Orwell (29 page)

For the last forty years Ian Willison and Ian Angus' “work” on their nevercompleted bibliography of George Orwell has discouraged everyone else from doing the job. Finally, Gillian Fenwick, using the material in the Orwell Archive at London University, has finished this difficult task and compiled an impressive list. During twenty years as a professional, Orwell wrote—despite frequent, serious and agonizing bouts of illness—12 books, 50 contributions to books, 842 articles, 18 collections of essays (16 of them posthumous), 269 wartime radio broadcasts, 456 published letters, 25 poems and 1,262 unpublished works (mostly letters, but also notes for unfinished essays on Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh, and a story about Burma.) He also organized 519 radio talks by T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Herbert Read and other distinguished authors.

Keith Arbour's review of Fenwick's bibliography
(PBSA
, 93:2, June 1999) emphasized its limitations. I believe her work is clear, thorough and accurate, but it inevitably contains a number of errors and omissions. There are several typos: no one (vi: 5 up), Taddert (xv: 12 up), Hairmyres (xviii: 3), Kopp (66: 22),
Homenaje
(75: 20), Schorer (133: 18 up), Symons (161 n14 and n17), GUERRILLA (267: 22 up), Orwell, Partido and Unificación (406: 16) and Zoltan (409: 4 up). Fenwick does not mention the reprint of Orwell's poem “As One Non-Combatant to Another” in Philip Larkin's
Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
(1973), nor list in the section on Archival Materials Orwell's letters to Herbert Read at the University of Victoria in Canada.

Fenwick admits that her coverage of foreign editions is “undoubtedly spotty,” and that section could certainly be improved. There is no title for the German translation of
Burmese Days
(p. 30); and she does not list the Hungarian (Kaldor Gyorgy) or Spanish (Ediciones Destino) publishers of that novel, nor the Estonian, Gujurati, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Telugu editions of
Animal Farm.
In
The Politics of Literary Reputation
(1989), John Rodden writes that
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
have been translated into more than 60 languages and have together sold almost 40 million copies. Fenwick lists only 44 translations of these two books and her sales figures do not come close to Rodden's.

More significantly, Fenwick omits the American Popular Library paperback edition of
Burmese Days
(February 1958) and American Avon paperback edition of A
Clergyman's Daughter
(no date), as well as the stage adaptation of
1984 (sic)
by Robert Owens, Wilton E. Hall, Jr. and William A. Miles, Jr. (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1963).

Fenwick's introduction, filled with inaccurate assertions, is the weakest part of the book.
Contra
Fenwick, Orwell did
not
have to go to Burma, the definitive biographies had
not
been written before her book was published and there certainly
is
“a huge body of critical work on him.” He did
not
miss “the boat where the great age of literary criticism is concerned,” for his writing was brilliantly analyzed by Bertrand Russell, V. S. Pritchett, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, John Wain, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Richard Hoggart and George Steiner, as well as by the best American critics of his day: Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe.

Fenwick's discussion of the composition and publication history of each book, though based only on published letters, is valuable. We learn that
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933), out of print by 1938, was the most popular book in the library of Dartmoor prison. Two years later, Penguin printed a first edition of 55,000 copies.
Burmese Days
, written by “George Orwell,” was copyright under his real name, Eric Blair. The first printing of the English edition of
Animal Farm
was only 4,500. But, used for the teaching of English throughout the world, it was translated into exotic languages like Maltese, Persian and Vietnamese. The American Signet edition sold over 5 million copies by 1973 and continues to sell more than 350,000 a year. Orwell risked losing £40,000 when he refused to cut the Appendix on “The Principles of Newspeak” from the Book-of-the-Month Club edition of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, though the Club eventually backed
down and he got his money. Fenwick's Appendix on Payments and Royalties reveals that in 1925–27 Orwell earned £696 a year, plus bonuses, in the Burmese Police. As a writer, he did not exceed this income until 1941 when his BBC salary and literary fees (an average of £3 each for 18 articles) came to £706.

