George Orwell: A Life in Letters (2 page)

Early last year I decided to take a holiday, as I had been writing 4 articles a week for 2 years. I spent 6 months in Jura, during which time I did not do any work, then came back to London and did journalism as usual during the winter. Then I returned to Jura and started a novel which I hope to finish by the spring of 1948. I am trying not to do anything else while I get on with this. I do very occasionally write book reviews for the
New Yorker
. I mean to spend the winter in Jura this year, partly because I never seem to get any continuous work done in London, partly because I think it will be a little easier to keep warm here. The climate is not quite so cold, and food and fuel are easier to get. I have a quite comfortable house here, though it is in a remote place. My sister [Avril] keeps house for me. I am a widower with a son aged a little over 3.

I hope these notes will be of help. I am afraid I cannot write anything for the
Strand
at present, because, as I have said, I am trying not to get involved in outside work. We have only 2 posts a week here and this letter won’t go until the
30th, so I shall address it to Sussex.

Yours sincerely

George Orwell

Although Orwell says he was never a member of a political party, he had either forgotten, or is glossing over, that for a short time he was a member of the Independent Labour Party. He wrote about joining in ‘Why I Join the I.L.P.’, 24 June 1938. He left when war broke out because it retained its pacifist stance. His forgetting might have been a wish for disassociation.

Orwell makes only the briefest, indirect, reference in his letter to his first wife, Eileen. Typically for a man of his character and time, he does not harp on her loss in his letters, though there is no doubt he felt it keenly. Eileen O’Shaughnessy was born in South Shields in 1905. He and Eileen met at a party given by Mrs Rosalind Obermeyer at 77 Parliament Hill, London, in March 1935. For Orwell it was love at first sight. On leaving the party he told a friend, ‘The girl I want to marry is Eileen O’Shaughnessy’, something he also said to Mrs Obermeyer. Eileen was at the time reading for a master’s degree in psychology at University College London. Despite the hard fact that Orwell was earning very little and his obvious prospects limited, they were married from Orwell’s cottage in Wallington in the adjacent parish church on
9 June 1936. She died under anaesthetic at Newcastle upon Tyne on 29 March 1945.

There is a very curious link between Orwell and Eileen that quite possibly neither may have realised. Both ‘celebrated’ the year 1984. The title of Orwell’s novel, only chosen shortly before he sent his typescript to his publisher, Fredric Warburg, could obviously not have been known to Eileen, but did he know that she had written a poem to celebrate the centenary of her school, Sunderland High, called ‘End of the Century: 1984’? It has three fourteen-line stanzas, entitled ‘Death’, ‘Birth’, and ‘The Phoenix’ and seems to have no obvious link with anything Orwell was to write. Her poem celebrates the past; Orwell’s novel warns of the future.

Over 1,700 letters by George Orwell are included in Vols X–XX of
The Complete Works of George Orwell
and in
The Lost Orwell
. This figure does not include the many letters he wrote in reply to readers of
Tribune
, nor the many dozens of internal memoranda he wrote making programme booking arrangements whilst working for the Indian Section of the BBC Overseas Service, 1941–43.
The Complete Works
and
The Lost Orwell
also include many letters written to Orwell or about him and, most particularly, letters by his wife, Eileen. This compilation is, therefore, only a small proportion of what is available.

In making this selection I have had two principles in mind. Firstly, that the letters chosen should illustrate Orwell’s life and hopes; and secondly that each one should be of interest in its own right. Most of the letters are given in full, but I have cut the lengthier passages that repeat what is printed elsewhere. As Orwell’s horizons narrowed in his last couple of years as a result of increasing illness and confinement to hospitals and Jura, even though his circle of friends grew rather than narrowed, there is more repetition and hence more excisions.

It is surprising how many people saved letters that Orwell wrote to them. Inevitably what has survived varies over the years and sometimes, in order to tell the story of Orwell’s life, one must rely on letters sent
to
Orwell. A notable example of this last is the important correspondence with Ihor Szewczenko regarding the publication of the Ukrainian version of
Animal Farm
from 11 April 1946 onwards. Even if one wished to include an equal number of letters from each year of Orwell’s adult life, mere survival defines what can be chosen for inclusion. Thus, and most obviously, there are no extant letters from the five years Orwell spent in Burma.

