Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  26 Spender delivered the lofty pronouncement in a memorial essay in The World (June 1950).

  27 See Richard Lance Keeble, ‘Orwell, Astor, and Me’, www.orwellsociety.com, February 2012.

  28 The clearest demonstration is the article Orwell wrote in April 1945, ‘Antisemitism in Britain’, in Contemporary Jewish Record. Bernard Crick notes that by this point he was ‘fully purged of the mild and conventional but more or less clear anti-Semitism which appeared early in Down and Out in Paris and London and his wartime diaries’. The mischievous Muggeridge, surveying the many Jewish mourners at Orwell’s funeral, maintained that he was ‘strongly anti-Semite at heart’, which seems contradictory.

  29 A comprehensive survey of the BYT phenomenon is given by D. J. Taylor in Bright Young People (London, 2007). Eton is prominent but the book does not include George Orwell.

  30 See Kathryn Hughes, who had a childhood connection with the Buddicoms, ‘Such Were the Joys’, The Guardian (17 February 2007). The above account is largely taken from her.

  31 See, for example, D. J. Taylor, ‘Orwell and the Rats’, pp. 143–7.

  32 Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, in the well-known passage excoriating himself as ‘an odious little snob’ in his schooldays.

  33 For Orwell big-game shooting on a motorbike, with his pal ‘Robbie’ (Captain H. R. Robinson), see Gerry Abbot, ‘Robbie and the Poet’, SBBR, IV/I (Spring 2006), www.soas.ac.uk.

  34 Crick has the most useful summary of Orwell’s trial plans for this novel, which was very long in the writing and publication.

  35 The conversation is recorded in John Haffenden’s William Empson, vol. II: ‘Against the Christians’ (Oxford, 2011). For more on this period in Orwell’s life, and his relationship with Empson, and his wife, see below.

  36 This anecdote was first turned up by Stansky and Abrahams. It has been made much of by subsequent biographers.

  37 Caldwell was the bestselling author of such 25-cent shockers as God’s Little Acre (1933) and Tobacco Road (1932).

  38 So described in Burmese Days.

  39 The memorable comment was first turned up in an interview by Crick. Arthur Koestler also likened Orwell to a ‘Burmese sergeant’.

  40 See J. J. Ross, ‘Tuberculosis, Bronchiectasis, and Infertility: What Ailed George Orwell?’, http://cid.oxfordjournals.org, June 2005.

  41 In Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough (London, 2012). Ross writes with a trained physician’s authority.

  42 Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Orwell Looks at the World’, in George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974). O’Brien’s charge is refuted vigorously by Christopher Hitchens in Why Orwell Matters (New York, 2003).

  43 Lord Curzon of Kedleston was the vigorously reforming viceroy and governor general of India, 1899–1905. His influence was still palpable in Orwell’s day.

  44 Information taken from Michael Silvestri, ‘The Thrill of Simply Dressing Up’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, II/2 (Fall 2001).

  45 See George Woodcock’s The Crystal Spirit (London, 1966).

  46 Orwell took the word ‘prole’, a central term in Nineteen Eighty-Four, from Jack London’s dystopian science-fiction work The Iron Heel (New York, 1908). A direct influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four, the title of London’s work inspired one of the famous lines in the novel, when O’Brien tells Winston, ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’

  47 John Rodden, The Unexamined Orwell (Austin, TX, 2011), p. 300. Rodden is informative on this and other aspects of Orwell’s life recently thrown up.

  48 ‘Orwell’s Fear and Loathing in Southwold’, East Anglian Daily Times (26 April 2003).

  49 This letter, and others of a similar intimate kind, were first made generally available in A Kind of Compulsion: 1903–1936, ed. Peter Davison and Ian Angus (London, 1999). Some of the Orwell–Salkeld correspondence is still, apparently, withheld.

  50 Bowker gives the fullest account of this unsettled period of Orwell’s life and his tangled relationships with women.

  51 No book has been written about Collings, although he deserves one. The best account of his life is given in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  52 For background on Collings see ‘Hubert Dennis Collings’, www.zoominfo.com/p/Hubert-Collings/1337240949.

  53 See my introduction to the Everyman Classics edition of Brave New World (London, 2014).

  54 Pritchett made the much-quoted witticism in his obituary of Orwell, published in the New Statesman (28 January 1950).

  55 For the florescence of expatriate literature in between-wars Paris, see Hugh D. Ford, Published in Paris (New York, 1975).

  56 He confided the fact to his Hampstead friend, Mabel Fierz. See below for the friendship, which proved very useful to Orwell.

