Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  Inter urinas et faeces was, for Orwell, something accompanying both ends of life. We arrive and depart shit-smeared.

  He who had come to see how the poor lived now saw, and smelled, how the poor died. It was an eerie forecast of how he himself would leave the world: in a hospital, beyond the power of medicine to save him. But at least he would be in UCL between clean sheets and in a private room. Bowker guesses, persuasively, that it was about this time, in places like this, or earlier, in some spike or dosshouse, that he contracted the TB which would carry him off all those years later.

  He returned to Southwold (where else could he go?) almost simultaneously with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the following worldwide ‘slump’. Poverty is the theme of the Parisian half of his tale of two cities; unemployment is the theme of the London half. He became, for the best part of a year after his return, a ‘tramp’, ever more expert at the class impersonation this required. He had, as he had in Paris, friends and family. But he wanted raw material. And he wanted to feel it – in his empty belly, in unwashed clothes, in the daily humiliation heaped on tramps and beggars.

  Hopping

  ‘Kent, sir – everybody knows Kent – apples, cherries, hops and women.’

  CHARLES DICKENS, The Pickwick Papers (1836–7)

  In 1932 Orwell went, as a casual ‘hopper’, to the summer hop fields of Kent. He was following again in the footsteps of Jack London in People of the Abyss. London’s description of the annual Cockney excursion was in his lofty, denunciatory, ‘Downfall of Albion’ style:

  It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the street people to pick her hops. And out they come, obedient to the call, which is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of adventure-lust still in them. Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them forth . . . and their withered crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity of nature.

  Forty years later, working-class Londoners, marginally less rotted, still went to the Kent fields as a kind of summer camping holiday – a Butlin’s holiday camp avant Butlin’s. There was, among the reading classes, steamy ‘romance’ about the hop-pickers. In one of Orwell’s favourite books, Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, the hero finds sexual fulfilment rutting in the fields.

  The reality for Orwell was something else. Sex there was – but of no fulfilling variety. In his journal he gives a vivid picture of

  old Deafie, sitting on the grass with a newspaper in front of him. He lifted it aside, and we saw that he had his trousers undone and was exhibiting his penis to the women and children as they passed. I was surprised – such a decent old man, really; but there is hardly a tramp who has not some sexual abnormality.

  This was too ‘down’ to be published in Down and Out.57

  In between his fieldwork, Orwell took on a number of local day jobs in Southwold – tutoring barely a notch or two above childminding. He liked children: he liked all animals, he once joked. The bona fide animal Hector, the Blair family dog, always got his best walks when Eric was home. The atmosphere at home was tense. He was contributing little if anything to the family kitty.

  All the time his raw material was amassing, and promising, if only he could get it into shape and find takers. He persisted, expanding the French articles into a short book. Finally everything was stewed up together into a first draft of Down and Out in Paris and London. The manuscript (renamed ‘A Scullion’s Diary’) was turned down by Jonathan Cape and, twice, with the faintest of praise, by T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber. The book was too strong for the genteel London literary world, still bruised by Cape’s prosecution, in 1928, for daring to publish The Well of Loneliness. Down and Out, like that burned book, had ‘licentious’ Parisian scenes. Brothel scenes (a rape, narrated by ‘Charlie’, is particularly brutal, even bowdlerized) and frank use of actual ‘street’ language (some asterisked ‘f-wordage’ got through) made potential takers nervous, as did possible libel suits. Throughout his life Orwell thought British publishers a ‘gutless’ crew.

  In trips up to London he had made useful contacts in the literary world: one in particular was the fellow Etonian ‘socialist baronet’, Richard Rees, proprietor of The Adelphi. Orwell had been getting occasional commissions to review in Rees’s magazine. The editors, John Middleton Murry and his successor, Max Plowman, published ‘The Spike’, ‘A Hanging’, ‘Hop Picking’ and ‘Poverty Plain and Coloured’. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell ungratefully intimates that Rees (‘Ravelston’) did it as a favour – one old Etonian scratching the back of another. In fact it was a sound editorial choice to have encouraged this unknown writer, with his uncomfortable subject matter, at Rees’s proprietorial behest. Plowman, with an echt working-class background and an inextinguishable hatred for the English ruling classes, had no objection, even if he was being paid with a baronet’s conscience money. The Adelphi essays comprise a nugget of purest early Orwell.

