George Orwell: A Life in Letters

by Peter Davison

  No, I haven’t severed connection with Tribune, though I have stopped editing for them. I was away in France and Germany between February and May, and my affairs have been disorganised in other ways which obliged me to cut down my journalistic work for some time. However, I am going to start a weekly column again in Tribune in October, but not under the old title.

  I am glad your book should be° translated into French. My impression in France was that the Soviet mythos is less strong there than in England, in spite of the big Communist party.

  I am leaving London shortly for a holiday, but shall be back about the 25th. I would like to meet you if you are in London any time. My phone number is can 3751.

  Yours sincerely

  George Orwell

  [XVII, 2737, pp. 274–5; typewritten]

  1.Gleb Struve did translate Animal Farm into Russian, in conjunction with M. Kriger, as Skotskii Khutor. It first appeared as a serial in Possev (Frankfurt-am-Main), Nos. 7–25, 1949, and then in two book versions, one on ordinary paper for distribution in Western Europe and one on thin paper for distribution behind the Iron Curtain. Orwell’s practice was never to benefit from his work distributed in Communist-dominated countries.

  To Kay Dick*

  26 September 1945

  27B Canonbury Square

  Islington N 1

  Dear Kay,

  I was very glad to get your letter because I had been trying to get in touch with you. When I rang up John o’ London° 1 they just said you had left, and I had lost your home address.

  I simply haven’t any ideas for a story at this moment, and I don’t want to force one. Later on I don’t know. I did one time contemplate a story about a man who got so fed up with the weeds in his garden that he decided to have a garden just of weeds, as they seem easier to grow. Then of course as soon as he started to do this he would find the garden being overwhelmed with flowers and vegetables which came up of their own accord. But I never got round to writing it.

  I note that you will be back in London about the 4th and will get in touch with you after that. I’ll try and not lose your address this time. I wish you would come round here some time and see my little boy, who is now aged nearly 17 months. If you come from Hampstead you have to go to the Angel and then take a bus, or if you come from the City you come on the 4 bus to Highbury Corner. I am almost always at home because I don’t go to an office now. The child goes to bed about 6 and after that I have high tea about 7.

  You may be interested to hear that poor old Wodehouse was most pathetically pleased about the article in the Windmill. I met him in Paris and afterwards heard from him once or twice.

  Looking forward to seeing you,

  Yours

  George Orwell

  [XVII, 2754, p. 290; typewritten]

  1.John O’ London’s Weekly was a popular literary journal founded in 1919.

  To Leonard Moore*

  29 November 1945

  27B Canonbury Square

  London N 1

  Dear Mr Moore,

  I have just heard from Erval of Nagel Paris. He says that the contract you drew up for Animal Farm provides for publication in not less than a year, and says that this is an impossible condition. The main reason he gives is that it is not usual in France to publish two books by a foreign writer within 18 or 20 months of one another. Burmese Days is supposed to appear about February, so Animal Farm would clash with it if published in 1946. He also hints that from a political point of view this may not be a happy moment for producing a book like Animal Farm and says Nagel Paris would like to be able to judge the right moment. I fancy the second objection is the real one, as they are so short of books of any kind in France at present that the first consideration would not be likely to carry much weight.

  I am going to tell him that I leave the matter in your hands. The point is that we don’t want the publication of A.F. put off for 18–20 months if it is at all avoidable. I have no doubt that now such a book would be likely to get a hostile reception in France, but it would in any case be a question of publishing it some time late in 1946, by which time pro-Russian feeling may have worn thin as it seems to be doing here. I don’t fancy the book would be suppressed while Malraux has the Ministry of Information. I met him when in Paris and found him very friendly, and he is far from being pro-Communist in his views. Could we at need take it to another French publisher? The Fontaine people asked for it, you may remember. How does the contract stand with Nagel? Have they an option on all my books? I should be glad to hear what you are doing about this.

