George Orwell: A Life in Letters

by Peter Davison

  I’ll write and tell Karl2 about his parents. I haven’t seen him since you left. He was very down in the mouth about not being allowed to go back to Germany—at the same time, of course, other people who don’t want to go back to their own countries are being made to. You didn’t say when you are coming back. As soon as we have the Jura house running I hope you’ll come and stay. I think it could be very nice there in the summer once the house is in proper trim.

  With love

  George

  P.S. Isn’t it strange, we got a vacuum cleaner recently and Richard is terrified of it. He starts yelling as soon as he sees it, even before it is turned on, and in fact we can’t use it when he is in the house. My theory is that he gets some kind of vibration from it which gives him an electric shock.

  [XVIII, 2965, pp. 230–1; typewritten]

  1.A gossip column.

  2.Karl Schnetzler (1906– ), German electrical research engineer. He worked in England, 1935–39, but was then interned (though a refugee) until 1943. He was naturalised British in 1948. He accompanied Eileen when she visited Orwell at Preston Hall Sanatorium. None of his letters to Orwell or those from Orwell to him have been traced. Orwell attempted, through Michael Foot, M P, to again permission for him to visit Germany to see his parents but this was unsuccessful. (See also 1.3.39, n. 1.)

  To Philip Rahv*

  9 April 1946

  27 B Canonbury Square

  Islington N 1

  Dear Rahv,

  Thanks for your letter of April 4th. I note that you want the next ‘London Letter’ by about May 20th, and I will despatch it early in May. I am going to drop all my journalistic work here and go to Scotland for 6 months as from about the end of April, but I haven’t definitely fixed the date of leaving yet. As soon as I do I’ll send you my new address, but any way letters sent to the above would get to me.

  Yes, I saw the article in Time,1 which was a bit of good luck. I have no doubt the book2 will be subject to some boycotting, but so far as this country is concerned I have been surprised by the unfriendly reactions it didn’t get. It is being translated into 9 languages. The most difficult to arrange was French. One publisher signed a contract and then said it was ‘impossible’ for political reasons, others made similar answers—however, I have fixed it with a publisher who is in Monte Carlo and thus feels a bit safer. She is a woman, Odille Pathé, and worth keeping in mind for people who have unpopular books to translate, as she seems to have courage, which is not common in France these last few years. I have no doubt what Camus said was quite true. I am told French publishers are now ‘commanded’ by Aragon 3 and others not to publish undesirable books (according to my information, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was one such). The Communists have no actual jurisdiction in the matter, but it would be in their power, eg., to set fire to a publisher’s buildings with the connivance of the police. I don’t know how long this kind of thing will go on. In England feeling has undoubtedly been growing against the C.P. In France a year ago I got the impression that hardly anyone cares a damn any longer about freedom of the press etc. The occupation seemed to me to have had a terrible crushing effect even upon people like Trotskyists: or maybe a sort of intellectual decadence had set in years before the war. The only Frenchman I met at that [time] to whom I felt I could talk freely was a man named Raimbaud, a hunchback, who was one of the editors of the little near-Trotskyist weekly Libertés. The queer thing is that with all this moral decay there has over the past decade or so been much more literary talent in France than in England, or than anywhere else, I should say.

  I don’t know whether you have seen Polemic, the new bi-monthly review. In the third number I have a long article on James Burnham which I shall reprint afterwards as a pamphlet.4 He won’t like it—however, it is what I think.

  Yours

  Geo. Orwell

  [XVIII, 2966, pp. 231–2; typewritten]

  1.The article appeared in Time, 4 February 1946, and was prompted by the publication of Animal Farm in England. Publication in the United States was more than six months later.

  2.Animal Farm.

  3.Louis Aragon (1897–1984), novelist, poet, journalist, and Communist activist, was a leading figure in the Surrealist school; see his first volume of poems, Feu de joie (1920), and his first novel Le Paysan de Paris (1926; English translation, The Night-Walker, 1950). He became a Communist following a visit to Russia in 1930 and he edited the Communist weekly Les Lettres Françaises, 1953–72.