  Mabel

  Mabel Fierz was a woman who did as much for Orwell’s literary prospects as Dennis Collings had done for his intellect. Collings was Cambridge; she was, through and through, London Literary World.

  In the face of that world’s manifest lack of interest in it, Orwell gave up on his down-and-out book, pinning his hopes on Burmese Days. He left the manuscript of Down and Out, as a lost cause, with Mabel. He had first come across her in the summer of 1930 on the Southwold beach. She was married to a rich executive in the steel business, and was of a certain age, cosmopolitan, ‘mystically’ socialist (a ‘crank’, Orwell would have said) and sexually libertine (something that mitigated any off-putting crankiness). She was also an Adelphi contributor, and knew Richard Rees well. She was not the commonest thing on Southwold beach. Orwell was painting when they met. (As far as I know none of his artwork survives – it would be interesting to see it.) Eric and Mabel went on to have an affair, in between discussing things of the mind.58 Her husband, Francis, was apparently complaisant. Wandering along the river it was Francis, apparently, who suggested the pen name ‘Orwell’. A comment in a letter suggests that his first sexual enjoyment of Mabel was, for Orwell, that highest form of sexual bliss, copulation in the wild, in summer, with the scents of ripe nature in his nostrils and a woman under his loins. That kind of thing happened all too rarely. Mabel, unembarrassed, hit it off with Ida, another cosmopolitan woman. They played bridge together.

  The Fierzes had a large house in Hampstead, and came to Southwold every summer for the air. When the affair cooled Orwell would, over the next few years, lodge with them and go to parties Mabel threw, often with interesting guests. She read the manuscript of Down and Out he had left with her, admired it and ignored Orwell’s instruction to burn it (but keep the paper clips). He didn’t mean it. Authors routinely give this order to the women they love as a test. Stephen King threw the first draft of Carrie (the novel that would ‘make’ him) into the rubbish bin, to be rescued by his loyal wife, Tabitha. Joyce threw the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into the fire, to be rescued by his wife, Nora. And Mabel rescued Down and Out in Paris and London; the paper clips she may have thrown away. Mabel knew exactly whom to hassle. Eventually the manuscript found its way to the new, dynamically socialist publisher Victor Gollancz. A lover of the people, Gollancz lunched every working day in the Savoy Grill. But he had a vision of the books that would suit his list.59

  To shield his family from possible embarrassment, and to keep his own identity, Eric Blair at this point became ‘George Orwell’ – a ‘round English name’, and a memorial to some good fishing he had had in its waters. Some of his journalism still came out under the name Eric Blair.

  Down and Out in Paris and London was published in January 1933 and well reviewed. There was a pleasingly acute notice (anonymous) in the TLS:

  It is vivid picture of an apparently mad world that Mr Orwell paints in his book, a world where unfortunate men are preyed upon by parasites, both insect and human, where a straight line of demarcation is
drawn above which no man can hope to rise once he has fallen below its level. One lays down the book, wondering why men living in such conditions do not commit suicide; but Mr Orwell conveys the impression that they are too depressed and hopeless for such a final and definite effort as self-inflicted death.

  Not too many ‘parasites’ crawling the walls in The Times’ Printing House Square, one gathers.

  Eric Blair at last had a book to his (other) name. Three helpers had got him going: Richard Rees, Dennis Collings and Mabel Fierz. Victor Gollancz could claim a second-row place in the little pro-Orwell scrum.

  Paris and London

  Down and Out in Paris and London is a tale of two cities. For the down and out, Orwell’s Paris is more fun. Wine, baguette and poules are more palatable than a ‘cup of tea and two slices of bread and marge’ and Old Deafie’s waggling penis. But, one notes, in Paris the narrator’s closest companions were once as upper-class in origin as he, under his rags, still is. Boris was a former officer in the czarist army and Charlie a high-born Frenchman who had come down in the world. In London, the narrator’s tramping companions were what he would call, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘proles’: illiterates like the amiable Irishman Paddy, and Bozo the ‘screever’ (pavement artist, cripple and amateur astronomer). British law, unlike French, is less tolerant of down and outs. Since Elizabethan times they have been forced, by law and the police, to ‘move on’ (Dickens’s phrase, in Bleak House). Legally they are always ‘vagrants’, not ‘indigents’, always ‘tramping’ nowhere. The ‘spikes’ allowed one night only. If it were England, Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon (‘they do not move’ is the last line in Waiting for Godot) would have been arrested or made to move. In France they can carry on waiting.60