  I had to make a new will when my wife died, and I am just having it put into proper legal form. It is not that there is likely to be much to leave, but I must think of copyrights and reprints. I am naming Christy & Moore as my literary agents and Sir Richard Rees as my literary executor, and I am leaving it to him to sort out whatever unpublished or reprintable material I may leave behind and decide what is worth preserving. I am also leaving records of anything I publish in periodicals, as there might at any given moment be a good deal that was worth salvaging for some kind of reprint. It is just as well to get all this cleared up, what with atomic bombs etc.

  Yours sincerely

  Eric Blair

  [XVII, 2806, pp. 401–2; typewritten]

  To Michael Sayers

  11 December 1945

  27B Canonbury Square

  London N 1

  Dear Michael,

  Please forgive delay in answering. I’ve been rather overwhelmed since I saw you.

  I’d love to meet again, but I haven’t many spare dates before Christmas. Dates I could manage would be Monday 17th or Friday 21st, for dinner either day. I can’t arrange any lunch times at present, because I’m in the throes of getting a secretary1, and when she starts I want to see how the time works out.

  I don’t think I could fairly be described as Russophobe. I am against all dictatorships and I think the Russian myth has done frightful harm to the leftwing movement in Britain and elsewhere, and that it is above all necessary to make people see the Russian regime for what it is (ie. what I think it is). But I thought all this as early as 1932 or thereabouts and always said so fairly freely. I have no wish to interfere with the Soviet regime even if I could. I merely don’t want its methods and habits of thought imitated here, and that involves fighting against the Russianisers in this country. The danger as I see it is not our being conquered by Russia, which might happen but depends chiefly on geography. The danger is that some native form of totalitarianism will be developed here, and people like Laski, Pritt, Zilliacus, the News Chronicle and all the rest of them seem to me to be simply preparing the way for this. You might be interested in the articles I wrote for the first two numbers of Polemic.2

  Looking forward to seeing you.

  Yours

  George

  P.S. Nearly everyone calls me George now though I’ve never changed my name.3

  1.Miss Siriol Hugh-Jones (see XVII, afternote to 2689, pp. 199–200).

  2.‘Notes on Nationalism’, Polemic 1, October 1945 (XVII, 2668, pp. 141–57) and ‘The Prevention of Literature’, Polemic 2, January 1946 (XVII, 2792, pp. 369–81). Orwell records payment for the former of £25 on 15 May 1945 and of £26 5s on 12 November 1945. ‘The Prevention of Literature’ was translated and published in French, Dutch, Italian and Finnish journals.

  3.This important letter was one of two addressed to Michael Sayers discovered as this volume was in the press. The editor is extremely grateful to Michael Sayers (now aged 98 and living in New York) and his sons, Sean and Peter, for permission to publish it. In his first letter of 29 November 1945, Orwell expresses pleasure in hearing from Mr Sayers and suggests meeting over lunch. Sayers, Rayner Heppenstall and Orwell had shared a flat in 1935 (see letter to Heppenstall, 24.9.35, n. 1).

  To G. H. Bantock

  Late 1945–early 1946

  These extracts are from a letter Orwell wrote to G. H. Bantock (1914– ), who was then doing research for his L.H
. Myers: A Critical Study, published in 1956. Myers had died in 1944. (See 19.2.46, n. 1).

  I was staying with him when war broke out. He spoke with the utmost bitterness of the British ruling class and said that he considered that many of them were actually treacherous in their attitude towards Germany. He said, speaking from his knowledge of them, that the rich were in general very class-conscious and well aware that their interests coincided with the interests of the rich in other countries, and that consequently they had no patriotism—‘not even their kind of patriotism,’ he added. He made an exception of Winston Churchill. . . .

