George Orwell: A Life in Letters Read online

  Yours sincerely

  Eric A. Blair

  P.S. [at top of letter] As to the title of the book. Would ‘The Confessions of a Dishwasher’ do as well? I would rather answer to ‘dishwasher’ than ‘down and out’, but if you and Mr G[ollancz] think the present title best for selling purposes, then it is better to stick to it.

  [X, 148, p. 274; handwritten]

  1.This undated letter, as for a number of others, can be placed from the receipt stamp used in Moore’s office. The use of this evidence is not again mentioned.

  2.Before electronic setting with its automatic re-lineation, print was set in lead type and changes affecting lineation were troublesome and very time-consuming – hence, expensive.

  3.In ‘Clink’ Orwell writes that he had the name Edward Burton put down on the charge sheet. He also used the name Burton for a character in his play King Charles II.

  4.In the BBC radio broadcast about the magazine The Adelphi, 6 July 1958, produced by Rayner Heppenstall, Sir Richard Rees recalled Orwell’s fear of his real name appearing in print. In George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory, Rees elaborated on this: Orwell had told him that it ‘gave him an unpleasant feeling to see his real name in print because “how can you be sure your enemy won’t cut it out and work some kind of black magic on it?” Whimsy, of course; but even Orwell’s genuine streak of old-fashioned conventionality sometimes bordered on whimsy and you could not always be quite certain if he was serious or not’ (p. 44).

  5.Burmese Days.

  6.Compare Dorothy in A Clergyman’s Daughter.

  7.In a letter to Eleanor Jaques of 30 November he said he was going to ‘see some people at Gerrard’s Cross’.

  To Brenda Salkeld*

  Saturday [? June 1933]

  The Hawthorns

  Dearest Brenda

  I sent you about two thirds of the rough draft of my novel1 yesterday. I would have sent it earlier, but it has been with my agent all this time. He is quite enthusiastic about it, which is more than I am; but you are not to think that when finished it will be quite as broken-backed as at present, for with me almost any piece of writing has to be done over and over again. I wish I were one of those people who can sit down and fling off a novel in about four days. There is no news here. I am frightfully busy, suffering from the heat, and exercised about the things in my garden, which are going to dry up and die if this cursed weather doesn’t change. I am growing, among other things, a pumpkin, which of course needs much more careful treatment than a marrow. I have read nothing, I think, except periodicals, all of which depress me beyond words. Do you ever see the New English Weekly? It is the leading Social Credit 2 paper. As a monetary scheme Social Credit is probably sound, but its promoters seem to think that they are going to take the main weapon out of the hands of the governing classes without a fight, which is an illusion. A few years ago I thought it rather fun to reflect that our civilisation is doomed, but now it fills me above all else with boredom to think of the horrors that will be happening within ten years—either some appalling calamity, with revolution and famine, or else all-round trustification and Fordification, with the entire population reduced to docile wage-slaves, our lives utterly in the hands of the bankers, and a fearful tribe of Lady Astors3 and Lady Rhonddas4 et hoc genus riding us like succubi in the name of Progress. Have you read Ulysses yet? It sums up better than any book I know the fearful despair that is almost normal in modern times. You get the same kind of thing, though only just touched upon, in Eliot’s poems. With E, however, there is also a certain sniffish ‘I told you so’ implication, because as the spoilt darling of the Church Times he is bound to point out that all this wouldn’t have happened if we had not shut our eyes to the Light. The C[hurch] T[imes] annoys me more and more. It is a poor satisfaction even to see them walloping the Romans, because they do it chiefly by descending to their level. I wonder whether it is true, as I have been told, that the CT advertisement columns are full of disguised abortion advertisements? If so it is pretty disgusting in a paper which is in constant pursuit of Bertrand Russell, Barney the Apostate,5 etc because of their birth control propaganda. By the way did you see Barney’s recent pronouncements at the Conference on I forget what, about the undesirable multiplication of the lower classes. His latest phrase is ‘the social problem class’, meaning all those below a certain income. Really you sometimes can’t help thinking these people are doing it on purpose, Write soon. I wish you were here now. Have you been bathing yet? I keep putting it off.

