Orwell (30 page)

Davison includes the list of interrogator's notes about Orwell and Eileen (they were never formally charged), which were given to the Communist Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason in Valencia, three weeks after they'd barely managed to escape from Spain. Based on papers stolen from Orwell's hotel room while Eileen was being questioned by the police, these notes show that Orwell was well known as a writer and prominent member of POUM, and would certainly have been executed if they'd caught him.

His heroic commander, Georges Kopp, was arrested and tortured in Spanish prisons, and Orwell bravely visited him and tried to get him out while he himself was being hunted. It's worth noting, as Orwell would say, that the powerful, bull-like Kopp appears as O'Brien in
Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“In spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his
movements…. A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards O'Brien…. When you looked at O'Brien's powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilised, it was impossible to believe that he could be defeated.”

“Good war books,” Orwell said, “are nearly always written from the angle of a
victim,”
and
Homage to Catalonia
—his greatest book—was written with white-hot anger. He was disgusted by the way the Left-wing press in England had covered up or lied about the savage suppression of POUM by the Communists and was determined to reveal the truth about what had really happened in Spain. As he told his close friend Arthur Koestler, who had gone through a similar experience in Málaga (and been interned in both French and English prisons during the war): “The sin of nearly all leftwingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.”

Orwell perfected a plain style that was part of his rhetorical arsenal, and persuaded his audience that he was both honest and sympathetic. As Wynd-ham Lewis wrote in
One-Way Song:
“These times require a voice that naked goes,/Without more fuss than Dryden's or Defoe's.” The striking openings of his major essays, for example, are uncannily effective and immediately hook the reader:

—In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people.

—As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

—Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

—Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

The first two sentences portray Orwell as victim; the last two are paradoxical statements about human nature.

Gloomy George could also be surprisingly witty in the supercilious Etonian mode. In a review of
The Hamlet
in 1940, he describes Faulkner's characters as if they belonged to a primitive tribe in a remote corner of the earth: “people with supremely hideous names—names like Flem Snopes and Eck Snopes—sit about on the steps of village stores, chewing tobacco, swindling one another in small business deals, and from time to time committing a rape or a murder.”

Orwell—a conscientious, imaginative but severe schoolmaster for two years in the early 1930s—later mocked (millenarians take note) the mechanical way in which he was taught history at school: “in 1499 you were still in the Middle Ages, with knights in plate armour riding at one another with long lances, and then suddenly the clock struck 1500, and you were in something called the Renaissance, and everyone wore ruffs and doublets and was busy robbing treasure ships on the Spanish Main.”

When describing the sexual habits of amphibians in one of his most charming essays, “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1946), he combines close observation and unusual facts with tenderness for a repulsive creature, and ends with a comical twist: “All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad.”

Though
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is more a realistic projection of the present than a nightmare vision of the future, Orwell was acutely prophetic (in that novel and elsewhere) about the breakdown of the nuclear family, the fate of the homeless, environmental pollution, deforestation, the dangers of addictive drugs, fanaticism and violence in international sporting events, the decay of meaningful language, the treatment of political dissidents in mental hospitals, the sudden disappearance of people who oppose repressive regimes, the proliferation of atomic weapons and the endless small wars, backed by the superpowers, who threaten but never actually fight each other.

Just as Orwell was almost captured and killed before he could write
Homage to Catalonia
and tell the truth about what happened in Spain, so he nearly died, during a boating accident in the dangerous Scottish whirlpool at Corryvrecken, before he could finish
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and radically change our way of thinking about modern politics. The grim letters about his rapidly declining health reveal the terrible struggle to finish his last novel (published seven months before he died). In the tuberculosis sanatoria he suffered weight loss, high fever, acute pain and a severe reaction to the streptomycin that might—in more moderate doses—have saved his life. Confined to bed, without a typewriter or even a decent pen, and with his right arm in a plaster cast, he heroically raced against death.

Orwell's statement about Kipling applies with equal force to himself: he was “the only English writer of [his] time who has added phrases to the language.” In
Nineteen Eighty-Four
alone Orwell invented these vivid phrases: Big Brother Is Watching You, Two Minutes Hate, Thought Police, Thoughtcrime, Facecrime, Doublethink, Memory Hole, Vaporized and Unperson. He was, paradoxically, a Tory Anarchist, a Socialist in love with
the past. The destruction of the past is a dominant theme in his last four books: the Communist lies about what really happened in Barcelona in
Homage to Catalonia
, Bowling's childhood village destroyed by developers and polluters in
Coming Up for Air
, the pigs' constant alteration of the Seven Commandments in
Animal Farm
and Winston's rewriting history in the Ministry of Truth in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Though Orwell died fifty years ago, we now need him more than ever. Had he lived, he would surely have commented on the squalid strife in western democracies. In April 1942, disgusted with wartime propaganda on both sides, Orwell wrote a scathing passage in his diary that seems to describe contemporary American politics: “You can go on and on telling lies, and the most palpable lies at that, and even if they are not actually believed, there is no strong revulsion. We are all drowning in filth…. 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.”

Evelyn Waugh—the subject of Orwell's last, unfinished essay—was the same age as Orwell and came from a similar background. But Waugh delighted in snobbish society and indulged in all the luxuries that Orwell despised: a grand country house, a London club, hedonistic cruises, elegant clothes, fine wines and expensive cigars. Though Orwell wanted very few material things, he didn't get any of them—even when he became comparatively wealthy at the end of his life. He wanted a handsome pram, decorated with a gold line, for his adopted son (impossible to obtain during the war), a good pair of American shoes (which were sent but didn't fit), a van for the rough roads of Jura (which arrived in wretched condition and couldn't even be driven off the ferry), streptomycin to cure his tuberculosis (which caused a severe reaction and saved another patient) and a second wife (who married him on his deathbed).

Though Orwell seems more puritanical than Byronic, this edition is full of extraordinary revelations about his love affairs. As a young man in Burma he slept with prostitutes and almost certainly had a mistress who inspired the vengeful Ma Hla May in
Burmese Days.
In Southwold in the early 1930s he had an affair (as I've recently discovered) with his married patron, Mabel Fierz. While seeing Mabel he was also courting Eleanor Jaques (engaged to his friend), who slept with him, and Brenda Salkeld (a clergyman's daughter),
who did not. He then moved on to another love triangle: Kay Ekevall, with whom he had an affair, and Sally Jerome (who worked in an advertising agency, like Rosemary in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying)
, who did not sleep with him. He dropped both women (Sally's still angry about his duplicity) when he met and immediately fell in love with the bright and attractive Eileen.

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.”