In the novel, Gordon pigs it in wretched lodgings: his ogre of a landlady’s ears are always suspiciously cocked to hear any creaking bed springs in the rooms of her ‘paying guests’. Then it’s ‘pack your bags and get out, you filthy fellow’.
Booklovers’ Corner also had a ‘tuppenny library’ of current bestsellers. Good-Bad Books, as Orwell called the best of them. These, however, were not, all of them, the best bad books. They were tat of the Ethel M. Dell and Edgar Wallace kind. Before Allen Lane’s Penguins came on the scene in 1936, ‘tuppenny’ loans were a profitable sideline. Even Boots the Chemist lent them. Orwell is scathing in Keep the Aspidistra Flying about the clientele who patronize the 800 volumes of ‘soggy, half-baked trash’ Gordon is in charge of. Dowdy, ill-smelling women, so-called ‘book lovers’, come in, looking like ‘draggled ducks nosing among garbage’, with their insatiable appetite for Ethel M. Dell’s romantic slush and the loathed Warwick Deeping (author of Sorrell and Son, 1925). Similarly held up for scorn are timid smut hunters (how Lawrence’s Women in Love will disappoint them!) and ‘nancies’, delicately fondling books about ballet. There is not a single admirable customer in the hateful bookshop Gordon superintends, and no ‘Hampstead Intellectuals’.
Booklovers’ Corner: Gordon Comstock’s hell.
Victor Gollancz, the publisher of Keep the Aspidistra Flying – soon to launch, in 1936, his Left Book Club (in which Orwell would later publish The Road to Wigan Pier) – had a high regard for his fellow socialist Frank Westrope and for Hampstead intellectuals generally. When Gollancz pointed out to Orwell that the depiction of Frank (and, indirectly, his wife) was derogatory and possibly libellous, the author replied, in honest innocence, how could that be? Mr McKechnie is Scottish, has a white beard and takes snuff. Frank Westrope was clean-shaven, English and did not take snuff. Case closed. No malicious intent whatsoever. Orwell, so clear-headed about so many things, never seems to have worked out what libel and its consequent criminal damage were. If there was one place in London where a book like Keep the Aspidistra Flying was likely to be read (did Westrope display it in the window?), it was bookish Hampstead. What customers, thereafter, would be encouraged to browse and buy from the Westrope establishment with the imputation hanging over them that they were so many draggled ducks, smut hounds and nancy boys? And knowing that the superior young man behind the desk was looking at them with secret contempt, which he would put into print?
Why did Orwell hurt in this way (as he surely did) the Westropes, who had offered him nothing but kindness? What had the kindly Richard Rees, who got him the Booklovers’ Corner job (a life saver), done to deserve the lampoon of himself as Ravelston in Keep the Aspidistra Flying? Or the literary critic William Empson in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the big-brained buffoon Ampleforth? To find yourself in Orwell’s novels, said the woman he first loved, was to feel torn limb from limb.
The Two Mistresses of George Orwell
You might find it interesting to be a writer’s widow.
ORWELL’s proposal to his second wife, Sonia
Orwell’s depiction of his first wife, Eileen (as Rosemary), in Keep the Aspidistra Flying is disparaging.18 Much more so is the fictional portrait of his second wife. It is accepted that Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘is’ Sonia. Hilary Spurling titles the memoir of her friend The Girl from the Fiction Department. It’s how Winston Smith first identifies his future lover.19
In Nineteen Eighty-Four Julia works in Pornosec (the ‘Muck Factory’), engaged in churning out ‘the lowest kind of pornography’. Sonia Brownell (later ‘Orwell’ – she took his pen name in marriage rather than ‘Blair’) was, in fact, a long-serving co-editor, with Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly, of the most distinguished literary magazine of the 1940s and early 1950s, Horizon.20 It was no muck factory. Among the galaxy of writers it published was George Orwell. Sonia later worked as an editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, where she is credited with ‘discovering’ the novelist Angus Wilson. She had sound literary, and even better artistic, taste. Anthony Powell depicts her, admiringly and infinitely more kindly than does Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the efficient Ada Leintwardine in Books Do Furnish a Room.