  4.‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’, Polemic, 3, May 1946, XVIII, 2989, pp. 268–84. As a pamphlet it was titled James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, 1946.

  The following letter, sent from Quakenbrück, Northern Germany, urges the need for a translation of Animal Farm for the benefit of refugees, and particularly for those from the Ukraine, and vividly describes readings Ihor Szewczenko1 gave in his own translation for Soviet refugees.

  Ihor Szewczenko* to Orwell

  11 April 1946

  c/o K. A. Jeleński, P40–OS, B.A.O.R.2

  Dear Mr. Orwell,

  About the middle of February this year I had the opportunity to read Animal Farm. I was immediately seized by the idea, that a translation of the tale into Ukrainian would be of great value to my countrymen.

  Quite apart from the benefit it would bring to our intelligentsia, only too incidentally acquainted with modern English literary life, a condition due partly to a certain remoteness from the West, such a translation would have a broader ‘moral’ influence which cannot be too much stressed. It is a matter of fact, that the attitude of the Western World in many recent issues roused serious doubts among our refugees. The somewhat naïve interpretation of this attitude oscillated between two poles. For many it looked something like the famous ‘tactics’, a miscalculated and disastrous device, dictated subconsciously by fear. It seemed to be miscalculated, because the other side is much stronger in this sort of tactics. It was deemed disastrous, because it would lead to a disappointment on the part of the European masses, only too willing to identify the democratic principles with democratic acts.

  By the others this attitude was attributed to the perfect skill with which English public opinion is influenced from outside, to the misconception of the Soviet state and institutions being to a great extent like those of the West, to the inability to penetrate a deliberately created state of confusion, caused by a lack of adequate information, or to something like this.

  Whatever the roots of this alleged attitude might be, the predominance of such an opinion has had a disintegrating influence. The refugees always tend to ‘lean against’ and to localise their best hopes and their idea of what they consider ‘moral perfection’. Such object lacking or failing to justify the expectations, purposelessness and cyni[ci]sm ensue.

  This part° of our emigrants who found themselves in exile moved not purely by nationalistic considerations but by what they vaguely felt to be a search for ‘human dignity’ and ‘liberty’ were by no means consoled if some right-wing intellectual raised the so called warning voice. They were especially anxious to hear something of this sort from the Socialist quarters, to which they stood intellectually nearer. They wondered how it were possible that nobody ‘knew the truth’. The task then was to prove that this assumption of the ‘naïveté’ was at least only partially true. Your book has solved the problem. I can judge it from my own feelings I had after having read it. I daresay the work can be savoured by an ‘Eastern’ reader in a degree equal to that accessible to an Englishman, the deformation a translation is bound to bring about being outweighed by the accuracy with which almost every ‘traceable’ sentence of the tale can be traced down to the prototype. For several occasions I translated different parts of Animal Farm ex abrupto. Soviet refugees were my listeners. The effect was striking. They approved of almost all of your interpretations. They were profoundly affected by such scenes as that of animals singing ‘Beasts of England’ on the hill. Here I saw, that in spite of their atte
ntion being primarily drawn on detecting ‘concordances’ between the reality they lived in and the tale, they very vividly reacted to the ‘absolute’ values of the book, to the tale ‘types’, to the underlying convictions of the author and so on. Besides, the mood of the book seems to correspond with their own actual state of mind.

  For these and similar reasons I ask you for an authorisation to translate Animal Farm into Ukrainian, a task which is already begun.

  I hear from Mr. Jeleński3 that his mother4 has already talked over with you the delicate question of publishing the translation in present conditions.5 I must ask you therefore not to mention my name overmuch and to consider the whole business unofficial for the present.

  Reading this kind of book one is often tempted to speculate about the ‘real’ opinions of the author. I myself confess to having indulged in this sort of guessing, and I have many questions to put to you, mainly related to your appreciation of certain developments in the USSR, but also many of more technical character, such as the translation of proper names. But this requires a separate letter. For the meantime I apologise for the long delay in addressing you. I was away in South Germany and your letter to Mme Jeleńska had not reached me until now.

