Orwell (3 page)

The bed-wetting was only the first of endless episodes that made Orwell feel guilty: he was poor, he was lazy and a failure, ungrateful and unhealthy, disgusting and dirty-minded, “weak, ugly, cowardly, smelly.” Flip and Sambo caned, reproached, abused and humiliated him throughout the six years, and Orwell developed the “profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude—and all this, it seemed, was inescapable.” After a homosexual scandal, “guilt seemed to hang in the air like a pall of smoke…. Till then I had hoped that I was innocent, and the conviction of sin which now took possession of me was perhaps all the stronger because I did not know what I had done.” These disturbing passages have metaphysical implications and suggest the guilt, absurdity, confusion and anxiety of the world created by Franz Kafka. And in this world the child—credulous, weak and vulnerable—is the ready and constant victim. He lacks any sense of proportion or probability and is forced to live with the constant “dread of offending against mysterious, terrible laws.”

The dominant pattern in Orwell's life that emerges from “Such, Such” is the series of masochistic impulses for a higher cause that testifies to his compulsive need to assuage his intense guilt by self-punishment: at St. Cyprian's; in the Burmese police; among scullions and beggars; in squalid doss houses and inside mines; with the ragged, weaponless army of the Spanish Republic; in propagandistic drudgery for the wartime BBC (a “whoreshop and lunatic asylum”); in thankless and exhausting political polemics; and finally in that mad and suicidal sojourn amidst the bleak and isolated wastes of Jura. In
Wigan Pier
Orwell states that he was “haunted by a sense of guilt” (127), and he explains that this guilt is political and derives from his experience as a colonial oppressor. But it seems that the cause of this guilt, which he could never extinguish, occurred earlier than Orwell suggests and had its deep roots in his childhood. Though this masochistic strain existed, Orwell's writing is manifest proof of his ability to transcend this personal guilt by channeling it into effective social and political thought and action. His own suffering led to a feeling of responsibility for the suffering of others.

 

My trip to Burma in August 2000 fulfilled a longstanding ambition, and I was the first Orwell scholar to visit that country (just as I was the first Lawrence scholar to go down a coal mine). Despite its extreme poverty, authoritarian regime and oppressive atmosphere, I found Burma extremely appealing. Like the Greek islanders of the 1960s, the people were among the nicest I'd ever met, and it was the most rewarding and interesting of my forty trips abroad. I confirmed at first hand that a Burmese student had never (as Maung Htin Aung claimed and I had doubted) pushed Orwell down a staircase in Rangoon.

The Orient-Express company asked me to pay my own plane fare to Burma, but gave me a free cruise on the Irrawaddy River from Pagan to Bhamo, near the Chinese border. They said I would not have to give any lectures, but once aboard (and with no notes) I had to give two extemporaneous talks.
Condé Nast Traveler
did not respond to my original proposal and my essay was not commissioned. But when I came home, they bought it and kept it for a year. They finally published it in November 2001—but left me out of the table of contents and contributors' notes.

It was not easy to follow George Orwell's footsteps in Burma. Not that I was hampered by a lack of freedom to travel. While the country's military junta was still limiting the movements of the courageous Aung San Suu Kyi—the hopeful alternative to the current repressive regime—last year it had signed treaties with rebellious hill tribes on the borders of India and China and had lifted travel restrictions. I was able to journey by plane, ship, boat, bus, car, trishaw, and foot to see the places where Orwell, the subject of my recently published biography, had lived while serving with the Burmese police from
1922 through 1927. The prison at Insein, near Rangoon, was the scene of “A Hanging,” his polemic on capital punishment. Moulmein, a city in Lower Burma, was the setting of “Shooting an Elephant,” his essay on the limitations of British colonial power. His life in Katha, a town far north of the capital, inspired his powerful novel
Burmese Days
(1934), a satiric portrait of English officials and corrupt Burmese that had offended everyone.

But Orwell's letters from Burma have not survived, and the meager records of his service had either been transferred to London or destroyed during the Japanese occupation. When writing the Burmese chapter in my biography, I'd had to use information from gazetteers, travel books, and memoirs. Today, most British buildings are in a state of advanced decay, and the Burmese government has tried to obliterate all traces of the colonial era, which lasted from the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 to independence in 1948. (The five-story National Museum leaves out more than a century of the country's history.) But with the help of Burmese friends, I was able to find the places where he had worked, to imagine how it was for a very young Englishman to represent British rule in an exotic, alien land.

Rangoon, like a rich widow fallen on hard times, was a broken-down and depressing city—more like Calcutta than the thriving capitals of Southeast Asia. It had leprous-looking, fungus-encrusted buildings; dark, uninviting shops; and restaurants that served such menacing dishes as “stamping fish,” “fish bladder soup,” and “pork stomach with garlic bean curd,” as well as more exotic plates of snake, alligator and monkey meat. Street vendors had pathetic offerings: a tiny mound of lemons, a few cheap sunglasses, some tattered English magazines. Men dressed in
lungis
and rubber sandals hung off the edge of packed buses. (Few people in Burma wear shoes, as I discovered when I broke my shoelaces and had trouble buying new ones.) Laborers staggered by, under crushing piles of bricks. Lines of monks—heads shaved, feet bare, with rust-colored robes and umbrellas—walked in procession with black lacquer bowls to beg their food and alms. Huge red government billboards carried Big Brother's slogans in English, urging the populace to destroy those who opposed the ruling generals and who wanted to restore the democratically elected government (Aung San Suu Kyi's party won the national elections in 1990): “Crush all internal and destructive elements as the common enemy,” and “Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views.” The regime revealed its puritanical side with another sign that read, rather oddly: “Prohibition: Any indecorous social behavior is strictly prohibited.”