  Hardly a page of Down and Out is without a reference to money, usually low-denomination coinage. Lack of ‘ready’ combined with malnourishment was, Orwell believed, at the root of England’s underclass problem. Without money you are chronically hungry: ‘You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.’ Orwell hints that after 1926, when, with the General Strike, Britain teetered on the brink of revolution, the authorities were not sorry to have an unmoneyed docile, above all hungry, working class. Starve the buggers into submission. ‘You can’t think when you’re hungry’ was a refrain with Orwell.

  Orwell’s Ambivalence About the Lower Classes

  How terrible for Mrs Blair to have a son like that, he looks as though he never washes.

  SOUTHWOLD RESIDENT, COMMISERATING WITH ERIC BLAIR’S MOTHER

  Orwell’s mixed fascination and disgust with the poor, the down and outs and the tramp population was crystallized in his first book. The tired Gallicism nostalgie de la boue (a yearning for mud – and worse) is routinely applied to his voluntary submersion into society’s silt. It doesn’t satisfactorily cover what he was doing. There was as much disgust as nostalgia. An Etonian in rags, he was, for one thing, always fastidious, however filthy the surroundings. He recalls, for example, starving in Paris: a bug falls from the ceiling into the milk that will keep him going. He throws the milk away with the bug. He would rather starve to death, and nearly does. He is sleeping in an English dosshouse and wakes to find a sailor’s stinking feet in his face. But he sleeps there the next night. Foul smells are everywhere – only tobacco masks them. You could, you feel, contract bronchitis or worse from the miasma rising from the pages of Orwell’s book.

  And if in Burma he had discovered the imperial universality of Sambo’s rattan cane, in the spike’s washroom he discovered, for the working classes of England, the universality of the turd in Saint Cyp’s ‘plunge bath’:

  The scene in the bathroom was extraordinarily repulsive. Fifty dirty, stark-naked men elbowing each other in a room twenty feet square, with only two bathtubs and two slimy roller towels between them all. I shall never forget the reek of dirty feet.

  Nothing ‘nostalgic’ here. There is, to continue the theme, no more futile gesture by Jesus Christ than his washing the feet of his disciples, or kings (the last to do so in England was James II) and popes (they’re still doing it) ritually washing, in honour of their saviour, the feet of the poor. They stink because they don’t have the money not to. Kings and popes have a lot of money. Judas was right about that – silver matters.

  At the end of Down and Out Orwell confesses that he has only scraped the ‘fringe’ of what it is to be poor and unemployed. It took Malinowski five years to fully ‘participate’ with his Trobriand islanders. Tourists stay longer in Paris than did Eric Blair. But few see as much. What comes through strongly in the envoi of Down and Out is not the depth of the research but Orwell’s generosity of spirit and the rank simplicity of his proposed solution. The poor, he insists, are not parasites, not ‘scroungers’, not layabouts, not ‘degenerate’ (pace Jack London) – they are, most of them, victims of a society that will not give them the meagre wherewithal to be ‘decent’ and hard-working. A few pounds, a worthwhile job of work and some ‘hope’, and you will not have to worry about their smelly feet. Jesus can throw away his towel.

  For the rest of his life Orwell would carry with him the testimonial aura of the tramp. It made a point. Some saw it as a kind of sanctity. Some, like Stephen Spender, saw it as ‘phoney’, and giggled. Others, like Malcolm Muggeridge, saw it as classclownishness:

  I made Orwell’s acquaintance in the flesh through Anthony Powell . . . It was arranged the three of us should lunch together in, I think, a restaurant in Fleet Street, and that was my first sight of Orwell. I had a certain stereotype of an Etonian in my mind, so Orwell’s appearance came as a complete surprise. He was dressed in a sort of proletarian fancy dress; an ancient battered sports jacket and corduroy trousers, not actually tied up with string as in old comic drawings, but of the kind that could still be bought in those days in working-class districts and in seaside towns where fishermen live.61

  Young ladies of Orwell’s acquaintance, it is recorded by Crick, hoped he was not using their loofah when, dying for a bath, he came back from one of his expeditions into the underworld.

