Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  Lawrence took him under his personal care at a sanatorium, Preston Hall in Aylesford, Kent. It was what in Switzerland would be called a Kurort – a place to get well, gradually and expensively. His magic mountain. One firm prescription was no work whatsoever. Lawrence paid for Orwell’s private room – a ‘cell’, he doubtless thought. Privacy doubtless enabled him to smoke his ‘foul black shag’ roll-ups without disturbing more valetudinarian tuberculars.

  Orwell had been placed into convalescent paralysis. Manacled. Between the publication of Homage to Catalonia (April 1938) and Coming Up for Air (June 1939), his literary cv is vacant. He could still think, however. And, in the Preston Hall longueur, memories from his early life came flooding back. It was less a cell, from this aspect, than Proust’s cork-lined room. An apolitical novel, set in his Henley childhood past, was ‘seething’ (Eileen’s term) in his mind: ‘The title I thought of is “Coming Up for Air”’, he confided. It was an appropriate title for a man close himself to terminal suffocation – although he was thinking of the way in which carp come to the surface, in hot weather, and gulp.85 He had got in some fishing at Preston Hall after the annual close season ended on 15 June.

  By spring he was as much on the mend as he would ever be. Eileen’s close friend Lydia Jackson visited him alone. A walk in the estate grounds in the company of an attractive woman had its usual aphrodisiac effect. There occurred the ‘Orwellian pounce’ and what Bowker gallantly calls a ‘moment of dalliance’ and the News of the World that Sunday would have called ‘intimacy’. If not cured, he was himself again. It led to one of the more discomfiting escapades one knows about, as disclosed by Jackson in her memoirs. He pursued her for months afterwards, pressing for a furtive, full-blown affair. She presents herself as having merely submitted that once in the grounds out of charity. She was appalled by the idea of betraying Eileen, her best friend. Eileen was also, Lydia hinted, put off by the smell of sickness he carried about with him.86 Eileen was tolerant of such lapses: the only time we know her to have been badly upset was when he had a long-term ‘serious’ relationship with a secretary in his later Tribune years. But in fact, with mutual tolerance, it was – at this period anyway – an oddly happy marriage. He was the demanding genius; she was the willing helpmeet. But one can fantasize about Lawrence and Gwen huffing and puffing a bit about how their sibling was being treated.

  Morocco: Eileen’s Story

  There are beautiful arches with vile smells coming out of them and adorable children covered in ringworm and flies.

  EILEEN ORWELL on Marrakesh

  Their slender flanks and pointed breasts . . . the odour of spices that clung to their satiny skins.

  ORWELL, nostalgic for the smell of Arab girls, recorded conversationally by Christopher Hollis

  The massed O’Shaughnessy pressure meant that Orwell was, for once, biddable. After five and a half months’ supervised convalescence at Preston Hall, Lawrence insisted that he convalesce in a warm, dry climate. It should have been the South of France, but that was expensive. Neither Orwell had worked gainfully for months and the Côte d’Azur was beyond their means. He was bitter. He felt he had been lied to (he had been, about the seriousness of his condition) and forcibly prevented from working. As Eileen said, ‘He is in debt for the first time in his life & has wasted practically a year out of the very few in which he can expect to function.’ The clock was already ticking on him. A British winter in Wallington would undo all the good Preston Hall had done.

  Eton pitched in to help him. The novelist L. H. Myers, well known in his day, was an admirer and schoolfellow. It is worth repeating that, having learned about Orwell’s plight, Myers dispatched £300 anonymously via a discreet intermediary, Max Plowman (an Adelphi editor). Orwell, years later, would offer honourably to repay it, when he discovered who his benefactor was. But Myers had by then committed suicide. The gesture almost makes one eager to read Myers’s best-known work (an Indian narrative), The Root and the Flower. Orwell’s aura of ‘sanctity’ often inspired disinterested generosity in others. It’s an odd feature of his life.87

  French Morocco was chosen. It was cheap and Orwell may have been curious about French imperialism. It was, of course, in Spanish Morocco that the Civil War began. If a book was in mind, all that survives is a harsh essay, published in an obscure magazine. Even by his standards, Orwell’s eye is cold:

  Sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine. In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves.

