George Orwell: A Life in Letters

by Peter Davison

  To Dwight Macdonald*

  15 April 1947

  Barnhill

  Isle of Jura

  Dear Dwight,

  Many thanks for your very interesting and informative article on Wallace 1, which reached me yesterday—unfortunately a few days after I’d left London for the summer. I’ve sent it on to Tribune, as I should think they could well use parts of it, at least as background material. I left London the day before W[allace] had his big public meeting at the Albert Hall, but I heard him say a few words of welcome on arrival and got the impression that he meant to be very conciliatory and not make the sort of remarks about ‘British imperialism’ which he has been making in the USA. His visit here has been timed to do the maximum of mischief, and I was somewhat surprised by the respectful welcome given to him by nearly everyone, incidentally including Tribune, which has given him some raps over the knuckles in the past.

  It doesn’t matter about the Tolstoy article. If you feel you do want to use a piece of it sooner or later, hang on to it until then. Otherwise, could you be kind enough to send it on to my agents, Mcintosh & Otis, explaining the circumstances. It’s possible they might be able to do something with it, though as they failed with another Polemic article (one on Swift), perhaps this one is no good for the American market either.

  As to books on the USSR. It’s very hard to think of a good list, and looking back, it seems to me that whatever I have learned, or rather guessed, about that country has come from reading between the lines of newspaper reports. I tried to think of ‘pro’ books, but couldn’t think of any good ones except very early ones such as Ten Days that Shook the World 2 (which I haven’t read through but have read in, of course.) The Webbs’ Soviet Communism,3 which I have not read, no doubt contains a lot of facts, but Michael Polanyi’s little essay 4 on it certainly convicted the W.s of misrepresentation on some points. A nephew of Beatrice Webb 5 whom I know told me she admitted privately that there were things about the USSR that it was better not to put on paper. For the period round about the Revolution, Krupskaya’s Memories of Lenin has some interesting facts. So does Angelica Balabanov’s My Life as a Rebel.6 The later editions of Krupskaya’s book have been tampered with a little, at any rate in England. Of the same period, Bertrand Russell’s Theory and Practice of Bolshevism (a very rare book which he will not bother to reprint) is interesting because he not only met all the tops but was able to foretell in general terms a good deal that happened later. Rosenberg’s History of Bolshevism is said to be good and unprejudiced, but I haven’t read it and his book on the German Republic seemed to me rather dry and cagey. A book that taught me more than any other about the general course of the Revolution was Franz Borkenau’s The Communist International. This of course is only partly concerned with the USSR itself, and it is perhaps too much written round a thesis, but it is stuffed with facts which I believe have not been successfully disputed. As for books of ‘revelations,’ I must say I was doubtful of the authenticity of Valtin’s book, but I thought Krivitsky’s book 7 genuine although written in a cheap sensational style. In one place where it crossed with my own experiences it seemed to me substantially true. Kravchenko’s book 8 is not out in England yet. For the concentration camps, Anton Ciliga’s The Russian Enigma 9 is good, and more recently The Dark Side of the Moon10 (now I think published in the USA) which is compiled from the experiences of many exiled Poles. A little book by a Polish woman, Liberation, Russian Style,11 which appeared during the war and fell flat, overlaps with The Dark Side and is more detailed. I think the most important of very recent books is the Blue Book on the Canadian spy trials,12 which is fascinating psychologically. As for literature, Gleb Struve’s Twenty-five Years of Soviet Russian Literature is an invaluable handbook and I am told very accurate. Mirsky’s Russian Literature 1881–1927 (I think that is the title) takes in the earlier part of post-revolutionary literature. There is also Max Eastman’s Artists in Uniform. You’ve probably read everything I have mentioned except perhaps the Blue Book. If you haven’t read the latter, don’t miss it—it’s a real thriller.

