George
Orwell
BORN- Eric AArthur
Blair 25 June 1903
Motihari, Bengal
Presidency, British India
DIED- 21 January
1950(aged 46)
University College
Hospital, London, England, United kingdom
RESTING PLACE- Sutton
Courtenay, Oxfordshire, England, United Kingdom
PEN NAME- George Orwell
OCCUPTION- Novelist,
Poltical Writer, Journalist
NATIONALITY- English
LANGUAGE- English
CITIZENSHIP-British
Subject
ALMA MATER- Eton College
PERIOD- 6 October
1928 – 1 january 1950
GENRES- Dystopia, Rom
an a clef, Stire
SUBJECTS-Anti-fascism
and anti-Stalinist left,democratic socialism, literary criticism, news,
polemic
NATABLE WORKS- Homage
to Catalonia (1938) Animal Farm (1945) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
essays
SPOUSE(S)-
Eileen O'Shaughnessy (1935–1945, her death)
Sonia Brownell (1949–1950,
until his death)
CHILDREN-Richard Horatio Blair (adopted)
RELATIVE(S)-Richard Walmesley Blair (father)
Ida Mabel Blair (née
Limouzin) (mother)
Marjorie (sister) Avril (sister)
1. LIFE
1.1- ERLY YEARS
Blair
family home at Shiplake
Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25
June 1903, in Motihari, Bihar, in India. His great-grandfather Charles Blair was a wealthy
country gentleman in Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of Thomas
Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland, and had income as an absentee landlord of
plantations in Jamaica.His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a
clergyman. Although the gentility passed down the generations, the prosperity did
not; Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class". His father, Richard
Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service.
His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where
her French father was involved in speculative ventures.Eric had two sisters:
Marjorie, five years older, and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was one
year old, his mother took him and his older sister to England.
In 1904, Ida Blair settled with
her children at Henley-on-Thames. Eric was brought up in the company of his
mother and sisters, and apart from a brief visit in the summer of 1907, they did not see
the husband and father Richard Blair until 1912.His mother's diary from 1905
describes a lively round of social activity and artistic interests.
The
family moved to Shiplake before the First World War, where Eric became friendly
with the Buddicom family, especially their daughter Jacintha. When they first
met, he was standing on his head in a field. On being asked why, he said,
"You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way
up."Jacintha and Eric read and wrote poetry, and dreamed of becoming
famous writers. He said that he might write a book in the style of H. G.
Wells's A Modern Utopia. During this period, he also enjoyed shooting,
fishing and birdwatching with Jacintha's brother and sister.
Blair's
time at St. Cyprian's informed his essay "Such, Such Were the Joys"
At the age of five, Eric was
sent as a day-boy to a convent school in Henley-on-Thames, which Marjorie also
attended. It was a Roman Catholicconvent run by French Ursuline nuns, who had
been exiled from France after religious education was banned in 1903. His mother wanted
him to have a public school education, but his family could not afford the
fees, and he needed to earn a scholarship. Ida Blair's brother Charles Limouzin
recommended St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, East Sussex. Limouzin, who was
a proficient golfer, knew of the school and its headmaster through the Royal
Eastbourne Golf Club, where he won several competitions in 1903 and 1904.The
headmaster undertook to help Blair to win the scholarship, and made a private
financial arrangement that allowed Blair's parents to pay only half the normal
fees. In September 1911 Eric arrived at St Cyprian's. He boarded at the school
for the next five years, returning home only for school holidays. He knew
nothing of the reduced fees although he "soon recognised that he was from
a poorer home". Blair hated the school and many years later wrote an
essay "Such, Such Were the Joys", published posthumously, based on
his time there. At St. Cyprian's, Blair first met Cyril Connolly, who became a
noted writer and, as the editor of Horizon, published many of Orwell's
essays.
As part of school work, Blair
wrote two poems that were published in the Henley and South Oxfordshire
Standard, He came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize,
had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships
to Wellington and Eton Colleges. But an Eton scholarship did not guarantee a
place, and none was immediately available for Blair. He chose to stay at St
Cyprian's until December 1916, in case a place at Eton became available.
In
January, Blair took up the place at Wellington, where he spent the Spring term.
In May 1917 a place became available as a King's Scholar at Eton. He studied at
Eton until December 1921, when he left at age 18½. Wellington was
"beastly", Orwell told his childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom, but he
said he was "interested and happy" at Eton. His principal
tutor was A. S. F. Gow, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who also gave him
advice later in his career.Blair was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley.
Stephen Runciman, who was at Eton with Blair, noted that he and his
contemporaries appreciated Huxley's linguistic flair.Cyril Connolly followed
Blair to Eton, but because they were in separate years, they did not associate
with each other
Blair's
academic performance reports suggest that he neglected his academic studies,but
during his time at Eton he worked with Roger Mynors to produce a College
magazine, The Election Times, joined in the production of other
publications—College Days and Bubble and Squeak—and participated
in the Eton Wall Game. His parents could not afford to send him to university
without another scholarship, and they concluded from his poor results that he
would not be able to win one. Runciman noted that he had a romantic idea about
the East and the family decided that Blair should join the Imperial Police, the
precursor of the Indian Police Service. For this he had to pass an entrance
examination. His father had retired to Southwold, Suffolk by this time; Blair
was enrolled at a crammer there called Craighurst, and brushed up on his
classics, English and History. Blair passed the exam, coming seventh out of the
26 candidates who exceeded the pass mark..
.
1.2 POLICING
IN BURMA-
Blair pictured in a passport
photo during his Burma years
Blair's maternal grandmother
lived at Moulmein, so he chose a posting in Burma. In October 1922 he sailed on
board S.S. Herefordshire via the Suez Canal and Ceylon to join the
Indian Imperial Police in Burma. A month later, he arrived at Rangoon and
travelled to the police training school inMandalay. After a short posting at
Maymyo, Burma's principal hill station, he was posted to the frontier outpost
of Myaungmya in the Irrawaddy Deltaat the beginning of 1924.
Working as an imperial policeman
gave him considerable responsibility while most of his contemporaries were
still at university in England. When he was posted farther east in the Delta to
Twante as a sub-divisional officer, he was responsible for the security of some
200,000 people. At the end of 1924, he was promoted to Assistant District
Superintendent and posted to Syriam, closer to Rangoon. Syriam had the refinery
of the Burmah Oil Company, "the surrounding land a barren waste, all
vegetation killed off by the fumes of sulphur dioxide pouring out day and night
from the stacks of the refinery." But the town was near Rangoon, a
cosmopolitan seaport, and Blair went into the city as often as he could,
"to browse in a bookshop; to eat well-cooked food; to get away from the
boring routine of police life." In September 1925 he went to Insein, the home of Insein
Prison, the second largest jail in Burma. In Insein, he had "long talks on
every conceivable subject" with Elisa Maria Langford-Rae (who later
married Kazi Lhendup Dorjee). She noted his "sense of utter fairness in
minutest details".
British Club in Kathar (in
Orwell's time, it occupied only the ground floor)
In Burma, Blair acquired a
reputation as an outsider. He spent much of his time alone, reading or pursuing
non-pukka activities, such as attending the churches of the Karen ethnic
group. A colleague, Roger Beadon, recalled (in a 1969 recording for the BBC)
that Blair was fast to learn the language and that before he left Burma,
"was able to speak fluently with Burmese priests in 'very high-flown
Burmese.'"Blair made changes to his appearance in Burma that remained for
the rest of his life. "While in Burma, he acquired a moustache similar to
those worn by officers of the British regiments stationed there. [He] also
acquired some tattoos; on each knuckle he had a small untidy blue circle. Many
Burmese living in rural areas still sport tattoos like this – they are believed
to protect against bullets and snake bites." Later, he wrote that he felt
guilty about his role in the work of empire and he "began to look more
closely at his own country and saw that England also had its oppressed..."
1.3 LONDON AND PERIS
Blair's
1927 lodgings in Portobello Road
In England, he settled back in
the family home at Southwold, renewing acquaintance with local friends and
attending an Old Etonian dinner. He visited his old tutor Gow at Cambridge for
advice on becoming a writer.[30] Early in autumn 1927 he moved to London. Ruth Pitter, a
family acquaintance, helped him find lodgings, and by the end of 1927 he had
moved into rooms in Portobello Road; a blue plaque commemorates his residence there.Pitter's
involvement in the move "would have lent it a reassuring respectability in
Mrs Blair's eyes." Pitter had a sympathetic interest in Blair's writing,
pointed out weaknesses in his poetry, and advised him to write about what he
knew. In fact he decided to write of "certain aspects of the present that
he set out to know" and "ventured into the East End of London – the
first of the occasional sorties he would make to discover for himself the world
of poverty and the down-and-outers who inhabit it. He had found a subject.
