Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  What slender evidence there is suggests that Mr Blair did his work off-handedly, but not at all badly. According to the local Hayes historian Mike Paterson:

  Orwell was known as being strict in the classroom (not a word of English was allowed in French lessons), yet kindly and enthusiastic at extra-curricular activities. He frequently took the lads on nature rambles, showing them how to capture marsh gas in jars, that sort of thing; he also wrote and directed the school play – Charles II – which was performed in St Mary’s Church nearby.62

  The nearby church, St Mary’s, which was ‘high’, interested Blair. He underwent, at this period, what looks like a spiritual conversion. He had befriended the curate, the Revd Ernest Parker – the only educated person in the vicinity of the Hawthorns. Blair assisted Parker with Sunday communion and visits to the dying. He subscribed to the Church Times. He took up radically anti-Catholic positions. He may, perhaps, have thought some holiness would endear him to the indomitably Blair-resistant Brenda Salkeld, the clergyman’s daughter. Attendance at the church furnished material for the novel of that name. But he was at risk of becoming what he liked to call a ‘creeping Jesus’. What was actually taking shape in his mind, alongside the novel, was a complex idea about the historical importance of Anglican religion, namely that you could revere the institution without believing in its doctrines (the conclusion Dorothy arrives at in A Clergyman’s Daughter). There was a place for the church in Orwell’s ‘England, your England’. It is incarnate in John Major’s favourite image from Orwell: ‘the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning’. Or in what is agreed to be his best poem, read, by his request, at his funeral, before his interment in a church graveyard. It begins: ‘A happy vicar I might have been / Two hundred years ago / To preach upon eternal doom / And watch my walnuts grow.’

  Orwell’s new sense of religion is spelled out in the contract Dorothy Hare, who has lost her faith, makes with the church in his next novel. It is a beautifully written passage that would have found a happy home in a late essay, or, indeed, a secularist sermon:

  It seemed to her that even though you no longer believe, it is better to go to church than not; better to follow in the ancient ways, than to drift in rootless freedom. She knew very well that she would never again be able to utter a prayer and mean it; but she knew also that for the rest of her life she must continue with the observances to which she had been bred. Just this much remained to her of the faith that had once, like the bones in a living frame, held all her life together.

  It is similar to his compromised eulogy, worked out in The Lion and Unicorn, about ‘England’. It’s rotten, but it’s all we have, and better than any alternative going.

  There may have been some presence of God in St Mary’s communion services but Hayes was, Orwell said, ‘one of the most God-forsaken places I have ever struck’. He loathed it. Rescue came unexpectedly. In July 1933 Eunson went broke, sold up and summarily discharged his ‘staff’. A headmaster from nearby Uxbridge, on the lookout for some cheap pre-owned desks, decided to include the Hawthorns’ pre-owned French teacher in the package for his own institution, Frays College. The ‘college’ was named after the nearby river (not a grand stream, but good enough for Orwell to fish in, and one reason he accepted the offer). The proprietor, John Bennett, ran a more thriving and ambitious institution than the Hawthorns. It had some 200 pupils, boys and girls, ‘day’ and boarder, five to eighteen years old. The salary was £70 p.a. plus bed and board – ‘coolie rates’.

  ‘Mr Blair’ was liked, despite his constitutional aloofness. He did what he was paid wretchedly to do, teaching French that his pupils would never seriously use, working, when he could, on what really mattered to him. Reportedly the clattering of the typewriter could be heard, all night long, from his ill-heated room. Uxbridge had nothing to tempt him out. His life seems to have been monastically sex-starved at this stage.

  His teaching career was terminated by one of his typically suicidal impulses. He had earned enough to buy a second-hand motorbike. There was a kind of death-or-glory romance associated with these machines, on roads which the highway code, and speed restriction, had yet to civilize. A year or two later T. E. Lawrence would wipe himself out on his Brough Superior, a machine capable of the ‘ton’. On a spin back home, in December 1933, Orwell took the road without leathers or warm clothes. Gordon Bowker pictures, vividly, what followed:

  Perhaps to impress Brenda or Eleanor, he drove his bike all the way to Southwold one weekend without an overcoat or any decent protection against the cold except his long Eton College scarf. Refusing advice to wrap up more, he then drove back to Uxbridge.