  57 It was eventually published in Peter Davison and Ian Angus’s A Kind of Compulsion.

  58 As usual, Bowker is authoritative on this episode.

  59 The authoritative life of Orwell’s first publisher is Ruth Dudley Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (London, 1987).

  60 For a concise account of Britain’s idiosyncratic vagrancy laws, see ‘A Short History of English Vagrancy Laws’, www.southernafrica-litigationcentre.org/i/wp-content/uploads/2013/o7/o4_SALC-NoJustice-Report_A-Short-History-of-English-Vagrancy-Laws.pdf.

  61 Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘A Knight of the Woeful Countenance’, in The World of George Orwell, ed. Miriam Gross (London, 1972). It was Crick’s essay in this volume that induced Sonia to replace the tactically non-productive ‘authorized’ biographer, Muggeridge, with the very productive Crick.

  62 See, for this and the following account of Orwell in Hayes, Crick’s biography; and Mike Paterson, ‘“One of the Most God-forsaken Places I Have Ever Struck”: George Orwell in Hayes’, on the London Historians’ Blog, https://londonhistorians.wordpress.com, 16 November 2011.

  63 A useful collection of reviews of Orwell’s published works is compiled by Jeffrey Meyers, ed., in George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (London, 1997).

  64 A concise history of the ILP is given by Mordecai Ryan in www.workersliberty.org/node/5391.

  65 See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford, 1956).

  66 Orwell reviewed Connolly’s novel, The Rock Pool, a study of rich bohemianism, a few months later. ‘Mr Connolly rather admires the disgusting beasts he depicts,’ he observed tartly.

  67 Valerie Allen offers a fascinating account of the venerable history of social flatulence, acceptable and unacceptable, in On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (New York, 2010).

  68 Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French Social Imagination, trans. Miriam Kochan (Cambridge, MA, 1986).

  69 See George Orwell, ‘Antisemitism in Britain’, http://orwell.ru, April 1945.

  70 The authoritative biography of Burt, a highly controversial figure in his field, is L. S. Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt: Psychologist (Ithaca, NY, 1979).

  71 In the preface to the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm (1947).

  72 The anecdote was turned up by the early-bird biographers Stansky and Abrahams, who were able to interview many still-living witnesses.

  73 See, for example, www.orwelltoday.com/reader1984poemeileen2.shtml.

  74 Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson, and Humphry House: three critics who went on to revolutionize Victorian studies.

  75 Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (New York, 1959).

  76 I am gratefully following here, and above, D. J. Taylor’s analysis, quotation and interpretations of the letters, which he discussed in ‘George Orwell: Another Piece of the Puzzle’, The Guardian, on 10 December 2005, two years after his prizewinning Orwell biography was published. The letters have not yet, I believe, been published in full.

  77 He confided this desire, and his experiment, to Harold Acton. See Gordon Bowker, ‘The Road to Morocco’, http://theorwellprize.co.uk.


  78 See Taylor, ‘Another Piece of the Puzzle’.

  79 For example, the ‘nancy poets’ W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, and their patron Nancy Cunard. See The Road to Wigan Pier and ‘Political Reflections on the Crisis’, The Adelphi (December 1938).

  80 Taylor, ‘Another Piece of the Puzzle’.

  81 George Orwell, ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’, New England Weekly (July and September 1937).

  82 Bowker is particularly illuminating and informed on this episode in Orwell’s Spanish sojourn.

  83 Colls gives an extremely well-informed account of the Spanish episode in George Orwell: English Rebel (Oxford, 2013).

  84 For the enigmatic relationship of Eileen, Georges and George, see Marc Wildermeersch, George Orwell’s Commander in Spain: The Enigma of Georges Kopp (London, 2013).

  85 Not, as Orwell seems to have thought, because of flies on the surface, but because the warm water there has higher oxygen levels.

  86 I follow Bowker in this episode, working from Jackson’s memoirs, written as ‘Elisaveta Fen’ (specifically A Russian’s England: Reminiscences of Years 1926–1940 [London, 1976]), and her literary remains, archived at Leeds University.

  87 There is obscurity about this ‘anonymous’ gift. My suspicion is that it was the ever-generous Rees (proprietor of The Adelphi) and that the Myers story was a tactful fiction.

  88 Taylor, ‘Another Piece of the Puzzle’.

  89 Here again I am indebted to D. J. Taylor.

  90 I have written about it at length in The Boy who Loved Books (and hooks, I might add) (London, 2007).

  91 See Stephen Cullen, Home Guard Socialism (Warwick, 2006).

  92 One wonders whether Eileen’s Trotskyist/ILP record led to her removal from the more sensitive censorship division, where she originally worked.