These sorties, explorations, expeditions, tours or immersions were made
intermittently over a period of five years."
In
imitation of Jack London, whose writing he admired (particularly The People
of the Abyss), Orwell started to explore slumming the poorer parts of
London. On his first outing he set out to Limehouse Causeway, spending his
first night in a common lodging house, possibly George Levy's 'kip'. For a
while he "went native" in his own country, dressing like a tramp and
making no concessions to middle-class mores and expectations; he
recorded his experiences of the low life for use in "The Spike", his
first published essay in English, and in the second half of his first book, Down
and Out in Paris and London (1933).
Rue
du Pot de Fer, on the Left Bank, in the 5th arrondissement, where Blair lived
in Paris
In the spring of 1928 he moved
to Paris. He lived in the Rue du Pot de Fer, a working class district in the
5th Arrondissement. His aunt Nellie Limouzin also lived in Paris and gave
him social and, when necessary, financial support. He began to write novels,
including an early version of Burmese Days but nothing else survives
from that period. He was more successful as a journalist and published
articles in Monde, a political/literary journal edited by Henri
Barbusse, – his first article as a professional writer, "La Censure en
Angleterre", appeared in that journal on 6 October 1928 – G. K.'s
Weekly – where his first article to appear in England, "A Farthing
Newspaper", was printed on 29 December 1928 – and Le Progrès Civique (founded
by the left-wing coalition Le Cartel des Gauches). Three pieces appeared in
successive weeks in Progrès Civique: discussing unemployment, a day in
the life of a tramp, and the beggars of London, respectively. "In one or
another of its destructive forms, poverty was to become his obsessive subject –
at the heart of almost everything he wrote until Homage to Catalonia."
He
fell seriously ill in February 1929 and was taken to the Hôpital Cochin in the
14th arrondissement, a free hospital where medical students were trained. His
experiences there were the basis of his essay "How the Poor Die",
published in 1946. He chose not to identify the hospital, indeed was
deliberately misleading about its location. Shortly afterwards, he had all his
money stolen from his lodging house. Whether through necessity or simply to
collect material, he undertook menial jobs like dishwashing in a fashionable
hotel on the rue de Rivoli, which he later described in Down and Out in
Paris and London. In August 1929, he sent a copy of "The Spike"
to John Middleton Murry's New Adelphi magazine in London. The magazine
was edited by Max Plowman and Sir Richard Rees, and Plowman accepted the work
for publication.
1.4
SOUTHWOLD
In December 1929, after nearly two
years in Paris, Blair returned to England and went directly to his parents'
house in Southwold, which was to remain his base for the next five years. The
family was well-established in the town and his sister Avril was running a
tea-house there. He became acquainted with many local people, including Brenda
Salkeld, the clergyman's daughter who worked as a gym-teacher at St Felix
Girls' School, Southwold. Although Salkeld rejected his offer of marriage, she
was to remain a friend and regular correspondent for many years. He also
renewed friendships with older friends, such as Dennis Collings, whose
girlfriend Eleanor Jacques was also to play a part in his life.
Southwold – North Parade
In the spring he stayed briefly
in Bramley, Leeds, with his sister Marjorie and her husband Humphrey Dakin, who
was as unappreciative of Blair as when they knew each other as children. Blair
was writing reviews for Adelphi and acting as a private tutor to a
disabled child at Southwold. He then became tutor to three young brothers, one
of whom, Richard Peters, later became a distinguished academic. "His history
in these years is marked by dualities and contrasts. There is Blair leading a
respectable, outwardly eventless life at his parents' house in Southwold,
writing; then in contrast, there is Blair as Burton (the name he used in his
down-and-out episodes) in search of experience in the kips and spikes, in the
East End, on the road, and in the hop fields of Kent." He went painting
and bathing on the beach, and there he met Mabel and Francis Fierz who were
later to influence his career. Over the next year he visited them in London,
often meeting their friend Max Plowman. He also often stayed at the homes of
Ruth Pitter and Richard Rees, where he could "change" for his
sporadic tramping expeditions. One of his jobs was to do domestic work at a
lodgings for half a crown a day.
Blair now contributed regularly
to Adelphi, with "A Hanging" appearing in August 1931. From
August to September 1931 his explorations of poverty continued, and, like the
protagonist of A Clergyman's Daughter, he followed the East End
tradition of working in the Kent hop fields. He kept a diary about his
experiences there. Afterwards, he lodged in the Tooley Street kip, but could
not stand it for long and with financial help from his parents moved to Windsor
Street, where he stayed until Christmas. "Hop Picking", by Eric
Blair, appeared in the October 1931 issue of New Statesman, whose
editorial staff included his old friend Cyril Connolly. Mabel Fierz put him in
contact with Leonard Moore, who was to become his literary agent.
At this time Jonathan Cape rejected A
Scullion's Diary, the first version of Down and Out. On the advice
of Richard Rees, he offered it to Faber & Faber, whose editorial director,
T. S. Eliot, also rejected it. Blair ended the year by deliberately getting
himself arrested, so he could experience Christmas in prison, but the authorities
did not regard his "drunk and disorderly" behaviour as imprisonable,
and he returned home to Southwold after two days in a police cell.
1.5
TEACHING CARRER
In
April 1932 Blair became a teacher at The Hawthorns High School, a prep school
for boys in Hayes, West London. This was a small school offering private
schooling for children of local tradesmen and shopkeepers, and had only twenty
boys and one other master.While at the school he became friendly with the
curate of the local parish church and became involved with activities there.
Mabel Fierz had pursued matters with Moore, and at the end of June 1932, Moore
told Blair that Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish A Scullion's Diary for
a £40 advance, through his recently founded publishing house, Victor Gollancz
Ltd, which was an outlet for radical and socialist works.
At the end of the summer term in 1932, Blair returned to
Southwold, where his parents had used a legacy to buy their own home. Blair and
his sister Avril spent the summer holidays making the house habitable while he
also worked on Burmese Days. He was also spending time with Eleanor Jacques, but her
attachment to Dennis Collings remained an obstacle to his hopes of a more
serious relationship.
The pen-name "George Orwell" was inspired by the
River Orwell
In the summer of 1933 Blair left
Hawthorns to become a teacher at Frays College, in Uxbridge, West London. This
was a much larger establishment with 200 pupils and a full complement of staff.
He acquired a motorcycle and took trips through the surrounding countryside. On
one of these expeditions he became soaked and caught a chill that developed
into pneumonia. He was taken to Uxbridge Cottage Hospital, where for a time his
life was believed to be in danger. When he was discharged in January 1934, he
returned to Southwold to convalesce and, supported by his parents, never
returned to teaching.
He was disappointed when Gollancz turned down Burmese Days,
mainly on the grounds of potential suits for libel, but Harpers were prepared
to publish it in the United States. Meanwhile, Blair started work on the novel A
Clergyman's Daughter, drawing upon his life as a teacher and on life in
Southwold. Eleanor Jacques was now married and had gone to Singapore and Brenda
Salkield had left for Ireland, so Blair was relatively isolated in
Southwold—working on the allotments, walking alone and spending time with his
father. Eventually in October, after sending A Clergyman's Daughter to
Moore, he left for London to take a job that had been found for him by his Aunt
Nellie Limouzin.
1.6
HAMPSTEAD
This job was as a part-time
assistant in Booklovers' Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead run by
Francis and Myfanwy Westrope, who were friends of Nellie Limouzin in the
Esperanto movement. The Westropes were friendly and provided him with
comfortable accommodation at Warwick Mansions, Pond Street. He was sharing the
job with Jon Kimche, who also lived with the Westropes. Blair worked at the
shop in the afternoons and had his mornings free to write and his evenings free
to socialise. These experiences provided background for the novel Keep the
Aspidistra Flying(1936). As well as the various guests of the Westropes, he
was able to enjoy the company of Richard Rees and the Adelphi writers
and Mabel Fierz. The Westropes and Kimche were members of the Independent
Labour Party, although at this time Blair was not seriously politically active.
He was writing for the Adelphi and preparing A Clergyman's Daughter and
Burmese Days for publication.
At the beginning of 1935 he had to
move out of Warwick Mansions, and Mabel Fierz found him a flat in Parliament
Hill. A Clergyman's Daughter was published on 11 March 1935. In the
spring of 1935 Blair met his future wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy, when his
landlady, Rosalind Obermeyer, who was studying for a masters degree in
psychology at University College London, invited some of her fellow students to
a party. One of these students, Elizaveta Fen, an autobiographer and future
translator of Chekhov, recalled Orwell and his friend Richard Rees
"draped" at the fireplace, looking, she thought, "moth-eaten and
prematurely aged." Around this time, Blair had started to write reviews for the New
English Weekly.