For her lovers, Sonia Brownell was not merely a beauty (‘the Venus of Euston Road’ – she was sketched by an admiring Picasso and Lucian Freud) and a gratifyingly easy lay (allegedly Connelly would pimp her out to potential backers of his magazine), but an intellectual equal. The love of her life was not Orwell, but the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She formed lifelong friendships with such other French intellectuals (her command of French was perfect) as Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan (later the darling of deconstruction) and the roman nouveau novelist Marguerite Duras, whose work Sonia translated and who honoured her with yet another friendly depiction in her fiction.
Sonia Orwell (left), the Venus ofEuston Road, at work in the Horizon office.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia is depicted as an intellectual dolt. She falls asleep when Winston Smith reads The Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism out loud to her. It is beyond her feeble brain. Sonia Brownell, by contrast, had no difficulty, we understand, grappling with Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception, or Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil. Julia’s one virtue in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that she has a politically rebellious vagina, which she uses like an anarchist’s indiscriminate bomb. Winston raves about the organ’s voracity. ‘Listen,’ says Winston, ‘The more men you’ve had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?’ Was Sonia’s highest claim to Orwell’s respect that she had been, over the course of her life, rampantly promiscuous? A living vagina dentata? Sonia had not liked Orwell, when healthy, as a lover. She was one of the ‘once in a lifetime with that man is quite enough’ party. She was not, the evidence suggests, the ‘gold-digger’ some biographers have portrayed her as. She would have been the least competent gold-digger in literary history. She died so penniless that her friends Francis Bacon and Hilary Spurling had to kick in for her funeral. The reason she married Orwell, I suspect, was that she respected what he was – a great writer. And serving the writing and art she most admired was her self-imposed mission in life. Stephen Spender liked to tell a story about Sonia that is probably apocryphal but which contains an essential truth about the woman. She was spending a weekend
in the country with Connolly’s friend Dick Wyndham, a leathery, lustful satyr who pursued her round his garden until she dashed into the pond. ‘It wasn’t his trying to rape me that I mind,’ she gasped when the writer Peter Quennell fished her out, ‘but that he doesn’t seem to realize what Cyril stands for.’
She married Orwell because of what he stood for. Literary greatness.
Particularly hurtful in Orwell’s depiction of Julia was O’Brien’s casual answer to Winston’s question, ‘What have you done with Julia?’ O’Brien smiles: ‘She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately – unreservedly.’ Sonia never betrayed the man whose name she bore.
Why, one wistfully thinks, could Orwell not have portrayed a more loyal and clever Julia/Sonia in his last novel? It would not have hurt, in either sense – hurt the novel, or hurt her.
The Dam Breaks
Finally, in 1974, Sonia relented and broke the dying Orwell’s prohibition. The pressure had become irresistible. She invited Bernard Crick to write an ‘authorized’ biography. Crick was the editor of Political Quarterly and an LSE-trained political scientist with no outstanding literary-critical qualifications. He was mystified at the summons. Sonia was reportedly won over by a review in which he had called Orwell a ‘giant with warts’ and by his unrelenting attacks on the then prime minister, Harold Wilson.
Crick took as his guiding thesis the premise that Orwell’s great, and achieved, mission had been to turn political writing into art. The subtext, for hard-nosed Crick, was that Orwell’s fine words buttered no political parsnips. Himself a no-nonsense writer, Crick had no pretension to any art whatsoever. He was sadly lacking a ‘literary touch’, sighed Frank Kermode, revie
wing the resulting biography.21 True enough. What political scientist trusts ‘literature’? Crick, it was clear, saw Orwell as a political ignoramus.
Sonia did not like one bit this line of biography that she had unwittingly commissioned. Crick was determined that his portrait would be ‘external’. There would be no psycho-biographical nonsense. And he would be Solomonic in his judgements. He acid-tests for falseness such ubiquitously quoted (late-life) declarations as: ‘From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.’22 In their milestone four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Sonia and her co-editor, Ian Angus, use that sentence as their epigraph. This was the dominant Orwellian ‘fact’. It was as if a fairy godmother had come to little Eric Blair’s cradle, waved a wand and uttered ‘Be a writer, my child.’ But does it, Crick wondered, if you give it a moment’s thought (and recollect your own career aspirations aged five), ring true? A train driver, perhaps. But a ‘writer’? By his own account, little Eric was only months past bedwetting. Orwell was, Crick concluded mildly, ‘laying it on a bit thick’. He peeled off many other layers of thickness. Leaving what? Not enough to keep admirers of Orwell happy.
