Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  With political unrest brewing in Europe, Blair eased up on his single-minded focus on fiction; he needed money. Even though he also wrote poetry, he realized that no earnings would come of it. He started writing for a left-wing weekly publication and other newspapers, with an eye toward stories with sociological and political issues—in particular the implications of censorship (exploring ideas that would incubate and later shape his dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-four), and the homeless. He started signing these pieces “E. A. Blair.”

  Unfortunately, he was hardly getting by in Paris; he would learn firsthand what it felt like to be impoverished. His experiences there felt desultory. He was reduced to fishing (without success) in the Seine, rationing his food supply, and even pawning some of his possessions. “I underwent poverty and the sense of failure,” he recalled of his time in Paris. “This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes.”

  After doing menial work and finding it wretched, he was pleased that a publication in London had accepted one of the essays he’d submitted. He decided that moving back to London would not signify failure but offer greater potential for becoming a professional writer. In December 1929 he left Paris and returned to his parents’ house. “England is a very good country when you are not poor,” he wrote a few years later. Still, it was better to struggle in his own country than in France.

  In no way embarrassed by having to work as a babysitter and take occasional odd jobs, Blair (who looked like a bum) started writing a nonfiction book about beggars and outcasts, based on his own experiences, which would evolve into Down and Out in Paris and London. He also began publishing criticism. It didn’t earn him much money, but he established himself as a respected reviewer, or at least the beginnings of one.

  Though slowly finding his way toward his vocation, Blair didn’t fit neatly into any single category: he came from a snobbish family that was not wealthy; he’d been given the most prestigious public school education a student could hope for—yet unlike many of his contemporaries, who had already achieved fame and wealth, he had little to show for it. He disowned Eton but wore it as a badge of honor. He spoke in a posh accent but dressed in ill-fitting, rumpled clothing. And having immersed himself in Shakespeare, Chaucer, Twain, Poe, Ibsen, Dickens, and Thackeray, among others, he was well read and intellectual, but he had rejected a university education. Although he was bitter about not having gone to Oxford or Cambridge, it was also a point of pride that he had not. He was austere, but he enjoyed comfort. He was stridently political and deplored politics. He was unlucky in love and perpetually unable to sustain relationships with women. (Prostitutes, however, he did fine with.) He appeared to love women and despise them; even some of his friends described him as a misogynist. He sought out tramps and beggars, yet he was an intellectual snob and ill at ease in the presence of those who did not share his interests. He relished immersing himself in vagrant life, but had a pathological aversion to bad smells and dirt, and was oblivious to the foul stench of his own smoking habit. He was happy only when writing, but no matter how hard he worked, he couldn’t earn a living doing it. He was frustrated by his frequent illnesses, which kept him from writing, yet he did not take responsibility for his health—he smoked heavily even while coughing up blood. All the intriguing contradictions of Eric Blair would find their way into the work of George Orwell. Blair might be judged by others as mentally unstable, paranoid, troubled, sadistic, and aberrant—but George Orwell? He was a noble and brilliant author.

  Regardless of his quirks, and there were many, it was almost unnerving to see how little Blair cared about others’ opinions of him. Still, he kept his writing ambition largely private. Slowly, Blair was developing a pioneering, novelistic style that blended reportage and memoir. His work was investigative yet highly personal, driven by a sense of moral outrage at social injustices. (The genre might be called Proletarian Lit—not exactly sexy stuff.) He had also taken to hanging out with vagrants in London and sometimes dressing like a tramp, sleeping in Trafalgar Square covered in newspapers. “He didn’t look in the least like a poor man,” a friend recalled of Blair decades later. “God knows he was poor, but the formidable look didn’t go with the rags.”

  Nor did the rags go with the name Eric Arthur Blair. It was time to invent George Orwell. Blair had always been secretive in every respect; adopting a pseudonym would allow him to release the various facets of his personality. Doing so was not without some degree of shame: he wrote in A Clergyman’s Daughter (in which a character uses a pseudonym) that “[i]t seemed a queer thing to have to do, to use a false name; dishonest—criminal, almost.”

  As Eric Blair, he accepted a teaching job at a boys’ school—hardly a posh one—which would make the twenty-nine-year-old seem somewhat respectable in the eyes of his parents. (Even though he had no university degree, his Eton schooling was impressive enough to win him the job.) He was bored by the work, and described the school as “foul.”

  That summer, he received the best news he’d heard in a long time: he’d found a publisher for Down and Out in Paris and London. Under a different title, the manuscript had been rejected by Jonathan Cape, and also by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber—Eliot’s elitist sensibility did not exactly savor tales of the malodorous downtrodden. In refusing the book, he wrote to Blair that it was “too loosely constructed.”

  The final version of the manuscript was a semiautobiographical story narrated by an anonymous, penniless English writer—or, rather, it was a collection of essays about Blair’s own experiences, recounted in fictionalized form. Most of the events in the book had occurred, but some fabrications were thrown in. It was startling for its up-close exploration of street people and others left behind by society. It was also a shocking exposé of harsh, filthy, inhumane conditions in the restaurant kitchens of Paris, where Blair had toiled as a lowly dishwasher.