Orwell's time as a bookseller is
commemorated with this plaque
In June, Burmese Days was
published and Cyril Connolly's review in the New Statesman prompted
Orwell to re-establish contact with his old friend. In August, Blair moved into
a flat in Kentish Town, which he shared with Michael Sayers and Rayner
Heppenstall. The relationship was sometimes awkward and Orwell and Heppenstall
even came to blows, though they remained friends and later worked together on
BBC broadcasts.[46]
Orwell was now
working on Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and also tried unsuccessfully to
write a serial for the News Chronicle. By October 1935 his flatmates had
moved out and he was struggling to pay the rent on his own. He remained until
the end of January 1936, when he stopped working at Booklovers' Corner.
1.7
THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER
At this time, Victor Gollancz
suggested Orwell spend a short time investigating social conditions in
economically depressed northern England. Two years earlier J. B. Priestley had written about
England north of the Trent, sparking an interest in reportage. The depression
had also introduced a number of working-class writers from the North of England
to the reading public.
On 31 January 1936, Orwell set
out by public transport and on foot, reaching Manchester via Coventry,
Stafford, the Potteries and Macclesfield. Arriving in Manchester after the
banks had closed, he had to stay in a common lodging-house. Next day he picked
up a list of contacts sent by Richard Rees. One of these, the trade union
official Frank Meade, suggested Wigan, where Orwell spent February staying in
dirty lodgings over a tripe shop. At Wigan, he visited many homes to see how
people lived, took detailed notes of housing conditions and wages earned, went
down Bryn Hall coal mine, and used the local public library to consult public
health records and reports on working conditions in mines.
During
this time, he was distracted by concerns about style and possible libel in Keep
the Aspidistra Flying. He made a quick visit to Liverpool and spent March
in south Yorkshire, spending time in Sheffield and Barnsley. As well as
visiting mines, including Grimethorpe, and observing social conditions, he
attended meetings of the Communist Party and of Oswald Mosley – "his
speech the usual claptrap—The blame for everything was put upon mysterious
international gangs of Jews" – where he saw the tactics of the Blackshirts
– "one is liable to get both a hammering and a fine for asking a question
which Mosley finds it difficult to answer." He also made visits to his sister at
Headingley, during which he visited the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, where he
was "chiefly impressed by a pair of Charlotte Brontë's cloth-topped boots,
very small, with square toes and lacing up at the sides."
A
former warehouse in Wigan Pier is named after Orwell
The result of his journeys
through the north was The Road to Wigan Pier, published by Gollancz for
the Left Book Club in 1937. The first half of the book documents his social
investigations of Lancashire and Yorkshire. It begins with an evocative
description of working life in the coal mines. The second half is a long essay
on his upbringing and the development of his political conscience, which
includes criticism of some of groups on the left. Gollancz feared the second
half would offend readers and added a disculpatory preface to the book while
Orwell was in Spain.
Orwell needed somewhere he could
concentrate on writing his book, and once again help was provided by Aunt
Nellie, who was living at Wallington, Hertfordshire in a very small
sixteenth-century cottage called the "Stores". Wallington was a tiny
village thirty-five miles north of London and the cottage had almost no modern
facilities. Orwell took over the tenancy and moved in on 2 April 1936.He
started work on The Road to Wigan Pier by the end of April, but also
spent hours working on the garden and testing the possibility of re-opening the
Stores as a village shop. Keep the Aspidistra Flying was published by
Gollancz on 20 April 1936. On 4 August Orwell gave a talk at the Adelphi Summer
School held at Langham, entitled An Outsider Sees the Distressed Areas;
others who spoke at the school included John Strachey, Max Plowman, Karl
Polanyi and Reinhold Niebuhr.
Orwell's research for The
Road to Wigan Pier led to him being placed under surveillance by the
Special Branch in 1936, for 12 years, until one year before the publication of Nineteen
Eighty-Four.
Orwell
married Eileen O'Shaughnessy on 9 June 1936. Shortly afterwards, the political
crisis began in Spain and Orwell followed developments there closely. At the
end of the year, concerned byFrancisco Franco's military uprising, (supported
by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and local groups such as Falange), Orwell
decided to go to Spain to take part in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican
side. Under the erroneous impression that he needed papers from some left-wing
organisation to cross the frontier, on John Strachey's recommendation he
applied unsuccessfully toHarry Pollitt, leader of the British Communist Party.
Pollitt was suspicious of Orwell's political reliability; he asked him whether
he would undertake to join the International Brigade and advised him to get a
safe-conduct from the Spanish Embassy in Paris.Not wishing to commit himself
until he'd seen the situation in situ, Orwell instead used his
Independent Labour Party contacts to get a letter of introduction to John
McNair in Barcelona.
1.8 THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
The
square in Barcelona renamed in Orwell's honour
Orwell set out for Spain on
about 23 December 1936, dining with Henry Miller in Paris on the way. The
American writer told Orwell that going to fight in the Civil War there out of
some sense of obligation or guilt was ‘sheer stupidity,’ and that the
Englishman’s ideas ‘about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc.,
were all baloney.’ A few
days later, in Barcelona, Orwell met John McNair of the Independent Labour Party
(ILP) Office who quoted him: "I've come to fight against Fascism". Orwell stepped
into a complex political situation in Catalonia. The Republican government was
supported by a number of factions with conflicting aims, including the Workers'
Party of Marxist Unification (POUM – Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista),
the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the
Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (a wing of the Spanish Communist Party,
which was backed by Soviet arms and aid). The ILP was linked to the POUM and so
Orwell joined the POUM.
After a time at the Lenin
Barracks in Barcelona he was sent to the relatively quiet Aragon Front under
Georges Kopp. By January 1937 he was atAlcubierre 1,500 feet (460 m) above sea
level, in the depth of winter. There was very little military action, and the
lack of equipment and other deprivations made it uncomfortable. Orwell, with
his Cadet Corps and police training, was quickly made a corporal. On the
arrival of a British ILP Contingent about three weeks later, Orwell and the
other English militiaman, Williams, were sent with them to Monte Oscuro. The
newly arrived ILP contingent included Bob Smillie, Bob Edwards, Stafford
Cottman and Jack Branthwaite. The unit was then sent on to Huesca.
Meanwhile, back in England,
Eileen had been handling the issues relating to the publication of The Road
to Wigan Pier before setting out for Spain herself, leaving Aunt Nellie
Limouzin to look after The Stores. Eileen volunteered for a post in John McNair's
office and with the help of Georges Kopp paid visits to her husband, bringing
him English tea, chocolate and cigars. Orwell had to spend some days in hospital with a
poisoned hand and had most of his possessions stolen by the staff. He returned
to the front and saw some action in a night attack on the Nationalist trenches
where he chased an enemy soldier with a bayonet and bombed an enemy rifle
position.
In April, Orwell returned to
Barcelona. Wanting to be sent to the Madrid front, which meant he "must
join the International Column", he approached a Communist friend attached
to the Spanish Medical Aid and explained his case. "Although he did not
think much of the Communists, Orwell was still ready to treat them as friends
and allies. That would soon change."This was the time of the Barcelona May
Days and Orwell was caught up in the factional fighting. He spent much of the
time on a roof, with a stack of novels, but encountered Jon Kimche from his
Hampstead days during the stay. The subsequent campaign of lies and distortion
carried out by the Communist press,in which the POUM was accused of
collaborating with the fascists, had a dramatic effect on Orwell. Instead of
joining the International Brigades as he had intended, he decided to return to
the Aragon Front. Once the May fighting was over, he was approached by a
Communist friend who asked if he still intended transferring to the
International Brigades. Orwell expressed surprise that they should still want
him, because according to the Communist press he was a fascist. "No one who
was in Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere
produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails,
enormous food queues and prowling gangs of armed men."
After his return to the front,
he was wounded in the throat by a sniper's bullet. Orwell was considerably
taller than the Spanish fighters and had been warned against standing against the trench
parapet. Unable to speak, and with blood pouring from his mouth, Orwell was carried
on a stretcher to Siétamo, loaded on an ambulance and after a bumpy journey via
Barbastro arrived at the hospital at Lleida. He recovered sufficiently to get
up and on 27 May 1937 was sent on to Tarragona and two days later to a POUM
sanatorium in the suburbs of Barcelona. The bullet had missed his main artery
by the barest margin and his voice was barely audible. It had been such a clean
shot that the wound immediately went through the process of cauterisation. He
receivedelectrotherapy treatment and was declared medically unfit for service.
