Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  Perverse, thinks Ravelston, with an automatic sniff. Desirable women won’t look at you, complains Gordon, now in full cry. You have to buy sex from women who smell as bad as you (there’s a later scene when, very drunk, Gordon does just that). Ravelston thinks, inwardly, of his fragrant mistress, Hermione, as wholesome to her lover’s nostrils as a ‘wheatfield in the sun’. ‘Don’t talk to me about the lower classes,’ she always says whenever he brings up his damned socialism. ‘I hate them. They SMELL.’ She must not call them the ‘lower classes’, he objects mildly (tacitly agreeing with the smell point). They are the ‘working class’. Very well, she says, ‘But they smell just the same.’

  The two men go their separate ways: Comstock to his ‘slops and cabbage’ in Willowbed Road; Ravelston by taxi to his flat, where a sleepy Hermione is waiting for him, curled voluptuously, half-dressed, in an armchair. ‘We’ll go out and have supper at Modigliani’s,’ she commands (in other words, Quaglino’s in Piccadilly, London’s best restaurant). In the taxi she lies against him, still half asleep, her head pillowed on his breast. The ‘woman-scent’ breathes out of her. Philip inhales it, sensually, thinking of his favourite corner table at Modigliani’s and of sex, trying not to think of that vile pub with its hard benches, stale beer-stink and brass spittoons.

  Outside Modigliani’s a beggar importunes them for money: ‘A cup of tea, guv’nor!’ The request is half-coughed through ‘carious teeth’. Halitosis. Spittle. Phlegm. SMELL. Hermione forbids Ravelston to give this human offal a single penny. Ravelston obeys. His socialism is a paper and print thing. He loves the people – but not their smell. He and Hermione dine, expensively, on grilled rump steak and half a bottle of Beaujolais. A feast to the nose and the palate.

  Orwell’s feelings towards Rees and his kind were deeply confused. He was grateful enough for favours given to name his son (Richard Blair) after the socialist baronet who so helped his early career and whom he made his literary executor. He liked the man. Who could not? Everyone who knew him liked him. Yet Orwell hated Rees ‘for what he was’. Rees/Ravelston’s kind of socialism, well meant as it might be, smelled wrong to Orwell because it had the aroma of expensively scented sex, French cuisine and newly washed underwear, after the morning bath fragrant with its expensive Selfridges-bought ‘salts’. Where, then, was the healthy ‘smell’ of socialism to be found? Not in that ‘hotbed’ of theory, the LSE, dominated by the Laski faction – those incorrigible abusers of plain English (half-gramophone, half-megaphone, all phoney) and sympathizers with Moscow. Not in the brimming chamber pot under the working-class Wigan breakfast table. Not in what is called, in Aspidistra, the ‘money stink’ that leaks, like furtively broken wind, from the well-meaning, well-bred rich, like Ravelston.

  It is found in two places, one deduces from Orwell’s writing. One is the naked coal miner, hundreds of feet underground, his finely muscled body exposed in the murky light: ‘but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere.’ Around them the ‘fiery dusty smell’ of their work place. It is a ‘real’ smell. The stench of honest labour and erect manhood. The other location where socialism smells ‘right’ is the trenches of wartime Spain. ‘I suppose I have failed to convey more than a little of what those months in Spain meant to me,’ says Orwell in the epilogue to Homage to Catalonia: ‘I have recorded some of the outward events, but I cannot record the feeling they have left me with. It is all mixed up with sights, smells, and sounds that cannot be conveyed in writing.’ Orwell’s nose can do more than most, but it cannot put into words what it knows, on the senses, is right, and what is wrong.

  And what, one wonders, would socialism smell of now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, were Orwell and his diagnostic nose here to sniff it for us?

  Personal

  Nineteen Eighty-Four is at the top of teachers’ list of books ‘every student should read before leaving secondary school’.

  NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH, July 2015

  My acquaintance with Orwell occurred on 19 December 1954 – I can date it as precisely as my wedding days.

  Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, by Orwell’s most loyal publisher, Frederic Warburg, on 9 June 1949. It sold brilliantly but by the autumn of 1954, three years after Orwell’s death, reprint sales had steadied to 150 a month; just sufficient to keep the novel in print. It was not, as now, a novel that the schoolteachers of England were advised to drill into their pupils like imams in a madrasa.