  I am up here for 6 months. Last year I was just taking a holiday after six years of non-stop journalism, but this year I am going to get on with a novel. I shan’t finish it in six months but I ought to break its back and might finish it at the end of the year. It is very hard to get back to quiet continuous work after living in a lunatic asylum for years. Not that conditions are now any better than during the war—worse in many ways. This last winter has been quite unendurable, and even now the weather is appalling, but one is a little better off up here where it is a bit easier to get food and fuel than in London.

  Yours

  George

  [XIX, 3215, pp. 126–9; typewritten]

  1.For Henry Wallace see 5.12.46 n. 6.

  2.John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). Reed (1887–1920) was involved in setting up the Communist Party in the United States. He died of typhus and was buried in the Kremlin wall.

  3.Sidney James Webb (1859–1947) and Beatrice Webb (1858–1943), Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (2 vols, London, 1935; New York, 1936). Republished in London in 1937, but without the question mark, and in 1941 with a new introduction by Beatrice Webb.

  4.Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), The Contempt of Freedom: The Russian Experiment and After (1940). Includes his ‘Soviet Economics – Fact and Theory’ (1935), ‘Truth and Propaganda’ (1936), ‘Collectivist Planning’ (1940).

  5.Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–90), author and journalist. In 1930, after three years as a lecturer at the Egyptian University, Cairo, he joined the Manchester Guardian and was its Moscow correspondent, 1932–3 (see his Winter in Moscow, 1934). He then worked on the Calcutta Statesman and, from 1935–6, on the Evening Standard. He served throught the war (Major, Intelligence Corps) and afterwards was Daily Telegraph Washington correspondent, 1946–7, and its deputy editor 1950–2. From 1952–7 he edited Punch. His The Thirties (1940) is a useful account of that decade. Sonia Orwell asked him to write Orwell’s biography; he agreed but never produced anything. The section of this letter from ‘A nephew’ to ‘on paper’ was marked in the margin, in Orwell’s hand, ‘Off the record.’

  6.Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869–1939), wife of Lenin and active in his revolutionary programme. Her Memories of Lenin is quoted more than once by Orwell. Angelica Balabanov (1878–1965), associate editor with Mussolini of Avanti, worked with Lenin and Trotsky during the Russian Revolution and was the first secretary of the Third International. Her memoir was published in 1937.

  7.Jan Valtin (pseudonym of Richard Krebs, 1904–1951), Out of the Night (New York, 1940; London and Toronto, 1941). He later became a war correspondent with the American forces in the Pacific. Walter G. Krivitsky (d. 1941), In Stalin’s Secret Service (New York, 1939; I Was Stalin’s Agent, London, 1963). He was head of the western division of the NKVD, but defected.

  8.Victor Kravchenko (1905–1966), I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (New York, 1946; London, 1947). During the Spanish civil war, Kravchenko served as an aide to General Dimitri Pavlov (shot on Stalin’s orders, 1941). (See Thomas, p. 588, n. 1.)

  9.Anton Ciliga (1898–1991), a founder of the Yugoslav Communist Party. His The Russian Enigma was published in English in 1940 (in French, Paris, 1938). It is concerned chiefly with Russian economic policy, 1928–1932, and with its prisons. His The Kronstadt Revolt (Paris 1938; London, 1942) was described by Orwell as an ‘Anarchist pamphlet largely an attack on Trotsky’.

  10.Anonymous, The Dark Side of the Moon (London, 1946; New York, 1947), deals with Soviet-Polish relations. It has a preface by T. S. Eliot, a director of the book’s English publishers, Faber & Faber.

  11.Ada Halpern, Liberation—Russian Style (1945); it is listed by Whitaker as August 1945 and so published not during the war but just as it was ending.

  12.In the left-hand margin, against one or both of Liberation—Russian Style and the Canadian Government Blue Book, is a marker
arrow, presumably added by Macdonald. The Blue Book referred to reported on a Canadian Royal Commission which investigated Soviet espionage in Canada, 1946 and 1947. This found that a spy ring had been built up by the Soviet Military Attaché, Colonel Zabotin. Amongst those sentenced to terms of imprisonment was Fred Rose, the only Canadian Communist MP.

