A Life in Letters Read online

  5.Burmese Days.

  6.Compare Dorothy in A Clergyman's Daughter.

  7.In a letter to Eleanor Jaques of 30 November he said he was going to 'see some people at Gerrard's Cross'.

  To Brenda Salkeld*

  Saturday [? June 1933]

  The Hawthorns

  Dearest Brenda

  I sent you about two thirds of the rough draft of my novel1 yesterday. I would have sent it earlier, but it has been with my agent all this time. He is quite enthusiastic about it, which is more than I am; but you are not to think that when finished it will be quite as broken-backed as at present, for with me almost any piece of writing has to be done over and over again. I wish I were one of those people who can sit down and fling off a novel in about four days. There is no news here. I am frightfully busy, suffering from the heat, and exercised about the things in my garden, which are going to dry up and die if this cursed weather doesn't change. I am growing, among other things, a pumpkin, which of course needs much more careful treatment than a marrow. I have read nothing, I think, except periodicals, all of which depress me beyond words. Do you ever see the New English Weekly? It is the leading Social Credit 2 paper. As a monetary scheme Social Credit is probably sound, but its promoters seem to think that they are going to take the main weapon out of the hands of the governing classes without a fight, which is an illusion. A few years ago I thought it rather fun to reflect that our civilisation is doomed, but now it fills me above all else with boredom to think of the horrors that will be happening within ten years--either some appalling calamity, with revolution and famine, or else all-round trustification and Fordification, with the entire population reduced to docile wage-slaves, our lives utterly in the hands of the bankers, and a fearful tribe of Lady Astors3 and Lady Rhonddas4 et hoc genus riding us like succubi in the name of Progress. Have you read Ulysses yet? It sums up better than any book I know the fearful despair that is almost normal in modern times. You get the same kind of thing, though only just touched upon, in Eliot's poems. With E, however, there is also a certain sniffish 'I told you so' implication, because as the spoilt darling of the Church Times he is bound to point out that all this wouldn't have happened if we had not shut our eyes to the Light. The C[hurch] T[imes] annoys me more and more. It is a poor satisfaction even to see them walloping the Romans, because they do it chiefly by descending to their level. I wonder whether it is true, as I have been told, that the CT advertisement columns are full of disguised abortion advertisements? If so it is pretty disgusting in a paper which is in constant pursuit of Bertrand Russell, Barney the Apostate,5 etc because of their birth control propaganda. By the way did you see Barney's recent pronouncements at the Conference on I forget what, about the undesirable multiplication of the lower classes. His latest phrase is 'the social problem class', meaning all those below a certain income. Really you sometimes can't help thinking these people are doing it on purpose, Write soon. I wish you were here now. Have you been bathing yet? I keep putting it off.

  With love

  Eric A. Blair

  [X, 176, pp. 316-18; handwritten]

  1.Burmese Days.

  2.The Social Credit movement, based on the ideas of Major C. H. Douglas, claimed that prosperity could be achieved through a reform of the monetary system.

  3.Nancy Witcher Astor (1879-1964), wife of the first Viscount Astor, born in Virginia, society and political hostess at Cliveden, the Astor estate on the Thames, was the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons, 1919-45. She was an eloquent advocate of temperance and women's rights. In the first edition of Coming Up for Air (1939), Orwell included Lady Astor's name among a 'fearful tribe' of 'soul-savers and Nosey Parkers'.Though that name was set for the Secker & Warburg 1948 edition - as the 1947 proof witnesses - it was marked for omission in proof and has not been included (VII, p. 183). The omission sign does not appear to be Orwell's, but it might follow his instructions. Since the name Lord Beaverbrook in this same list was allowed to stand, fear of an action for libel or defamation could hardly be responsible for the omission. Perhaps Orwell removed the name out of his friendship with David Astor; he did not know of the change.

  4.Margaret Haig Thomas (1883-1958), second Viscountess Rhondda, was a highly successful businesswoman and ardent believer in the equality of the sexes. She actively edited her own independent weekly, Time and Tide, 1928-58.

  5.Ernest William Barnes (1874-1953) was a mathematician and modernist churchman, and Bishop of Birmingham, 1924-53. His writings include Should Such a Faith Offend? and Scientific Theory and Religion.