Orwell constantly, perhaps defensively, ran down his own books.
Burmese Days
, he said, “made me spew when I saw it in print,” A
Clergyman's Daughter
was “very disconnected as a whole, and rather unreal” and he felt he “made rather a muck” of
The Road to Wigan Pier.
Nevertheless, his reputation has risen steadily since his death in 1950. Most of his books are still in print, and he is the most widely read and influential serious writer of the twentieth century.

A Voice That Naked Goes

 

In 1973 I sent an essay on Roger Casement to Alan Ross—naval officer, racing and cricket enthusiast, poet and autobiographer, and excellent (if rather too casual) editor of the
London Magazine.
He rejected it, I rang him to ask why and he frankly said he didn't know anything about the investigator of atrocities in the Congo and Putumayo, and ill-fated Irish revolutionary. When he kindly agreed to send it to an expert and eventually published the piece, I established a permanent relationship with the magazine (surviving through three other editors) and since then have published twenty-seven essays (including this one) with them.

This piece emphasized Orwell's violent streak, risky self-sabotage and dangerous invitation to his wife Eileen to visit him on the Aragon front and in Barcelona in 1939. It also showed how O'Brien in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
was physically modeled on Georges Kopp, and noted the astonishingly accurate prophecies in Orwell's last novel.

The 20-volume
Complete Works
of George Orwell (1998), brilliantly edited by Peter Davison, reveals as much about Orwell's life as about his books. In 1945 he noted the contrast in many writers “between the character which they display in private life and the character which seems to emanate from their published works.” But Orwell's life, like Chekhov's, matches the idealism of his writing, and reflects the literary and political history of the first half of the twentieth century. He had exemplary courage, compassion and honesty, and the more we examine his character, the more we like him. Even his crankiness and eccentricity seem endearing.

Orwell could never remain in one place for long and was always an outsider: a chubby bed-wetter at St. Cyprian's prep school, a cynical rebel at Eton, a gentleman-outcast in Paris and London, a member of the defeated faction of the defeated side in the Spanish Civil War, a truthteller amidst the propagandists of the BBC, a critic of the Left on the Socialist
Tribune.
His appearance was also idiosyncratic. He was, like his contemporary and friend Graham Greene, unusually tall and thin. Greene dressed conservatively and looked like a man of the upper middle class while Orwell had a workman's cropped haircut, a Frenchman's thin mustache, a proletarian's clothes—and an invalid's furrowed face.

Like Simone Weil, Orwell identified with and actually lived the life of the poor and oppressed. Both were committed, self-sacrificial writers who joined the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell went down and out, and investigated the lives of the industrial poor. Weil became a manual laborer on farms and in a car factory, and joined the Resistance movement in France and England. Orwell gave up part of his wartime rations so “others”—people he didn't know—would have more to eat. Weil, finally, refused to eat in order to show her solidarity with the victims of World War II. Both authors died of tuberculosis in an English hospital.

Orwell's life, in essence, was a series of irrational, sometimes life-threatening decisions. He joined the Burmese police instead of going to university; washed dishes in Paris and tramped in England; tried to grow vegetables and run a small shop in Hertfordshire; fought with the POUM Anarchists in Spain, just after his marriage, and put his wife in great danger by encouraging her to come to Barcelona. He moved to London during the Blitz, when everyone else was trying to leave; and he made a suicidal sojourn to Jura when he was dying of tuberculosis. All these potentially disastrous moves, this risky self-sabotage, provided valuable experience that he transformed into art.

Orwell had extensive military training, was fascinated by explosives and had a violent streak in his character. As he wrote at the beginning of the war: “At seven years old I was a member of the Navy League and wore a sailor suit with
‘H.M.S. Invincible
' on my cap. Even before my public-school O.T.C. [Officers Training Corps] I had been in a private school cadet corps. On and off, I have been toting a rifle ever since I was ten”—in the Burmese police, drilling recruits and fighting on the Aragon front, and training volunteers in the London Home Guard.