By the middle of June the
political situation in Barcelona had deteriorated and the POUM—painted by the
pro-Soviet Communists as a Trotskyist organisation—was outlawed and under
attack. The Communist line was that the POUM were "objectively"
Fascist, hindering the Republican cause. "A particularly nasty poster
appeared, showing a head with a POUM mask being ripped off to reveal a
Swastika-covered face beneath." Members, including Kopp, were arrested and others were
in hiding. Orwell and his wife were under threat and had to lie low, although they
broke cover to try to help Kopp.
Finally
with their passports in order, they escaped from Spain by train, diverting to
Banyuls-sur-Mer for a short stay before returning to England. In the first week
of July 1937 Orwell arrived back at Wallington; on 13 July 1937 a deposition
was presented to the Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason,
Valencia, charging the Orwells with "rabid Trotskyism", and being
agents of the POUM. The trial
of the leaders of the POUM and of Orwell (in his absence) took place in
Barcelona in October and November 1938. Observing events from French Morocco,
Orwell wrote that they were "—only a by-product of the Russian Trotskyist
trials and from the start every kind of lie, including flagrant absurdities,
has been circulated in the Communist press." Orwell's experiences in the Spanish
Civil War gave rise to Homage to Catalonia (1938).
1.9 REST
AND RECUPERATION
Orwell returned to England in
June 1937, and stayed at the O'Shaughnessy home at Greenwich. He found his
views on the Spanish Civil War out of favour. Kingsley Martin rejected two of
his works and Gollancz was equally cautious. At the same time, the communist Daily
Worker was running an attack on The Road to Wigan Pier, misquoting
Orwell as saying "the working classes smell"; a letter to Gollancz
from Orwell threatening libel action brought a stop to this. Orwell was also
able to find a more sympathetic publisher for his views in Frederic Warburg of
Secker & Warburg. Orwell returned to Wallington, which he found in disarray
after his absence. He acquired goats, a rooster he called "Henry
Ford", and a poodle puppy he called "Marx" and settled down
to animal husbandry and writing Homage to Catalonia.
There were thoughts of going to
India to work on the Pioneer, a newspaper in Lucknow, but by March 1938
Orwell's health had deteriorated. He was admitted to Preston Hall Sanatorium at
Aylesford, Kent, a British Legion hospital for ex-servicemen to which his
brother-in-law Laurence O'Shaughnessy was attached. He was thought initially to
be suffering from tuberculosis and stayed in the sanatorium until September. A
stream of visitors came to see him including Common, Heppenstall, Plowman and
Cyril Connolly. Connolly brought with him Stephen Spender, a cause of some
embarrassment as Orwell had referred to Spender as a "pansy
friend" some time earlier. Homage to Catalonia was published by
Secker & Warburg and was a commercial flop. In the latter part of his stay
at the clinic Orwell was able to go for walks in the countryside and study
nature.
The novelist L.H. Myers secretly
funded a trip to French Morocco for half a year for Orwell to avoid the English
winter and recover his health. The Orwells set out in September 1938 via
Gibraltar and Tangier to avoid Spanish Morocco and arrived at Marrakech. They
rented a villa on the road to Casablanca and during that time Orwell wroteComing
Up for Air. They arrived back in England on 30 March 1939 and Coming Up
for Air was published in June. Orwell spent time in Wallington and
Southwold working on a Dickens essay and it was in July 1939 that Orwell's father,
Richard Blair, died.
1.10 WORLD WAR II AND ANIMAL FARM
On the outbreak of World War II,
Orwell's wife Eileen started work in the Censorship Department in London,
staying during the week with her family in Greenwich. Orwell also submitted his
name to the Central Register for war effort but nothing transpired. "They
won't have me in the army, at any rate at present, because of my lungs",
Orwell told Geoffrey Gorer. He returned to Wallington, and in the autumn of
1939 he wrote material for his first collection of essays, Inside the Whale.
For the next year he was occupied writing reviews for plays, films and books
for The Listener,Time and Tide and New Adelphi. On 29
March 1940 his long association with Tribune began[70] with a review of a
sergeant's account of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. At the beginning of 1940,
the first edition of Connolly's Horizon appeared, and this provided a
new outlet for Orwell's work as well as new literary contacts. In May the
Orwells took lease of a flat in London at Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street,
Marylebone. It was the time of the Dunkirk evacuation and the death in France
of Eileen's brother Lawrence caused her considerable grief and long-term
depression. Throughout this period Orwell kept a wartime diary.
Orwell was declared "unfit
for any kind of military service" by the Medical Board in June, but soon
afterwards found an opportunity to become involved in war activities by joining
the Home Guard. He shared Tom Wintringham's socialist vision for the Home Guard
as a revolutionary People's Militia. His lecture notes for instructing platoon
members include advice on street fighting, field fortifications, and the use of
mortars of various kinds. Sergeant Orwell managed to recruit Frederic Warburg
to his unit. During the Battle of Britain he used to spend weekends with
Warburg and his new friend Zionist Tosco Fyvel at Twyford, Berkshire. At
Wallington he worked on "England Your England" and in London wrote
reviews for various periodicals. Visiting Eileen's family in Greenwich brought
him face-to-face with the effects of the blitz on East London. In the summer of
1940, Warburg, Fyvel and Orwell planned Searchlight Books. Eleven eventually
appeared and Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English
Genius was the first and was published on 19 February 1941.
Early in 1941 he started writing
for the American Partisan Review and contributed to Gollancz' anthology The
Betrayal of the Left, written in the light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
(although Orwell referred to it as the Russo-German Pact and the Hitler-Stalin
Pact. He also applied unsuccessfully for a job at the Air Ministry. Meanwhile
he was still writing reviews of books and plays and at this time met the
novelist Anthony Powell. He also took part in a few radio broadcasts for the
Eastern Service of the BBC. In March the Orwells moved to St John's Wood in a
7th floor flat at Langford Court, while at Wallington Orwell was "digging
for victory" by planting potatoes.
"One could not have a
better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the
fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is
temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten."
— George Orwell, in his
war-time diary, 3 July 1941,
In August 1941, Orwell finally
obtained "war work" when he was taken on full-time by the BBC's
Eastern Service. He supervised cultural broadcasts to India to counter
propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine Imperial links. This was Orwell's
first experience of the rigid conformity of life in an office. However it gave
him an opportunity to create cultural programmes with contributions from T. S.
Eliot, Dylan Thomas, E. M. Forster, Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, and William
Empson among others.
At the end of August he had a dinner
with H. G. Wells which degenerated into a row because Wells had taken offence
at observations Orwell made about him in a Horizon article. In October
Orwell had a bout of bronchitis and the illness recurred frequently. David Astor
was looking for a provocative contributor for The Observer and invited
Orwell to write for him—the first article appearing in March 1942. In spring of
1942 Eileen changed jobs to work at the Ministry of Food and in the summer of
1942 the Orwells moved to a larger flat, a ground floor and basement, 10a
Mortimer Crescent in Maida Vale/Kilburn - "the kind of lower-middle-class
ambience that Orwell thought was London at its best." Some time that
summer also Orwell's mother and sister Avril, who had found work in a
sheet-metal factory behind Kings Cross Station, moved into a flat close to
George and Eileen.
At the BBC, Orwell introduced Voice,
a literary programme for his Indian broadcasts, and by now was leading an
active social life with literary friends, particularly on the political left.
Late in 1942, he started writing regularly for the left-wing weekly Tribune[75] directed by
Labour MPs Aneurin Bevan and George Strauss. In March 1943 Orwell's mother died
and around the same time he told Moore he was starting work on a new book,
which would turn out to be Animal Farm.
In September 1943, Orwell
resigned from the BBC post that he had occupied for two years. His resignation
followed a report confirming his fears that few Indians listened to the
broadcasts,[76]but he was also keen to concentrate on writing Animal
Farm. Just six days before his last day of service, on the 24th November
1943, his adaptation of the fairy tale, Hans Christian Andersen'sThe
Emperor's New Clothes was broadcast. It was a genre in which he was greatly
interested and which would appear on Animal Farm's title-page. At this time he
also resigned from the Home Guard on medical grounds.
In November 1943, Orwell was
appointed literary editor at Tribune, where his assistant was his old
friend Jon Kimche. Orwell was on staff until early 1945, writing over 80 book
reviews and on 3 December 1943 started his regular personal column, "As I
Please", usually addressing three or four subjects in each.[80] He was still
writing reviews for other magazines, notably Partisan Review, Horizon,
and the New York Nation and becoming a respected pundit among left-wing
circles but also close friends with people on the right like Powell, Astor and
Malcolm Muggeridge. By April 1944 Animal Farm was ready for publication.