  Yours sincerely

  Ihor Szewczenko

  [XVIII, 2969, pp. 235–8]

  1.Ihor Szewczenko was, in April 1946, commuting between Munich (where his then wife and mother-in-law, both Soviet-Ukrainian refugees, and he lived) and Quakenbrück in the British Zone of Germany, where a daily newspaper for the Second Polish, the Maczek, Division was published. Szewczenko, who was then twenty-five, had been ‘found’ after the war by one of its editors, André de Vincenz (a school friend from Warsaw), and, though Ukrainian, given work on the newspaper. He was engaged to survey the British Press and paid particular attention to Tribune (picking out ‘As I Please’). Another editor, Konstanty (‘Kot’) Jeleński, put him in touch, through his mother, with Orwell in order that he might ask permission to publish the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm, upon which he worked every day after lunch in Quakenbrück and in the evenings in Munich.

  2.B.A.O.R.: British Army of the Rhine.

  3.Konstanty A. Jeleński was the son of a Polish diplomat. In April 1946 he held the rank of lieutenant. He was familiar with the English literary scene and later achieved some prominence in Paris, where he contributed to Épreuves and the important Polish monthly Kultura, which published four of Orwell’s articles in Polish. The first three were translated by Teresa Jeleńska and the fourth by Teresa Skórzewska all ‘with the author’s authority’. Jeleński died about 1989.

  4.Mme Teresa Jeleńska, Konstanty Jeleński’s mother, was the intermediary who on Szewczenko’s behalf broached with Orwell the possibility of the publication of a Ukrainian translation. No correspondence between her and Orwell has been traced. Mme Jeleńska made a translation into Polish of Animal Farm and that, with illustrations by Wojciecha Jastrzebowskiego, was published by the League of Poles Abroad, London, under the title Folwark Zwierzecy, in December 1946.

  5.The translation into Ukrainian was published in Munich in November 1947; the translator’s name was given as Ivan Cherniatync’kyi and the title as Kolhosp Tvaryn. It was intended for displaced persons. Orwell wrote a special Preface for this translation and it is printed as Appendix II of the Complete Works and Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics editions.

  To Andrew S. F. Gow*

  13 April 1946

  27B Canonbury Square Islington N 1

  Dear Mr Gow,

  It was very nice to hear from you after all this time. I heard almost simultaneously from M. D. Hill,1 who wrote to me appropos° of the Gem and Magnet 2 and George Lyttelton,3 who is now editing a series for Home & Van Thal and wanted me to write something. To my sorrow I had to say no, at any rate for the time being, because I am just on the point of dropping all journalism and other casual work for six months. I may start another book during the period, but I have resolved to stop hackwork for a bit, because I have been writing three articles a week for two years and for two years previous to that had been in the BBC where I wrote enough rubbish (news commentaries and so on) to fill a shelf of books. I have become more and more like a sucked orange and I am going to get out of it and go to Scotland for six months to a place where there is no telephone and not much of a postal service.

  A lot has happened to me since I saw you. I am very sorry to say I lost my wife a little over a year ago, very suddenly and unexpectedly although her health had been indifferent for some time. I have a little adopted son who is now nearly 2 and was about 10 months old when his mother, ie. my wife, died. He was 3 weeks old when we adopted him. He is a splendid child and fortunately very healthy, and is a great pleasure to me. I didn’t do much in the war because I was class IV, having a disease called bronchiectasis and also a lesion in one lung which was never diagnosed when I was a boy. But actually my health has been much better the last few years thanks to M and B.4 The only bit of war I saw apart from blitzes and the Home Guard was being a war correspondent for a little while in Germany about the time of the collapse, which was quite interesting. I was in the Spanish war for a bit and was wounded through the neck, which paralysed one vocal cord, but this doesn’t affect my voice. As you gathered I had a difficult time making a living out of writing at the start, though looking back now, and knowing what a racket literary journalism is, I see that I could have managed much better if I had known the ropes. At present the difficulty with all writers I know is that whereas it is quite easy to make a living by journalism or broadcasting, it is practically impossible to live by books. Before the war my wife and I used to live off my books, but then we lived in the country on £5 a week, which you could do then, and we didn’t have a child. The last few years life has been so ghastly expensive that I find the only way I can write books is to write long essays for the magazines and then reprint them. However all this hackwork I have done in the last few years has had the advantage that it gets me a new public, and when I do publish a book it sells a lot more than mine used to before the war.