  To Eleanor Jaques*

  7 July 1933

  The Hawthorns

  Dearest Eleanor,

  It seems so long since that day I went out with you--actually, I suppose, about a month. This 'glorious' weather has been almost the death of me. However, I occasionally manage to get over to Southall & have a swim at the open-air baths, & my garden has done pretty well considering the drought. The only failures I have had were shallots & broad beans, both I fancy due to having been planted too late. I have had enormous quantities of peas, & I am a convert forever to the system of sinking a trench where you are going to grow a row of peas. I hope I shall be in S'wold for part of the summer holidays, but I am afraid it won't be long, because I am going to a new school at Uxbridge next term & they may want me to do some tutoring during the holidays. God send I'll be able to drop this foul teaching after next year. I do hope you'll be in Southwold during the holidays & perhaps we can go & picnic as we did last year. I am so pining to see the sea again. Do try to be in S'wold if you can, & keep some days free for me during the first fortnight in August. I think I shall get home about the 28th of this month. My novel will be about finished by the end of this term, but I don't like large sections of it & am going to spend some months revising it. Please write & tell me what your plans are, & remember me to your parents.

  With much love

  Eric

  [X, 178, p. 319; handwritten1]

  1.Published by kind permission of Richard Young.

  To Eleanor Jaques*

  Thursday [20 July 1933]

  The Hawthorns

  Dearest Eleanor,

  Do write & tell me if you will be in S'wold during the summer holidays. I am going to be there I think from the 29th inst. to the 18th August, & am so wanting to see you. If you are to be there, try & keep some days free for me, & it would be so nice if we could go & bathe & make our tea like we used to do last year along the W'wick1 shore. Let me know.

  The heat here is fearful, but it is good for my marrows & pumpkins, which are swelling almost visibly. We have had lashings of peas, beans just beginning, potatoes rather poor, owing to the drought I suppose. I have finished my novel,2 but there are wads of it that I simply hate, & am going to change. They say it will be soon enough if it is done some time at the end of the year. Please G. I get a little spare time in my next job. I went over to see the prize-giving at the school & it looked pretty bloody--the girls' section of the school (which I shall have nothing to do with--perhaps it is for the best) sang the female version of Kipling's 'If.' I am told that there is also a female version of 'Forty years on', which I would give something to get hold of.3 I have been reading in D. H. Lawrence's collected letters. Some of them very interesting--there is a quality about L. that I can't define, but everywhere in his work one comes on passages of an extraordinary freshness, vividness, so that tho' I would never, even given the power, have done it quite like that myself, I feel that he has seized on an aspect of things that no one else would have noticed. In another way, which I can still less explain, he reminds me of someone from the Bronze Age. I think there are some scraps of mine in the August Adelphi 4--a poem, but I am not sure it is not one you have seen. Au revoir, & write soon.

  Much love from

  Eric

  [X, 179, pp. 319-20; handwritten5]

  1.Walberswick is about two miles south of Southwold.

  2.Burmese Days.

&n
bsp; 3.'Forty Years On,' the Harrow school song, written in 1872 by John Farmer, was also sung by many girls' schools; in Great Days and Jolly Days (1977), Celia Haddon lists a wide range of such girls' schools (p. 21). It was also sung by such coeducational state schools as Eccles Grammar School. (Orwell reverted to this topic in a letter to Brenda Salkeld, 7.5.35.)

  4.There was no poem by Orwell in the August issue of The Adelphi, though his review of Enid Starkie's Baudelaire appeared.

  5.Published by kind permission of Anthony Loudon.

  Publishing, Wigan and Spain

  1934 - 1938

  This was a productive period for Orwell. Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and The Road to Wigan Pier were published and, although Orwell dismissed the second and third of these as potboilers which he did not wish to see reprinted unless they would bring in his heirs a shilling or two, they are not wholly unrewarding. His experiences in the 'Distressed Areas' - he travelled around far more than solely to Wigan, of course - and in Spain were formative both to his character and outlook, social and political. He also contributed reviews and essays to literary journals, notably 'Shooting an Elephant', which says as much about the decline of the Raj as the collapse of an elephant.

  Having delivered the typescript of The Road to Wigan Pier to Victor Gollancz just before Christmas Day 1936, he made his own way to Spain to fight for the Government against Franco. He had intended to join the International Brigade but, as he told Gollancz, partly by accident he enrolled in the POUM - the Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista. This he described as 'one of those dissident Communist parties which have appeared in many countries in the last few years as a result of the opposition to "Stalinism"; i.e. to the change, real or apparent, in Communist policy. It was made up partly of ex-Communists and partly of an earlier party, the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc. Numerically it was small, with not much influence outside Catalonia . . . [where] its strongold was Lerida' (Homage to Catalonia, pp. 202-3). He would probably not have joined had he known that, long before he left England, the Soviet Communists were determined to eliminate it. In October 1936, Victor Orlov, head of the NKVD in Spain, assured his Headquarters that 'the Trotskyist organization POUM can easily be liquidated' (Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive (1996), p. 95). Thus the description of Orwell and Eileen as 'trotzquistas pronunciados' (confirmed Trotskyists) in the Report on them to the Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason in Valencia (a document Orwell knew nothing about) was to damn them utterly. Had they been in Spain at the time of the trial of such colleagues as Jordi Arquer* it could have led to their imprisonment or even execution.

