Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  The widowed Orwell was lonely and frantically asked any eligible woman who came his way to marry him. If they came up to Jura on spec, they were not lured. The house was at the end of an eight-mile dirt track. Orwell had no reliable van, only an unreliable motorbike and pillion. The west coast of Scotland has the highest rainfall in Britain. His pied-à-terre in Islington – during some of the worst winters in history – was freezing and leaked. His lungs needed warm, dry air and his body total rest. The fact that he was infectiously tubercular (he carefully avoided breathing on Richard and had him x-rayed) was no attraction in the marriage market.

  Astor bent regulations to get supplies of the new American ‘wonder drug’, streptomycin. Orwell proved allergic – a cruel irony. Emergency visits to Scottish hospitals were followed by an extended sanatorium stay, failed surgical intervention and finally the private room at UCL that he would never leave alive. With an income now rising to the level of wealth, he could afford to die (12 guineas a week) in more comfort than he had ever lived.

  Final Arrangements

  The reasons why I married him are not clear.

  SONIA BROWNELL, later Orwell

  His last weeks sped into a gallop to the grave. He finished, with huge labour, Nineteen Eighty-Four in March 1949. It was published three months later. In September he was admitted to UCL hospital. Sonia agreed to marry him and did so, in hospital, him prone in bed, her standing in front of the hospital chaplain, on 13 October. He made his will three days before he died, in the same bed, on 21 January 1950. Its terms made Sonia the sole beneficiary and co-executor with his first patron, Richard Rees, of his literary estate. His son, Richard, was made the beneficiary of a less generous insurance policy. His ever-neglected sister, Avril, who would be Richard’s carer (as she had been over the last few years), was apparently left nothing directly.

  Two funerals (one in London) and interment in the churchyard of All Saints, Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire – farming country – followed. He was, for the first time, in his last few months, admitted into Who’s Who.

  Nineteen Eighty-Four

  If we ask what it is he stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is: the virtue of not being, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence.

  LIONEL TRILLING (1949)

  Nineteen Eighty-Four will be a curio in 1984.

  New Left Review (1979)

  Nineteen Eighty-Four was first conceived ‘some time between mid-1940 and the end of 1943’, when it looked quite likely that Britain would lose the war. Orwell’s first outlines of his new novel, then provisionally entitled ‘The Last Man in Europe’, emerge in his notebook between January 1944 and the summer of 1946, when victory was followed by crippling austerity in Britain. By the last date, some fifty pages were written. The year 1946 saw the first fully fledged ‘English Socialist’ (‘Ingsoc’) government in the UK, under Clement Attlee. The first complete draft was written up by summer 1947, with the inception of the Cold War, which would last until 1989. The novel was finished by October 1947 and extensively revised and typed up in May–November 1948. This labour, it is plausibly suggested, accelerated Orwell’s final decline and death. He sacrificed years of life for the completion of the book. Knowing that, he admitted, cast a pessimistic cloud over the narrative.

  The manuscript was sent to Orwell’s publishers in December 1948. The first edition went on sale in the U.S., initially, as a cut-price Book of the Month Club volume, in June 1949; a few days later it was brought out in the UK as a 10-shilling hardback. Orwell died in January 1950. After five years of socialist government, Winston Churchill became Conservative prime minister in October 1951. Big Brother had arrived.

  As I write, the English teachers’ unions have prescribed Nineteen Eighty-Four in the same way that, in my school days, the New Testament was prescribed to the pupils of the country. And, in its day, Mao’s little red book in China. Orwell’s book needs no exegesis from me. But from the point of view of ‘nasocriticism’, it is worth noting that it depicts a world in which all wholesome smell is a thing of the past. The only fragrant relics of times when such smells were around are Julia’s hair, the whiff of good coffee and wine which the perplexed Winston and Julia encounter in O’Brien’s luxurious quarters, the antique redolence of Mr Charrington’s junk shop whose oil lamps give off ‘an unclean but friendly smell’ (a typically nice discrimination) and, most ecstatically, the idyllic, one-off lovemaking in the ‘Golden Country’ among a host of bluebells, with their ‘faint sickly smell’ (another nice discrimination). Otherwise it is Parsons’s sweat (worse still his shit, as they wait for Room 101), boiled cabbage (Orwell’s pet culinary hate for its persistence), ‘tinny’ tea and coffee, Victory fags, rot-gut Victory Gin and stews with unspeakable matter, masquerading as meat. The stenches of totalitarian oppression.

  There is not a single animal in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Unless, that is, you count the rat, debating whether to start with Winston’s cheeks or eyeballs. Its rodent smell will never, after he has been re-educated, leave Winston’s nostrils. And the working class (‘proles’) smell, if anything, worse than they did in the Brookers’ lodging house in Wigan.

  ‘Cause of Death: Suicide?’

  The death certificate was unequivocal: Orwell died in the middle of the night, with no nurse around, of an unexpected haemorrhage of one of his lungs. One could argue a different cause of death: suicide. He would rather die a young(ish) man than grow old.