  93 See Bowker’s analysis in George Orwell, pp. 326–7.

  94 There was a chronic shortage of stenographers and typists in the 1940s. Eileen was in this respect irreplaceable.

  95 Taylor, ‘Another Piece of the Puzzle’.

  96 For an account of Horizon in Blitzed London and safe Cornwall see John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: A Literary Life (London, 2004).

  97 For Peter Watson’s central role as a patron and friend, see Adrian Clark and Jeremy Dronfield, Queer Saint: The Cultured Life of Peter Watson (London, 2015).

  98 I had the story from Natasha Spender, who was there.

  99 See Richard Lance Keeble, ‘Orwell, Astor – and Me’, http://bestof.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk, 8 December 2011.

  100 See Richard Cockett, David Astor and the Observer (London, 1990).

  101 The decision was later reversed, but the initial objection was symptomatic of the lingering distrust the BBC has for Orwell. John Peel, the disc jockey, they are happy to commemorate.

  102 The preceding and following account of Orwell’s wartime relationship with Empson is taken from John Haffenden’s William Empson, vol. II: ‘Against the Christians’ (Oxford, 2011).

  103 Empson encouraged Hetta’s promiscuity: ‘I loved you in bed with young men,/ Your arousers and foils and adorers,’ he wrote in one of his poems. Orwell, alas, was not an arouser.

  104 Denis Donoghue, ‘Plain English’, London Review of Books, vi/24 (20 December 1984).

  105 Raymond Williams, George Orwell (London, 1971).

  106 The windowpane analogy was actually made a couple of months later, in the essay ‘Why I Write’ (Summer 1946).

  107 See Bowker, George Orwell, p. 368, for Orwell’s pleasure in gutting animals he had slain.

  108 Trotsky’s birth name was Bronstein.

  109 Richard was later put down for Westminster. He went to neither and – something that would have delighted his father – went successfully into farming.

  110 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 2000).

  111 J. J. Ross gives the complex condition of his health in his last years, Orwell’s Cough, pp. 216–17.

  112 Richard Blair, ‘Remembering Jura’, http://theorwellprize.co.uk, 5 October 2012.

  Appendix I: Blair/Orwell’s Smoking Diary

  1 Josh Indar, ‘Bumming Smokes in Paris and London: George Orwell’s Obsession with Tobacco’, www.popmatters.com, 18 June 2009. I gratefully borrow from Indar’s witty account.

  Acknowledgements

  I owe a particular debt to Bill Hamilton, and through him the Orwell Estate. I owe another debt to Gillian Furlong, and the curators of the archive of Orwell materials at UCL. I am very grateful to Ben Hayes, at Reaktion Books, for encouraging what must have looked like a very strange book, and helping lick it into less strange shape. Martha Jay has been tireless in editing and re-editing the work. Anything which has escaped her eye is entirely my responsibility. Peter Davison I knew well fifty years ago. No one working on Orwell cannot be indebted to the majestic materials he has discovered, gathered, marshalled and published over the last half-century.

  Photo Acknowledgements

  The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it.

  © Collings, images courtesy of the Orwell Archive, UCL Library Special Collections: pp. 116, 165; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten photograph collection, Washington, DC: p. 19; © Estate of Donald McGill: p. 155; images courtesy of the Orwell Archive, UCL Library Special Collections: pp. 41, 44, 48, 53, 71, 78, 85, 86, 97, 140, 163, 200, 235.

  Index

  Abbot, Gerry 245

  Abrahams, William 37, 49, 65–6, 70, 74–6, 82, 138, 161, 245, 247

  Acton, Harold 82, 97, 98, 188, 247

  Adam, Eugene 166

  Adelphi, The 79, 100, 127, 138, 150, 157, 158, 247

  Allen, Valerie 247

  Angus, Ian 8, 36, 46, 246

  Animal Farm 11–12, 34, 37, 82, 92, 97, 198, 202, 207–8, 215, 219–24, 236, 247

  ‘Antisemitism in Britain’ 244, 247

  Aristophanes 74

  ‘Art of Donald McGill, The’ 244

  ‘As I Please’ (columns) 206

  Astor, David 57, 79–81, 181, 195, 202–6, 214, 223, 225

  Attlee, Clement 191, 205, 226

  Auden, W. H. 25–6, 176, 247

  Austen, Jane 11, 13, 82, 139

  Ayer, A. J. 195

  Bacon, Francis 45

  Bagehot, Walter 148

  Bakunin, Mikhail 108

  Bastian, Hilda 236

  Bataille, Georges 43, 45

  Beckett, Samuel 130, 158

  Bennett, Arnold 178

  Bennett, John 136, 143–4

  Bergman, Ingmar 22

  Bevan, Aneurin 205

  Black Bethlehem 198

  Blair, Avril (later ‘Dunn’) 38–9, 51, 53–5, 84, 109–10, 112, 115, 133, 138, 143, 163, 195, 199, 224, 226