  Hard Times, 1930–34

  You can no more be cultured without money than you can join the cavalry club.

  Keep the Aspidistra Flying

  Down and Out in Paris and London got good reviews, but its author would have been back in the workhouse on the royalties. Even a rave in the TLS did not put money in your pocket (it’s a recurrent joke in Aspidistra). And Burmese Days was, meanwhile, ageing in the womb. It would eventually, after much reworking, come out first in the U.S., as a ‘sex-shocker’, in October 1934. Even more reworking would bring it to belated birth in the UK in June 1935, ten years after the events it depicted. A significant lag.

  George Orwell has more lost years than William Shakespeare and 1930–34 are among the most lost. He was restless, unhappy, broke, largely unpublished, unknown and, as regards posterity, an invisible man. As Crick sourly puts it, he was cooped up for most of the time in ‘a small rented house in an out-of-the-way seaside town, the home of his 73-year-old father and his 55-year-old mother’. Avril, now well into her twenties, was working in a tea shop. His family gave him bed and board. Recalling his plongeur skills, he is recorded as helping his mother with the washing-up. Nothing else of what went on in the house is recorded. There must have been rows. He fished, during long, empty hours of the day. A favourite spot was the pond at Walberswick, alongside one of East Anglia’s many old water mills, commemorated by Constable. It teemed with eels, tench, gudgeon, carp and other piscine lovers of deep, still water.

  There were sporadic reviewing commissions, mainly from Rees, but nothing that would make his name. And he suspected Rees was just doing another down-on-his-luck Etonian a favour. It was not until 1934 that Orwell made enough from his writing to live on. Not well – but enough to keep the wolf from the door and escape Southwold. Peter Davison’s schedule of his earnings from 1928 to 1933 makes pit
iful reading. He had given up £600 p.a. in the IPS for what? Out of these years would emerge his most spiteful novel and his most self-flagellating novels: A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

  Teacher

  Teaching is harder work than it looks.

  A Clergyman’s Daughter

  Orwell was, hindsight makes clear, in a condition of ‘latency’, like the moth in its pupa. But that is not what it looked like to those close to him, who saw him as a layabout. On a visit to his elder sister, Marjorie, in Leeds, his no-nonsense brother-in-law, Humphrey (who had never warmed much to the ‘stinker’ Eric), told him to stir his stumps. To make what he meant clear he gave Orwell ten shillings a week to work on his (Humphrey’s) allotment. That ten-bob note (‘half-bar’, his down-and-out pals would have called it) tilling the soil must have scorched. Humphrey recalled, years later, that he had thought Eric lazy and self-pitying – and not all that useful with a spade. He was wrong, of course. Eric was preparing himself – although for what was not clear even to him. While waiting to find out he took up a series of casual jobs that were beneath him intellectually. He wanted nothing permanent. No commitment.

  Private schools were not inspected by any authority until the 1950s. Anyone, even a 1930s Wackford Squeers, interested in making some money on the side could set up a school and run it as they wanted. Derek Eunson (a Scottish surname, ominously), whose day job was as an engineer at the local HMV (His Master’s Voice) factory, had set up an establishment in Hayes, outer London, called, grandly, ‘Hawthorns High School’. Its sole purpose was to make the proprietor some pin money. Mr Eunson kept children as a less wily man might have kept bantams. The Hawthorns had fourteen boys and two teachers. Eunson himself was beneath even the modest academic requirement for classroom work beyond the janitorial. Neither of the ‘staff’ was professionally qualified. The salary was as little as Eunson could get away with. Eric Blair was appointed ‘head master’ and, doubtless, instructed to wear his Eton tie on parents’ days. His service has been thought to warrant a plaque. His predecessor, Crick records, had been sent down for six years for sexual abuse of his pupils. The length of the sentence suggests a gross offence. It is extraordinary that the school, with half its teaching force locked up for arrant buggery, was not closed down.