Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  Without a degree, and ‘friends’, the elite track in the India Office was closed to Eric (dashing what had been his father’s fond hope). He would never be a viceroy’s personal secretary. His mother’s family had been three generations in the Burmese teak industry, and at times rich. But the industry was now monopolized by multinationals, and the Limouzin clan was a spent force. The premium required to get Orwell in was thousands more than the Blairs could afford, or his mother’s relatives nowadays wangle. He could, however, opt for the Indian Police Service, Burmese branch. He had maternal relatives in that country. It was a home-from-home posting that would mollify his parents. It would not, however, get him any glory at his school. IPS Burma was not a line of work that was crowded with Etonians, as his reference letter snidely implied. Richard could just about stretch to the required initial expense (around £200, Crick records). There was a very decent salary in prospect: the IPS would yield a qualified assistant superintendent as much as £600 p.a. Eric would no longer be a drain on the Blair household, and he might even repay something of what he owed his father. There was also another reason for his getting out of England.

  A Close-run Thing

  I took hold of her.

  Coming Up for Air

  For a nineteen-year-old chronically starved of oats, as were most young males of Orwell’s class and time, the prospect of exotic ‘oriental’ sex was alluring. He was certainly having no luck with the English variety.

  He had, for five years, been courting Jacintha Buddicom, a friend since childhood in Henley. A bright young girl, Jacintha had missed out on any chance of higher education. Her prospects were sacrificed so her brother Prosper (aptly named) could go to Oxford. This was the sister’s lot (Avril and Marjorie Blair’s, as well). But she was nubile. Marriage would be her career. Orwell offered to marry Jacintha and carry her off as a memsahib to Burma. He was throughout life impulsive with proposals of marriage. She was inclined. The families, who had smiled at the relationship over the years, could be talked round – although perhaps a longish engagement would be prudent. His financial and career prospects in the IPS were hopeful once he settled in.

  Throughout his life Orwell found open, deserted places in the wild wildly aphrodisiac. There was something, one guesses, about the ambient smell that, via his supersensitive nose, triggered a rush of uncontrollable desire. He dreamed like Winston Smith of Edenic love in the ‘golden countryside’ – a dell, glade or meadow in the woods – where the act of love would be as natural as the bluebells and birdsong. Julia and Winston achieve it – just once in their lives. So, just once in his life, does George Bowling with his Elsie:

  I chucked my hat on to the grass (it bounced, I remember), knelt down, and took hold of her. I can smell the wild peppermint yet. It was my first time, but it wasn’t hers, and we didn’t make such a mess of it as you might expect.

  Bowker recalls an odd but revealing exchange with Anthony Powell in which Orwell asked him (seriously) if he found parks sexually arousing. When Tony looked perplexed – ‘Why parks?’ he enquired – ‘Nowhere else to go’ was the answer.

  If a friend like Arthur Koestler was, as the ladies who knew him agreed, NSIT (not safe in taxis), Orwell was not safe with grass under his feet. And if he encountered resistance, it was, perversely, the woman’s fault. (He blamed Jacintha, in one of the three letters he sent her, for ‘abandoning’ him to Burma – and its sexual delinquencies, presumably. A wife would have kept him straight.)

  The teenaged Jacintha Buddicom, Eric’s sweetheart.

  Orwell’s first recorded attempt at love al fresco was, by contrast, a total mess. It was on a walk with Jacintha in the countryside round Rickmansworth, where both the Blairs and the Buddicoms were holidaying, in the heat of late summer, some fifteen months before his departure for Burma. His life was at its point of change. The young couple doubtless talked of ‘relationship’: what they would do with their lives. Marriage? They may have kissed. There was in the air the redolence that excited Eric, as the wild peppermint excites George Bowling into ‘taking hold’ of Elsie. Fifty years later, Jacintha recalled in a letter to a friend what had then happened to scupper everything. She was five foot nothing. He was over six feet tall, twelve stone and honed into athletic condition by the high-contact, all-barging sport he played at Eton – the wall game. Open space had its usual effect on Orwell. She resisted; he attempted bodily persuasion. She broke free with bruises and torn clothing. Luckily for him she kept quiet. Had Jacintha Buddicom, a young woman of impeccable virtue, gone, weeping, to the local police station, Eric Blair might well have faced Wandsworth Prison rather than Rangoon.30

  Husky Orwell, back right. Wall game at Eton.

