It was lack of intelligence that had led to the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857. That lesson was learned. In 1906 a CIB (Criminal Investigation Branch) had been established in Burma. It was a clearing house for intelligence to be referred up. It had free-ranging powers and became a ‘cornerstone of the surveillance and intelligence powers of government’. The gathering of ‘intelligence’ was diffused, at local level, to DIDS – District Intelligence Departments – which operated networks of paid informants and, in villages, ‘watchmen’. They had the responsibility to detect and the power to arrest. The prime aim was to identify potential insurgents. With its off-books spies, the ratio of population to police personnel would have been in the low hundreds. But the arterial information channels were ‘native’ – Burmans spying on Burmans. In Orwell’s last posting, there were some twenty Europeans (‘whites’) in a population of hundreds of thousands over a land area of a thousand square miles. It was nonetheless efficiently ‘policed’, and obsessively ‘watched’.
It would be naive to suppose that Orwell had not genned up on what the IPS was, and what his responsibilities as an officer would be. He had eight postings in his five years, most of them to country districts (the population of Burma was principally dispersed, in the country’s vast territory, into a mosaic of disparate villages, typically tribally endogenous). He was not moved around because he gave dissatisfaction, but because he was good at his job: a competent spy in policeman’s uniform. He was shrewd, fluent in native languages and observant, and could write the kind of clear English that made for a good analytic report.
During officer Blair’s tenure, truly terrible things were being enacted. He helped to enact them. The Criminal Tribes Legislation was brought into Burma in 1924 (it had been in force in India since 1911). Its powers were brutal: villages, communities and ethnic groups (myriad in Burma) could be summarily judged to be collectively criminal and relocated; members of the groups could be summarily arrested and tried – on emergency trumped-up charges, if necessary. (What crime has the condemned man committed in ‘A Hanging’? We are never told.)
Two of his postings clarified what would be Blair’s indissolubly contrary feelings about the country, and what his own country had done to it. One was his six-month post in Syriam. It was the site of the largest oil refinery in the Empire, a gleaming testament to British (specifically Scottish) industrial achievement. The plant processed seven million gallons annually. India, with its vast spaces and population, depended on ‘Burmah Oil Company’ fuel, sucked, vampirically, out of the neighbouring country’s soil. For miles around Syriam, the luscious Burmese countryside was a hideous, poisoned wasteland. The fumes killed vegetation, infected residents and did officer Blair’s lungs no good at all. The oil, like the mature jungle teak, was irreplaceable. When it was exhausted, all that would be left – for millennia – was soil pollution. Syriam was valuable enough to be protected by a standing force of British troops whom, from time to time, Orwell helped command. He disliked their sweaty smell but he positively hated the chemical stench of the refinery (ill-named). Orwell lived to read about Syriam being destroyed in 1942 by the retreating British, who had built it, lest it fall into the hands of the invading Japanese. The irony must have given him rueful pleasure. He would have liked to have been there with the torch himself.
His last posting was in Katha (the ‘Kyauktada’ of Burmese Days) in the far north of the country, at the end of the railway line: the fringe of colonialism. The unviolated landscape entranced him. In the novel, Flory goes into the jungle, swims in its pools, wonders at the Edenic wildness. It teems with life but the British do not belong here. There is a poignant moment in the novel when Flory, who has earned a furlough in England, decides he cannot go back. Burma (specifically Katha) is too beautiful, and has become a part of him. It would be like tearing the only decent part of himself out of his body. Orwell, however, did go home, before his five-year term of service was up, on the pretext of sickness. He intended to leave for good – unless, he may have forlornly thought, he could persuade a forgiving Jacintha to come back with him as his memsahib. The option remained open for a month or two. There was the added factor that his years in Burma had, as with Flory, aged him: ‘When he left home he had been a boy, a promising boy and handsome in spite of his birthmark; now, only ten years later, he was yellow, thin, drunken, almost middle-aged in habits and appearance.’ The youthful bloom had withered. It had, with Eric Blair, taken only half as long as with Flory. He would, however, wait awhile before telling his parents or the authorities about the drastic step he had in mind.
