for you if you wanted to see it). Yet neither the New Statesman nor Brailsford has published any retraction of this statement, which amounts to an accusation of theft and treachery against numbers of innocent people. I do not think you can blame me if I feel that the New Statesman has its share of blame for the one-sided view that has been presented.

  Once again, let me say how sorry I am about this whole business, but I have got to do what little I can to get justice for people who have been imprisoned without trial and libelled in the press, and one way of doing so is to draw attention to the pro-Communist censorship that undoubtedly exists. I would keep silent about the whole affair if I thought it would help the Spanish Government (as a matter of fact, before we left Spain some of the imprisoned people asked us not to attempt any publicity abroad because it might tend to discredit the Government), but I doubt whether it helps in the long run to cover things up as has been done in England. If the charges of espionage etc. that were made against us in the Communist papers had been given a proper examination at the time in the foreign press, it would have been seen that they were nonsense and the whole business might have been forgotten. As it was, the rubbish about a Trotsky-Fascist plot was widely circulated and no denial of it was published except in very obscure papers and, very half-heartedly, in the [Daily] Herald and Manchester Guardian. The result was that there was no protest from abroad and all these thousands of people have stayed in prison, and a number have been murdered, the effect being to spread hatred and dissension all through the Socialist movement.

  I am sending back the books you gave me to review. I think it would be better if I did not write for you again, I am terribly sorry about this whole affair, but I have got to stand by my friends, which may involve attacking the New Statesman when I think they are covering up important issues.

  Yours sincerely

  [XI, 424, pp. 116-20; typewritten with handwritten addition]

  Handwritten on a separate sheet is a note by Orwell which, because there is no salutation, was almost certainly sent to Raymond Mortimer with the typewritten letter above. Orwell enclosed the letter from H. N. Brailsford which he said Spender had. (See XI, p.118.)

  1.Basil Kingsley Martin (1897–1969), left-wing writer and journalist, was editor of the New Statesman and Nation, 1931–60.


  2.John McGovern (1887–1968), ILP MP, 1930–47; Labour M P, 1947–59, led a hunger march from Glasgow to London in 1934. Félicien Challaye, French left-wing politician, member of the committee of La Ligue des Droits des Hommes, a liberal, anti-Fascist movement to protect civil liberty throughout the world. He resigned in November 1937, with seven others, in protest against what they interpreted as the movement’s cowardly subservience to Stalinist tyranny.

  Raymond Mortimer quickly sent Orwell a handwritten note saying, ‘Dear Orwell, Please accept my humble apologies. I did not know Kingsley Martin had written to you in those terms. My own reasons for refusing the review were those that I gave. I should be sorry for you not to write for us, and I should like to convince you from past reviews that there is no premium here on Stalinist orthodoxy.’ On 10 February, Kingsley Martin wrote to Orwell: ‘Raymond Mortimer has shown me your letter. We certainly owe you an apology in regard to the letter about The Spanish Cockpit. There is a good deal else in your letter which suggests some misunderstanding and which, I think, would be better discussed than written about. Could you make it convenient to come and see me some time next week? I shall be available on Monday afternoon, or almost any time on Tuesday.’ It is not known whether Orwell accepted Martin’s invitation, but he probably did. Orwell’s review of Galsworthy’s Glimpses and Reflections was published in the New Statesman on 12 March 1938, and he contributed reviews to the journal from July 1940 to August 1943. However, as is recorded in conversation with friends, he never forgave Martin for his ‘line’ on the Spanish civil war.