  . . . I didn’t see Leo very frequently during the war. I was in London and he was generally in the country. The last time I saw him was at John Morris’s flat.1 We got into the usual argument about Russia and totalitarianism, Morris taking my side. I said something about freedom and Leo, who had got up to get some more whisky, said almost vehemently, ‘I don’t believe in freedom.’ (NB. I think his exact words were ‘I don’t believe in liberty.’) I said, ‘All progress comes through heretics,’ and Leo promptly agreed with me. It struck me then, not for the first time, that there was a contradiction in his ideas which he had not resolved. His instincts were those of a Liberal but he felt it his duty to support the USSR and therefore to repudiate Liberalism. I think part of his uncertainty was due to his having inherited a large income. Undoubtedly in a way he was ashamed of this. He lived fairly simply and gave his money away with both hands, but he could not help feeling that he was a person who enjoyed unjustified privileges. I think he felt that because of this he had no right to criticise Russia. Russia was the only country where private ownership had been abolished, and any hostile criticism might be prompted by an unconscious desire to protect his own possessions. This may be a wrong diagnosis, but that is the impression I derived. It was certainly not natural for such a sweet-natured and open-minded man to approve of a regime where freedom of thought was suppressed.

  [XVII, 2825, p. 456; typewritten]

  1.John Morris was one of Orwell’s colleagues at the BBC. Their relations were rather sour. For an unfavourable account of Orwell by Morris, see his ‘Some Are More Equal than Others,’ Penguin New Writing, No. 40 (1950); as ‘That Curiously Crucified Expression’, in Orwell Remembered, pp. 171–76, and Crick’s comments thereon, pp. 419–20.

  Jura

  1946 and 1947

  Now that Animal Farm is seen as one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, it is remarkable how difficult it was to get it published in England and in the USA. There were simple physical problems in England – paper was in very short supply – but other forces conspired to ensure that Orwell became so desperate over rejections that he considered publishing the book himself. T. S. Eliot, for Faber & Faber, opined on behalf of the directors (of which he was one) that they had ‘no conviction . . . that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time’ and later, ‘your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals . . . so that what was needed . . . was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs’. Warburg was willing but had no paper and when he eventually secured some could only initially print 4,500 copies. No US publisher saw the book’s merits – there was no market, one publisher said, for animal stories – but eventually Harcourt, Brace took the risk and on 26 August 1946 published 50,000 copies. Then as a Book of the Month Club edition there were print runs of 430,000 and 110,000 and Orwell was suddenly earning major royalties: his first advance was $37,500. Foreign versions proliferated (although Orwell never took royalties from oppressed peoples), and sometimes there were comic side-effects. Thus, the French translation was to be Union des Republiques Socialistes Animales – URSA, The Bear. Because that might offend Communists, it was changed to Les Animaux Partout!; Napoleon became César. Misunderstanding abounded. Orwell subtitled his book, A Fairy Story. Only British and Telugu versions in Orwell’s lifetime included this description. It was never acceptable in the USA. Yet one of the origins of Animal Farm is Beatrix Potter’s Pigling Bland, a favourite of Orwell’s and Jacintha Buddicom’s childhood.

  Orwell was still busy writing and this period saw the publication of ‘The Prevention of Literature’, ‘Decline of English Murder’, ‘Politics and the English Language’ (one of his most important essays), the delightful ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, ‘Why I Write’, ‘Politics vs Literature’, and ‘How the Poor Die’ (looking back to his time in a hospital in Paris in March 1929). He also wrote three radio plays: ‘The Voyage of the Beagle’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ for Children’s Hour, and his own adaptation of Animal Farm.

  From 23 May to 13 October 1946 Orwell rented Barnhill, Jura and started writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, completing about fifty pages that year. He was at Barnhill from 11 April to 20 December 1947 and although he was ill from time to time, it was also a very happy period. He cultivated his land, walked, went fishing, and played with Richard. Despite wishing to get on with Nineteen Eighty-Four, he found time to write ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, which he sent to Warburg but which could not be published until after his death for fear of libel charges.

  On 3 May 1946 his older sister, Marjorie, died and he travelled south to attend her funeral. His younger sister, Avril, came to share his life at Barnhill (see her letter, 1.7.46), and he gave up The Stores in September 1947. By October he had become so ill he had to work in bed, and by the end of the year ‘extensive’ TB (see 23.12.47) had been diagnosed and he left Jura for Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride, near Glasgow.