  With love

  Eric A. Blair

  [X, 176, pp. 316–18; handwritten]

  1.Burmese Days.

  2.The Social Credit movement, based on the ideas of Major C. H. Douglas, claimed that prosperity could be achieved through a reform of the monetary system.

  3.Nancy Witcher Astor (1879–1964), wife of the first Viscount Astor, born in Virginia, society and political hostess at Cliveden, the Astor estate on the Thames, was the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons, 1919–45. She was an eloquent advocate of temperance and women’s rights. In the first edition of Coming Up for Air (1939), Orwell included Lady Astor’s name among a ‘fearful tribe’ of ‘soul-savers and Nosey Parkers’.Though that name was set for the Secker & Warburg 1948 edition – as the 1947 proof witnesses – it was marked for omission in proof and has not been included (VII, p. 183). The omission sign does not appear to be Orwell’s, but it might follow his instructions. Since the name Lord Beaverbrook in this same list was allowed to stand, fear of an action for libel or defamation could hardly be responsible for the omission. Perhaps Orwell removed the name out of his friendship with David Astor; he did not know of the change.

  4.Margaret Haig Thomas (1883–1958), second Viscountess Rhondda, was a highly successful businesswoman and ardent believer in the equality of the sexes. She actively edited her own independent weekly, Time and Tide, 1928–58.

  5.Ernest William Barnes (1874–1953) was a mathematician and modernist churchman, and Bishop of Birmingham, 1924–53. His writings include Should Such a Faith Offend? and Scientific Theory and Religion.

  To Eleanor Jaques*

  7 July 1933

  The Hawthorns

  Dearest Eleanor,

  It seems so long since that day I went out with you—actually, I suppose, about a month. This ‘glorious’ weather has been almost the death of me. However, I occasionally manage to get over to Southall & have a swim at the open-air baths, & my garden has done pretty well considering the drought. The only failures I have had were shallots & broad beans, both I fancy due to having been planted too late. I have had enormous quantities of peas, & I am a convert forever to the system of sinking a trench where you are going to grow a row of peas. I hope I shall be in S’wold for part of the summer holidays, but I am afraid it won’t be long, because I am going to a new school at Uxbridge next term & they may want me to do some tutoring during the holidays. God send I’ll be able to drop this foul teaching after next year. I do hope you’ll be in Southwold during the holidays & perhaps we can go & picnic as we did last year. I am so pining to see the sea again. Do try to be in S’wold if you can, & keep some days free for me during the first fortnight in August. I think I shall get home about the 28th of this month. My novel will be about finished by the end of this term, but I don’t like large sections of it & am going to spend some months revising it. Please write & tell me what your plans are, & remember me to your parents.

  With much love

  Eric

  [X, 178, p. 319; handwritten1]

  1.Published by kind permission of Richard Young.

  To Eleanor Jaques*

  Thursday [20 July 1933]

  The Hawthorns

  Dearest Eleanor,

  Do write & tell me if you will be in S’wold during the summer holidays. I am going to be there I think from the 29th inst. to the 18th August, & am so wanting to see you. If you are to be there, try & keep some days free for me, & it would be so nice if we could go &
bathe & make our tea like we used to do last year along the W’wick1 shore. Let me know.

  The heat here is fearful, but it is good for my marrows & pumpkins, which are swelling almost visibly. We have had lashings of peas, beans just beginning, potatoes rather poor, owing to the drought I suppose. I have finished my novel,2 but there are wads of it that I simply hate, & am going to change. They say it will be soon enough if it is done some time at the end of the year. Please G. I get a little spare time in my next job. I went over to see the prize-giving at the school & it looked pretty bloody—the girls’ section of the school (which I shall have nothing to do with—perhaps it is for the best) sang the female version of Kipling’s ‘If.’ I am told that there is also a female version of ‘Forty years on’, which I would give something to get hold of.3 I have been reading in D. H. Lawrence’s collected letters. Some of them very interesting—there is a quality about L. that I can’t define, but everywhere in his work one comes on passages of an extraordinary freshness, vividness, so that tho’ I would never, even given the power, have done it quite like that myself, I feel that he has seized on an aspect of things that no one else would have noticed. In another way, which I can still less explain, he reminds me of someone from the Bronze Age. I think there are some scraps of mine in the August Adelphi 4—a poem, but I am not sure it is not one you have seen. Au revoir, & write soon.