Gollancz refused to publish it, considering it an attack on the Soviet regime
which was a crucial ally in the war. A similar fate was met from other
publishers (including T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber) until Jonathan Cape
agreed to take it.
In May the Orwells had the
opportunity to adopt a child, thanks to the contacts of Eileen's sister Gwen
O'Shaughnassy, then a doctor in Newcastle upon Tyne. In June a V-1 flying bomb
landed on Mortimer Crescent and the Orwells had to find somewhere else to live.
Orwell had to scrabble around in the rubble for his collection of books, which
he had finally managed to transfer from Wallington, carting them away in a
wheelbarrow.
Another bombshell was Cape's
reversal of his plan to publish Animal Farm. The decision followed his
personal visit to Peter Smollett, an official at the Ministry of Information.
Smollett was later identified as a Soviet agent.
The Orwells spent some time in the
North East, near Carlton, County Durham, dealing with matters in the adoption
of a boy whom they named Richard Horatio Blair.By September 1944 they had set
up home in Islington, at 27b Canonbury Square. Baby Richard joined them there, and
Eileen gave up her work at the Ministry of Food to look after her family.
Secker and Warburg had agreed to publish Animal Farm, planned for the
following March, although it did not appear in print until August 1945. By
February 1945 David Astor had invited Orwell to become a war correspondent for
the Observer. Orwell had been looking for the opportunity throughout the
war, but his failed medical reports prevented him from being allowed anywhere
near action. He went to Paris after the liberation of France and to Cologne
once it had been occupied by the Allies.
It was while he was there that Eileen
went into hospital for a hysterectomy and died under anaesthetic on 29 March
1945. She had not given Orwell much notice about this operation because of
worries about the cost and because she expected to make a speedy recovery.
Orwell returned home for a while and then went back to Europe. He returned
finally to London to cover the 1945 UK General Election at the beginning of
July. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story was published in Britain on 17 August
1945, and a year later in the U.S., on 26 August 1946.
1.11
JURA AND NINETEEN
EIGHTY-FOUR
Animal
Farm struck a particular resonance in
the post-war climate and its worldwide success made Orwell a sought-after
figure.
For the next four years Orwell mixed journalistic work –
mainly for Tribune, The Observer and the Manchester Evening
News, though he also contributed to many small-circulation political
andliterary magazines – with writing his best-known work, Nineteen
Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949.
Barnhill on the Isle of Jura
In the year following Eileen's death he published around 130 articles and was active in various political lobbying campaigns. He employed a housekeeper, Susan Watson, to look after his adopted son at the Islington flat, which visitors now described as "bleak". In September he spent a fortnight on the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides and saw it as a place to escape from the hassle of London literary life. David Astor was instrumental in arranging a place for Orwell on Jura.Astor's family owned Scottish estates in the area and a fellow Old Etonian Robert Fletcher had a property on the island. During the winter of 1945 to 1946 Orwell made several hopeless and unwelcome marriage proposals to younger women, including Celia Kirwan (who was later to become Arthur Koestler's sister-in-law), Ann Popham who happened to live in the same block of flats and Sonia Brownell, one of Connolly's coterie at the Horizon office. Orwell suffered a tubercular haemorrhage in February 1946 but disguised his illness. In 1945 or early 1946, while still living at Canonbury Square, Orwell wrote an article on "British Cookery", complete with recipes, commissioned by the British Council. Given the post-war shortages, both parties agreed not to publish it.[86] His sister Marjorie died of kidney disease in May and shortly after, on 22 May 1946, Orwell set off to live on the Isle of Jura. Barnhill was an abandoned farmhouse with outbuildings near the northern end of the island, situated at the end of a five-mile (8 km), heavily rutted track from Ardlussa, where the owners lived. Conditions at the farmhouse were primitive but the natural history and the challenge of improving the place appealed to Orwell. His sister Avril accompanied him there and young novelist Paul Potts made up the party. In July Susan Watson arrived with Orwell's son Richard. Tensions developed and Potts departed after one of his manuscripts was used to light the fire. Orwell meanwhile set to work on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Later Susan Watson's boyfriend David Holbrook arrived. A fan of Orwell since school days, he found the reality very different, with Orwell hostile and disagreeable probably because of Holbrook's membership of the Communist Party. Susan Watson could no longer stand being with Avril and she and her boyfriend left.
Orwell returned to London in
late 1946 and picked up his literary journalism again. Now a well-known writer,
he was swamped with work. Apart from a visit to Jura in the new year he stayed
in London for one of the coldest British winters on record and with such a
national shortage of fuel that he burnt his furniture and his child's toys. The
heavy smog in the days before the Clean Air Act 1956 did little to help his
health about which he was reticent, keeping clear of medical attention.
Meanwhile he had to cope with rival claims of publishers Gollancz and Warburg
for publishing rights. About this time he co-edited a collection titled British
Pamphleteers with Reginald Reynolds. As a result of the success of Animal
Farm, Orwell was expecting a large bill from the Inland Revenue and he
contacted a firm of accountants of which the senior partner was Jack Harrison.
The firm advised Orwell to establish a company to own his copyright and to
receive his royalties and set up a "service agreement" so that he could
draw a salary. Such a company "George Orwell Productions Ltd" (GOP
Ltd) was set up on 12 September 1947 although the service agreement was not
then put into effect. Jack Harrison left the details at this stage to junior
colleagues.
Orwell left London for Jura on
10 April 1947.In July he ended the lease on the Wallington cottage. Back on Jura in
gales and rainstorms he struggled to get on with Nineteen Eighty-Fourbut
through the summer and autumn made good progress. During that time his sister's
family visited, and Orwell led a disastrous boating expedition which nearly led
to loss of life whilst trying to cross the notorious gulf of Corryvreckan and
gave him a soaking which was not good for his health. In December a chest
specialist was summoned from Glasgow who pronounced Orwell seriously ill and a
week before Christmas 1947 he was in Hairmyres hospital in East Kilbride, then
a small village in the countryside, on the outskirts of Glasgow. Tuberculosis
was diagnosed and the request for permission to import streptomycin to treat
Orwell went as far as Aneurin Bevan, now Minister of Health. By the end of July
1948 Orwell was able to return to Jura and by December he had finished the
manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In January 1949, in a very weak
condition, he set off for a sanatorium in Gloucestershire, escorted by Richard
Rees.
The sanatorium at Cranham consisted of a series of small
wooden chalets or huts in a remote part of the Cotswolds near Stroud. Visitors
were shocked by Orwell's appearance and concerned by the short-comings and
ineffectiveness of the treatment. Friends were worried about his finances, but
by now he was comparatively well-off. He was writing to many of his friends,
including Jacintha Buddicom, who had "rediscovered" him, and in March
1949, was visited by Celia Kirwan. Kirwan had just started working for a
Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, set up by the Labour
government to publish anti-communist propaganda, and Orwell gave her a list of
people he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their
pro-communist leanings. Orwell's list, not published until 2003, consisted
mainly of writers but also included actors and Labour MPs.[81][91] Orwell received more
streptomycin treatment and improved slightly. In June 1949 Nineteen
Eighty-Four was published to immediate critical and popular acclaim.
1.12
FINAL MONTHS AND DEATH
University College Hospital where
Orwell died
Orwell had requested to be buried in
accordance with the Anglican rite in the graveyard of the closest church to
wherever he happened to die. The graveyards in central London had no space, and
fearing that he might have to be cremated, against his wishes, his widow
appealed to his friends to see whether any of them knew of a church with space
in its graveyard.
David Astor lived in Sutton
Courtenay, Oxfordshire, and negotiated with the vicar for Orwell to be interred
in All Saints' Churchyard there, although he had no connection with the
village.[94] His gravestone bears the simple epitaph: "Here
lies Eric Arthur Blair, born 25 June 1903, died 21 January 1950"; no
mention is made on the gravestone of his more famous pen-name.
Orwell's son, Richard Blair, was
brought up by an aunt after his father's death. He maintains a low public
profile, though he has occasionally given interviews about the few memories he
has of his father. Richard Blair worked for many years as an agricultural agent
for the British government.
In 1979 Sonia
brought a High Court action against Harrison who had in the meantime
transferred 75% of the company's voting stock to himself and had dissipated
much of the value of the company. She was considered to have a strong case, but
was becoming increasingly ill and eventually was persuaded to settle out of
court on 2 November 1980. She died on 11 December 1980, aged 62.
2.
LITERARY CAREER AND LEGACY
During
most of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism, in essays,
reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books of reportage:Down
and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these
cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the living conditions of the
poor in northern England, and the class divide generally) and Homage to
Catalonia. According to Irving Howe, Orwell was "the best English
essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson."