  Blair, Eileen (later ‘Orwell’) 43, 47, 114, 156, 156, 159–68, 170–71, 173–5, 180, 183–8, 195–202, 210, 219, 221, 248

  Blair, Ida 22, 38–9, 51–6, 57, 60, 62, 70, 72, 83, 88, 115, 128, 130, 133, 138, 143, 163, 195, 200

  Blair, Marjorie 54, 55, 57, 72, 84, 109, 134

  Blair, Richard (father) 37, 51–5, 57, 62, 68, 70–72, 73, 75, 83, 88–90, 110, 115, 123, 133, 143, 200

  Blair, Richard Horatio (son) 32, 54, 199–200, 222, 224–5, 248, 249

  Blake, William 56

  Blunt, Anthony 111

  Books Do Furnish a Room 43

  ‘Books vs. Cigarettes’ 236

  Borea, Arturo 243

  Boris (Parisian friend) 123, 129

  Bosch, Hieronymus 194

  Boswell, James 215

  Bowker, Gordon 22, 25, 36, 49, 54, 59–60, 85, 89, 93, 98, 114, 124–5, 137, 185, 219, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248

  ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ 162

  ‘Bozo’ (pavement artist) 129

  Brave New World 118, 246

  Brecht, Bertolt 180, 215

  Brideshead Revisited 83

  Brockway, Fenner 181r />
  Browne, Sir Thomas 215

  Brownell, Sonia see Orwell, Sonia

  Buchanan, Jack 21

  Buddicom, Jacintha 75, 77, 84–7, 107, 111–12, 114–15, 144

  Buddicom, Prosper 84

  Burgess, Guy 111

  Burmese Days 15, 88, 91–4, 98, 101, 103, 106–7, 127, 132–3, 138, 145, 245

  Burt, Cyril 157, 160–61, 165, 247

  Butler, Robert 242

  Campbell, Roy 210

  Cape, Jonathan 126

  Carroll, Lewis 207

  Cavett, Dick 12

  ‘Censure en Angleterre, La’ 121

  Chamberlain, Neville 188

  Chandler, Raymond 69

  Chase, James Hadley 69

  Christie, Agatha 140

  Chu, Simon 242

  Churchill, Winston 34, 108, 196, 222, 227

  Clark, Adrian 248

  Clergyman’s Daughter, A 12–13, 22, 26, 39, 55, 133, 134, 135–6, 138–45, 147, 162, 237–9

  Cockett, Richard 205, 248

  Collings, Dennis 113–14, 117–18, 127, 129, 145, 162, 246

  Colls, Robert 177, 247

  Coming Up for Air 16, 28, 37, 39, 58, 69, 75, 81, 84–5, 90, 109, 158, 185, 188–93, 195, 203, 236

  Common, Jack 14, 193

  Comstock, Anthony 121

  Connolly, Cyril 14, 43, 45, 61, 62–6, 68–9, 72, 76, 79, 81–2, 97, 150, 159, 162, 172, 181, 184, 203–4, 224, 231, 243, 244, 246

  Conrad, Joseph 92, 93, 118

  Constable, John 133

  Cooper, Lettice 165, 198, 222

  Corbin, Alain 156, 242, 247

  Cornford, John 175

  Country of the Blind, The 69

  Crick, Bernard 22, 46–7, 52, 57, 66–7, 72–3, 77, 83, 98, 100, 110, 132, 133, 135, 146, 152, 154, 159, 198, 243, 244, 245, 246

  Cripps, Stafford 205

  Crook, David 175

  Croquis Parisiens 24–5

  Cullen, Stephen 248

  cummings, e e 121

  Cunard, Nancy 247

  Curzon, Lord George 103–4, 245

  Cushing, Peter 34

  Dakin, Humphrey 134

  Dalí, Salvador 18, 215–17

  David Astor and the Observer 248

  Davison, Peter 8, 36, 49, 60, 115, 122, 133, 178, 207, 209, 245–6, 250