  Much love from

  Eric

  [X, 179, pp. 319–20; handwritten5]

  1.Walberswick is about two miles south of Southwold.

  2.Burmese Days.

  3.‘Forty Years On,’ the Harrow school song, written in 1872 by John Farmer, was also sung by many girls’ schools; in Great Days and Jolly Days (1977), Celia Haddon lists a wide range of such girls’ schools (p. 21). It was also sung by such coeducational state schools as Eccles Grammar School. (Orwell reverted to this topic in a letter to Brenda Salkeld, 7.5.35.)

  4.There was no poem by Orwell in the August issue of The Adelphi, though his review of Enid Starkie’s Baudelaire appeared.

  5.Published by kind permission of Anthony Loudon.

  Publishing, Wigan and Spain

  1934 – 1938

  This was a productive period for Orwell. Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and The Road to Wigan Pier were published and, although Orwell dismissed the second and third of these as potboilers which he did not wish to see reprinted unless they would bring in his heirs a shilling or two, they are not wholly unrewarding. His experiences in the ‘Distressed Areas’ – he travelled around far more than solely to Wigan, of course – and in Spain were formative both to his character and outlook, social and political. He also contributed reviews and essays to literary journals, notably ‘Shooting an Elephant’, which says as much about the decline of the Raj as the collapse of an elephant.

  Having delivered the typescript of The Road to Wigan Pier to Victor Gollancz just before Christmas Day 1936, he made his own way to Spain to fight for the Government against Franco. He had intended to join the International Brigade but, as he told Gollancz, partly by accident he enrolled in the POUM – the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista. This he described as ‘one of those dissident Communist parties which have appeared in many countries in the last few years as a result of the opposition to “Stalinism”; i.e. to the change, real or apparent, in Communist policy. It was made up partly of ex-Communists and partly of an earlier party, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc. Numerically it was small, with not much influence outside Catalonia . . . [where] its strongold was Lérida’ (Homage to Catalonia, pp. 202–3). He would probably not have joined had he known that, long before he left England, the Soviet Communists were determined to eliminate it. In October 1936, Victor Orlov, head of the NKVD in Spain, assured his Headquarters that ‘the Trotskyist organization POUM can easily be liquidated’ (Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive (1996), p. 95). Thus the description of Orwell and Eileen as ‘trotzquistas pronunciados’ (confirmed Trotskyists) in the Report on them to the Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason in Valencia (a document Orwell knew nothing about) was to damn them utterly. Had they been in Spain at the time of the trial of such colleagues as Jordi Arquer* it could have led to their imprisonment or even execution.

  Orwell was on leave in Barcelona during ‘the May Events’ when the Communists attempted to eliminate the revolutionary parties (including the POUM). He returned to the Huesca front and, on 20 May 1937, he was shot through the throat. He and Eileen escaped from Spain and they returned to their Wallington Cottage where Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia. In March 1938 he was taken seriously ill with a tubercular lesion and spent over five months in Preston Hall Sanatorium, Kent. On 2 September, he and Eileen left for French Morocco, believing it would restore him to health.