  Orwell’s growing-up years coincided with world cataclysm – ‘the War’, as it was called for decades afterwards, as if humankind had known no other conflict. His school assemblies were darkened by lists of former pupils, gloriously ‘fallen’. You soon will join them, was the daily subliminal message. You will die, many of you, virgins as regards everything enjoyable in life, never having lived. Pro gloria et patria. The old, be consoled, will live on to mourn you and build monuments on which your name will be scratched. The ‘sediment’ of that ceaseless, juvenile carnage Orwell diagnosed as burning ‘hatred’. Not hatred for King and Country (‘Old England’ was still lovable for its Englishness) or the Empire (disgusting ‘racket’ though that was) but the ‘old’. The survivors. Orwell waxed eloquently on the subject (now himself, at 1933, no longer young) in The Road to Wigan Pier.

  But those years, during and just after the war, were a queer time to be at school, for England was nearer revolution than she has been since or had been for a century earlier . . . it was a revolt of youth against age, resulting directly from the war . . . the war had been conducted mainly by old men and had been conducted with supreme incompetence . . . At that time there was, among the young, a curious cult of hatred of ‘old men’.

  The old cut a very poor figure in Orwell’s fiction. It is, as Yeats would say, ‘no country for old men’. He hated, viscerally, senility and the physical ugliness of age that came with the remorselessly passing years. One can imagine him sharing Swift’s morbid but fascinated disgust at the Struldbruggs – those ever-decaying, ever-living corpses. There are many reasons for not wanting to be old. The mirror is one. Swift’s picture of age is grisly and unforgettably accurate:

  At ninety, they lose their teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason, they never can amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect, they are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable.

  In Nineteen Eighty-Four the horror of the street prostitute Winston uses is not that she stinks (bad enough), or that she is mindless (no ‘hope’ in this particular prole), but, ‘When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman,
fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same.’

  Orwell’s favourite poet was A. E. Housman. It was a high point in his life that he met him, at Cambridge, in 1927. And it’s a safe guess that one of his (and everyone’s) favourite Housman poems was ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’: ‘Now you will not swell the rout / Of lads that wore their honours out, / Runners whom renown outran / And the name died before the man.’ Orwell, it is safe to say, loathed the idea of himself getting old, losing what remained of his teeth, his fine head of hair and, horror of horrors, his mind, like the Struldbruggs. He must have observed that Struldbruggian decline in his eighty-year-old father. This leads to a plausible speculation. Orwell deliberately took life-threatening risks with his health. In Paris his failure to look after himself led to his ending up in the awful paupers’ ward with one of his recurrent (but wholly preventable) bouts of pneumonia. It is plausibly suggested that this is where his TB was contracted. A little care of himself would have prevented that. Virtually everything he did in life was bad for his lungs and his lifespan. Not least, of course, the chain-smoking – even in hospital. He put off treatments for his pulmonary condition, denying it was real. He did not have to raise his head above the trench parapet in Aragon and get shot in the throat. He did not have to take a long, unnecessary, motorbike ride in freezing, sleety December, clad only in a sweater and an Eton scarf. That image is glorious. The pneumonia (his most serious bout) that followed is not. He did not have to go to Burma, a white man’s grave for someone with his weakness. It ruined his health, he said airily. It brought his death that much closer. Jura was a fulfilment of a lifelong dream, but in winter, miles from even a general practitioner, it was ill-advised, verging on madness. Or suicidal. Orwell’s life was one long game of Russian roulette. In January 1950, when he was 46, the bullet was in the chamber.

  A few years earlier, in his 1942 essay ‘How the Poor Die’, he had intimated his revulsion at living beyond youth, and his horror of living beyond middle age:

  One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old . . . ‘Natural’ death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful. Even at that, it makes a difference if you can achieve it in your own home and not in a public institution.

  The word ‘smelly’ resonates here as it does through everything he wrote. The odour of mortality. Write on the unofficial death certificate, ‘suicide’.

  APPENDIX I

  Blair/Orwell’s Smoking Diary

  He nearly killed me with his black tobacco.

  PADDY DONOVAN, Orwell’s comrade in the Aragon trenches

  The above title should have a parenthesis ‘with apologies to Simon Gray’. It was Gray who, in one of the great comic works of the last half-century, identified the essence of his being in the cigarettes he dragged on. I smoke, therefore I am.

  Cyril Connolly recalls visiting Eric Blair in his room at Eton, reposing coolly among ‘a litter of cigarette ash’. Doubtless there was an overflowing ashtray in the hospital room where he died. In the notes for novels he might, if he lived, write alongside his bed in UCH was one provisionally called ‘Smoking Room Story’. It could be the story of George Orwell’s life.

  It is not recorded when Orwell had his first drag. Like one’s first lover’s kiss, he himself would have known. It was when he was very young, in Henley, one guesses. And furtive – a ‘behind the cycle sheds’ kind of thing. By the time he got to Eton, he had what would be a lifelong ‘habit’. His taste, and the kind of cigarette he favoured, changed over the years. When hard up, he went for the working-class standby, ‘Wild [“Willy”] Woodbines’ (a year’s use, he calculated, could be had for £40). The name ‘Wild Woodbine’ contained a literary allusion, and Orwell must have been one of the few of the puffers who recognized and relished it: ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows; Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). In his down-and-out period, in Paris and London, he developed a taste for harsher, ‘foul-smelling’ roll-ups. He would be loyal to Gallic ‘black shag’ tobacco for life. It fascinated the children he taught, in his school-teaching year, that he had learned in Paris how to roll a cigarette single-handed.