  To Fredric Warburg*

  31 May 1947

  Barnhill

  Isle of Jura

  Dear Fred,

  Many thanks for your letter. I have made a fairly good start on the book and I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time, because I have really been in most wretched health this year ever since about January (my chest as usual) and can’t quite shake it off. However I keep pegging away, and I hope that when I leave here in October I shall either have finished the rough draft or at any rate broken its back. Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess having very little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job. So if I do finish the rough draft by October I might get the book done fairly early in 1948, barring illnesses. I don’t like talking about books before they are written, but I will tell you now that this is a novel about the future— that is, it is in a sense a fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel. That is what makes it a difficult job—of course as a book of anticipations it would be comparatively simple to write.

  I am sending you separately a long autobiographical sketch1 which I originally undertook as a sort of pendant to Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, he having asked me to write a reminiscence of the preparatory school we were at together. I haven’t actually sent it to Connolly or Horizon, because apart from being too long for a periodical I think it is really too libellous to print, and I am not disposed to change it, except perhaps the names. But I think it should be printed sooner or later when the people most concerned are dead, and maybe sooner or later I might do a book of collected sketches. I must apologise for the typescript. It is not only the carbon copy, but is very bad commercial typing which I have had to correct considerably—however, I think I have got most of the actual errors out.

  Richard is very well in spite of various calamities. First he fell down and cut his forehead and had to have two stitches put in, and after that he had measles. He is talking a good deal more now (he was three a week or two ago.) The weather has cheered up after being absolutely stinking, and the garden we are creating out of virgin jungle is getting quite nice. Please remember me to Pamela and Roger.2

  Yours

  George

  [XIX, 3232, pp. 149–50; typewritten]

  1.In the margin there is a handwritten annotation (in Warburg’s hand?): ‘Such, Such were the Joys’. For the development of this essay and for the nature of the ‘commercial typing’, see headnote to the essay, XIX, 3408, pp. 353–6. Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise was published in 1938. Warburg wrote to Orwell on 6 June saying, ‘I have read the autobiographical sketch about your prep. school and passed it to Roger.’

  2.Fredric Warburg’s second wife, formerly Pamela de Bayou (they married in 1933); and Roger Senhouse.

  To Leonard Moore*

  14 July 1947

  Barnhill

  Isle of Jura

  Dear Moore,

  I wonder if you could get in touch with the ‘Britain in Pictures’ people and find out what they are doing about a booklet, The British People, which I wrote for them 3 or 4 years ago. The history of it was this.1

  In 1943 W. J. Turner,2 who was editing the series, told me that they had had books on British scenery, British railways, etc., but none on the British people, and that they would like me to do one. I was not very keen on the idea, but as it was to be a short book (15,000) and Turner promised me I should have a free hand, I agreed. Before going to work I submitted a detailed synopsis, which was approved. I then wrote the book, and it was no sooner sent in than the reader for Collins’s, who were publishing the series, raised a long series of objections which amounted, in effect, to a demand that I should turn the book into a much cruder kind of propaganda. I pointed out that I had closely followed the agreed synopsis, and said I was not going to change anything. Turner backed me up, and the matter seemed to be settled. About a year later, nothing having happened, I met Turner in the street and told him I thought I ought to have some money for the book, on which I had been promised an advance of £50. He said he could get me £25, and did so. About this time he told me it had been decided to get someone else to do a companion volume to mine, on the same subject, so as to give as it were two sides to the picture. They first got Edmund Blunden,3 who made such a mess of it that his copy was unprintable, so there was another delay. They afterwards got someone else, I forget whom, to do the companion volume. Turner and his assistant, Miss Shannon, several times told me that the objections to my book had been over-ruled and that it would appear in due course. About a year ago I was sent the proofs and corrected them. I was told then, or shortly afterwards, that they were choosing the illustrations, and if I remember rightly Miss Shannon told me what the illustrations would be. During last winter Turner died suddenly, and Miss Shannon wrote to say that this would impose another short delay, but that the book would appear shortly. Since then nothing has happened. I think it must be more than 4 years since I submitted the manuscript.

