As the Letters reveal, he reached a very clear-sighted assessment of his own work. Among his four “conventional” novels, he retained a certain fondness for Burmese Days, which he found faithful to his memories of the place. He felt “ashamed” of Keep the Aspidistra Flying and, even worse, of A Clergyman’s Daughter and would not allow them to be reprinted: “They were written for money; at that time I simply hadn’t a book in me, but I was half-starved.” He was rightly pleased with Coming Up for Air—written in one go, with relative ease, it is indeed a most remarkable book, quite prescient in the light of today’s environmental concerns. Among the books worth reprinting he listed (in 1946—Nineteen Eighty-Four was not yet written) first of all, and in order of importance: Homage to Catalonia; Animal Farm; Critical Essays; Down and Out in Paris and London; Burmese Days; Coming Up for Air.
THE COMMON MAN
The extraordinary lengths to which Orwell would go in his vain attempts to turn himself into an ordinary man are well illustrated by the Wallington grocery episode, on which the Letters provide colourful information. In April 1936, Orwell started to rent and run a small village grocery in an old, dark and pokey cottage, insalubrious and devoid of all basic amenities (no inside toilet, no cooking facilities, no electricity, only oil lamps for lighting). On rainy days the kitchen floor was underwater and blocked drains turned the whole place into a smelly cesspool. Davison comments: “One may say without being facetious it suited Orwell to the ground.” And it especially suited Eileen, his wonderfully Orwellian wife. She moved in the day of their marriage and the way she managed this improbable home testifies both to her heroism and to her eccentric sense of humour. The income from the shop hardly ever covered the rent of the cottage. The main customers were a small bunch of local children who used to buy a few pennies worth of lollies after school. By the end of the year, the grocery went out of business, but at that time it had already fulfilled its true purpose: Orwell was in Barcelona, volunteering to fight against fascism, and when he enlisted in the Anarchist militia, he could proudly sign: Eric Blair, grocer. [3]
FAIRNESS
Orwell’s sense of fairness was so scrupulous that it extended even to Stalin. As Animal Farm was going into print, at the last minute Orwell sent a final correction — which was effected just in time. (As all readers will remember, “Napoleon” is the name of the leading pig, which, in Orwell’s fable, represents Stalin):
In chapter VIII, when the windmill is blown up, I wrote “all the animals including Napoleon flung themselves on their faces.” I would like to alter it to “all the animals except Napoleon.” I just thought the alteration would be fair to Stalin as he did stay in Moscow during the German advance.
POVERTY AND ILL-HEALTH
Orwell was utterly stoic and never complained about his material and physical circumstances, however distressing they were most of the time. But from the factual information provided by the Letters, one realises that his extreme poverty ceased only three years before his death (first royalties windfall from Animal Farm), whereas his health became a severe and constant problem (undiagnosed tuberculosis) virtually from his return from Burma (age twenty-five). In later years it required frequent, prolonged and often painful treatment in various hospitals. For the last twelve years of his short existence (he died, aged forty-six, in 1950) he was in fact an invalid — but he insisted most of the time on carrying on with normal activity.
His entire writing career lasted for only sixteen years; the quantity and quality of work produced during this relatively brief span of time would be remarkable even for a healthy man of leisure; that it was achieved in his appalling state of permanent ill-health and poverty is simply stupendous.
WOMEN
In his relations with women, Orwell seems to have been generally awkward and clumsy. He was easily attracted to them, whereas they seldom found him attractive. Still, by miraculous luck, he found in Eileen O’Shaughnessy a wife who was able not only to understand him in depth, but also to love him truly and bear with his eccentricities without giving up any of her own originality — an originality that shines through all her letters. If Orwell was a failed poet, Eileen, for her part, was pure poetry.
Her premature death left Orwell stunned and lost for a long time. A year later he abruptly approached a talented young woman he hardly knew (they lived in the same building); with a self-pity that was utterly and painfully out of character for such a proud man, he wrote to her telling her how sick he was and inviting her “to become the widow of a literary man.” “I fully realise that I’m not suited to someone like you who is young and pretty… it is only that I feel so desperately alone… I have no woman who takes an interest in me and can encourage me… of course it’s absurd a person like me wanting to make love to someone of your age. I do want to, but I wouldn’t be offended or even hurt if you say no…” The woman was flabbergasted and politely discouraged him.
Some years earlier he had made an unfortunate and unwelcome pass at another woman. This episode is documented by the editor with embarrassing precision — at which point readers might remember Orwell’s hostility to the very concept of biography (“every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats too humiliating and disgraceful to contemplate”). Do biographers, however serious and scrupulous, really need or have the right to explore and disclose such intimate details? Yet we still read them. Is it right for us to do so? These questions are not rhetoricaclass="underline" I honestly do not know the answer.
SOLID OBJECTS AND SCRAPS OF USELESS INFORMATION — TREES, FISHES, BUTTERFLIES AND TOADS
Just as in “Why I Write,” Orwell evoked the simple pleasure he took “in solid objects and scraps of useless information,” in his famous “Thoughts on the Common Toad” he added: “If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia?… I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.” His endearing and quirky tastes, his inexhaustible and loving attention to all aspects of the natural world crop up constantly in his correspondence. The Letters are full of disarming non sequiturs: for instance, he interrupts some reflections on the Spanish Inquisition to note the daily visit a hedgehog pays to his bathroom. While away from home in 1939, he writes to the friend who looks after his cottage: his apprehension regarding the looming war gives way without transition to concerns for the growth of his vegetables and for the mating of his goat: “I hope Muriel’s mating went through. It is a most unedifying spectacle by the way, if you happened to watch it. Did my rhubarb come up, I wonder? I had a lot and then last year the frost buggered it up.” To an anarchist friend (later a professor of English in a Canadian university) he writes an entire page from his Scottish retreat, describing in minute detail all aspects of the life and work of local crofters: again the constant and inexhaustible interest in “men who do things” in the real world.
THE END
While already lying in hospital, he married Sonia Brownell[4] three months before his death. At the time he entertained the illusion that he might still have a couple of years to live and he was planning for the following year a book of essays that would have included “a long essay on Joseph Conrad” (if it was ever written, it is now lost). He also said that he still had “two books on his mind”—alongside “the stunning idea for a short novel” mentioned earlier.