Orwell (7 page)

Another obscure phase of his life is his decision in 1946 to live the extremely arduous and exhausting existence on the remote island of Jura in the Hebrides. Mr. Angus' explanation that he had gone to Jura “to find some peace away from journalism, the telephone, etc.” is clearly unsatisfactory since an equally quiet place could be found in a more salubrious climate, closer to medical assistance and away from the country that Orwell professed to dislike (see
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, 42). The terminal phase of Orwell's very serious illness (he could speak, like Pope, of “this long disease, my Life”) dates from the winter of 1946, part of which he spent on Jura.

One pattern that emerges from these volumes is the terrible state of Orwell's health. Like D. H. Lawrence, he seems to have had defective lungs since boyhood—“after about the age of ten, I was seldom in good health…. I had defective bronchial tubes and a lesion in one lung that was not discovered till many years later”—which tormented him for the rest of his life. The Burmese climate ruined his health, he had pneumonia in February 1929 (see “How the Poor Die”), was shot through the throat in Spain in May 1937, had tuberculosis in March 1938, was unfit for service in the Second World War due to bronchiectasis and was gravely ill during the last three years of his life.

Orwell's published letters, like Conrad's, are strangely impersonal, rather pedestrian and unvarying with each correspondent, but they become extraordinarily moving during the last months of his life when he faces the gravity of his disease with a Keatsian courage. He was deeply devoted to his adopted son, Richard, and poignantly writes: “I am so afraid of his growing away from me, or getting to think of me as just a person who is always lying down & can't play. Of course children can't understand illness.
He used to come to me & say ‘Where have you hurt yourself?'” In May 1949 he admits: “I am in most ghastly health…. When the picture is taken I am afraid there is not much doubt it will show that both lungs have deteriorated badly. I asked the doctor recently whether she thought I would survive, & she wouldn't go further than saying she didn't know…. Don't think I am making up my mind to peg out. On the contrary, I have the strongest reasons for wanting to stay alive. But I want to get a clear idea of
how long
I am likely to last, & not just be jollied along the way doctors usually do.” In August he announces, rather surprisingly: “I intend getting married again (to Sonia) when I am once again in the land of the living, if I ever am. I suppose everyone will be horrified.” And in October he writes: “I am still very weak & ill, but I think better on the whole. I am getting married very unobtrusively this week. It will probably be a long time before I can get out of bed.” He died three months later, in January 1950.

Future biographers will certainly be interested in Orwell's unusual second marriage, just as Orwell, in discussing Carlyle's marriage, was interested in “the frame of mind in which people get married, and the astonishing selfishness that exists in the sincerest love.”

The other dominant pattern in Orwell's life (closely related to his illness) is the series of masochistic impulses for a higher cause that testifies to his compulsive need for self-punishment: in school; in the Burmese Police; among scullions and beggars; in squalid doss houses and inside mines; with the ragged, weaponless army of the Republic in Spain; 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 damp, bleak and isolated wastes of Jura. In
Wigan Pier
Orwell states, “I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate” and explains that this guilt derives from his experience as a colonial oppressor.
⁷
But it seems that the source of this guilt, which he could never extinguish (see his “Diary,” quoted in the epigraph), was both earlier and deeper than Orwell suggests (“Such, Such Were the Joys” describes his deep-rooted childhood guilt). Though no specific evidence yet exists, it is possible to imagine an early Lord Jim syndrome, a kind of moral self-betrayal or dishonorable fall from self-esteem that is a truer source of his masochistic guilt. But whatever the source, 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.

Orwell's books deal with two dominant themes—poverty and politics—or as he put it, “the twin nightmares that beset nearly every modern man, the nightmare of unemployment and the nightmare of State interference.” The autobiographical
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933), the novels
A
Clergyman's Daughter
(1935) and
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936), and the reportage
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937) deal with the first theme;
Burmese Days
(1934),
Homage to Catalonia
(1938),
Animal Farm
(1945) and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949) with the second; while
Coming Up For Air
(1939) is a transitional work that concerns an unsuccessful attempt to escape from both nightmares. The rest of this essay concentrates on the first phase of Orwell's career; I do not discuss
A Clergyman's Daughter
, his weakest book.

“We all live in terror of poverty,” writes Orwell, and its psychological and social effects are his great theme. Though almost all his books treat this question in a significant way (the exploited natives in
Burmese Days
, the plight of the common soldier in
Homage to Catalonia
and of the dehumanized proles in
Nineteen Eighty-Four)
, Orwell's three books of the depressed mid-thirties are completely devoted to the exploration of this theme. Works like
New Grub Street, The Spoils of Poynton, Nostromo, Howards End
and
Major Barbara
all deal, in their different ways, with the corruption of capitalistic society; Orwell's books consider the working classes who are exploited by this corrupt society.

