Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  He admitted that he was unfaithful to her—with bewitching Berber girls in Morocco and with Sally McEwan (his secretary at the Tribune)—and also tried to seduce a girl he escorted home from William Empson's party and Eileen's Russian friend, Lydia Jackson. Orwell's school friend Cyril Connolly—though fat, porcine and physically repulsive—seduced many women with his Irish wit, cleverness and charm. Orwell, though better looking and more manly, was shy, awkward and rather gauche. But in his own quiet way he had more women than Conrad and Lawrence, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

  The quintessential erotic moment in Orwell's life took place in the summer of 1932 when Eleanor Jaques surrendered to him and revealed her nakedness in an idyllic setting: “I cannot remember when I have ever enjoyed any expeditions so much as I did those with you,” he wrote to her in September. “Especially that day in the wood along past Blythburgh Lodge—you remember, where the deep beds of moss were. I shall always remember that, & your nice white body in the dark green moss.”

  This scene—an unresisting, often virginal woman lying naked in the grass—recurs in three of his novels:

  —Naked, she lay back, her hands behind her head, her eyes shut, smiling slightly…. “I'll be as gentle as I can with you.” “It doesn't matter.” (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936)

  —[I] stood over her for a moment. She was lying on the grass with her arm over her face…. She was mine and I could have her, this minute if I wanted to. (Coming Up for Air, 1939)

  —He had pulled her down onto the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her. (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949)

  The most moving piece in the entire edition was written by Eileen in March 1945, just before she went into hospital for surgery. Her long last letter was more concerned with making things easier for Orwell (then a war correspondent in Germany) than for herself, and explains why the sweet-natured, stoical wife was willing to put up with such discomfort, even hardship, during their marriage: “Obviously I can't just go on having a [uterine] tumour or rather several rapidly growing tumours…. I really don't think I'm worth the money [for this expensive operation]. On the other hand of course this thing will take a longish time to kill me if left alone and it will be costing some money the whole time.” Eileen's death at the age of thirty-nine, under anesthesia, was particularly tragic, for she'd survived a difficult time during the war and had just adopted an infant. She never lived to see the great success of Animal Farm, which she'd helped to plan, or to enjoy the hard-won wealth and fame of Orwell's last years.

  After Eileen's sudden death, Orwell, lonely, sick and left with a baby he refused to give up, was desperate for a wife. So he impulsively proposed to several young women he scarcely knew. His letter of April 1946 to Anne Popham (who was thirteen years younger than Orwell and later married Quentin Bell), after her astonished rejection of his unexpected proposal, was unusually personal and revealing:

  I wonder if I committed a sort of crime in approaching you. In a way it's scandalous that a person like me should make advances to a person like you, and yet I thought from your appearance that you were not only lonely and unhappy, but also a person who lived chiefly through the intellect and might become interested in a man who was much older and not much good physically…. What I am really asking you is whether you would like to be the widow of a literary man. If things remain more or less as they are there is a certain amount of fun in this, as you would probably get royalties coming in and you might find it interesting to edit unpublished stuff….

  Several times in the past I have been supposed to be about to die, but I always lived on just to spite them…. I am also sterile I think—at any rate I have never had a child, though I have never undergone the examination because it is so disgusting. On the other hand if you wanted children of your own by someone else it wouldn't bother me, because I have very little physical jealousy…. If you think of yourself as essentially a widow, then you might do worse—i.e. supposing I am not actually disgusting to you.

  Orwell emphasized his age and poor health (bronchiectasis and a tubercular lesion in one lung) and practically promised to die as soon as possible. He offered widowhood rather than marriage and the chance to edit his works (Anne later edited Virginia Woolf's Diaries). He also confessed, to put the topping on the cake, that he was sterile (though he didn't know for sure) and had been unfaithful to Eileen. He ends with a Clifford Chatterley-like offer to let his would-be fiancée breed with another man.

  This bizarre, abject declaration is reminiscent of Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer—he too was tubercular and close to death—in which he assumed a pathetic posture, confessed the worst about himself and tested her ability to endure him: “I should want to drag you … down to the dreadful decrepitude that I represent…. In spite of everything [do] you want to take up the cross? … I am prostrate before you and implore you to push me aside: anything else means ruin for us both.”

  Orwell portrayed his second, deathbed wife, Sonia Brownell, as Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston's confession at their first meeting suggests that Orwell had proposed to her in the same Kafkaesque manner: “I'm thirty-nine years old…. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth…. You are ten or fifteen years younger than I am. What could you see to attract you in a man like me?”

  Orwell's description of Julia's deceptively hearty demeanor—“the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and the general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her”—is a joking allusion to Sonia's lifelong rebellion against her convent school in Roehampton. Winston's first reaction to Julia—“He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so”—expresses Orwell's frustration with Sonia, who slept with him only once and found the experience unsatisfactory. The marriage of the gaunt El Greco saint and the blooming Renoir beauty was not consummated.