  As foul as his roll-ups was the stench of the places Orwell visited in this down-and-out phase of his life. The following, for example, is from ‘The Spike’:

  Willy Woodbines.

  In the morning they told us we must work till eleven, and set us to scrubbing out one of the dormitories . . . The dormitory was a room of fifty beds, close together, with that warm, faecal stink that you never seem to get away from in the workhouse . . . These workhouses seem all alike, and there is something intensely disgusting in the atmosphere of them. The thought of all those grey-faced, ageing men living a very quiet, withdrawn life in a smell of w.c.s, and practising homosexuality, makes me feel sick. But it is not easy to convey what I mean, because it is all bound up with the smell of the workhouse.

  Tobacco would have to be super-foul to beat that.

  Around the time that he went down and out, Orwell began to use the roll-up machines that became popular in the 1920s – and more so in the Depression years, when shop-bought packet cigarettes were out of reach for many. Even when he could afford ready-mades, Orwell liked the working-class statement that rolling your own made, as he liked drinking his tea from the saucer in the BBC canteen. It made a point.

  Gold Flake.

  Josh Indar has written an authoritative survey on Orwell’s ‘smoking obsession’.1 His dabbling, for example, with ‘green cigars’ in Burma. There are 41 references, Indar calculates, to smoking in Down and Out in Paris and London, and the characteristically Orwellian comment, ‘It was tobacco that made everything tolerable.’ As a tramp, doubtless he picked up and smoked – along with Paddy – ‘dog ends’. Part of the tramp’s constant battle with authority was preserving a tobacco stash from the strip-searches when entering the spike. ‘We would’, writes Orwell, in his notes for Down and Out,

  Player’s Weights.

  [smuggle] our matches and tobacco, for it is forbidden to take these into nearly all spikes, and one is supposed to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in our socks, except for the twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the tobacco in their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with contraband until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of elephantiasis.

  Note the ‘we’: smoking, and its paraphernalia, was one of the few things that put the Etonian on equal terms with the working-class man – symbolized by the pseudo-handshake of the ‘offer’. If you couldn’t smoke, you’d put it ‘behind your ear’, because your turn to offer would, in time, come.

  The ever-present cigarette.

  In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock comes close to nervous breakdown with only four ciggies to last him till payday. His brand is Gold Flake, with their distinctive canary-yellow packet. When ‘short’, however, he has to make do with Player’s Weights (poor relative of the ‘Player’s Please’, which were not quite so proletarian), so called because they were originally sold by the weight, not the number. The second paragraph of Aspidistra is one of tobacco-addiction torment:

  The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr McKechnie’s bookshop, Gordon – Gordon Comstock, last member of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already – lounged across the table, pushing a four-penny packet of Player’s Weights open and shut with his thumb.

  He has four cigarettes left, and no money to buy a new supply for two days. ‘Tobaccoless’ hours stretch before the ‘last member of the Comstock family’.

  In Homage to Catalonia, tobacco is recorded by Orwell as being one of the five things a soldier in the trenches cannot live without. To paraphrase Napoleon, a
n army marches on its lungs. At a very low point the POUM ration sinks to five a day. The first thing Orwell did, on recovering from being shot in the throat, was ask his nurse for a cigarette. He writes:

  I wonder what is the appropriate first action when you come from a country at war and set foot on peaceful soil. Mine was to rush to the tobacco-kiosk and buy as many cigars and cigarettes as I could stuff into my pockets.

  George Bowling, in Coming Up for Air (between puffs, presumably), smokes cigarettes and, when he is feeling good, cigars, like the proverbial chimney. He had an early taste for Abdulla: ‘the one with the Egyptian soldiers on it’.

  As a mark of his new bipedality, the former pig smokes a pipe in Animal Farm. And most readers, particularly smokers who roll up, recall Winston Smith, in the first chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four, forgetting to keep his wretched Victory cigarette upright, and the tobacco tipping out on to the floor.

  Cigarettes were one of the things that kept the British sane during the Second World War. In his essay ‘Books vs. Cigarettes’ of 1946, Orwell calculates that he smokes six ounces of Player’s tobacco a week, spending £40 a year to sustain the habit, £15 more than he spends on reading material. If most hand-rolled cigarettes contain about a gram of tobacco each, Orwell must have smoked close to 170 cigarettes a week, a little more than a pack per day. Empson, working alongside Orwell in the BBC, found the aura of ‘shag’ he generated ‘disgusting’. But, he notes, it was preferable to the body odour of Orwell himself. J. J. Ross, the author of Orwell’s Cough, concludes: ‘A heavy smoking habit probably also contributed to his gaunt appearance.’