“One of the greatest joys of my own childhood,” he wrote at the end of the war, “were those little brass cannons on wooden gun-carriages … [that] went off with a noise like the Day of Judgement…. Normal healthy
children enjoy explosions.” And so, apparently, do normal healthy adults. His publisher Fredric Warburg, who served under Sergeant Orwell in the Home Guard, described how Orwell loaded a spigot mortar, an anti-tank weapon, with the wrong kind of fifty-pound bomb and then gave the order to fire. The man holding the mortar lost all his front teeth and another, standing nearby, was knocked unconscious for twenty-four hours.

In his essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish” (1944) Orwell contrasted the gentlemanly, intellectual English detective with his violent and brutal American counterpart (though the author, James Hadley Chase, was actually English) and criticized Chase's portrayal of one of the American gang, “whose sole pleasure in life consists in driving knives into other people's bellies.” But the sometimes saintly Orwell had the same violent urge. In “Such, Such Were the Joys” (c. 1947), his horrific account of St. Cyprian's, he describes his swift revenge on an older boy who'd cruelly twisted his arm: “[I] walked up to Burton with the most harmless air I could assume, and then, getting the weight of my body behind it, smashed my fist into his face.” Quarreling with an elderly but contentious Paris taxi-driver, en route to Spain in 1936, he exclaimed: “You think you're too old for me to smash your face in. Don't be too sure!” When his flatmate Rayner Heppenstall came home drunk late one night and threatened him, Orwell punched him in the face and knocked him down the stairs.

Later on, Orwell was haunted by memories of the Burmese servants and coolies he had hit with his fist in moments of rage. In “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) he recalled that during the endless provocations and torments in Burma, “I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.” In the dark months of 1940 he recorded in his diary: “one must above all die
fighting
and have the satisfaction of killing someone else first.” The torture scenes in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
were based not only on the ghastly medical treatments during the last years of his life, but also on his own deep-rooted streak of sadism.

When Orwell came home after five years in Burma, he horrified his family by throwing up his secure, well-paying job and deciding to become a writer. But he needed something to write
about.
So instead of working for a newspaper or publisher (as Greene did at the beginning of his career), he became a kitchen slave and wandering bum. He knew how to get on with outcasts and quite enjoyed their company. He neither patronized nor scorned them, but showed real sympathy and interest—a considerable imaginative
leap for an Old Etonian and imperial policeman. His desire for first-hand experience with the down and outs was meant to compensate, he said, “for the tragic failure of theoretical Socialism to make any contact with the normal working class.”

His revulsion from and guilt about his bourgeois background as well as his natural inclination toward austerity made it essential for him to live in extreme discomfort. Just after he married Eileen O'shaughnessy in June 1936, she abandoned her graduate studies and they moved into a little-ease cottage. “It's bloody awful,” he told the working-class writer Jack Common. “Still, it's more or less livable…. When there is sudden rain in winter the kitchen tends to flood…. The living room fire, you may remember, smokes…. There is water laid on, but no hot.” The crude toilet, of course, was outdoors. The six flights of stone steps leading to his wartime flat in Islington (which also had the requisite leaking roof) left Orwell, who also had to carry up a baby and pram, gasping for breath. His remote, wet and windy cottage in Jura—a cross between Wuthering Heights and Cold Comfort Farm—was down a deeply rutted road, without electricity or telephone, and six hours from the nearest doctor. A hemorrhage on Jura would have finished him off.

In 1934 “gloomy George” (as Herbert Read called him) compared himself to an Old Testament prophet of doom: “This age makes me so sick that sometimes I am almost impelled to stop at a corner and start calling down curses from Heaven like Jeremiah or Ezra.” The event that profoundly sickened him, changed his life and transformed the nature of his writing was the Spanish Civil War. Orwell told Heppenstall (who'd provoked and then forgiven Orwell's violence) that “we started off by being heroic defenders of democracy and ended by slipping over the border with the police panting on our heels.”