  From Orwell’s letter to his mother, 24 March 1912

  To Dwight Macdonald*

  3 January 1946

  27 B Canonbury Square

  Islington N 1

  Dear Dwight,

  Many thanks for your letter of December 31st. I’m so glad you read Animal Farm and liked it.1 I asked Warburg to send you a copy, but knowing how desperately short he was of copies of the first edition, I wasn’t sure whether you would get one. Neither he nor I now have a copy of that edition. A month or two back the Queen sent to Warburg’s for a copy (this doesn’t mean anything politically: her literary adviser is Osbert Sitwell * who would probably advise her to read a book of that type), and as there wasn’t one left the Royal Messenger had to go down to the Anarchist bookshop run by George Woodcock*, which strikes me as mildly comic. However now a second edition of 10 thousand has come out, also a lot of translations are being done. I have just fixed up to have it done in the USA by a firm named Harcourt & Brace who I believe are good publishers. I had a lot of difficulty to place it in the USA. The Dial Press who had been pestering me for some time for a book rejected it on the ground that ‘the American public is not interested in animals’ (or words to that effect.) I think it will get a bit of pre-publicity in the USA as Time rang up saying they were going to review it and asking me for the usual particulars. I also had an awful fight to get it into print over here. No one except Warburg would look at it, and W. had to hold it up for a year for lack of paper. Even as it is he has only been able to print about half as many copies as he could have sold. Even the M[inistry] O[f] I[information] horned in and tried to keep it out of print. The comic thing is that after all this fuss the book got almost no hostile reception when it came out. The fact is people are fed up with this Russian nonsense and it’s just a question of who is first to say ‘The Emperor has no clothes on.’2

  I feel very guilty that I still haven’t done you that article on the ‘comics.’ The thing is that I am inconceivably busy. I have to do on average 4 articles a week and have hardly any energy left over for serious work. However I have roughly sketched out an article which I shall do some time. I am going to call it ‘An American Reverie’ and in it I shall contrast these papers with the American books and papers which I, like most people about my age, was partly brought up on.3 I noticed with interest that the G.Is in Germany were mostly reading this kind of stuff, which seems to be aimed at children and adults indifferently.


  I have another book coming out in the USA shortly, a book of reprinted articles, and I have included that one on ‘Miss Blandish’ which you printed. I’m afraid I didn’t ask your permission, but I didn’t suppose you’d mind. I have made the usual acknowledgements.

  Did you see Polemic, the new paper Humphrey Slater* has started? I dare say it didn’t get to you as they only did 3000 of the first number. The second number will be 5000 and then they hope to work up to 8000, but they can only become a monthly by stealth. One is not allowed to start new periodicals, but you can get hold of a little paper if you call yourself a publisher, and you have to start off by pretending that what you are publishing is a book or pamphlet. The first number was rather dull and very badly got-up, but I have great hopes of it because we have great need of some paper in which one can do long and serious literary-political articles.

  David Martin4 is over in Canada and was going to look you up if he is in New York. He has great schemes for starting an international review in several languages. Arthur Koestler* is also very anxious to start something like what the League for the Rights of Man used to be before it was stalinised. No doubt you will be hearing from him about this.

  All the best and thanks for writing.

  Yours

  Geo. Orwell

  [XVIII, 2839, pp. 11–13; typewritten]

  1.Macdonald had written to Orwell on 31 December 1945: ‘“Animal Farm” . . . is absolutely superb. The transposition of the Russian experience into farm equivalents is done with perfect taste and skill, so that what might have been simply a witty burlesque becomes something more—really a tragedy. The pathos of the Russian degeneration comes out more strongly in your fairy tale than in anything I’ve read in a long time. The ending is not a letdown, as I should have thought it would have had to be, but is instead one more triumph of inventiveness. Congratulations on a beautifully done piece of writing.’ He asked if the book were to be published in America; he thought two or three hundred copies could be sold to readers of Politics.