The Anarchist Spasm
Orwell came home with a stopover in Marseilles. There were street demonstrations in the city against the impending execution, by electric chair, of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on 23 August. The Marseilles event was one of several worldwide street protests. The Italian-born anarchists had been convicted (probably railroaded, Orwell and others believed) of a bomb outrage against a bank seven years earlier. Followers of the extremist Luigi Gallean, Sacco and Vanzetti believed that domestic terrorism was the only way an entrenched capitalist system could be overthrown and replaced. The politics of the deed. And the bomb.
Incidental as it was, the Marseilles event planted in Orwell a spasmodic sympathy with anarchism, which proposed total internal war against the state as the only solution. That sympathy was to erupt at moments of political despair in his life, when anything other than the surgical ‘bomb’ was deemed hopeless. It seems to be connected with his occasional suicidal tendencies. Consider, for example, what Winston loyally swears to do in his recruitment to the ‘Brotherhood’ (a favourite anarchist term) by O’Brien, in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Will he murder and betray Oceania to foreign powers? ‘Yes,’ Winston asserts:
‘You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases – to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?’
‘Yes.’
‘If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face – are you prepared to do that?’
‘Yes.’
Stop the novel at this point, and picture a narrative in which Winston Smith, in the interest of ‘weakening the power of the party’, actually does go around spreading VD, throwing acid in children’s faces and murdering innocent bystanders in his good cause. Call it ‘Nightmare on 1984 Street’. But how else can Big Brother be overthrown? The kind of vote that kicked Churchill (on whom Big Brother is partly based) out of Downing Street in 1945?
At moments of hopelessness (and there were plenty during the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four), Orwell embraced the anarchist nihilism of Mikhail Bakunin as the only solution. He joined the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, at a time when the struggle looked increasingly hopeless. He fought there, and damn near died, under the red-and-black flag of POUM, the romantically ineffective anarchists, against the twin totalitarianisms of Fascism and Stalinism.
The strangest ebullition of Orwell’s normally quiescent anarchism was during his service, as an NCO, in the Home Guard during the Second World War. The government, Orwell realized excitedly, was giving guns, grenades and bombs to the people. An armed populace could, surely, mobilize itself to overthrow and replace the government by acts of domestic terrorism. Or so, for a month or two, he fantasized. It’s amusing to fancy a kind of revolution via Dad’s Army: Captain Mainwaring on the barricades, Private Pike passing the ammunition. His Trotskyist supporters (Christopher Hitchens, for example) are embarrassed by this Orwellian flight of anarchist fancy.
Over the years Orwell’s interest in anarchism was fanned and kept alight by his friend and intellectual antagonist George Woodcock.45 His belief in it as the only way came and went, sporadically, like a bout of malarial fever.
Down-and-out
The prole suffers physically, but he’s a fre
e man when he isn’t working.
Coming Up for Air46
When Orwell came back from Burma in the summer of 1927, the question ‘what will Eric do?’ hovered over the cramped Southwold household like a black cloud. It would hang there for seven lean years. Once the hope of the family, Eric was now a double-dyed failure – at Eton and in the Indian Police Service.
Orwell intended, without consulting his family on the matter, to resign his five-year commission prematurely on the pretext (fabricated) of illness – a touch of dengue fever, which he could easily have shaken off with some rest and recuperation in Rangoon. No one is recorded as seeing any sign of the ailment’s symptomatic jaundiced complexion or falling hair. The Blairs could not rejoice in Eric’s coming home. Marjorie, now married, had gone to live in the north and had a family of her own. Avril, whose prospects in life had been cruelly narrowed to pay for her brother’s, was caring for her parents. At 22, her marriage chances looked remote. Richard was now verging on seventy, and cranky. A good cook, Avril was selling homemade cakes for the summer tourist trade to help with the family’s straitened finances. Accustomed for four years to servants waiting on him hand and foot, Eric would drop cigarette ends on the floor at home and expect someone else to pick them up. Avril, the picker-up, remembered that, resentfully, decades later. Decades later, of course, she was still picking up his dog-ends in Jura. Her role in life.