  Eileen later said: ‘Of course we were silly to come but I found it impossible to refuse.’ They cruised via liner to Marrakesh, since any feasible rail journey would have taken them through Spain. So cheap were prices they could afford a villa and garden large enough for livestock on the outskirts of town. Backyard goats and chickens again figured in their family life. Marrakesh was sufficiently emetic not to distract Orwell from writing. The city was, if anything, even more revolting to Eileen than to him:

  Marrakech crawls with disease of every kind, the ringworm group, the tuberculosis group, the dysentery group; & if you lunch in a restaurant the flies only show themselves as flies as distinct from black masses when they hurry out for a moment to taste a corpse on its way to the cemetery.88

  Heretical to say so but, from the small samples one has, Eileen often strikes one as the more vivacious writer of the two.

  They were refreshed by a trip to the Atlas Mountains. As in Burma, only in the distant back country could one find anything nobly pre-colonial. Orwell particularly admired the noble savagery of the Berbers and made an odd request that Eileen allow him to sample ‘a young arab girl’. Eileen’s permission for this relief adultery was as inexplicable as his asking permission for it. One assumes it was because, for some reason, conjugal relations had ceased between them. There may have been more than one young Arab girl. The unreliable Harold Acton (a fellow Etonian) describes, in his More Memoirs of an Aesthete (2009), a lubricious conversation: ‘This cadaverous ascetic . . . admitted that he had seldom tasted such bliss as with certain Moroccan girls.’ Cadaverous relic is hard.

  Morocco was less recovery than stay of execution. Orwell lost the weight he had gained at Preston Hall in the first month and there was a bloody relapse. As Eileen told a friend, over the first month he ‘coughed all day & particularly all night so that we didn’t get thirty minutes’ consecutive rest until November’. Towards the end of the stay he was, she said, about where he was when he had started. By that point, as she stoically put it, ‘Now that we’re hardened to the general frightfulness of the country we’re quite enjoying it & Eric is writing a book that pleases both of us very much.’ That she was sharing in the writing of the book is revealing. He liked reading aloud to her and, of course, she typed the fair copies.89

  They returned, in March 1939, with a virtually complete Coming Up for Air, to an England numb with false relief at Chamberlain’s ‘piece of paper’ assurance of peace in their time.

  Real Air

  The very first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin chaff.

  GEORGE BOWLING, in Coming Up for Air

  If Orwell’s last book had been quixotic, Coming Up for Air is the squire Panza’s tale. In a virtuoso act of ventriloquism, Orwell took on the voice, stream of consciousness and personality of George Bowling, a shrewd, tubby, middle-aged (but still lecherous, when he has cash in his pocket to buy sex) insurance salesman. George is recently possessed of a set of gleaming false teeth and a lifelong down-to-earth view of a world going to hell. He is also possessed, at times unconvincingly, of an engagingly Orwellian cast of thought. For example: ‘It’s queer, I thought, as I ate a bit of roll, how dull murders are nowadays.’ Orwell wrote one of his more famous essays on the same, De Quinceyan subject, seven years later. Orwellian, too, is Bowling’s presci
ent vision of what is just a year or two away: 1984, to put the obviously resonant date to it, is prophesied. It is not the war, but the ‘after-war’ that will bring the real disaster:

  The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It’s all going to happen.

  Having come into a seventeen-quid windfall, Bowling resolves, rather than buying himself a woman and some razzle as he normally does, to revisit that foreign country, his childhood past in Lower Binfield – a place where the sun always shone and the fish always bit. Patently Henley-on-Thames. He doesn’t tell his nag of a wife Hilda. (There are no good wives in Orwell’s fiction; in his life there were two.) George’s trip back to Edwardian Binfield is inspired by a rare whiff, in motorized London where the latest fast food is synthetic fishburger, of a carthorse’s droppings. Dung brings back the ‘real air’ of his childhood.