  I haven’t the faintest interest in the book nor any desire that it should appear in print. It was simply a wartime book, part of a series designed to ‘sell’ Britain in the USA. At the same time I obviously ought to have some more money out of them, at least the other half of the £50 advance. £50 was incidentally rather a small advance, since these books, when once on the market, usually sold largely. Unfortunately I have not my copy of the contract, as this was one of the documents that were destroyed when my flat was bombed in 1944.4 However, I suppose that wouldn’t matter, and I am sure Miss Shannon, if she is still helping to run the series, would be cooperative.

  Yours sincerely

  Eric Blair

  [XIX, 3248, pp. 172–3; typewritten]

  1.Though he did not realise it when he wrote to Moore, The English People was about to be published, in August 1947 (XIX, 3253, p. 179). Collins had not bothered to inform the author.

  2.W. J. Turner (1889–1946), poet, novelist, and music critic who did a variety of publishing and journalistic work, including acting as general editor of the Britain in Pictures series for Collins.

  2.Edmund Charles Blunden (1896–1974), poet, critic, and teacher.

  4.Orwell and his wife were bombed out on 14 July 1944.

  To Lydia Jackson*

  28 July 1947

  Barnhill

  Isle of Jura

  Dear Lydia,

  I have just received notice to quit the Wallington Cottage.1 It was bound to happen sooner or later, and of course as it is only a weekly tenancy they can do it on very short notice. However the date given on the notice is August 4th, so that in theory your furniture ought to be removed by that date. I wrote off at once to the Solicitors explaining that you could hardly be expected to get out at such short notice, as you must find somewhere to put your furniture. If you want to write to them direct they are Balderston Warren & Co, Solicitors, Baldock, Herts. I have no doubt you could get more time, but of course if ordered to get out we have to do so, especially as I, the theoretical tenant, am not using the cottage at all, and you are only using it for week ends. I believe actually on a weekly tenancy they are supposed to give six week° notice. I am very sorry this should have happened.

  If you’d like to come and stay any time, please do,2 I shall be here till October, and there are always beds here. Just give me good notice, so that I can arrange about meeting you. The weather has been filthy but has lately turned nice again. Love to Pat.

  Yours,

  George

  [XIX, 3250, p. 177; typewritten copy]

  1.The Stores, Wallington; Orwell moved there on 2 April 1936, and it wa
s his home until May 1940. He seems to have used it rarely thereafter (most often for a few days in 1940 and 1941, and perhaps a Bank Holiday weekend in 1942).

  2.Lydia Jackson visited Barnhill 26 March to 2 April 1948. She might have retyped the final version of ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ while she was there.

  To Leonard Moore*

  28 July 1947

  Barnhill

  Isle of Jura

  Dear Moore,

  Herewith the proofs.1 It seems quite a good translation, so far as I am able to judge. I have made a few corrections, but mostly of punctuation etc.

  Many thanks for your offices in connection with the ‘Britain in Pictures’ book.

  I am getting on fairly well with the novel, and expect to finish the rough draft by October. I dare say it will need another six months° work on it after that, but I can’t say yet when it is likely to be finished because I am not sure of my movements. I have to come back to London in October and shall probably stay at any rate a month, but we are thinking of spending most of the winter up here because I think it is not quite so cold here and fuel is a bit easier to get. If I do stay here I shall no doubt get on with the rewriting of the novel faster than if I am in London and involved in journalism. At any rate I have some hopes of finishing it fairly early next year.