  Sonia, “the Euston Road Venus,” had a series of illustrious lovers—including the painters Victor Pasmore, William Coldstream and Lucian Freud—but she didn't like sex. This explains the contrast in Nineteen Eighty-Four between Julia's leading role in the Junior Anti-Sex League (which represents Sonia's sexual attitude in real life) and her reckless nymphomania (which alludes to Sonia's numerous lovers and portrays Orwell's fantasies about her): “With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside…. ’Have you done this before?’ ‘Of course. Hundreds of times—well, scores of times, anyway.’”

  Orwell's comment that Julia “obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked” suggests that he was sceptical about Sonia's motives for marrying him. But “at the sight of the words I love you,” when she passes him a secret note, “the desire to stay alive had welled up in him.” Sonia, whatever her extremely ambiguous motives, certainly gave him hope when he was moribund. Their plans to fly to a Swiss sanatorium ended with his fatal hemorrhage, but he kept a never-to-be-used fishing rod at the end of his hospital bed. As Winston prophetically observes: “It was impossible that this affair should end successfully; such things did not happen in real life.”

  EIGHTEEN

  ORWELL AND THE ART OF WRITING

  Since everyone these days wants to be a writer, I thought a collection of Orwell's essays on writing, with my introduction, would be a useful and successful book. There is no better model for a nonfiction writer than Orwell, who expressed what he thought as honestly as he could and in the clearest possible way. Though I was publishing two art biographies with Harcourt at the time, they foolishly rejected my idea and I brought out my essay in the Kenyon Review. I showed how Orwell influenced the concepts and methods of American participatory journalism; compared his views on style to those of Hobbes and Swift; and argued that his clear style was closely related to his moral integrity.

  I

  While our country is bitterly divided by radically opposing views on domestic and foreign policy and we are engaged in an increasingly co
stly and risky far-off war, we had to vote in a presidential election in which neither candidate inspired hope or confidence. In London during the Second World War, when the propaganda war at home raged in concert with the war against Hitler, Orwell felt as many of us feel now. In his “War Diary” of April 27, 1942, he recorded: “We are all drowning in filth. When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth…. Is there no one who has both firm opinions and a balanced outlook? Actually there are plenty, but they are powerless. All power is in the hands of paranoiacs.” Repeatedly struck by the viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy, Orwell used his journalism to attack politicians’ lies and blatant fear-mongering tactics, the supine press and passive public.

  Orwell perfected his rhetorical arsenal and lucid but flexible prose style during the political battles of the 1930s and 1940s, when the threat to Western civilization came from totalitarian and Fascist regimes in Europe. Today we wage a “war on terror,” for which the “Patriot Act” has been passed (both classic Orwellian locutions) against a shadowy and multinational army of radical Islamists. In Orwell's time people suffered large-scale bombing and destruction, and after 1945 learned to live with the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war. In our time we feel nostalgic for the good old days, when the major powers, at least, had enriched plutonium under lock and key. Terrorist attacks signify an additional loss of security that affects every aspect of our lives, and we are now led ever deeper into confrontation and danger.

  Though he died in 1950, Orwell's ideas about the language and style of politics, expressed in witty how-to-do-it essays as well as in his weekly political commentary and literary journalism, are not merely relevant to this moment, but more desperately needed than ever. As Wyndham Lewis wrote in One-Way Song (1933): “These times require a tongue that naked goes, / Without more fuss than Dryden's or Defoe's.” “A happy vicar I might have been,” wrote Orwell in a reflective poem about that pre-1914 world he had briefly glimpsed in his childhood. His ambition was to create long “social” novels, and he also tried almost every other kind of writing. But history and politics claimed him, and his genius was to write more acutely about politics than anyone had done before.

  Orwell, whose books have sold a phenomenal forty million copies in more than sixty languages, was the most influential prose stylist of the twentieth century. Homage to Catalonia (1938), which showed that good reporting not only describes the urgent political and military issues but also captures the spirit of the place, influenced both the concepts and methods of participatory journalism from Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote to Joan Didion, George Plimpton and Tom Wolfe. Kingsley Amis observed that “no modern writer has his air of passionately believing what he has to say and of being passionately determined to say it as forcefully and simply as possible.” Norman Mailer, agreeing with Amis, maintained: “I don't think there's a man writing English today who can't learn how to write a little better by reading his essays. Even his maxims and instructions on how to write well are superb.” Like Hobbes and Swift, Orwell saw political writing not only as a powerful tool for conveying ideas, but also as a demanding and enthralling art with a moral imperative to search for truth.