  All this changed with Nigel Kneale’s ‘horror’ adaptation, put out by the BBC on Sunday evening, 12 December 1954. With it the novel’s rise to supersellerdom took off like a Guy Fawkes rocket from a milk bottle. The fact that it was the first novel in which the arch-villain is a television set must have helped. BB was watching Winston. When, then, would the BB(C) be watching us?

  My family home couldn’t yet run to a ‘goggle-box’. I missed out on the first broadcast but, inflamed by playground gossip (‘rats! eyeballs!’), I was careful to book a place with a better-off friend to see the repeat, a week later. It wasn’t actually a repeat in the modern sense, there being no video technology then. The cast, troupers all, went through the whole thing again.

  The production starred Peter Cushing as Winston Smith (the eighty-year-old Churchill, after whom he is named, was currently prime minister, which added a resonance). Cushing’s constipated, haunted look would be carried over into his portrayals of arch-agents of light versus darkness in Hammer Horror films of the 1960s. There was a preliminary Auntyish warning that the programme was ‘unsuitable for children or those with weak nerves’. This had the predictable effect of gluing even the most susceptible viewer (including, of course, fifteen-year-old schoolchildren like myself) to the screen, their nerves pinging like over-wound violin strings.

  The dramatization (still available on YouTube, as a muzzy TV-grab from the surviving 35-mm film) opened with a clanging overture based on Holst’s ‘Mars’ and the monitory voiceover: ‘This is one man’s alarmed view of the future’ (not, that is, Lord Reith’s view). There followed a Wagnerian montage of atomic explosions before the opening scenes in Minitrue (an institution inspired, as we dimly apprehended, by the BBC’s Broadcasting House). And so, with the competent performance level of a good provincial repertory company, the narrative rolled on, for one hour and 47 minutes, to rats and eyeballs. Orwell’s bleak ending was respected by Kneale (as it was not in the CIA-financed animated film of Animal Farm that also came out in 1954; or the ciA-financed American version of Nineteen Eighty-Four).

  The effect of the 1954 dramatization of Nineteen Eighty-Four on the population – soon, they were informed, to become telescreen-enslaved citizens of ‘Airstrip One: Oceania’ – was electrifying. Susceptible housewives, who had lived serenely through the Blitz, were reported (apocryphally) to have died of shock watching the ‘H[orror] Programme’. On 15 December five Conservative MPS put down a motion deploring ‘the tendency evident in recent BBC programmes, notably on Sunday evening, to pander to sexual and sadistic tastes’. A less pompously inclined weather forecaster began his bulletin with ‘Stand by your sets, Citizens, bad news coming up.’

  Television lives by viewing figures. Those for Nineteen Eighty-Four were, for a live drama, unprecedented. The tally (seven million) was exceeded only by that for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the previous year. ‘Big Brother is watching you’, ‘doublethink’, ‘thought-crime’ and the ‘two-minute hate’ became catchphrases. They still are.

  The 1954 televization jump-started Orwell’s upward progress to his present status as the Cassandra of his time. All time, perhaps. As the estate’s literary agent, Bill Hamilton, reported in January 2015: ‘Interest in Orwell is accelerating and expanding practically daily . . . We’re selling in new languages – Breton, Friuli, Occitan – Total income has grown 10% a year for the last three years.’13 With s
ome difficulty (it’s not yet on Google Translate) I’ve discovered that the Occitan for ‘Big Brother Is Watching You’ is ‘Gròs Hrair T’espia’.