  Marriage was henceforth off the cards. The five-year love affair ended with a mystifying chill. Jacintha did not go to Burma as his bride, did not apparently write to him (apart from one cool letter) and went out of her way never to meet her former sweetheart again, even though, when he came back five years later, he had a hopeful engagement ring for her in his baggage.

  In later life Jacintha admitted that Eric was the only man she had ever loved. He had ruined it. She was not, she later said, ready – aged 21 as she had been on that awful day – to go ‘all the way’. Or even, one suspects, some of the way. She would live almost twice as long as him but never married and after the assault closed her mind on him. As late as 1949 she did not even know that ‘her’ Eric was the George Orwell everyone was talking about. When she read the account of Winston and Julia’s lovemaking in the country in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which incorporated background elements of their disastrous summer walk, meaningful only to her, she felt torn, ‘limb from limb’.

  What happened in that Hertfordshire countryside was an act of crass inexperience on Eric’s part. He was no freebooting Alec D’Urberville, ravishing a helpless maiden in the woods. And young Blair should have remembered another of his favourite novels, The Way of All Flesh, whose hero, Ernest Pontifex, attempts what he attempted on the body of a wholly respectable young woman (tries it on with force) and goes to prison for it. Eric Blair dodged the bullet, but it was an added reason for wanting to get out of England.

  Kitting Up

  The Blairs had moved from Henley to something less expensive, but more congenial to Richard, in Southwold on the Suffolk coast, during the same period Eric was leaving Eton, in December 1921. They were perhaps feeling the financial strain (it would make for difficulty until, five years on, Ida inherited some family money). Eric was duly enrolled with a ‘crammer’ in Southwold. There was an Anglo-Indian retiree colony in the town and a small establishment for their offspring taking the India Office exams. Orwell doubtless relished Southwold’s briny air and green spaces. He hated its character, however, as an Anglo-Indian graveyard whose occupants wouldn’t have the decency actually to die (his own father would live there until the age of 82). It is described, venomously (with location replacement) in Burmese Days:

  the special nature of the hell that is reserved for Anglo-Indians. Ah, those poor prosing old wrecks in Bath and Cheltenham! Those tomb-like boarding-houses with Anglo-Indians littered about in all stages of decomposition, all talking and talking about what happened in Boggleywalah in ’88! Poor devils, they know what it means to have left one’s heart in an alien and hated country.

  One of the fascinating features of Orwell’s fiction, read in the context of his life, is its savagery (the ‘vein of nastiness’). His father and mother (‘prosing old wrecks’) would not merely have read this; they would have felt it was written with them specifically in mind.

  Eric contrived to get himself expelled from his crammer (an establishment run by an ‘old Indian hand’) for a childish prank – posting a dead rat as a birthday present to a local town official whom he and another wayward pupil had, for no particular reason, taken against. It would be another source of embarrassment for his father. Quite a lot has been written about Orwell and Rattus rattus: they crop up frequently before their starring role in Ninet
een Eighty-Four.31 The expulsion did not matter. At least, not to him. He was sufficiently ‘crammed’ by the best education England could offer to pass any lowly tests for the branch of colonial service he was destined for. Classics (judged as essential in the tropics as quinine) were again prominent, and he came near the top of his intake in them. To his credit Orwell, as far as I can see, rarely drops a single Latin word, or phrase, in his mature writing, where, as the fourth rule of his good writing decrees, a good English equivalent is to hand. ‘You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school,’ he said.32 But enough remains, and ‘having’ Latin and Greek wafting around you like the aroma of Imperial Leather was, like the Masonic handshake, an infallible sign of a gentlemanly background.