  The narrative is strung along George’s remembered life story. He was born the son of a high-street seed merchant, doomed to extinction by competition from larger firms than his. There are echoes throughout of Orwell’s favourite novel, H. G. Wells’s The History of Mr Polly. In that wonderful novel, it will be remembered, the hero, at peace at last, is pictured fishing serenely alongside the Thames. For Orwell, that would be Paradise Regained. Bowling left the smell of the big schoolroom and its smell of ink and dust and boots aged fifteen. He was a clever lad, but no one encouraged him to do anything worthwhile with his cleverness. He goes to work as a counter assistant in a Sainsbury’s-like food shop (the kind of establishment which was destroying small shops like Orwell’s in Wallington). It’s a ‘good’ job. Come the ‘War’ he is swept up and – such is the fearsome casualty rate – promoted to the commissioned rank of ‘temporary gentleman’. Not a good job. A ‘Blighty’ wound, and his knowledge of ‘food supplies’ (in other words, how to slice bacon), puts him in charge of ‘Twelve Mile Dump’, a supplies store that has no supplies. It does, however, have a vast quantity of ‘Good-Bad’ novels hanging around which constitute George Bowling’s higher education.

  On demobilization he is a gentleman no more, and drifts into what he does best – fooling customers into buying ‘insurance’ in a world about to be destroyed. He is, in 1939, a five-pound-a-week man, with the prospect of retiring a seven-pound-a-week man on a petty pension from Pearl Insurance. ‘And properly speaking that’s the end of my story’ – except that, with seventeen quid burning a hole in his pocket, he wants to recover his temps perdus.

  Coming Up for Air is the most aromatic of Orwell’s novels. There are passages that fairly caress the nostrils, as, for example (he’s thinking of the epic heatwave of 1911):

  It was a hot July that year. How we sweated in the shop, and how the cheese and the ground coffee smelt! And then the cool of the evening outside, the smell of night-stocks and pipe-tobacco in the lane behind the allotments, the soft dust underfoot, and the nightjars hawking after the cockchafers.

  But at the heart of the novel is fishing – the ‘angling’ celebrated by Izaak Walton. Visitors noticed a fishing rod and tackle at the foot of Orwell’s bed when he was dying. It was the only luxury (it cost a whopping eight quid) we know him to have bought himself. The rod was purchased on General Election Day, 1945. Clement Attlee, the winner, reminded him, Orwell said, of a dead fish which was still slimy. He did not cheer much at the result. Coarse fishing had irresistible attractions and profound meaning for Orwell. Angling, even more than football (whose massed supporters he feared might be proto-fascistic), is the people’s true sport. It is individualistic and non-competitive. It promotes rumination, not hot blood. It connects the angler with the rhythms of nature. And its artful skills have been built up over years and passed down, generation to generation. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – a title that would have made Orwell’s skin crawl) insist that angling is as sadistic as badger baiting. ‘Fish’, they say, ‘suffer horribly at the hands of anglers.’ They are right, but no political party dares bring in a ‘ban’ such as that which did away with John Peel’s (‘in his coat so gay’) successors. Angling matters too much to the working classes. One might as well abolish beer and skittles.

  For Orwell there was also the peculiar attraction that fishing is an extremely smelly sport – but one whose smells attract and uplift, like the ‘real air’ of Binfield. Toff fishing, for salmon and trout, with cunning artificial flies, thigh-boots, landing nets, protected rivers and – at its toffiest – ghillies, is relatively scentless. Coarse fishing has a rich menu for the nose. For example, the primitive bread-paste bait (no roach or gudgeon can resist it), moistened with spittle for those at the bent-pin entry level, then kneaded into a ball in a handkerchief with thumb and index finger. You smell it, and by the end of the day your hands smell of it and it of your hands. There is the dangerous toxic taste of the lead weights, which you bite onto the catgut. The loamy smell of earthworms and ranker smell of maggots (‘gentles’), still wriggling as the hook goes through them (no PETA cares a damn about them). Overhanging it all are the ambient smells of the river, which change during the day with the course of the weather and season. Orwell notes the increase in the aroma of wild peppermint as the day’s sport comes to a twilight end.