  “I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up,” the narrator reflects in the book’s final paragraph. “I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.”

  The publisher Victor Gollancz had accepted the work and paid Blair an advance of forty pounds. After some discussion about the title and potential libel issues, there was one significant matter to settle: the name of the author. Blair had informed his agent that he wished to use a pseudonym. “If by any chance you do get it accepted,” he wrote, “will you please see that it is published pseudonymously, as I am not proud of it.” (Perhaps he was ashamed by the rejections he’d received, and certain that his execrable book was doomed to failure.) Then there was the matter of his family: he did not want to embarrass them with sordid (if thinly disguised) tales of his adventures. He also wrote to Gollancz that “if the book has any kind of success I can always use the same pseudonym again.” The editor suggested simply signing the book with the letter “X,” but Blair wished to find a suitable name, perhaps thinking about his future career. He had trouble settling on a nom de plume, so he sent Gollancz four suggestions: H. Lewis Allways, P. S. Burton, Kenneth Miles—and George Orwell, which was his favorite.

  His anxiety about concealing his authorship from his parents may have been genuine, but he didn’t try very hard. Portions of the book had already appeared in literary periodicals under his own name; he confessed to his sister Avril that he was publishing his first book using a pseudonym; and he allowed his mother to read the book. Still, the pen name at least shielded the family from public scrutiny. It seems that another compelling reason for using an alter ego was the fact of his background. How credible was it for an Eton graduate to go undercover by living on the margins of society, rejecting respectability, and plunging himsel
f into the lives of outcasts? It could also be perceived as highly offensive that such a genteel young man would “slum it” for the sake of creating a literary masterpiece. For him, vagrancy was a choice: if his situation became too dire, he could always borrow money from his mother; and he could find a place to sleep whenever he wished. He was certainly in a bad way, yet he could afford to be a part-time tramp; it was a role to play more than anything else.

  Writing about poverty demanded authorial authenticity, and that meant erasing all traces of Eric Arthur Blair. He had to “pass” as a man living on the margins, and Eric Blair was not that man. Changing his name was also appealing because he claimed to detest his birth name. Perhaps it had to do with the strained relationship he’d had with his father.

  Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell was published in January 1933, with an initial print run of 1,500 copies. The author was relieved to have some validation of his efforts. “Isn’t it a grand feeling when you see your thoughts taking shape at last in a solid lump?” he wrote to a friend.

  There are a few reasons why Blair had settled on “George Orwell” as his literary persona. Some have speculated that the first name came from his admiration for the late-nineteenth-century writer George Gissing, who influenced his work. The surname seemed to have derived from the River Orwell in Suffolk, which Blair is said to have loved—Defoe had written of it—or from the village of Orwell in Bedfordshire, which Blair had once passed through.

  In any case, it seemed perfect, and “George Orwell” became the most famous English pseudonym of the twentieth century. As well, thanks to his novel Nineteen Eighty-four, the adjective “Orwellian” became part of the lexicon. (It has a much better ring than, say, Milesian or Allwaysian, had he settled on his other choices.)

  Anthony Powell once asked his friend if he’d ever considered adopting “George Orwell” as his legal name. “Well, I have,” he told Powell, “but then, of course, I’d have to write under another name if I did.” Why he felt such a profound need to separate himself in private life from his “writing self” is a mystery. But duality is present throughout his work: in A Clergyman’s Daughter, for instance, and elsewhere Orwell’s characters lead double lives and harbor hidden selves. “He was as secretive about his private life as any man I ever knew,” a friend recalled of him.

  The book was well received in England and, upon its international publication, by critics abroad. “George Orwell is but trembling on the age of 30 this year, but he appears to have had about as much experience so far as the seamy side of life is concerned as a man of 50,” wrote a reviewer in the New York Times in 1933, adding that Orwell’s chilling account “is apt to put an American with a ticklish stomach off filets mignon in the higher-priced hotel restaurants for ever. It is Mr. Orwell’s argument bolstered by numerous horrible examples, that the more you pay for food in Paris, the less clean it is.”

  With the modest success of Down and Out, Blair’s metamorphosis into George Orwell was complete. He’d received fan letters addressed to Orwell, and had, for the first time, even signed a book review as Orwell. The persona endured. His family, friends, publisher, and agent knew him as Eric Blair, but to the public he was firmly established as George Orwell. He’d accepted that neither Eric Arthur Blair nor even “E. A. Blair” had ever found success as a writer, and that only Orwell would be taken seriously. Eric Blair was a loser.

  His books came in rapid succession: Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to Catalonia (1938), and in the last few years of his life, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four, published a year before his death. Even when he was highly productive, his usual reaction was to be dismissive of his output. “I have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling that I was wasting time,” he wrote in his diary. “As soon as a book is finished, I begin, actually from the next day, worrying because the next one is not begun, & am haunted with the fear that there never will be a next one.” Nevertheless, despite having exasperated so many people with his polemics, he had by then endeared himself, more or less, to the literary establishment. “He writes in a lucid conversational style which wakens one up suddenly like cold water dashed in the face,” V. S. Pritchett wrote of Orwell’s work.