I visited Rangoon's main attraction, the enormous Shwedagon pagoda, set in a vast green park, as the sun blazed off the white stone floors, glittering
altars and ornate statues. Unimpressed by the layers of gold and encrusted jewels, Aldous Huxley wrote that the pagoda belongs to the “merry-go-round style of architecture and decoration. It seems a sacred Fun Fair, a Luna Park dedicated to the greater glory of Gautama [Buddha].” Although there are very few new buildings in town, throughout the country there is an endless proliferation of pagodas—the only growth industry in Burma.

But the people smile warmly, no one bothers or begs from the occasional tourist, and the streets are safe, even at night and in the dingiest districts. In a large store I was ceremoniously escorted through various departments to buy tissues and bottled water, although my purchases amounted to only 65 cents. The Burmese believe that displays of anger and the loss of self-control are humiliating, and this desire to suppress hostility and avoid conflict makes social relations here more pleasant than in the West. I saw only one altercation, between a trishaw driver and an irate passenger who jabbed his fingers and made violent threats, as the crowd looked on disapprovingly and the driver slowly turned and pedaled away. Buddhism, which teaches that life is suffering, seems to make the people passive and fatalistic, yet it also gives them a sweetness, gentleness and charm.

Orwell's favorite bookshop, Smart & Mookerdum's, was long gone. But a Burmese friend from Rangoon University showed me the old English Gymkhana Club on Halpin Road, which Orwell frequented when he came to Rangoon. It had a high, cross-timbered ceiling and a tin roof that rattled in the rain, and was now the oldest building of the Children's Hospital. A young woman doctor, sensitive about Burma's low rating from the World Health Organization and assuming that I was collecting evidence, got angry when I took photos and started scolding my friend, who gently deflected her.

I also saw the Central Railway Station, where, according to Maung Htin Aung (the only Burmese to write about Orwell), a Burmese student once tripped Orwell, who fell down a staircase. In my biography, I wrote that this apparently eyewitness account seemed more like nationalist propaganda than an actual event. I was pleased to have this belief confirmed by my learned Burmese friend, who said that Aung, an old colleague and rector of the university, was an unreliable historian who refused to give sources for his assertions.

On a trip south of the river, I got special permission to enter the grounds of the old Burmah Oil Company, which had supplied most of the oil to India and was once guarded by Orwell's men. After a monsoon squall, I hired a taxi ($4 for 75 minutes) and drove north, near the airport, to Insein prison, where the execution described in “A Hanging” took place, also in the monsoon season. “It was Burma, a sodden morning of the rains,” Orwell wrote.
“A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls and into the jail yard.” In that crowded and squalid part of town, quite different from the quiet suburb it had been in the 1920s, a sign outside the prison gate warned that photos were forbidden. After my Rangoon lecture on writing biography, I met many lively, intelligent writers who were eager for news of the larger literary world. Several of them had done time in Insein prison for political offenses and told me that hangings still took place there.

After four days in Rangoon—full of irritations and interests, pleasures and disappointments—I flew north to Mandalay to join the eleven-day “Road to Mandalay” cruise offered by the Orient-Express company. For most of the year, it visits only Mandalay and Pagan, but in August and September, when the Himalayan snows melt and the Irrawaddy rises, an extended trip all the way up to Bhamo, only thirty miles from the Chinese border, becomes possible. The elegant ship, a converted Rhine passenger vessel, offered firstrate food, accommodations and service. In an extremely remote locale, it maintains a high standard of comfort, even luxury. The shore excursions are seamlessly organized, and since it is anchored at night, there are no rough seas. It is pleasantly without a disco, television, phones and email, and takes only sixty to ninety passengers.

I spent much of the journey sitting beside the swimming pool or under the canopy, watching the riverine scenery from the upper deck or even from my own high bed and stateroom. The river route enabled us to visit places hard to reach by road or by air. Wherever we arrived, the whole village would come out to greet us. The fast-flowing river, the houses built on stilts to protect against flooding, and the lush green mountains in the distance recalled the atmosphere of Joseph Conrad's early novels. Stepping off a jungly jetty, I felt like his Lord Jim or Tom Lingard, whose sudden appearance roused great interest when Westerners were still an unusual sight. It seemed odd, even vulgar at first, to stare at the villagers and take their photograph. But the interest was mutual. The people waved and smiled, sold us
lungis
and straw hats, and examined us as intensely as we did them.

The Irrawaddy was muddy yet clean, the vistas unspoiled, the green banks dotted with white and gold pagodas. Logs floated down the river on barges, dolphins leapt out of the water, workers dredged sand for cement, fishermen cast their nets, women washed clothes, children swam and carried home buckets of water on their heads. In some places, the jungle rushed down to the river and tall trees towered over the ship as it passed through the narrow defiles, close to the shore.

Of our destinations, I was most interested in Katha (pronounced ka-TAH), about two hundred miles north of Mandalay and the setting of
Burmese
Days
—in the novel, borrowing the name of a district of Rangoon, Orwell calls the town Kyauktada. Katha was a long way from Rangoon, and in 1927 the lonely young Orwell was as isolated as a Peace Corps volunteer is today, but had infinitely more responsibility. I toured the town in a narrow-seated, rickety trishaw, through heavy rain and mud, accompanied by a local schoolteacher on a motorcycle (surely a government agent assigned to keep an eye on me).

The main streets run north-south, parallel to the river, and at the far edge of town a lavish market offers mounds of tropical fruit and many kinds of rice. But there is no maidan, or central common, which unifies the characters and locales in the novel. Orwell's autobiographical hero has an affair with a Burmese girl. I wondered if he'd left any descendants, and looked out for a tall, thin, seventy-five-year-old Eurasian who might have fit the bill.