  Orwell was obsessed by writing, felt compelled to write and composed with great fluency in an age that greatly admired authors like Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce and Franz Kafka, who'd tortured themselves with creative agony. Flaubert, the antithesis of Orwell in his complete lack of political commitment, thought the artist “should have no religion nor fatherland nor even social conviction…. No cause is worth dying for, any government can be lived with, nothing but art may be believed in, and literature is the only confession.” The smoldering indignation of Orwell was also the opposite of the cool objectivity of Joyce, who said he wrote Dubliners in a style of “scrupulous meanness.” And his personal reticence is quite different from Kafka's self-exposure and belief that a book must “be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

  Who, then, was Orwell's model? In an autobiographical note of April 1940, he said “the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.” Both writers advocated direct language and unambiguous expression, distrusting attempts to “dress up” facts and ideas to make them more palatable. They believed that the writer ought to communicate in the clearest possible way and employed a plain style that appealed to their readers’ common sense. Maugham wrote that “good prose should be like the clothes of a well-dressed man, appropriate but unobtrusive”; Orwell echoed him in his famous simile: “Good prose is like a window pane.” Despite their preference for simplicity, both were also deeply moved when young by the rich sounds and exotic associations of John Milton's high style. Maugham noted “the exultation, the sense of freedom which came to me when first I read in my youth the first few books of Paradise Lost.” Orwell also recalled that “when I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words …. The lines from Paradise Lost … sent shivers down my backbone.”

  Like Maugham, Orwell trusted his audience to share his values and understanding of the world, but had a far more didactic bent, a crusading spirit that sought to cut through cant and intensify political consciousness. He developed a clear, racy, supple style, fluent and readable, forceful and direct, with a colloquial ease of expression. The critic Edmund Wilson, defining his essential qualities, praised his “readiness to think for himself, courage to speak his mind, tendency to deal with concrete realities rather than theoretical positions, and prose style that is both downright and disciplined.” The English historian Veronica Wedgwood elegantly described Orwell's combination of passion and restraint: “the strength of his feelings and his determination that they should not intrude make his style spare and economical, while his acute observation and sensibility make its very bleakness the more powerful.” Orwell's style is spare but never drab. His vigorous prose, engaging honesty and sly wit immediately engage his readers. And his literary personality—his integrity, idealism and commitment—shines through his writing like pebbles in a clear stream.

  Fascinated by every aspect of an author's life, in the course of his all-too-brief career Orwell discussed the teaching of creative writing, revising one's work, being edited, editing others, author's notes and the limitations of reviewers. In his “As I Please” newspaper column in the London Tribune, he satirized ads for writing courses (which were just beginning in England and have since become entrenched college courses, even majors, in America). He effectively punctured their pretensions with a commonsensical question: “If these [anonymous] people really knew how to make money out of writing, why aren't they just doing it instead of peddling their secret at 5/- a time? … If Bernard Shaw or J. B. Priestley offered to teach you how to make money out of writing, you might feel that there was something in it. But who would buy a bottle of hair restorer from a bald man?”

  In these days when everybody wants to be a writer (but nobody wants to read, preferring to get information and interpretation from television “news” and radio talk shows), it is worth emphasizing that writing even competently demands diligent effort that few students are prepared to give. In June 1940, chronically poor and still under pressure to earn money after more than a decade as a writer, Orwell reflected that his apparent ease of composition had been achieved by years of practice and repetition: “Nowadays, when I write a review, I sit down at the typewriter and type it straight out. Till recently, indeed till six months ago, I never did this and would have said that I could not do it. Virtually all that I wrote was written at least twice, and my books as a whole three times—individual passages as many as five or ten times.”

  Reviews and articles kept Orwell's body and soul together as he labored to complete his novels, and he wrote interestingly on the practical problems of writing for newspapers.
As a highly contentious and polemical writer, hostile to any form of censorship, he loathed cuts that weakened his argument and changed his meaning, yet had to accept the reality of being edited. “The question of ‘editing’ might be more difficult,” he told his agent. “In my experience one can never be sure that one's stuff will get to press unaltered in any daily or weekly periodical. The Observer, for instance, habitually cuts my articles without consulting me if there is a last-minute shortage of space. In writing for papers like the Evening Standard, I have had things not merely cut but actually altered, and of course even a cut always modifies the sense of an article to some extent. What really matters here is whether or not one is dealing with a civilized and intelligent paper.”

  When Orwell took over as literary editor of the Socialist Tribune in November 1943, he found his desk drawers “stuffed with letters and manuscripts which ought to have been dealt with weeks earlier, and hurriedly shut it up again.” As an editor himself, he had a fatal tendency to accept manuscripts which he knew very well could never be printed, but didn't have the heart to send back. When he considered manuscripts submitted to the newspaper, he must have remembered Gordon Comstock's bitter rage (in Orwell's novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) when his verse was politely rejected: “Why be so bloody mealy-mouthed about it? Why not say outright, ‘We don't want your bloody poems. We only take poems from chaps we were at Cambridge with.’” In June 1947 Orwell, an ex-policeman, recalled his generous weakness as editor and concluded the discussion with a characteristically witty simile: “It is questionable whether anyone who has had long experience as a free-lance journalist ought to become an editor. It is too like taking a convict out of his cell and making him governor of the prison.”