  He was caught in a freezing rainstorm; his fourth bout of pneumonia followed. He was taken to Uxbridge Cottage Hospital, where his life was feared for. He hallucinated that he was back in a spike, and someone was trying to steal his money. He did not die, but was ordered to take at least half a year’s total convalescence if he wanted to live longer than six months. It was farewell to Uxbridge and back to Southwold. George Orwell’s teaching career was over. Two good things had come out of it. He had finally managed to lick Burmese Days into a shape that was acceptable to the finicky Gollancz. And he had worked out what his next major piece of writing should be.

  Convalescence, he determined, would be a working sabbatical. His farewell to ‘god-forsaken’ Hayes was proclaimed in a poem, published in The Adelphi, ‘On a Ruined Farm near His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory’. It’s a work in the ‘pylon style’ popularized by Stephen Spender: ‘The acid smoke has soured the fields, / And browned the few and windworn flowers; / But there, where steel and concrete soar / In dizzy, geometric towers —’ and so it goes. Hateful: but it was the unstoppable future. A world in which, as he would later say, ‘children grow up with intimate knowledge of magnetos and in complete ignorance of the Bible’.

  There had been changes in the Blair family fortunes which meant having a sick Eric hanging about the house was less of a burden. Ida had received a legacy – the last of the Limouzin wealth. With it the Blairs bought a handsome new home, Montague House, in Southwold’s High Street (as I write it is advertised as ‘Grade II listed’, with a £5,000 pcm rental; the Blairs picked it up for £100). Avril and Ida had sufficient start-up money left over for their longed-for Copper Kettle/Bridge club venture in the centre of town. One of his relatives suggested that Orwell might work there – he’d washed up quite happily at the Crillon in Paris, hadn’t he?

  A Clergyman’s Daughter

  It is a classic case of an author misjudging his talent and his material.

  STANSKY AND ABRAHAMS

  Orwell’s Southwold convalescence would last from January until October. He was soon well enough to write and dashed off his next novel in six months. A Clergyman’s Daughter is a bitter book. Being cooped up (even in Montague House’s more spacious dimensions) was bound to brew bile in someone as raw-nerved as Blair/Orwell in 1932. The bile level was elevated by the fact that Eleanor, now Mrs Collings, was in Singapore and Brenda in Ireland.

  A Clergyman’s Daughter is the story of Dorothy Hare, whose life is one of servitude to her widowed, autocratic, snobbish, clergyman father, as negligent of his flock as he is careless of his daughter in a barely fictionalized, wholly hateful Knype Hill/Southwold which deserves no better than the Revd Hare for the care of its mean souls. The first half of the novel covers one hot day in August. Dorothy is less daughter and more skivvy, secretary, church janitor and domestic factotum. She works a seventeen-hour day and a seven-day week. The novel could well be called ‘The Clergyman’s Slave’. The Revd Hare has not the slightest interest in religion as such. He seethes with resentment that, as the distant twig of an aristocratic family, he has descended to this – the life of a country parson. It is not a vocation: it is an intolerable humiliation for the ‘younger son of the younger son of a baronet’. He does not care that his congregation has shrunk to a wizened core, that the belfry is about to collaps
e, or that Dorothy can only provide the ‘dainty’ food he demands (deserves, by God) by starving herself. He fobs off Dorothy’s request for money for overdue tradesmen’s bills. He is a horrible father.

  Dorothy has been traumatized by the horrific sex she witnessed, aged nine, between her parents. Her mother was mercifully carried off from further marital molestation in the 1921 flu epidemic. Dorothy has taken a nun’s vow of chastity. She has a terror of ‘that kind of thing’. It will soon not be a problem. She is verging on 28, the age at which, as Jane Austen grimly recorded, a woman loses her ‘bloom’. There is already a hint of crow’s feet around the eye; a grey hair or two. Dorothy mortifies her flesh with pinpricks, hunger and a morning cold bath. She is pursued by the Knype Hill lecher, Mr Warburton, another horrible man – middle-aged, wealthy and an inveterate groper and pincher.