  In my youth (I was as ‘mad’ about freshwater fishing as Orwell and Bowling are),90 I was aware of the different smells the caught fish had. Eels, for example, which wriggle furiously until their heads are cut off – and even then squirm a bit – had a deep, slimy smell that stuck on your hands like glue, drying and flaking off like piscine dandruff by the end of the day. Dace, the most beautifully darting of freshwater fish, were so fragrant you could eat them raw, as the Japanese do their favourite fish. The smell of fish is notoriously erotic for the renifleur-inclined, and there is a vague sexual gratification that one doesn’t like to dwell on too much. It is exclusively a male sport. The sensory ensemble of freshwater fishing is much more subtle than that of sea-fishing, which for Orwell, like all true anglers, is second best.

  Orwell was ‘mad’ about fishing from childhood to adolescence, and fond of it, thereafter, through life. It is, Bowling says in a fine rhapsody, the ‘soul’ of English civilization. Fishing under a willow tree, by a quiet pool (when there were still such things),

  belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler. There’s a kind of peacefulness even in the names of English coarse fish. Roach, rudd, dace, bleak, barbel, bream, gudgeon, pike, chub, carp, tench. They’re solid kind of names. The people who made them up hadn’t heard of machine-guns, they didn’t live in terror of the sack or spend their time eating aspirins, going to the pictures, and wondering how to keep out of the concentration camp.

  Bowling, newly kitted out, aims to revisit a secret pool he came across as a boy in Binfield, where he saw a vast pike. He finds the pool a stinking rubbish dump. At the end of the novel he goes back to the real world of fishburgers, motor cars, the shrewish Hilda and, in a year or two, bet on it, the concentration camp. But he’s a clever kind of fellow. Who knows? George Bowling may dodge the Gestapo bullet.

  Unreal Air

  To Jack Common, the friend who was looking after Wallington while they were in Morocco, Orwell wrote: ‘I don’t know whether or not you will be fitting on your gas mask by the time this gets to you.’ In the run-up to war it was assumed that the bomber would always get through and airborne fleets would rain down on Britain not just explosives (for which an air-raid shelter campaign was launched), but poison gas.

  Gas mask, as issued by the Ministry of Home Security, c. 1939/40.

  Remarkably, some 40 million of the protective devices were issued, nationwide, in 1938–9. I’m
one of the few Britons living who actually wore a government-issued gas mask in the fond expectation that it might, perhaps, save my little life. In the first years of the war the gas-mask case was the nation’s ubiquitous unisex handbag. By the end of the war (when the Germans, anyway, would have dropped nerve gas, against which masks were no protection) the gas mask, swinging in its canvas bag by the side, was history. The bags were, oddly, much valued by anglers. The gas masks themselves were nauseating. The smell of the protective chemicals, and new rubber, was itself enough to produce a faint. For lungs like Orwell’s, mustard gas would have been preferable.

  There is an oddly surreal event narrated in Coming Up for Air. A bomb is accidentally dropped by the RAF on Binfield. There is panic – the war has started! George sees what looks like a stampede of Gadarene swine:

  At the other end of the market-place the High Street rises a little. And down this little hill a herd of pigs was galloping, a sort of huge flood of pig-faces. The next moment, of course, I saw what it was. It wasn’t pigs at all, it was only the schoolchildren in their gas-masks.

  Pigs were always Farmer Orwell’s least-loved animals. Gas-masked pigs were something out of Hieronymus Bosch.

  War

  1939 was Orwell’s worst year.

  D. J. TAYLOR

  Coming Up for Air was published by Gollancz. He was no longer a Stalinist and was keen to re-establish a relationship with Orwell. The novel was well received but, since the war it solemnly warned against actually broke out three months after publication, it was après coup. The nation had put away its fishing rods.