  Orwell was on leave in Barcelona during 'the May Events' when the Communists attempted to eliminate the revolutionary parties (including the POUM). He returned to the Huesca front and, on 20 May 1937, he was shot through the throat. He and Eileen escaped from Spain and they returned to their Wallington Cottage where Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia. In March 1938 he was taken seriously ill with a tubercular lesion and spent over five months in Preston Hall Sanatorium, Kent. On 2 September, he and Eileen left for French Morocco, believing it would restore him to health.

  From Orwell's letter to his mother, 2 December 1911

  To Brenda Salkeld*

  Tuesday night [late August? 1934]

  36 High St

  Southwold, Suffolk

  Dearest Brenda

  Many thanks for your letter. I hope you are enjoying yourself more in Ireland than I am in England. When are you coming back? I am going up to town as soon as I have finished the book I am doing,1 which should be at the end of October. I haven't settled yet where I am going to stay, but somewhere in the slums for choice. A friend wrote offering me the lease of part of a flat in Bayswater, but it would choke me to live in Bayswater. No, I have never seen a tortoise drinking. Darwin mentions that when he was in the Galapagos Is. the big tortoises there which lived on cactuses & things on the higher ground used to come down into the valley once or twice in the year to drink, & the journey took them a day or two. They stored water in a kind of sack in their bellies.2 I have been reading some books by Lafcadio Hearn-- tiresome stuff, & he idolises the Japanese, who always seem to me such a boring people.3 I also tried to read Lord Riddell's diary of the Peace Conference & After.4 What tripe! It is amazing how some people can have the most interesting experiences & then have absolutely nothing to say about them. I went to the pictures last week and saw Jack Hulbert in Jack Ahoy which I thought very amusing, & a week or two before that there was quite a good crook film, which, however, my father ruined for me by insisting on telling me the plot beforehand. This week The Constant Nymph is on. I haven't been to it, of course, but even when I see the posters it makes me go hot all over to think that in my youth--I think I must have been about 23 when it was published in book form--I was affected by it almost to tears O mihi praeteritos etc.5 I should think that any critic who lives to a great age must have many passages in his youth that he would willingly keep dark. There must be, for instance, many critics who in the 'nineties went all mushy over Hall Caine or even Marie Corelli--though M.C. isn't so absolutely bad, judging by the only book of hers I ever read. It was called Thelma & there was a very licentious clergyman in it who wasn't half bad. Did you, by the way, give me back those books of Swift? It doesn't matter, only I don't want to lose them. Yes, Roughing It.6 does 'date' a bit, but not enough--because anything worth reading always 'dates.' Do come back soon. I am so miserable all alone. I have practically no friends here now, because now that Dennis & Eleanor are married & Dennis has gone to Singapore,7 it has deprived me of two friends at a single stroke. Everything is going badly. My novel about Burma made me spew when I saw it in print, & I would have rewritten large chunks of it, only that costs money and means delay as well. As for the novel I am now completing, it makes me spew even worse, & yet there are some decent passages in it. I don't know how it is, I can write decent passages but I can't put them together. I was rather pluming myself on having a poem8 in the Best Poems of 1934, but I now learn that there are several dozen of these anthologies of the so called best poems of the year, & Ruth Pitter 9 writes to tell me that she is in 4 of this year's batch, including one called Twenty Deathless Poems. We are getting delicious French beans from the garden, but I am concerned about the pumpkin, which shows signs of ripening though it is not much bigger than an orange. All my fruit has been stolen by the children next door, as I forsawdeg it would. The little beasts were in such a hurry to get it that they didn't even wait till it was half ripe, but took the pears when they were mere chunks of wood. Another time I must try a dodge Dr Collings told me, which is to paint a mixture of vaseline & some indelible dye, I forget what, on a few of the fruit that are likely to be taken first & then you can spot who has taken it by the stains on their hands. The town is very full & camps of Girl Guides etc. infesting all the commons. I nearly died of cold the other day when bathing, because I had walked out to Easton Broad not intending to bathe, & then the water looked so nice that I took off my clothes & went in, & then about 50 people came up & rooted themselves to the spot. I wouldn't have minded that, but among them was a coastguard who could have had me up for bathing naked, so I had to swim up & down for the best part of half an hour, pretending to like it. Do come back soon, dearest one. Can't you come & stay with somebody before the term begins? It is sickening that I have to go away just after you come back. Write soon.

  With much love

  Eric

  [X, 204, pp. 346-8; handwritten]

  1.A Clergyman's Daughter.