  Having made the life-changing downward step from King’s Colleger to king’s policeman, Probationary Assistant Superintendent Blair (a title almost as Pythonesque as his father’s) prepared to grow the obligatory toothbrush moustache and take up the white man’s burden. At this stage of life he loathed Kipling, whose poetry he had adored at school. He could have said no. Bowker suggests he went to Burma because, with England behind him, he could wrestle with his ‘demons’ and explore his ‘dark side’. Perhaps. But Eric Blair was also a fun-loving youngster (hence the rat prank), an eighteen-year-old who had barely torn the Eton collar off his neck. There was quite a lot of light side in him. He could now, in another absurd uniform, play the pukka sahib (in his by now well-honed ‘cynic’ style) and even go on ‘tiger shoots’. He chose to do so on a motorbike, wielding a pistol. The Burmese forests teemed with big game. The big cats had little to fear from Eric Blair other than noise. But he seems to have been a dab hand at rat shooting.33

  Bowker is a perceptive biographer, but Orwell’s important career moves were usually perversely driven. And he was surely, in acquiescing to this twist in his career, driven by intellectual curiosity about England’s biggest historical thing, Empire. To find out about that would be to find out about himself. Bengali-born, his English homes (particularly after Richard’s retirement and the nostalgic clutter – not least conversation – he brought with him) were a kind of Indian sarcophagus. In Coming Up for Air, George Bowling (the seed merchant’s child) says, ‘The very first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin chaff.’ With infant Eric, it was probably Burmese teak furniture, a wood whose smell lasts as long as the wood itself. The pharaoh’s tomb-like quality of the Anglo-Indian home is described, in a virtuoso Betjemanesque rhapsody in Coming Up for Air, by smellmeister George Bowling, whose faded wife is Anglo-Indian. (The passage can have given little pleasure to his mother; his father, dying of cancer, did not read it.)

  As soon as you set foot inside the front door you’re in India in the eighties. You know the kind of atmosphere. The carved teak furniture, the brass trays, the dusty tiger-skulls on the wall, the Trichinopoly cigars, the red-hot pickles, the yellow photographs of chaps in sun-helmets, the Hindustani words that you’re expected to know the meaning of, the everlasting anecdotes about tiger-shoots and what Smith said to Jones in Poona in ’87.

  What, Orwell was curious to know, was behind this ‘racket’? How to explain the great confidence trick tiny England had pulled on the world: staining more of it Britannic red on the map than any other imperial power in history – including Rome and the Mongols. And, with the prescience that marks every stage of his life, he foresaw – or rather felt, as some animals are said to feel, through the soles of their feet, earthquakes before they come – that the British Empire was doomed. He would live, short as his life was, to feel the first puffs of the wind of change that would blow the British Empire into the dustbin of history, a smiling Gandhi clamping the lid down on the Raj for ever.

  There must have been gloomy Decline and Fall conversations at home in Henley. Five years before Richard retired in 1912, Britain agreed to reduce, annually, the Indian opium export to China. It was effectively ended in 1916. It had brought in 20 per cent of India’s colonial income at its height. Richard had served imperial drug-dealing for forty years. Now there were editorials in the newspapers calling it a source of national shame. Teak – blood timber – had similarly declined as the source of Burma’s principal industry. Its glory days were when Britannia ruled the waves by virtue not just of hearts of oak but of planks of that wonderful Burmese timber, the ideal material for sail-driven vessels. The arrival of the ironclad – rivet, steel and steam – had hit the teak business hard. If the Empire wasn’t making money, what future did it have?