Modern
readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through
his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The former is often thought to reflect degeneration in the Soviet Union after
the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism; the latter, life under
totalitarian rule. Nineteen Eighty-Four is often compared to Brave
New World byAldous Huxley; both are powerful dystopian novels warning of a
future world where the state machine exerts complete control over social life.
In 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury'sFahrenheit 451 were
honoured with the Prometheus Award for their contributions to dystopian
literature. In 2011 he received it again for Animal Farm.
Coming Up for Air, his last novel before World War II
is the most "English" of his novels; alarums of warmingle with images
of idyllic Thames-side Edwardian childhood of protagonist George Bowling. The
novel is pessimistic; industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of Old
England, and there were great, new external threats. In homely terms, Bowling
posits the totalitarian hypotheses of Borkenau, Orwell, Silone and Koestler:
"Old Hitler's something different. So's Joe Stalin. They aren't like these
chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off and so
forth, just for the fun of it ... They're something quite new—something that's
never been heard of before".
2.1 LITERARY INFLUENCES
In an autobiographical piece
that Orwell sent to the editors of Twentieth Century Authors in 1940, he
wrote: "The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are:
Shakespeare, Swift,Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern
writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern
writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely
for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills."
Elsewhere, Orwell strongly praised the works of Jack London, especially his
book The Road. Orwell's investigation of poverty in The Road to Wigan
Pier strongly resembles that of Jack London's The People of the Abyss,
in which the American journalist disguises himself as an out-of-work sailor in
order to investigate the lives of the poor in London. In his essay
"Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels"
(1946) Orwell wrote: "If I had to make a list of six books which were to
be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's
Travels among them."
Other writers admired by Orwell included: Ralph Waldo
Emerson, George Gissing, Graham Greene, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Tobias
Smollett, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and Yevgeny Zamyatin. He was both an admirer and a critic of
Rudyard Kipling, praising
Kipling as a gifted writer and a "good bad poet" whose work is
"spurious" and "morally insensitive and aesthetically
disgusting," but undeniably seductive and able to speak to certain aspects
of reality more effectively than more enlightened authors. He had a similarly ambivalent attitude
to G. K. Chesterton, whom he regarded as a writer of considerable talent who
had chosen to devote himself to "Roman Catholic propaganda".
2.2
ORWELL AS LITERARY CRITIC
Throughout
his life Orwell continually supported himself as a book reviewer, writing works
so long and sophisticated they have had an influence on literary criticism. He
wrote in the conclusion to his 1940 essay on Charles Dickens,
When
one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of
seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face
of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding,
Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these
people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the
writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not
quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face
of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing,
with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the
face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the
open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—in other
words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with
equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for
our souls.
George Woodcock suggested that the last two sentences
characterised Orwell as much as his subject.
2.3
RECEPTION AND EVALUATIONS OF
ORWELL’S WORK
Arthur Koestler mentioned
Orwell's "uncompromising intellectual honesty [which] made him appear
almost inhuman at times."Ben Wattenberg stated: "Orwell’s writing
pierced intellectual hypocrisy wherever he found it."According to
historian Piers Brendon, "Orwell was the saint of common decency who would
in earlier days, said his BBC boss Rushbrook Williams, 'have been either
canonised – or burnt at the stake'".[
However, Raymond Williams in Politics and
Letters: Interviews with New Left Review describes Orwell as a "successful
impersonation of a plain man who bumps into experience in an unmediated way and
tells the truth about it." Christopher Norris declared that Orwell's
"homespun empiricist outlook – his assumption that the truth was just
there to be told in a straightforward common-sense way – now seems not merely
naive but culpably self-deluding".The American scholar Scott Lucas has
described Orwell as an enemy of the Left. John Newsinger has argued that Lucas could
only do this however by portraying "all of Orwell's attacks on Stalinism
[-] as if they were attacks on socialism, despite Orwell's continued insistence
that they were not."
Orwell's work has taken a
prominent place in the school literature curriculum in England, with Animal
Farm a regular examination topic at the end of secondary education (GCSE),
andNineteen Eighty-Four a topic for subsequent examinations below
university level (A Levels). Alan Brown noted that this brings to the forefront
questions about the political content of teaching practices. Study aids, in
particular with potted biographies, might be seen to help propagate the Orwell
myth so that as an embodiment of human values he is presented as a
"trustworthy guide", while examination questions sometimes suggest a
"right ways of answering" in line with the myth.
Historian John Rodden stated:
"John Podhoretz did claim that if Orwell were alive today, he’d be
standing with the neo-conservatives and against the Left. And the question
arises, to what extent can you even begin to predict the political positions of
somebody who’s been dead three decades and more by that time?"
In Orwell's Victory,
Christopher Hitchens argues, "In answer to the accusation of inconsistency
Orwell as a writer was forever taking his own temperature. In other words, here
was someone who never stopped testing and adjusting his intelligence".
John Rodden points out the
"undeniable conservative features in the Orwell physiognomy" and
remarks on how "to some extent Orwell facilitated the kinds of uses and
abuses by the Right that his name has been put to. In other ways there has been
the politics of selective quotation."
Rodden refers to the essay "Why I
Write", in which Orwell refers to the Spanish Civil War as being his
"watershed political experience", saying "The Spanish War and
other events in 1936–37, turned the scale. Thereafter I knew where I stood.
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written
directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for Democratic
Socialism as I understand it." (emphasis in original) Rodden goes on to explain how, during the McCarthy era,
the introduction to the Signet edition of Animal Farm, which sold more
than 20 million copies, makes use of "the politics of ellipsis":
If the book itself, Animal
Farm, had left any doubt of the matter, Orwell dispelled it in his essay Why
I Write: 'Every line of serious work that I’ve written since 1936 has been
written directly or indirectly against Totalitarianism ... dot, dot, dot, dot.'
"For Democratic Socialism" is vaporised, just like Winston Smith did
it at the Ministry of Truth, and that’s very much what happened at the
beginning of the McCarthy era and just continued, Orwell being selectively
quoted.
T.R.
Fyvel wrote about Orwell: "His crucial experience ... was his struggle to
turn himself into a writer, one which led through long periods of poverty,
failure and humiliation, and about which he has written almost nothing
directly. The sweat and agony was less in the slum-life than in the effort to
turn the experience into literature."
2.4 INFLUENCES ON LANGUAGE AND WRITING
his essay Politics and the
English Language (1946), Orwell wrote about the importance of precise and
clear language, arguing that vague writing can be used as a powerful tool of
political manipulation because it shapes the way we think. In that essay,
Orwell provides six rules for writers:
·
Never use a
metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in
print.
·
Never use a long
word where a short one will do.
·
If it is possible
to cut a word out, always cut it out.
·
Never use the
passive where you can use the active.
·
Never use a
foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an
everyday English equivalent.
·
Break any of these
rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Andrew N. Rubin argues,
"Orwell claimed that we should be attentive to how the use of language has
limited our capacity for critical thought just as we should be equally
concerned with the ways in which dominant modes of thinking have reshaped the
very language that we use."
The adjective Orwellian connotes
an attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance,
misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past. In Nineteen
Eighty-Four Orwell described a totalitarian government that controlled
thought by controlling language, making certain ideas literally unthinkable.
Several words and phrases from Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered popular
language. Newspeak is a simplified and obfuscatory language designed to
make independent thought impossible. Doublethink means holding two
contradictory beliefs simultaneously. The Thought Police are those who
suppress all dissenting opinion. Prolefeed is homogenised, manufactured
superficial literature, film and music, used to control and indoctrinate the
populace through docility. Big Brother is a supreme dictator who watches
everyone.
Orwell may have been the first
to use the term cold war, in his essay, "You and the Atom
Bomb", published in Tribune, 19 October 1945. He wrote:
We
may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as
the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed,
but few people have yet considered its ideological implications;— this is, the
kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would
probably prevail in a State which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent
state of 'cold war' with its neighbours.
3.
PERSONAL LIFE
3.1
CHILDHOOD
Jacintha Buddicom's account Eric
& Us provides an insight into Blair's childhood. She quoted his
sister Avril that "he was essentially an aloof, undemonstrative
person" and said herself of his friendship with the Buddicoms "I do
not think he needed any other friends beyond the schoolfriend he occasionally
and appreciatively referred to as 'CC'". She could not recall his having
schoolfriends to stay and exchange visits as her brother Prosper often did in
holidays. Cyril Connolly provides an account of Blair as a child in Enemies of
Promise.Years later, Blair mordantly recalled his prep school in the essay
"Such, Such Were the Joys", claiming among other things that he
"was made to study like a dog" to earn a scholarship, which he
alleged was solely to enhance the school's prestige with parents. Jacintha
Buddicom repudiated Orwell's schoolboy misery described in the essay, stating
that "he was a specially happy child". She noted that he did not like
his name, because it reminded him of a book he greatly disliked - Eric, or,
Little by Little, a Victorian boys' school story.