There intervened at this point a very strange event. Orwell visited the man at Eton who had effectively dished his prospects, to get ‘advice’ on what next he should do next. It may have been at Richard’s insistence. What is odd is that Andrew Gow invited Orwell to come and stay a day or two with him. After nine years of trying, the unhappy schoolteacher had finally got his Trinity fellowship. Competition had been thinned out by the war. A heart murmur had excused him from service. He is reputed to have replied, when someone asked why he was in civilian clothes, that he was the civilization others were dying for. My grandfather lost an eye in the First World War; I’m glad it went for a good cause. Gow’s advice on Blair’s career prospects had not hitherto been helpful, nor had Blair written to Gow since leaving Eton. In the interview Crick had for his biography with the retired don (still resident at Trinity) in 1976:
Gow remembered little about the visit, except that Blair came to tell him that he had resigned from the Burma Police, was thinking of pursuing a literary career, but wanted to take advice first. ‘I seem to remember’, Gow said, ‘that as he seemed fairly determined and had nothing else in mind, I said, in a rather non-committal way that he might as well have a try.’ He stayed the night in college [at Gow’s expense, presumably] and Gow remembers that he sat him next to A. E. Housman at High Table, who asked him about Burma. It is hard to interpret this incident.
Hard indeed. Orwell at Trinity, surrounded by what would later be called the Homintern, was a fish out of water. But it is relevant that before the Second World War M15 employed mostly former Indian policemen. Orwell, to indulge the most far-fetched of speculations, may have been viewed as a possible recruit. The reason these men were desirable as spooks is that their police work was that of a police state – surveillance and espionage. Orwell might be a prospect.
Gow, having got there, would, limpet-like, never leave Trinity. He taught Classics, published little (not imperative in those days at that place) and held extracurricular seminars for favourite students (his rooms were now sumptuous). He was a friend of fellow fellows such as Housman in the 1920s and master spy Anthony Blunt in the 1930s, and his favourite student was that other master spy, Guy Burgess. In short, was Gow sounding Blair out for something in behind-the-scenes ‘intelligence’? If so, it went nowhere. But at least Orwell met his idol, A. E. Housman.
Women Problems
I don’t think he really liked women.
BRENDA SALKELD, one of Orwell’s longest-lasting lovers
There had been virtually no correspondence between Orwell and Jacintha over the five years he had been away. He nonetheless had hopes. He had come back from Burma with an engagement ring. How he proposed to support a wife (unless by return to Burma) is not clear, but the problem did not arise. Jacintha wanted nothing more to do with him. He assumed it was because of his brutishness in the fields. He did not know, and never would, that while he was away she had borne an illegitimate child. Worse still, the father had absconded. The child had been discreetly adopted out of the country. It was this disgrace, not the attempted rape, that meant Jacintha could not welcome Eric home as her lover, even if she were inclined to.
‘They never met again,’ John Rodden records bleakly, ‘and Blair never knew the real reason why he had been rejected.’47 With an effort of will Jacintha closed her mind on him. She went to her grave regretting that she had not taken the risk of marrying Eric on his return from Burma. She wrote, in a letter long after his death: ‘He had ruined what been such a close and fulfilling relationship, since childhood, by trying to take us the whole way before I was anywhere near ready for that.’