  Almost as soon as Orwell arrived in Burma, a fictional character, embodying the doom of Empire, began to take form, embryonically, in his mind – ‘John Flory’. He is not a police officer but a drunken, sexually incontinent, facially disfigured, morally withered, cowardly (he dodged the war) teak merchant, keenly aware that he is raping the country of its irreplaceable natural resources (mature teak takes a century to grow), abusing its women and denying its people independence. But he is too weak to free himself from being what he knows he is – a thief, a rapist and a third-class conquistador. That insight, the intrinsic corruption of what his life is, ages the 35-year-old Flory. In the published version of Burmese Days, in an extremity of shame, he shoots himself. In an earlier plan, in an extremity of self-disgust, he drinks himself to death.34 Flory had come to Burma aged nineteen, Orwell’s age, a hopeful youth. In his darkest moment, Orwell doubtless foresaw those options for Assistant Deputy Superintendent Eric Blair, fifteen years on. He would, in the event, avoid the terminal ‘bullet or bottle’ dilemma and choose instead flight after five years. He had found out what he needed to. How the racket worked.

  It would take him nine years to hone, with much rewriting, his first-written, third-published novel, Burmese Days, into shape, sweating off the malarial influence of Somerset Maugham, A Passage to India, Kipling and Conrad. In the fifth chapter of its final version he was in a position to distil his Burma experience, and his realization of what the Empire actually is, into eight frigid words – ‘a despotism with theft as its final object’. Thievery is felonious. What made the Empire over which the sun never set more sinister to the thoughtful observer was its invention of ‘thoughtcrime’ to hold itself together. The colonists were mentally tyrannized, the natives (proles) physically tyrannized. The Empire, once you bought into it, was a world in which

  free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself . . . In the end the secrecy of your revolt poisons you like a secret disease. Your whole life is a life of lies.

  Despotism by thought control. Orwell would think more about that.

  Burma

  In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  JULIO ETCHART, Katha: In the Footsteps of Orwell in Burma (2010)

  Orwell was wryly self-deprecating as a novelist, prone to call a work on which he’d laboured for years ‘bollocks’. Burmese Days he described as a novel principally about ‘landscape’. Equivalent to saying Animal Farm is about animal farms.

  Knowledge, the Burmese novel affirms, can be achieved only at the cost of a lifelong, incurable ‘bad conscience’. The price paid is irremovable, like the stain on Flory’s face. (Flory averts his head so the birthmark is not visible, as Orwell habitually averted his head in conversation, because of anxiety about bad breath.) In Burma, to pick up Bowker’s point, if Orwell wrestled with anything ‘demonic’, it was the paradox he struggled with all his life. Call it the Jonah paradox. Do you understand the nature of the whale inside the belly of the beast – or outside, from a safe distance? At this stage of his life Orwell’s belief was that you could get to Empire’s dark heart (as Conrad decreed in his famous novella) only from inside. If, that is, you nodded your head in apparent assent (as does Flory) to conversation in the ‘Kipling haunted club’ (‘
they’re dirt’; ‘greasy little babus’); if you (yourself) punched a coolie in the face (‘everyone did it’), or had some muscled sepoy lash the Burman’s bare arse with bamboo canes till they splintered, pour encourager les autres, and violated a nation’s most desirable women at will, deluding yourself that you had a sovereign right to do so. And all this was for the sovereign himself, long may he reign, toasted at least once every night, standing to attention, ‘eyes front’, in the club.

  Orwell confided to an Indian friend, fifteen years later, that he had done ‘terrible things’ in Burma.35 One can be fairly confident that these things went beyond killing the occasional wayward elephant. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell recalls a moment of clarity. One of his sub-inspectors was bullying a suspect. An American missionary was watching:

  The American watched it, and then turning to me said thoughtfully, ‘I wouldn’t care to have your job.’ It made me horribly ashamed. So that was the kind of job I had! Even an ass of an American missionary, a teetotal cock-virgin from the Middle West, had the right to look down on me and pity me!

  This rings true. The implication is that a ‘teetotal cock-virgin’ can take the moral high ground, for what it’s worth, but only a participating drunken, bullying rapist can ‘know’, inwardly, what Empire is doing to Burma. And what was that? Orwell momentarily pictures himself as the cane-wielding Sambo Wilkes.

  Rule by Cane

  One thing which Dickens seems to have recognized, and which most of his contemporaries did not, is the sadistic sexual element in flogging.

  ‘Charles Dickens’ (1940)

  Orientals can be very provoking.