  Montague House.

  After near-rape by Warburton, Dorothy loses her mind. She has been boiling pot after pot of smelly glue for the costumes in the annual children’s play. It may have contributed to narcosis, together with the richly scented wine Warburton hopefully gave her too much of. More likely Orwell was recalling Agatha Christie’s sensational ‘amnesia’ in which, after an obscure shock to do with her husband’s infidelity, she went missing for eleven days in 1926. Dorothy comes to consciousness eight days later, dressed in rags, in a shabby London street, unaware of how she got there (nor will the reader ever know). She is still virgo intacta, we gather. She gradually recalls who she is and discovers the gutter press has headlined her as the naughty vicar’s daughter who has done a bunk with the local Lothario. Warburton had left town at the same time as her (a loose link in the plot). The scandal has been fanned by the Knype Hill gossip-monger Mrs Semprill. ‘It did not take much to get you “talked about” in Knype Hill.’ Orwell himself had been the subject of prurient ‘talking about’ by curtain-twitchers in Southwold. He was probably a topic of conversation in the Copper Kettle.

  Dorothy joins forces with three down-and-out Cockneys off for their summer break in the hop fields of Kent. It is almost a holiday and a liberation, but degrading for a clergyman’s daughter. Back in London, after the crop is picked, penniless again, she is arrested for vagrancy after ten hallucinatory nights in Trafalgar Square, narrated in a fractured style in homage to Joyce’s ‘Nighttown’ section in Ulysses, which, thanks to Mabel Fierz’s smuggling, Orwell was currently reading. Though not Orwell’s métier, it is not at all badly done.

  Dorothy is rescued from many fates worse than death (still ‘intact’ under her rags) by a distant aristocratic relative, worried not about her but about the family name. She is buried away in a teaching position, under a pseudonym, in Hayes (‘Southbridge’). It is hateful work and a hateful town. The malign, illiterate proprietor of the school, Mrs Creevy, is in it for the money alone: ‘Her oft-repeated phrase, “It’s the fees I’m after”, was a motto that might be – indeed, ought to be – written over the doors of every private school in England.’ (Including, one supposes, St Cyprian’s in Eastbourne. Not until 1957 did the government trouble itself to inspect these catchpenny establishments or monitor what damage they were doing to the nation’s children.) The school is filthy. The girls are rendered more stupid than nature made them by the educational pigswill that is served up to them. Dorothy’s attempt to introduce general knowledge, ‘interest’ and Shakespeare provokes a parental uprising. She takes to beating the children. ‘Nearly all teachers come to it in the end.’ Here, as in the colonies, the cane rules.

  Eventually Mr Warburton rides in to rescue her. The Knype Hill/Southwold scandal has been extinguished and the gossipmonger, Mrs Semprill, convicted of libel. Dorothy (whose preserved virginity is the most miraculous hymenal survival since Mary’s) resumes her domestic duties for a slightly reformed father. Scrambling his own eggs had been a trial. Dorothy refuses Warburton’s honest proposal of marriage. She would rather wither than be slobbered over by a smelly man. She no longer believes in God, but finds comfort in the church. She will never marry, but will be one of Orwell’s spinsters cycling through the autumn mists to communion.

  Hovering over the narrative is the image of Knype Hill/Southwold as a huge glue-pot. Once there, you’re stuck. The novel ends with the lines: ‘It was beginning to get dark, but, too busy to stop and light the lamp, she worked on, pasting strip after strip of paper into place, with absorbed, with pious concentration, in the penetrating smell of the glue-pot.’ Smells, always smells.

  A Clergyman’s Daughter was the fastest novel Orwell would ever put on paper. He sent it to his agent (appointed by Mabel Fierz) at the beginning of October 1934, already halfway out of the Montague House front door. In a sense, he threw it over his shoulder to settle some scores with Southwold, and made off to London.

  Spite, Bollox and Remorse

  I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

  D. H. LAWRENCE, to Cynthia Asquith, 1913

  I am so miserable struggling in the entrails of that dreadful book . . . loathing the sight of what I have done.