Least of all the woman who had ‘authorized’ Crick. There was much in his account to vex Sonia – and not merely his antipathy to literariness and refusal to take anything Orwell wrote at face value. He chronicled, without moral judgement, Orwell’s apparent indifferent attention to his first wife, as she died on the operating table of something he never seemingly inquired about (uterine cancer). And, along the way, there was his wayward, sometimes ‘rough’, sexuality, of which telling glimpses were on record. Crick glimpsed and recorded, with a cold, camera-like eye. And, unflatteringly to his patroness, he recorded the string of women to whom Orwell impulsively proposed when he knew for a fact that he was dying. Sonia came in at about number five.
Crick’s authorized biography saw publication, belatedly, in 1980. A mortified Sonia’s last weeks, petulant, alcoholic and broke, were anything but sweetened by the account she had brought into being. Crick’s task had been complicated, at every step, by his fallings-out with Sonia. Her touchiness is immortalized by her vitriolic, much-quoted outburst across a dinner table when Crick queried one of the most frequently cited ‘facts’ about Orwell and Empire: ‘Of course he shot the fucking elephant. He said he did. Why do you always doubt his word!’ Crick, predictably, is highly sceptical about the elephanticide, although he valued the famous essay as a brilliant allegory of the rotten core of colonial power.
Orwell inspires moral nobility in his admirers. Crick, not a rich man, made over his royalties to found the Orwell Society and its annual prize.
Orwell in his NUJ picture, 1930s.
Other, less self-restricting, full-life biographies followed. They went, some of them, very psycho-biographical. Gordon Bowker, the most intrepid, promised that ‘the main thrust of [my] book will be to reach down as far as possible to the roots of [Orwell’s] emotional life, to get as close as possible to the dark sources mirrored in his work.’ But all the biographers have been obliged, in the main, to chew over the same old facts, from their subject’s first recorded word (‘beastly’) to the fact that his coffin was six inches too long for his grave. He was always an awkward customer.
Orwell remained shadowy. Maddeningly, for someone who had worked at the BBC, there were no voice or pictorial recordings (he had a ‘flat’, toneless voice, we are told, croakier after he was shot in the throat in Spain), no moving film and very few photographs of the man. No revealing private journals. Reviewers of Davison’s mountainous Collected Works concluded that their sense of Orwell had been usefully solidified, but not overset. And the enigmas remained. Still remain. It was almost as if, like Winston Smith, he had a memory hole beside his desk. Stansky and Abrahams had called their quick-off-the-mark biography The Unknown Orwell (1972). They, and their successors, could have called it ‘the unknowable Orwell’.
The most informative of the post-Crick biographies are currently the third generation (following the work of the Americans Stansky and Abrahams, Michael Shelden and Jeffrey Meyers) by D. J. Taylor and Gordon Bowker, both published in 2003. As a novelist, Taylor lets his imagination loose more than the others. Among Orwell’s scrawled final words in his hospital notebook are: ‘At 50, every man has the face he deserves.’ He never made that age, but what does that rueful, moustached, expressionless face in the few photographs that survived tell us? Taylor was imaginatively speculative about that. He presents, I think, the ‘living’ Orwell as well as anyone will ever be able to. Paul Foot, in a haughty review of Taylor’s biography (it annoyed him as being insufficiently engaged politically), was rude. What next, he asked, a biographical meditation on ‘Orwell’s bum’?23 Actually, that might be interesting, if lifelong scars remained on the traumatically caned buttocks. They might explain a lot about the punitive and self-punitive Orwell.
For me, Taylor’s and Bowker’s are the biographies to start from, as on their part they started from Crick. Their accounts have been added to, and complicated, by new tranches of correspondence that have more recently come to light. John Rodden has been illuminating.24 Critical verdicts are in on all the half-dozen or so biographies: mine are supererogatory other than that I have drawn on them gratefully.