Over the next few years, as he came and went to the town, young Blair cut a poor figure in Southwold, a place he cordially disliked. Nor – at the time and for all time, it would seem – did Southwold like Eric Blair (or, come to that, his alter ego George Orwell). A hundred years after his birth, the local East Anglian Daily Times commemorated Southwold’s most famous literary son sourly:
A literary giant who ‘loathed’ the small-town conservatism of a seaside town in north Suffolk is being remembered in the centenary year of his birth. But according to his sister Avril Blair, . . . he ‘loathed’ the town. He is remembered as a rather dishevelled unshaven figure, dressed in suits handmade by a local tailor that needed a good iron, a long scarf, and no hat – which in the 1930s was considered under-dressed . . . people felt rather sorry for his parents.48
That summer he formed relationships with a number of local women, probably more of which we’ll never know about. Prominent among those we do know about, from surviving correspondence, was a gym teacher at St Felix’s girls’ school, Brenda Salkeld, and Eleanor Jaques, whose family had come to Southwold from Canada in 1921 and lived, for a while, next door to the Blairs. There were complications with both. Brenda, a vicar’s daughter, seems to have been an early adopter of Julia’s anti-sex sash. Eleanor, easier-going, was involved with, and later engaged to, Dennis Collings, the son of the Blairs’ family doctor.
Blair was generally regarded by the young men of the town, and some husbands he is alleged to have cuckolded, as a sexual raider. His Etonian airs did not endear him. On one occasion, as D. J. Taylor discovered from interviews with aged residents, he was chased across the Southwold commons by a rival on motorbike with homicidal intent, for unwelcome attentions to his fiancée. Eleanor’s boyfriend, Dennis Collings, apparently did not know what Eric, his supposed best friend, was up to when he was out of town. ‘Horning in’, Americans call it. He finally got his way with Eleanor in summer 1932, al fresco, wild scents in his nostrils, as he always preferred:
I cannot remember when I have ever enjoyed any expeditions so much as I did those with you. Especially that day in the wood along past Blythborough Lodge – you remember, where the deep beds of moss were. I shall always remember that & your nice white body in the dark green moss.49
Snapshots of Eleanor’s nice white body resurface in Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four’s woody love scenes. He apparently enjoyed her body in the mossy bank while Dennis was away at Cambridge (studying anthropology), having left his ‘girl’ in his best friend’s care. Dangerous. After summer passed, in October 1932, Eric wrote to Eleanor, ‘I hope you will let me make love to you again some time, but if you don’t it doesn’t matter, I shall always be grateful to you for your kindness to me.’ In November he wrote: ‘When we were together, you didn’t say whether you were going to let me be your lover again. Of course you can’t if Dennis is in S’wold, but otherwise? You mustn’t if you don’t want to, but I hope you will.’ Did she? Who
knows? But she did marry Collings in 1934.
Brenda Salkeld, the gym mistress, Orwell must have seen often stripped for calisthenics. He doubtless recalled the McGill postcard and fantasized about her getting her physical jerks under him.
It never happened. She tantalized him for years but never gave in, despite eloquent wooing by letter and in person, two proposals of marriage and, yet again, what looks like a near rape in the fields. As Bowker records:
He was not good at managing his relationships with women. One Sunday in July [1931] he invited Brenda for a fishing expedition-cum-picnic. On this occasion she must have permitted a little canoodling, and he must then have gone much too far for her – the abrupt move, perhaps, or his usual blunt proposition. When she rebuffed him he told her that if she did not want to make love to him it was better they part. Outraged at this she stormed off back to her lodgings.
Unlike Jacintha or Eleanor, Brenda – who worked out daily in the school gym – was quite capable of looking after her pearl beyond price. She was not, apparently, mollified by his letter of apology the next day in which he said, ‘it hurts me not to have you altogether.’ Brenda later concluded that he did not like women, but had an irresistible physical need to ‘possess’ them. ‘Cock-tease’ (one of his favourite blunt terms) that she was, Orwell admired Brenda’s spirit and invited her to come with him to the Kent hop fields in the summer of 1932. She declined the manifest offer of rutting in ditches. They remained friends. There was an odd postscript. In 1939, Orwell now married, met her again and, extraordinarily, wrote her a love letter, on his birthday in 1940, evidently with a ménage à trois or an affair in mind. He got his wife’s permission to do so.
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