  ORWELL, to Brenda Salkeld

  Orwell suppressed A Clergyman’s Daughter after its first printing during his lifetime and would have liked it to be gone for ever. ‘I oughtn’t to have published it,’ he later said. The reason he gave was authorial disapproval. It was, as literature, ‘bollox’, ‘tripe’, ‘a silly potboiler’. Orwell was never a friend to his own fiction. The truth is probably different. A Clergyman’s Daughter is a cruel book. He was not, when himself, a cruel man. But those ten months in Southwold were a bad time for him; he was not himself. In order to feel the novel’s cruelty one can set up a mind game.

  Assume that George Orwell (known to some as Eric Blair) is reading out his new novel to a small group of invited listeners in the large drawing room in Montague House. It is the late summer of 1935. Tea has been served. Present are his father, mother and sister Avril. Also in the audience are Brenda Salkeld; the school owners, Messrs Eunson and Bennett; the Revd Ernest Parker; and, hovering at the door, the Southwold gossip-mongers – women with loose, malicious tongues. How would they all react to what Eric/George/Mr Blair was reading out to them?

  Avril and Ida’s likely chagrin at the scornful description of their Copper Kettle/Ye Olde Tea Shoppe has been mentioned. Avril – her father’s ‘hand-maiden’, aged, like Dorothy Hare, 27, on the edge of old-maidhood – would have had a particular pang. Was this how her brother saw her? As a no-longer nubile chattel caught for ever in the Southwold glue-pot?

  Richard Blair would have wondered whether the domestic, snobbish, patriarch the Revd Hare (a rhyme in the surname?) was, in some sense, ‘him’. He was, like Hare, boastful about his remotely aristocratic family: he was the great-great-grandson of an earl, and made no secret of it in his clubs. Eric, he might have observed, had always been put off by his removing his false teeth for breakfast. Dorothy too is disgusted by her father’s gumminess when she brings him his morning hot shaving water (did Avril do that?). ‘His voice always sounded muffled and senile until he put his false teeth in.’

  Brenda – the clergyman’s daughter – would have felt the narrative extremely painfully. For years Eric Blair had been pestering her for sex. He was aggressive in his demands. The novel alleges neurotic ‘frigidity’ on her part. Brenda would have thought it payback for not succumbing to Eric. This, for example, is how he describes Dorothy’s antipathy:

  To be kissed or fondled by a man – to feel heavy male arms about her and thick male lips bearing down upon her own – was terrifying and repulsive to her. Even in memory or imagination it made her wince. It was her especial secret, the especial, incurable disability that she carried through life.

  Was this what Eric thought about Brenda and her ‘man’ aversions? That she was a covert lesbian? Brenda had refused the absurd offer to accompany him to the hop fields in 1932. What would have been left of her reputation, and her job at St Felix’s school (a religious establishment), had she gone? (‘Rect
or’s Daughter’s Wild Summer Romps in the Hop Fields! Exclusive!’) In the person of his fictional clergyman’s daughter, Eric put her in the hop fields anyway. A gym mistress, Brenda may, like Dorothy, have believed in the odd cold bath. Her relationship with her clergyman father we know nothing about. It may have been, as Orwell alleges, oppressive. The depiction of her in this novel is a violation: another tearing ‘limb from limb’, as Jacintha Buddicom called her treatment in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  The Hayes and Uxbridge school proprietors – honest men as far as one knows, and one of them, Bennett, educationally idealistic – would have regretted ever taking that Blair fellow on. And what had they done to be represented as the awful Creevy woman?

  Poor Ernest Parker, the curate at St Mary’s who had been so friendly to Mr Blair, would have gasped at his communion assistant’s description, via Dorothy, of the Revd Hare’s communicant, Miss Mayfill:

  In her ancient, bloodless face her mouth was surprisingly large, loose, and wet. The underlip, pendulous with age, slobbered forward, exposing a strip of gum and a row of false teeth as yellow as the keys of an old piano. On the upper lip was a fringe of dark, dewy moustache.