Despite exhaustive searches by Ian Angus and the editor in the preparation of
The Complete Works
, material about Orwell, including valuable letters, still comes to light – hence, of course,
The Lost Orwell
. It has been gratifying to be able to include here a few letters – and important ones – for the first time. I am especially grateful to the owners of the ‘new’ letters for allowing their inclusion. I am also grateful to those who have acquired already published letters for permission to include them here; their names are given in the notes to their letters. Rumours abound that a further batch of letters to Eleanor Jaques was initially offered for sale by Bonhams in 2009 and then withdrawn.

Orwell’s letters tend to be businesslike. This applies equally to friends as to his literary agent. He is quick to apologise if he feels he has been slow in explaining some action or has neglected some social pleasantry – such as on 24 December 1
934 when he regrets not writing earlier to send Christmas greetings to Leonard Moore, adding ‘Please remember me very kindly to Mrs Moore’. Even the letters that have come to light to Eleanor Jaques, Brenda Salkeld, and Lydia Jackson are short on endearments although his wish for a loving relationship is plain. The deaths of Eileen, his father and mother, and his sister Marjorie were all deeply felt by him, but he is reticent about expressing his pain. This is not a mark of coldness of character but how those brought up in the first half of the twentieth century expected to be seen to behave, at least publicly. Pain and suffering were thought to be relative and given that experienced by millions in the two ‘Great’ wars, personal loss, especially natural loss, was felt in context. One suffered in silence. Orwell can strike the casual observer as dour. His close friends likened him to his creation Benjamin, the donkey of
Animal Farm
. But, as David Astor told the editor, when he was depressed or troubled he would telephone Orwell and ask him to meet him in a local pub because he knew Orwell would make him laugh, would cheer him up. One can almost put this dourness into financial terms. Orwell was often poor – see his letters responding to Jack Common’s pleas for even small sums of money when Orwell was in French Morocco. He even speaks of making do for much of 1936 at The Stores by living on potatoes.
Animal Farm
earned him good royalties but when he died, and before the huge royalties that flooded in from
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, at his death he was shown to have £9,909 at probate – perhaps some £250,000 today, the cost of a modest house. But, at the time, he was owed £520
that he had lent to friends: George Kopp £250; Paul Potts £120; Sonia £100; Inez Holden £75; and Jack Common £50.

It is apparent how hard he worked on his correspondence. It is easy to forget nowadays, when using a personal computer with its facility to copy, paste, and save, that typing letters on a mechanical machine could be hard physical work, especially if, as for Orwell, he had to type when ill in bed. There was a limit as to how many copies could be typed at a time. Thus, if he or Eileen wanted to pass on the same information to more than one person, each one would receive a separate letter and each of those would have to be typed afresh. (See the conclusion to Eileen’s letter to Mary Common, 5 December 1938.) Yet Orwell would patiently type and retype his news in letters to different friends.

One very significant characteristic of Orwell’s letter-writing, telling something of his generosity of character, is how he would write at length to those he did not know, may never have met, and to whom he owed nothing. The letter above to Richard Usborne, and that to Jessica Marshall written from Hairmyres Hospital on 19 May 1948 are both letters on which he spent considerable time although a brief acknowledgement would have sufficed for most of us.

Eileen’s letters are completely different in content and style. It is to Eileen we must turn to discover what it was like staying with her husband’s parents at Southwold, what it was like living in their almost primitive cottage at Wallington, and it is to Eileen we turn for irony. She had a fine sense of humour and although both she and Orwell were self-deprecatory, in Eileen this is put with delicious wit.