  You mentioned Freddie Ayer.5 I didn’t know you knew him. He is a great friend of mine. This new magazine, Polemic, has only made two appearances so far, but I have great hopes that it will develop into something good. Bertrand Russell is of course the chief star in the constellation. It was a bad job Bobby Longden 6 getting killed. I believe Wellington became very enlightened while he was there. A boy whom you may know called Michael Meyer,7 who was in the RAF and is now I think back at Cambridge again, was at Wellington under Bobby and has a great regard for him.

  I will certainly come and see you next time I am at Cambridge, but I don’t quite know when that will be. I thought of you last time I was there about 2 years ago when I was lecturing to the London School of Economics which was evacuated there. About my name. I have used the name Orwell as a pen-name for a dozen years or more, and most of the people I know call me George, but I have never actually changed my name and some people still call me Blair. It is getting to be such a nuisance that I keep meaning to change it by deed poll, but you have to go to a solicitor etc. which puts me off.

  Yours

  Eric Blair

  P.S. You couldn’t be expected to read all the books your ex-pupils have produced, but I wonder whether you saw my last book but one, Animal Farm? If not I’d be happy to send you a copy. It is very short and might amuse you.

  [XVIII, 2972, pp. 241–3; typewritten]

  1.M. D. Hill was a master at Eton in Orwell’s time.

  2.‘Boys’ Weeklies’, Horizon, 1940, XII, pp. 57–79.

  3.The Honorable George Lyttelton, a master at Eton who was also in correspondence with Orwell at this time. He was no longer at Eton and wrote to Orwell on 9 April 1946 to thank him for replying to an earlier letter and to invite him to write one of the biographies of great writers he was editing for Home & Van Thal. He said he suspected Orwell was ‘committed kneedeep’ but thought it worth asking. A year or two earlier
, at £50 down and a royalty of 15% for 30,000 words, it might have been a chance to be seized. In a postscript he wrote, ‘I am very glad you put in a word for that foolish old Wodehouse. The discovery made by all our patriots that, because he made an ass of himself in the war, none of his books was really at all funny was very absurd—& very English.’

  4.May & Baker, drug manufacturers. Orwell is probably referring to a treatment for pneumonia.

  5.Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–1989; Kt., 1970), philosopher. His Language, Truth and Logic (1936) was a revolutionary work, the first extensive presentation of Logical Positivism in English. After Eton and Christ Church (1932–44) he served in the Welsh Guards and was an attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. From 1946 to 1978 he held professional appointments at UCL and Oxford; he was a fellow of Wolfson College, 1978–83.

  6.Robert P. (‘Bobbie’) Longden, a contemporary of Orwell’s at Eton, had a brilliant academic career, became headmaster of Wellington, and was killed in 1940 by a German stray bomb that hit the school. Orwell’s comment about Wellington becoming ‘very enlightened while [Longden] was there’ may reflect on his memories of the short time he spent at the school before going to Eton: he ‘did not like Wellington at all. He found the militaristic spirit of this famous army school abhorrent’ (Crick, p. 96).

  7.Michael Leverson Meyer (1921–2000), writer, critic, and distinguished translator and biographer of Ibsen and Strindberg. He had written what he described as a ‘timid letter’ to Orwell when Orwell was at the BBC and had a friendly response (13 April 1943) and they became friends. He had served in Bomber Command, 1942–45, and was Lecturer in English Literature, Uppsala University, Sweden, 1947–50.

  To Anne Popham*