  Not only has Nineteen Eighty-Four lasted, selling nowadays better than ever; it is, we’re told, a work of biblical importance. In November 2014 a list was drawn up on behalf of YouGov (or ‘You the People Govern’, an interesting example of what Orwell calls ‘Newspeak’), asking a representative two thousand members of the reading public what they thought were ‘the most valuable books to humanity’. The top ten were as follows:

  1) The Bible (37 per cent)

  2) The Origin of Species (35 per cent)

  3) A Brief History of Time (17 per cent)

  4) Relativity: The Special and General Theory (15 per cent)

  5) Nineteen Eighty-Four (14 per cent)

  6) Principia Mathematica (12 per cent)

  7) To Kill a Mockingbird (10 per cent)

  8) The Qur’an (9 per cent)

  9) The Wealth of Nations (7 per cent)

  10) The Double Helix (6 per cent)

  Nineteen Eighty-Four is judged more ‘valuable to humanity’ than the Qur’an. Not everyone (probably not two billion everyones in the Islamic world) would agree. But few would disagree with the assertion that Orwell ‘matters’. It is a pity he did not live to enjoy the vast revenue (the copyright is still in force for another five years) and join his rich friends on equal terms. What Orwell – who is recorded as giving away his meagre ration-book coupons to the deserving during the war – would have done with great wealth is a nice speculation.

  I devoured Nineteen Eighty-Four in the days following the 1954 broadcast and had read all the principal works by the end of 1955.14 Any relationship such as mine with Orwell has been enriched by Penguin’s handsome, budget-price reprints (Allen Lane was a staunch admirer); by the four-volume The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Secker & Warburg, London, 1968), edited by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell; and, climactically, by the twenty-volume Complete Works of George Orwell (1998). This last was the life’s work of Peter Davison. His efforts took seventeen years and required a sextuple bypass to complete, he told the launch party under UCL’s cupola, fifty yards from where Orwell had died. Few literary critics would pay the price that Davison did.

  The posthumous biographical situation has been troubled. In the will made three days before his death, Orwell forbade biography. His widow, Sonia, whom he married on his deathbed, would be a ferocious guardian of the flame. It may be that Orwell had that prohibition in mind when he made her his ‘future widow’, as he bluntly put it. It may be, as Gordon Bowker shrewdly suggests, that she insisted on it, as a kind of prenup/post-mortem. In the years after her husband’s death, Sonia slammed the door in the face of any serious life-writer (as they are now called) by appointing the deeply unserious Malcolm Muggeridge, in 1955, as the ‘authorized biographer’ – with the implicit understanding that he would do nothing. He did nothing.

  The first biographers to do something, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, were forbidden by Sonia to quote any incopyright material and were denied access to literary remains. Friends and family were instructed not to cooperate. A ferocious anathema was published in the TLS when their book appeared. Sonia was convinced that they had somehow cheated her. But working as they did, shortly after Orwell’s death, the American biographers had access to living sources. Their work, hampered as it was, has been foundational in the personally vouched-for witness it supplies.

  Nonetheless, Stansky and Abrahams were stumped, as all biographers have been, by strange turns in Orwell’s life. Why, having excelled at prep school, did he slack at Eton, closing off access to privileges that, with some effort, were his for the taking? Why did he, already sceptical about Empire, enrol and serve for five years in one of the most brutally exploited and neglected of the Crown’s colonial territories? And then, why did he come back, an Etonian, God help us, and plunge into the down-and-out depths of London and Paris?

  Born into a class neurotic about sanitation, what was it about dirt that so fascinated and obsessed Orwell? He went to Spain, as many of the militant left did, but why volunteer for a Fred Karno’s Circus outfit like the POUM? Anarchists are damnably efficient terrorists but they do not make good soldiers of the line. What on earth does ‘Tory anarchism’, as Orwell called it, mean? Where, precisely, did Orwell’s ‘socialism’ lie? Was he, come to that, really a socialist? Did he love the working class (the ‘animals’ of Animal Farm) or did they, particularly their porcine (trade union) leaders, disgust him to the point of nausea? Did he ever tell the low-life characters he dossed and tramped with, and the miners he accompanied, that Mr Blair was writing about them, unflatteringly, under another name? Why, in the last year of his life, was he so desperately keen to marry? Why, on his deathbed, was he so insistently desperate that there should be no biography when so much of his writing was infused with autobiography?

  Why did he, the creator of Big Brother, compose his ‘list’ – a lettre de cachet – denouncing people who thought they were his friends to one of the more sinister British secret-service agencies?15 One could extend the questions, but it is enough to say that his life is wreathed in enigma.