Because so much has been published of Orwell’s work and because so many of his letters have survived, we know (or think we know) what to expect. Eileen so often comes as a surprise. There are the lovely letters written to her husband (then working as a war correspondent on the Continent) telling him how their little boy was developing and also her hopes for their future away from London (which Orwell would realise on Jura) and her anxieties about the operation which we now know would bring an end to her life. Eileen also lived a life that we did not know about until the batch of letters to Norah Myles was published in
The Lost Orwell
and reproduced here. It was known that she went to Chapel Ridding at Windermere in July 1938 but we have never known why – and still do not know. Something of this other side of Eileen is revealed in her letters. One thing that is certain from them is that she had a very affectionate nature.

A small handful of letters by others than Orwell and Eileen have been included. Each one – such as Jennie Lee’s letter to Miss Goalby on page 68 – illuminates Orwell’s character or his medical condition (as does that from Dr Bruce Dick to David Astor on page 433). These few letters help to develop further our picture of Orwell – for example, the unforgettable image of his arrival in Spain just after Christmas 1936: ‘This was George Orwell and his boots arriving to fight in Spain.’ As Jennie Lee explains, ‘He knew he could not get boots big enough’ in Spain and he had come with a spare set hanging round his neck. The problem of getting footwear large enough for his feet came back to haunt him towards the end of his life.

Taken together, this volume and its companion volume, Orwell’s
Diaries
, go some way to offering the autobiography that Orwell did not write.

Peter Davison

This edition

Most letters are reproduced in full but their layout has been regularised. I have made a few cuts to avoid repeating what is readily available elsewhere in the selection (for example, Orwell’s instructions for making the journey from London to Barnhill, Jura). Where a cut is made, this is indicated within square brackets. A complete record with the original styling is available in
The Complete Works
. Addresses from which letters are sent are often shortened and standardised. After each letter is an inconspicuous reference to its source in
Complete Works
. Such explicatory notes to letters are provided as are deemed to be helpful in a volume of this kind. They are not exhaustive – but, again,
Complete Works
can usually be consulted for further information.

Over ninety much-abbreviated biographies of many of those to whom letters were written are given in the Biographical Notes. This will save too-frequent repetition of biographical information and the need to search for such notes where the individuals are first mentioned. Those for whom biographical notes are given are indicated by asterisks after their names in the body of the book. ‘George Orwell’ as we tend to call him, was born Eric Blair. He continued to use his birth names throughout his life. Some of his friends knew him as ‘Eric’, some as ‘George’. His first wife, Eileen, was always Eileen Blair and his son is Richard Blair. In this book, ‘the Blairs’ refers to Orwell’s parents and family and ‘the Orwells’ to George and Eileen as a couple.

The sources of these letters together with full notes are to be found in
The Complete Works of George Orwell
and its supplementary volume,
The Lost Orwell
. The first nine volumes of
The Complete Works
comprise Orwell’s books. These were published by Secker & Warburg in 1986–1987 and have been printed in paperback since by Penguin Books. Volumes X–XX were published in 1998 and then in paperback (with some supplementary material) in 2000–2002. The supplementary volume was published by Timewell Press in 2006. The facsimile of the extant manuscript of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
was published in 1984 by Secker & Warburg in London and M&S Press, Weston, Massachusetts. These volumes were edited by Peter Davison and amount to 9,243 pages. It will be evident that this present volume offers only a small proportion of what is to be found in the whole edition to which, of course, further reference might, if necessary, be made.

In the main the texts of letters are printed as Orwell wrote them. Slight oversights are silently corrected and titles of books and magazines and foreign-language expressions are italicised (something Orwell could not do on a typewriter). Occasionally (as in
Complete Works
) Orwell’s typical misspellings are retained but indicated by a superior degree sign (°). References to the
Complete Works
are given as Volume number in roman figure + item number + page(s), e.g., XIX, 3386, pp. 321–2. References to letters from
The Lost Orwell
are given similarly but preceded by
LO
+ page numbers; their position in
Complete Works
follows. References to books listed in ‘A Short List of Further Reading’ are given by the author’s name + page number – e.g. Crick, p. 482, except for
Orwell Remembered
and
Remembering Orwell
, which are so designated followed by their page numbers.