  Although he instructed later that A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying not be republished once they had fallen out of print—he dismissed them as “silly potboilers”—they were crucial building blocks in what would prove a highly successful and even lucrative career.

  A friend once commented on Orwell’s obsessive writing process. He walked in one day to find Orwell sitting at a table with books by W. Somerset Maugham and Jonathan Swift, reading passages from both, closing them, then copying out sections from memory. “I’m trying to find a style which eliminates the adjective,” Orwell explained. It was not unusual for Orwell to write for ten hours a day, to rewrite entire book drafts three times, or to revise individual passages five or ten times, until he was satisfied.

  His fussiness also extended to his personal life. In an entry written in 1940 for an American directory of authors, he revealed, “I dislike big towns, noise, motor cars, the radio, tinned food, central heating and ‘modern’ furniture.” His list of approved things included English beer, French red wine, Indian tea, strong tobacco, vegetable gardening, and comfortable chairs. He added: “My health is wretched, but it has never prevented me from doing anything that I wanted to. . . . I ought perhaps to mention that though this account that I have given of myself is true, George Orwell is not my real name.”

  In 1941, a critic (and former Eton classmate) named Christopher Hollis wrote a withering review of Orwell’s book The Lion and the Unicorn, attacking the author as a coward: “Many things interest me about Mr. Orwell,” he wrote, “and not the least among them the question why he prefers to confront the world with that peculiar name rather than with the very respectable one under which I have had the honour of knowing him for the last quarter of a century.” This must have come as a shock to those acquaintances who knew Orwell only as Orwell. By that time, he was signing his work correspondence “George Orwell,” and sometimes signing personal letters “E. A. B. (George Orwell).” Most of his old friends still called him Eric. Despite the confusion, he refused to have his name legally changed. He may have taken some pleasure in being able to flit at will between one self and the other, as suited the occasion.

  The 1930s had been a kind of golden age for the author, apart from his occasional hospitalizations and periods of convalescence. He established himself as a famous writer and he found love, or at any rate an acceptable version of it. After meeting an Oxford graduate named Eileen O’Shaughnessy at a party, he decided that she was “the type of girl I’d like to marry.” In 1936, they did, but like so many other things in his life, the marriage would prove ephemeral. In 1944, they adopted an infant son, whom they named Richard Horatio, but Eileen died a year later during an emergency operation. Because Orwell had been unfaithful to her, his grief was mingled with guilt. “It wasn’t an ideal marriage,” he admitted to his housekeeper. “I don’t think I treated her very well.” Her absence left him lonely and depressed, and with his recurrent bouts of flu and bronchitis, reminded him that he was probably running out of time himself.

  He was eager to find another wife, and at the age of forty-six his wish was fulfilled. On October 14, 1949, the Associated Press issued a brief announcement: “George Orwell, novelist, married yesterday Miss Sonia Brownell, an editor, in University College Hospital, where the author, who is suffering from tuberculosis, is confined.” Orwell remarked on their travel plans. “I don’t know when I shall be allowed to get up,” he said, “but if I am able to move, we shall go abroad for the worst part of the winter, probably for January and February.”

  He was dead by the end of January.

  V. S. Pritchett paid tribute to Orwell, calling
him “sharp as a sniper” and praising him as “a writer of extraordinary honesty, if reckless in attack; to the day he died, nearly three weeks ago, he had never committed an act of political hypocrisy or casuistry.” Six decades after his death, Orwell was named by fifty Penguin authors as the publisher’s most popular author ever. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four are still required reading in schools. He influenced scores of writers, including Kingsley Amis, Norman Mailer, and Anthony Burgess. And he is considered one of the twentieth century’s finest essayists. “If you want to learn how to write non-fiction, Orwell is your man,” wrote Jeremy Paxman in the Daily Telegraph in 2009. “The impeccable style is one thing. But if I had to sum up what makes Orwell’s essays so remarkable is that they always surprise you.”

  After Orwell’s death, his friends remembered him fondly while acknowledging that he was often difficult. One spoke of him, aptly, as having been “easier to love than to like.” Stephen Spender offered a more generous assessment: although he found Orwell disingenuous in earnestly aligning himself with the working class, Spender recognized his essential decency and the purity of his motives. “Even his phoniness was perfectly acceptable,” he recalled. “Orwell had something about him like a character in a Charlie Chaplin movie, if not like Charlie Chaplin himself. He was a person who was always playing a role, but with great pathos and great sincerity.”

  She weighed seventy pounds when she died

  Chapter 9

  Isak Dinesen & KAREN BLIXEN

  She may not have been descended from Danish royalty, but her childhood was filled with the traditional privileges of an aristocratic upbringing. Karen Cristenze Dinesen was born on April 17, 1885, and over the course of her life would be known alternately as Tanne, Tanya, and Tania by her family and close friends. “Tanne” was a nickname that originated from her youthful mispronunciation of her own name (and was one she was said to dislike), but it stuck nonetheless. She grew up on her family’s estate in Rungstedlund, on the Danish coast midway between Copenhagen and Elsinore. Her father bought the house, a former inn, in 1879, and Dinesen would spend her final years there in relative seclusion.