  2.Orwell had recommended Brenda read The Voyage of the Beagle some eighteen months earlier. His dramatised account of the voyage was broadcast by the BBC on 29 March 1946 (XVIII, 2953, pp. 179-201).

  3.Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), writer and translator. Born at Levkas in the Ionian Islands. Lived in the USA, 1869-90, then in Japan, where he became a citizen. Served with distinction as Professor of English at Imperial Universit
y, Tokyo. Wrote several books on Japanese life and culture. Three of his ghost stories were made into the Japanese film, Kwaidon, 1965.

  4.George Riddell (1865-1934; cr. Baron 1920), Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and After, 1918-23 (1934). He owned, among other newspapers, the News of the World.

  5.O mihi praeteritos referat si Iuppiter deg annos: 'O would Jupiter restore me the years that are fled!', Virgil, Aeneid, viii, 560.

  6.By Mark Twain (1872): it describes the author's experiences with silver miners in Nevada a decade earlier. An unsigned review in Overland Monthly, June 1872, said its humour was such that it 'should have a place in every sick-room, and be the invalid's chosen companion'.

  7.Dennis Collings and Eleanor Jaques married in 1934; he had been made assistant curator at the Raffles Museum in Singapore.

  8.'On a Ruined Farm near the His Master's Voice Gramophone Factory (X, 196, pp. 338-9).

  9.Ruth Pitter, CBE (1897-1992) had known Orwell since World War I, and he had stayed in her house from time to time in 1930. He later reviewed two of her books of poetry. In 1937 she won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and in 1955 was awarded the Queen's Medal for Poetry. Her Collected Poems appeared in 1991. She ran the Walberswick Peasant Pottery Co. Ltd in the 1930s, illustrated in Thompson, p. 23.

  To Brenda Salkeld*

  Wed. night [early September? 1934]

  36 High St

  Southwold

  Dearest Brenda

  As you complain about the gloominess of my letters, I suppose I must try and put on what Mr Micawber called the hollow mask of mirth, but I assure you it is not easy, with the life I have been leading lately. My novel1 instead of going forwards, goes backwards with the most alarming speed. There are whole wads of it that are so awful that I really don't know what to do with them. And to add to my other joys, the fair, or part of it, has come back and established itself on the common just beyond the cinema, so that I have to work to the accompaniment of roundabout music that goes on till the small hours. You may think that this is red ink I am writing in, but really it is some of the bloody sweat that has been collecting round me in pools for the last few days. I am glad to hear you enjoyed yourself in the peninsular, as you are pleased to call it. I shall send this to the London address you gave me, hoping they will keep it for you. The garden isn't doing badly. We had so many cauliflowers that we couldn't eat them up fast enough, so about twenty have run to seed. I have one marrow--the eighth so far--that is almost Harvest Festival size, and I am letting it get ripe to make jam out of. I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time.2 I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever. I also bought for a shilling a year's issue of a weekly paper of 1851, which is not uninteresting. They ran among other things a matrimonial agency, and the correspondence relating to this is well worth reading. 'Flora is twenty one, tall, with rich chestnut hair and a silvery laugh, and makes excellent light pastry. She would like to enter into correspondence with a professional gentleman between the ages of twenty and thirty, preferably with auburn whiskers and of the Established Church.' The interesting thing to me is that these people, since they try to get married through a matrimonial agency, have evidently failed many times elsewhere, and yet as soon as they advertise in this paper, they get half a dozen offers. The women's descriptions of themselves are always most flattering, and I must say that some of the cases make me distinctly suspicious--for of course that was the great age of fortune-hunting. You remember that beautiful case in Our Mutual Friend, where both parties worked the same dodge on each other. I wish you could come back here. However, if you can't it can't be helped. I could not possibly have come to Haslemere. I most particularly want to get this novel done by the end of September, and every day makes a difference. I know it sounds silly to make such a fuss for so little result, but I find that anything like changing my lodging upsets my work for a week or so. When I said that I was going to stay in a slummy part of London I did not mean that I am going to live in a common lodging house or anything like that. I only meant that I didn't want to live in a respectable quarter, because they make me sick, besides being more expensive. I dare say I shall stay in Islington. It is maddening that you cannot get unfurnished rooms in London, but I know by experience that you can't, though of course you can get a flat or some horrible thing called a maisonette. 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 or somebody -- 'Woe upon thee, O Israel, for thy adulteries with the Egyptians' etc etc. The hedgehogs keep coming into the house, and last night we found in the bathroom a little tiny hedgehog no bigger than an orange. The only thing I could think was that it was a baby of one of the others, though it was fully formed--I mean, it had its prickles. Write again soon. You don't know how it cheers me up when I see one of your letters waiting for me.