  From Orwell’s letter to his mother, 2 December 1911

  To Brenda Salkeld*

  Tuesday night [late August? 1934]

  36 High St

  Southwold, Suffolk

  Dearest Brenda

  Many thanks for your letter. I hope you are enjoying yourself more in Ireland than I am in England. When are you coming back? I am going up to town as soon as I have finished the book I am doing,1 which should be at the end of October. I haven’t settled yet where I am going to stay, but somewhere in the slums for choice. A friend wrote offering me the lease of part of a flat in Bayswater, but it would choke me to live in Bayswater. No, I have never seen a tortoise drinking. Darwin mentions that when he was in the Galapagos Is. the big tortoises there which lived on cactuses & things on the higher ground used to come down into the valley once or twice in the year to drink, & the journey took them a day or two. They stored water in a kind of sack in their bellies.2 I have been reading some books by Lafcadio Hearn— tiresome stuff, & he idolises the Japanese, who always seem to me such a boring people.3 I also tried to read Lord Riddell’s diary of the Peace Conference & After.4 What tripe! It is amazing how some people can have the most interesting experiences & then have absolutely nothing to say about them. I went to the pictures last week and saw Jack Hulbert in Jack Ahoy which I thought very amusing, & a week or two before that there was quite a good crook film, which, however, my father ruined for me by insisting on telling me the plot beforehand. This week The Constant Nymph is on. I haven’t been to it, of course, but even when I see the posters it makes me go hot all over to think that in my youth—I think I must have been about 23 when it was published in book form—I was affected by it almost to tears O mihi praeteritos etc.5 I should think that any critic who lives to a great age must have many passages in his youth that he would willingly keep dark. There must be, for instance, many critics who in the ’nineties went all mushy over Hall Caine or even Marie Corelli—though M.C. isn’t so absolutely bad, judging by the only book of hers I ever read. It was called Thelma & there was a very licentious clergyman in it who wasn’t half bad. Did you, by the way, give me back those books of Swift? It doesn’t matter, only I don’t want to lose them. Yes, Roughing It.6 does ‘date’ a bit, but not enough—because anything worth reading always ‘dates.’ Do come back soon. I am so miserable all alone. I have practically no friends here now, because now that Dennis & Eleanor are married & Dennis has gone to Singapore,7 it has deprived me of two friends at a single stroke. Everything is going badly. My novel about Burma made me spew when I saw it in print, & I would have rewritten large chunks of it, only that costs money and means delay as well. As for the novel I am now completing, it makes me spew even worse, & yet there are some decent passages in it. I don’t know how it is, I can write decent passages but I can’t put them together. I was rather pluming myself on having a poem8 in the Best Poems of 1934, but I now learn that there are several dozen of these anthologies of the so called best poems of the year, & Ruth Pitter 9 writes to tell me that she is in 4 of this year’s batch, including one called Twenty Deathless Poems. We are getting delicious French beans from the garden, but I am concerned about the pumpkin,
which shows signs of ripening though it is not much bigger than an orange. All my fruit has been stolen by the children next door, as I forsaw° it would. The little beasts were in such a hurry to get it that they didn’t even wait till it was half ripe, but took the pears when they were mere chunks of wood. Another time I must try a dodge Dr Collings told me, which is to paint a mixture of vaseline & some indelible dye, I forget what, on a few of the fruit that are likely to be taken first & then you can spot who has taken it by the stains on their hands. The town is very full & camps of Girl Guides etc. infesting all the commons. I nearly died of cold the other day when bathing, because I had walked out to Easton Broad not intending to bathe, & then the water looked so nice that I took off my clothes & went in, & then about 50 people came up & rooted themselves to the spot. I wouldn’t have minded that, but among them was a coastguard who could have had me up for bathing naked, so I had to swim up & down for the best part of half an hour, pretending to like it. Do come back soon, dearest one. Can’t you come & stay with somebody before the term begins? It is sickening that I have to go away just after you come back. Write soon.

  With much love

  Eric

  [X, 204, pp. 346–8; handwritten]

  1.A Clergyman’s Daughter.

  2.Orwell had recommended Brenda read The Voyage of the Beagle some eighteen months earlier. His dramatised account of the voyage was broadcast by the BBC on 29 March 1946 (XVIII, 2953, pp. 179–201).

  3.Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), writer and translator. Born at Levkás in the Ionian Islands. Lived in the USA, 1869–90, then in Japan, where he became a citizen. Served with distinction as Professor of English at Imperial University, Tokyo. Wrote several books on Japanese life and culture. Three of his ghost stories were made into the Japanese film, Kwaidon, 1965.