Connolly remarked of him as a
schoolboy, "The remarkable thing about Orwell was that alone among the
boys he was an intellectual and not a parrot for he thought for himself". At Eton, John Vaughan
Wilkes, his former headmaster's son recalled, "...he was extremely
argumentative—about anything—and criticizing the masters and criticizing the
other boys.... We enjoyed arguing with him. He would generally win the
arguments—or think he had anyhow."Roger Mynors concurs: "Endless
arguments about all sorts of things, in which he was one of the great leaders.
He was one of those boys who thought for himself...."
Blair liked to carry out
practical jokes. Buddicom recalls him swinging from the luggage rack in a
railway carriage like an orangutan to frighten a woman passenger out of the
compartment.At Eton he played tricks on John Crace, his Master in College,
among which was to enter a spoof advertisement in a College magazine implying
pederasty.Gow, his tutor, said he "made himself as big a nuisance as he
could" and "was a very unattractive boy".Later Blair was
expelled from the crammer at Southwold for sending a dead rat as a birthday
present to the town surveyor.] In one of his As I Please essays he refers to a
protracted joke when he answered an advertisement for a woman who claimed a
cure for obesity.
Blair had an enduring interest in
natural history which stemmed from his childhood. In letters from school he
wrote about caterpillars and butterflies, and Buddicom recalls his keen interest
in ornithology. He also enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits, and conducting
experiments as in cooking a hedgehog or shooting down a jackdaw from the Eton roof to dissect it. His zeal for scientific experiments
extended to explosives—again Buddicom recalls a cook giving notice because of
the noise. Later in Southwold his sister Avril recalled him blowing up the
garden. When teaching he enthused his students with his nature-rambles both at
Southwold and Hayes. His adult diaries are permeated with his observations on
nature.
3.2
RELATIONSHIPS
Buddicom
and Blair lost touch shortly after he went to Burma, and she became
unsympathetic towards him. She wrote that it was because of the letters he
wrote complaining about his life, but an addendum to Eric & Us by
Venables reveals that he may have lost sympathy through an incident which was
at best a clumsy seduction.
Mabel
Fierz, who later became his confidante, said "He used to say the one thing
he wished in this world was that he'd been attractive to women. He liked women
and had many girlfriends I think in Burma. He had a girl in Southwold and
another girl in London. He was rather a womaniser, yet he was afraid he wasn't
attractive."
Brenda
Salkield (Southwold) preferred friendship to any deeper relationship and
maintained a correspondence with Blair for many years, particularly as a
sounding board for his ideas. She wrote "He was a great letter writer.
Endless letters, And I mean when he wrote you a letter he wrote pages." His
correspondence with Eleanor Jacques (London) was more prosaic, dwelling on a
closer relationship and referring to past rendezvous or planning future ones in
London and Burnham Beeches.
When
Orwell was in the sanatorium in Kent his wife's friend Lydia Jackson visited.
He invited her for a walk and out of sight "an awkward situation
arose." Jackson was to be the most critical of Orwell's
marriage to Eileen O'Shaughnessy but their later correspondence hints at a
complicity. Eileen at the time was more concerned about Orwell's closeness to
Brenda Salkield. Orwell was to have an affair with his secretary at Tribune which
caused Eileen much distress, and others have been mooted. In a letter to Ann
Popham he wrote: 'I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and I also treated her
badly, and I think she treated me badly, too, at times, but it was a real
marriage, in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and
she understood all about my work, etc.'Similarly he suggested to Celia Kirwan
that they had both been unfaithful.There are several testaments that it was a
well-matched and happy marriage
Orwell was very lonely after Eileen's death, and desperate
for a wife, both as companion for himself and as mother for Richard. He
proposed marriage to four women, and eventually Sonia Brownell accepted.
3.3
RELIGIOUS VIEW
Orwell was a communicant member
of the Church of England, he attended holy communion regularly,[135] and
allusions to Anglican life are made in his book A Clergyman's Daughter.
Mulk Raj Anand has said that, at the BBC, Orwell could, and would, quote
lengthy passages from the Book of Common Prayer. At the same time he found the
church to be a "selfish...church of the landed gentry" with its
establishment "out of touch" with the majority of its communicants
and altogether a pernicious influence on public life. Moreover, Orwell
expressed some scepticism about religion: "It seems rather mean to go to
HC [Holy Communion] when one doesn't believe, but I have passed myself off for
pious & there is nothing for it but to keep up with the deception." Yet, he was
married according to the rites of the Church of England in both his first
marriage at the church at Wallington, and in his second marriage on his
deathbed in University College Hospital, and he left instructions that he was
to receive an Anglican funeral. In their 1972 study, The Unknown Orwell, the
writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams noted that at Eton Blair displayed a
"sceptical attitude" to Christian belief.Crick observed that Orwell
displayed "a pronounced anti-Catholicism". Evelyn Waugh,
writing in 1946, acknowledged Orwell's high moral sense and respect for justice
but believed "he seems never to have been touched at any point by a
conception of religious thought and life."
The ambiguity in his belief in
religion mirrored the dichotomies between his public and private lives: Stephen
Ingle wrote that it was as if the writer George Orwell "vaunted" his
atheism while Eric Blair the individual retained "a deeply ingrained
religiosity". Ingle later noted that Orwell did not accept the existence
of an afterlife, believing in the finality of death while living and advocating
a moral code based on Judeo-Christian beliefs.
3.4
POLITICAL VIEW
Orwell
liked to provoke argument by challenging the status quo, but he was also a
traditionalist with a love of old English values. He criticised and satirised,
from the inside, the various social milieux in which he found himself –
provincial town life in A Clergyman's Daughter; middle-class pretention
in Keep the Aspidistra Flying; preparatory schools in Such Such were
the Joys;colonialism in Burmese Days, and some socialist groups in The
Road to Wigan Pier. In his Adelphi days he described himself as a
"Tory-anarchist."
In
1928, Orwell began his career as a professional writer in Paris at a journal
owned by the French Communist, Henri Barbusse. His first article, La Censure
en Angleterre, was an attempt to account for the 'extraordinary and
illogical' moral censorship of plays and novels then practised in Britain. His
own explanation was that the rise of the "puritan middle class," who
had stricter morals than the aristocracy, tightened the rules of censorship in
the 19th century. Orwell's first published article in his home country, A
Farthing Newspaper, was a critique of the new French daily the Ami de
Peuple. This paper was sold much more cheaply than most others, and was
intended for ordinary people to read. However, Orwell pointed out that its
proprietor François Cotyalso owned the right-wing dailies Le Figaro and Le
Gaulois, which the Ami de Peuple was supposedly competing against.
Orwell suggested that cheap newspapers were no more than a vehicle for
advertising and anti-leftist propaganda, and predicted the world might soon see
free newspapers which would drive legitimate dailies out of business.
The Spanish Civil War played the
most important part in defining Orwell's socialism. He wrote to Cyril Connolly
from Barcelona on 8 June 1937: "I have seen wonderful things and at last
really believe in Socialism, which I never did before." Having witnessed
the success of the anarcho-syndicalist communities, for example in Anarchist
Catalonia, and the subsequent brutal suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists,
anti-Stalin communist parties and revolutionaries by the Soviet Union-backed
Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and joined
the Independent Labour Party, his card being issued on 13 June 1938. Although he was
never a Trotskyist, he was strongly influenced by the Trotskyist and anarchist
critiques of the Soviet regime, and by the anarchists' emphasis on individual
freedom. In Part 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier, published by the Left Book
Club, Orwell stated "a real Socialist is one who wishes – not merely
conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes – to see tyranny
overthrown." Orwell stated in "Why I Write" (1946): "Every
line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly
or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I
understand it." Orwell was a proponent of a federal socialist Europe, a
position outlined in his 1947 essay "Toward European Unity," which
first appeared in Partisan Review. According to biographer John
Newsinger,
the other crucial dimension to
Orwell's socialism was his recognition that the Soviet Union was not socialist.
Unlike many on the left, instead of abandoning socialism once he discovered the
full horror of Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union, Orwell abandoned the Soviet
Union and instead remained a socialist—indeed he became more committed to the
socialist cause than ever."