  My Orwell Problem: And Yours? ‘VH’

  The problem is small – relative to what is unproblematically great in Orwell’s achievement. But it is troublesome. One could call it ‘VH’-the vein of hurtfulness in his fiction to those who did nothing to deserve cruelty.

  Examples are legion. How could he, for example, write that cruel description of a son’s callous indifference at his father’s funeral in Coming Up for Air, as his own father was dying of cancer? (Luckily Richard Blair went to his burial having read only a glowing review of the novel.) His mother and sisters (particularly) had sacrificed their life chances for Eric’s expensive, and apparently wasted, start in life (as his father sacrificed a painfully large chunk of his income). It was not an easy thing for a family of four on £450 a year to send a child to Eton. Resourcefully, in 1933, Orwell’s mother and sister Avril set up a tea room and bridge club, ‘The Copper Kettle’, in Southwold’s Queen Street, where the family was then living. The café was a success and won them respectful affection from townspeople, along with good trade from summer holidaymakers. The Blairs’ Southwold tea room is scornfully rubbished in A Clergyman’s Daughter. In fact Avril did very well out of the Copper Kettle and her locally famed cakes. She even bought herself a new car with the profits. Orwell himself could not, for most of his life, afford motorized transport better than second-hand motorbikes. Avril had some right to be proud of her small achievement. What, then, did she and her mother (who ran the Copper Kettle bridge club) make of passages in A Clergyman’s Daughter like the following (Knype Hill is, transparently, Southwold):

  The two pivots, or foci, about which the social life of the town moved were Knype Hill Conservative Club (fully licensed) . . . and Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, a little farther down the High Street, the principal rendezvous of the Knype Hill ladies. Not to be present at Ye Olde Tea Shoppe between ten and eleven every morning, to drink your ‘morning coffee’ and spend your halfhour or so in that agreeable twitter of upper-middle-class voices [it goes on lengthily in this vein].

  The scorn shocks (‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’?) When he wrote this, Orwell, a thirty-year-old layabout, was out of work in his parents’ house, convalescing from pneumonia, at the very period the women were setting up their brave venture. He evidently disapproved.

  When, after the publication of A Clergyman’s Daughter, he was on his uppers, his rich, aristocratic and ever-obliging friend Richard Rees helped find him a stop-gap job in a bookshop in Hampstead – then, as now, the most intellectually active enclave in Britain. The bookshop, a local institution at the corner of Pond Street and South End Road (there’s a Daunt’s nearby now) was called the ‘Booklovers’ Corner’. The branch of Le Pain Quotidien that has replaced it in this degenerate age has a plaque commemorating Orwell’s fifteen m
onths’ service as an assistant and manager in the shop.16 The first fifty pages of Keep the Aspidistra Flying revolve around Gordon Comstock’s wage slavery in Booklovers’ Corner – unnamed in the novel. The proprietor in the novel is Mr McKechnie, a white-haired and white-bearded ‘dilapidated’ Scotsman (a nation Orwell peculiarly disliked). He is a chronically lazy, penny-pinching, stupid, rabidly teetotal, snuff-taking ignoramus who underpays and exploits Gordon before firing him for a night on the town that landed him in jail.

  The actual proprietor of Booklovers’ Corner was Frank Westrope. A founder member of the Independent Labour Party (with which Orwell would affiliate himself a couple of years later), Westrope had been imprisoned for years as a conscientious objector during the First World War. His conduct was gallant. He was still, in the mid-1930s, under surveillance (as was Orwell when he worked in the shop) by M15. He was no teetotaller. He would certainly have been indulgent to, and amused by, a youngster as bright as Orwell (it was by this name that Eric Blair introduced himself to Westrope) who went on the razzle and found himself up in front of the beak next morning. Westrope’s wife, Myfanwy, had thrown herself into the suffrage movement. It would not, until 1928, fully emancipate women.17 The kindest of landladies, she gave Orwell a bedsit around the corner, rent-free for six months, and intimated that she would turn a blind eye if he invited girlfriends in (this was freethinking Hampstead). He did. Noisily, according to later complaints (he was running at least two women – ‘compartmentalized’, as one of them later complained – during his months at the shop).