One of Orwell's main ideas can be found in Shaw's Preface to
Major Barbara
(1907): “The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.”
⁸
Shaw, a half-century before Orwell, “was drawn into the Socialist revival of the early eighties, among Englishmen intensely serious and burning with indignation at the very real and very fundamental evils that affected all the world.”
⁹
Orwell's way of dealing with these evils is to experience them personally and directly, to break out of the emotionally shallow and sheltered state of the middle classes and make contact with physical reality, “to look down at the roots on which his existence is founded.”
¹⁰
As Orwell explains in the autobiographical section of
Wigan Pier:

I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants…. Therefore my mind turned immediately towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes…. I could go among these people, see what their lives were like and feel myself temporarily part of their world. Once I had been among them and accepted by them, I should have touched bottom, and—this is what I felt: I was aware even then it was irrational—part of my guilt would drop from me…. And down there in the squalid and, as a matter of fact, horribly boring sub-world of the tramp I had a feeling of release, of adventure, which seems absurd when I look back, but which was sufficiently vivid at the time. (130–131, 134)

Many of Orwell's most characteristic ideas are stated in this passage: the desire to have immediate and actual experience, to see things from the inside rather than from a purely theoretical viewpoint; to fight, like Dickens, “on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere,” and to agonize over their sufferings; to extinguish, among out-castes, the sense of social class; to feel the pleasurable relief, the anxiety and guilt-annihilating euphoria of going to the dogs and knowing you can stand it; to undergo the excitement of a
sortie
to the lower depths.

Orwell felt, in Burke's words, “I must see the things; I must see the men.”
¹¹
Books like Johnson's
Life of Savage
, Zola's
Germinal
, Hamsun's
Hunger
, Crane's
Maggie
, Gorki's
The Lower Depths
, Davies'
Autobiography of a Super Tramp
and Jack London's
The Road
, which had vividly portrayed the outcasts at the extreme fringe of society, were pioneering works of intensely personal social protest. But the most immediate influence on
Down and Out
was London's
The People of the Abyss.
In his Preface, London likened himself to an explorer of the underworld and wrote, “what I wish to do, is to go down into the East End and see things for myself. I wish to know how these people are living there, and why they are living there, and what they are living for. In short, I am going to live there myself.”
¹²

Orwell lived first in a working class quarter of Paris and worked as a dishwasher (“a slave's slave”) in 1928–29, just after he returned from five years in Burma as a policeman. The similar injustices to the workers in both countries are suggested in
Down and Out
though this idea is not fully developed until
Wigan Pier.
When Orwell writes of the English tramp Paddy, for example, “Seeing him walk, you felt instinctively that he would sooner take a blow than give one” (109), it is clear that this “instinctive” feeling grew directly out of his nasty experiences in Burma where he did the dirty work of Empire, was responsible for “the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos” and saw “louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants.”
¹³
This made him burn with hatred of his countrymen and of himself. Similarly, the equation of exploitation with luxury in his analysis of the upper class attitude toward the poor—“since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you” (87)—again recalls the colonial parallel: “As the world is now constituted, we are all standing on the backs of half-starved coolies.”
¹⁴

In his summary chapter of the Paris section, Orwell compares the slavery and suffering of a
plongeur
to that of an Indian rickshaw puller and a coal miner, which both looks back to Burma and anticipates Wigan. The most striking aspect of the continuity of Orwell's books in this period is that his description of the infernal
plongeur
's cellar is extraordinarily like the hellish mine in Wigan:

[I came] into a narrow passage, deep underground, and so low that I had to stoop in places. It was stiflingly hot and very dark, with only dim, yellow bulbs several yards apart. There seemed to be miles of dark labyrinthine passages—actually, I suppose, a few hundred yards in all—that reminded one queerly of the lower decks of a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food, and a humming, whirring noise…. It was too low for me to stand upright, and the temperature was perhaps 110 degrees Fahrenheit…. Scullions, naked to the waist, were stoking the fires.
(Down and Out
, 41–43)

Most of the things one imagines in hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and above all, unbearably cramped space…. You can never forget … the line of bowed, [naked], kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their huge shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed.
(Wigan Pier
, 19–21)

The theme of class exploitation is dramatized most vividly amidst the luxury and squalor of the grand hotel where the splendid customers sit just a few feet away from the disgusting filth of the kitchen workers. The only connection between these two worlds is the food prepared by one for the other, which often contains the cook's spit and waiter's hair grease. From this fact Orwell posits a wonderfully ironic economic law: “the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it” (59).

One of the larger ironies of the book is that Orwell fled this unjust social hierarchy only to find among the down and out an even more elaborate and rigidly military caste system. The staff of the hotel descended from the exalted heights of the
patron
and manager, through the
maître d'hôtel
, head cook,
chef du personnel
, other cooks, and waiters, to laundresses, apprentice waiters and finally
plongeurs
(who aspired to become lavatory attendants) and who had only chambermaids and
cafétiers
below them. And a similar social line existed among the London beggars, “between those who merely cadge and those who attempt to give some value for money” (123).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is Orwell's description of the psychology of poverty, as he discovered it in the hotels, hospitals, pawnshops and parks of the mean and degenerate Paris of Zola and of Baudelaire's “Tableaux Parisiens”; and in his “very narrow street—a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse” (5), whose ancient and sinister quality suggests the medieval city of Villon and of Hugo's
Notre Dame de Paris.

Orwell seemed happier as a
plongeur
than as a tramp, perhaps because it was easier to be
déclassé
outside his own country, and because he was
fresher and the life had an exotic tinge despite the patina of antique filth. He speaks of the eccentric freedom from the normal and the decent, the mindless acceptance when you reach destitution after anticipating it for so long, the animal contentment of the simple rhythm of work and sleep. But in the long run, of course, the degrading human effects are disastrous. Hunger reduces men to a spineless, brainless condition and malnutrition destroys their manhood, while extreme poverty cuts men off from contact with women: “The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually” (148).