In his 1938 essay "Why I
joined the Independent Labour Party," published in the ILP-affiliated New
Leader, Orwell wrote:
For some years past I have managed
to make the capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books
against capitalism. But I do not delude myself that this state of affairs is
going to last forever ... the only régime which, in the long run, will dare to
permit freedom of speech is a Socialist régime. If Fascism triumphs I am
finished as a writer – that is to say, finished in my only effective capacity.
That of itself would be a sufficient reason for joining a Socialist party.
Towards the end of the essay, he
wrote: "I do not mean I have lost all faith in the Labour Party. My most
earnest hope is that the Labour Party will win a clear majority in the next
General Election."
Orwell was opposed to rearmament
against Nazi Germany—but he changed his view after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
and the outbreak of the war. He left the ILP because of its opposition to the
war and adopted a political position of "revolutionary patriotism".
In December 1940 he wrote in Tribune (the Labour left's weekly):
"We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be
a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary." During the war, Orwell
was highly critical of the popular idea that an Anglo-Soviet alliance would be
the basis of a post-war world of peace and prosperity. In 1942, commenting on
journalist E. H. Carr's pro-Soviet views, Orwell stated: "all the
appeasers, e.g. Professor E. H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from
Hitler to Stalin."
On anarchism, Orwell wrote in The
Road to Wigan Pier: "I worked out an anarchistic theory that all
government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime
and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them
alone." He continued however and argued that "it is always necessary
to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime
can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it
ruthlessly."
In his reply (dated 15 November
1943) to an invitation from the Duchess of Atholl to speak for the British
League for European Freedom, he stated that he didn't agree with their
objectives. He admitted that what they said was "more truthful than the
lying propaganda found in most of the press" but added that he could not
"associate himself with an essentially Conservative body" that
claimed to "defend democracy in Europe" but had "nothing to say
about British imperialism." His closing paragraph stated: "I belong
to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and
its poisonous influence in this country."
Orwell joined the staff of Tribune
as literary editor, and from then until his death, was a left-wing (though
hardly orthodox) Labour-supporting democratic socialist. On 1 September
1944, about the Warsaw Uprising, Orwell expressed in Tribune his
hostility against the influence of the alliance with the USSR over the allies:
"Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Do
not imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking
propagandist of the sovietic regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly
return to honesty and reason. Once a whore, always a whore." According to
Newsinger, although Orwell "was always critical of the 1945–51 Labour
government's moderation, his support for it began to pull him to the right
politically. This did not lead him to embrace conservatism, imperialism or
reaction, but to defend, albeit critically, Labour reformism." Between 1945 and
1947, with A. J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell, he contributed a series of articles
and essays to Polemic, a short-lived British "Magazine of
Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics" edited by the ex-Communist
Humphrey Slater.
Writing in the spring of 1945 a
long essay titled "Antisemitism in Britain," for the Contemporary
Jewish Record, Orwell stated that anti-Semitism was on the increase in
Britain, and that it was "irrational and will not yield to
arguments." He argued that it would be useful to discover why anti-Semites
could "swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining
sane on others." He wrote: "For quite six years the English
admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and
Buchenwald. ... Many English people have heard almost nothing about the
extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own
anti-Semitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their
consciousness." In Nineteen Eighty-Four, written shortly after
the war, Orwell portrayed the Party as enlisting anti-Semitic passions against
their enemy, Goldstein.
Orwell publicly defended P.G.
Wodehouse against charges of being a Nazi sympathiser - occasioned by his
agreement to do some broadcasts over the German radio in 1941 - a defence based
on Wodehouse's lack of interest in and ignorance of politics.
Special Branch, the intelligence
division of the Metropolitan Police, maintained a file on Orwell for more than
20 years of his life. The dossier, published by The National Archives, states
that, according to one investigator, Orwell had "advanced Communist views
and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at
Communist meetings." However, MI5, the intelligence department of the Home
Office, noted: "It is evident from his recent writings – 'The Lion and the
Unicorn' – and his contribution to Gollancz's symposium The Betrayal of the
Left that he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with
him."
3.5 SOCIAL INTERACTIONS
Orwell
was noted for very close and enduring friendships with a few friends, but these
were generally people with a similar background or with a similar level of
literary ability. Ungregarious, he was out of place in a crowd and his
discomfort was exacerbated when he was outside his own class. Though
representing himself as a spokesman for the common man, he often appeared out
of place with real working people. His brother-in-law Humphrey Dakin, a
"Hail fellow, well met" type, who took him to a local pub in Leeds,
said that he was told by the landlord: "Don't bring that bugger in here
again."Adrian Fierz commented "He wasn't interested in racing or
greyhounds or pub crawling or shove ha'penny. He just did not have much in
common with people who did not share his intellectual
interests."Awkwardness attended many of his encounters with working-class
representatives, as with Pollitt and McNair.but his courtesy and good manners
were often commented on. Jack Common observed on meeting him for the first time,
"Right away manners, and more than manners—breeding—showed through."
In
his tramping days, he did domestic work for a time. His extreme politeness was
recalled by a member of the family he worked for; she declared that the family
referred to him as "Laurel" after the film comedian.With his gangling
figure and awkwardness, Orwell's friends often saw him as a figure of fun.
Geoffrey Gorer commented "He was awfully likely to knock things off
tables, trip over things. I mean, he was a gangling, physically badly co-ordinated
young man. I think his feeling [was] that even the inanimate world was against
him..." When he shared a flat with Heppenstall and Sayer, he
was treated in a patronising manner by the younger men. At the BBC, in
the 1940s, "everybody would pull his leg,"and Spender described him
as having real entertainment value "like, as I say, watching a Charlie
Chaplin movie." A friend of Eileen's reminisced about her tolerance and
humour, often at Orwell's expense.
One
biography of Orwell accused him of having had an authoritarian streak.In Burma,
he struck out at a Burmese boy who while "fooling around" with his
friends had "accidentally bumped into him" at a station, with the
result that Orwell "fell heavily" down some stairs. One of his former
pupils recalled being beaten so hard he could not sit down for a week. When sharing a
flat with Orwell, Heppenstall came home late one night in an advanced stage of
loud inebriation. The upshot was that Heppenstall ended up with a bloody nose
and was locked in a room. When he complained, Orwell hit him a crack across the
legs with a shooting stick and Heppenstall then had to defend himself with a
chair. Years later, after Orwell's death, Heppenstall wrote a dramatic account
of the incident called "The Shooting Stick"and Mabel Fierz confirmed
that Heppenstall came to her in a sorry state the following day.
However,
Orwell got on well with young people. The pupil he beat considered him the best
of teachers, and the young recruits in Barcelona tried to drink him under the
table—though without success. His nephew recalled Uncle Eric laughing louder
than anyone in the cinema at a Charlie Chaplin film.
In the wake of his most famous works, he attracted many
uncritical hangers-on, but many others who sought him found him aloof and even
dull. With his soft voice, he was sometimes shouted down or excluded from
discussions.At this time, he was severely ill; it was wartime or the austerity
period after it; during the war his wife suffered from depression; and after
her death he was lonely and unhappy. In addition to that, he always lived
frugally and seemed unable to care for himself properly. As a result of all
this, people found his circumstances bleak. Some, likeMichael Ayrton, called him
"Gloomy George," but others developed the idea that he was a
"secular saint."
3.6 LIFESTYLE
Orwell
was a heavy smoker, rolling his own cigarettes from strong shag tobacco, in
spite of his bronchial condition. His penchant for the rugged life often took
him to cold and damp situations, both in the long term as in Catalonia and
Jura, and short term, for example, motorcycling in the rain and suffering a
shipwreck. His love of strong tea was legendary—he had Fortnum & Mason's
tea brought to him in Catalonia and in 1946 published "A Nice Cup of Tea" on
how to make it. He appreciated English beer, taken regularly and moderately,
despised drinkers of lager and wrote about an imagined, ideal pub in his 1946
newspaper article "The Moon Under Water". Not as particular
about food, he enjoyed the wartime "Victory Pie"extolled canteen food
at the BBC,and once ate the cat's dinner by mistake.He preferred traditional
English dishes, such as roast beef and kippers.Reports of his Islington days
refer to the cosy afternoon tea table.
His
dress sense was unpredictable and usually casual.In Southwold he had the best
cloth from the local tailor, but was equally happy in his tramping outfit. His
attire in the Spanish Civil War, along with his size 12 boots, was a source of
amusement. David Astor described him as looking like a prep school master, while according
to the Special Branch dossier, Orwell's tendency to dress "in Bohemian
fashion" revealed that the author was "a Communist".
Orwell's confusing approach to matters of social decorum—on the one hand
expecting a working-class guest to dress for dinner, and on the other, slurping tea out of
a saucer at the BBC canteen—helped stoke his reputation as an English
eccentric.
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