What I offer here is an approach from oblique, self-indulgent angles. The relationship of coarse fishing (that smelliest of sports) to Orwell’s notion of civilization, for example, may be thought a little too fine-drawn. But the indirect approach can sometimes pay off, as in John Ross’s illuminatingly medical Orwell’s Cough (2012). George Orwell’s bum may, I concede, be an obliquity too far.
The Life
I wasn’t born for an age like this.
‘Why I Write’ (1946)
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal, India, on 25 June 1903, the first and only son of a 46-year-old ‘assistant sub-deputy opium agent, 4th grade’, on £600 p.a., nine years off retirement and five into late marriage. Pooter in a sola topi, Richard Blair is remembered by his son as a remote ‘elderly man forever saying “don’t’”. Kids can live with that. What young Eric found beyond bearing was his father’s taking out his false teeth, and placing them in a glass on the family table, before eating.
A few months after Eric’s birth the family returned ‘home’. That they were fleeing an outbreak of plague he probably found piquant in later life. Plague-free since the fifteenth century, Henley-on-Thames was where they settled in 1904 and stayed for ten years. Young Eric liked the place more than anywhere else he would live.
With his family safely taken care of, Richard Blair went back to do his duty (giving grants to Indian poppy farmers to stupefy Chinese addicts, a filthy business) while clambering, at snail’s pace, towards ‘First Grade Deputy Agent’, before the mandatory retirement (given the exhaustions of colonial life), aged 55, in 1912. He was away from England for his son’s first eight years of life, apart from three months’ furlough (in which he impregnated his wife with a third, certainly unwanted, child, Avril).
Separation was very bearable for Eric and his mother. As Crick relates, one of the few revealing things one knows about Ida Blair is that her usual term for men was ‘beasts’. At a very early age, as he recollected, Eric overheard his mother’s view of sex, talking to women friends of a similarly independent mind. He could, Orwell apparently felt, write a story, founded on the impression he received that women did not like men:
they looked upon them as a sort of large, ugly, smelly and ridiculous animal, who maltreated women in every way, above all by forcing their attentions upon them . . . the picture of it in his mind was of a man pursuing a woman, forcing her down and jumping on top of her, as he had often seen a cock do to a hen. All this was derived, not from any remark having direct sexual reference – or what he recognized as a sexual reference – but from such overheard remarks as ‘It just shows what beasts men are.’1
Eric’s
first recorded word is not ‘ma-ma’ or ‘da-da’, but ‘beastly’.
It would have been possible for wife and husband to reunite in India (entrusting Eric to the care of a British boarding school, as other Anglo-Indian parents did), but they did not. Orwell’s most formative years were fatherless. He was, by way of compensation, over-mothered. Ida Blair, née Limouzin, was eighteen years younger than her husband, whom she married on the rebound. She was, by blood and cultural background, French-colonial (she had no English passport until late in life, and no desire for one). One of the very few things one knows about her is that she had suffragette sympathies.
Both parents were the offspring of families that had, over the generations, come down in the world. D. J. Taylor traces the paternal Blair heritage from the great-great-great-grandfather who was an earl, through gentry, discreet owners of slaves in the distant Caribbean (Orwell’s great-grandfather Charles Blair), high-ranking soldiers and sailors and clergymen, to, in the twentieth-century descendants, a few perilous notches above shabby genteel. Orwell is eloquent on that miserable social station in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
Ida the proud mother, with, probably, Avril.
Ida’s family had been, for three generations back, in the Franco-Burmese teak trade. ‘Blood timber’, it has been called, for the colonial rapacity of the industry and its indifference to the country it was ruinously deforesting. The rapacity extended beyond timber. Orwell had illegitimate Eurasian relatives on the Limouzin side.2 (Did Richard Blair console himself with native women in the long years of absence from his family?) The international teak industry changed during the late nineteenth century as forests were bought up by multinationals and as iron took over from the material of which large ships had been made for centuries. The Limouzins did not adapt to changing commercial circumstance, and the clan was falling apart when twenty-year-old Ida married the 39-year-old low-flyer Richard Blair in 1896.
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