George Orwell - George Orwell: A Life in Letters

George Orwell

A LIFE IN LETTERS

SELECTED AND ANNOTATED

BY

Peter Davison

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

New York London

FICTION

Burmese Days

A Clergymans Daughter

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Coming Up for Air

Animal Farm

Nineteen Eighty-Four

NON-FICTION

Down and Out in Paris and London

The Road to Wigan Pier

Homage to Catalonia

A Kind of Compulsion (190336)

Facing Unpleasant Facts (193739)

A Patriot After All (194041)

All Propaganda Is Lies (194142)

Keeping Our Little Corner Clean (194243)

Two Wasted Years (1943)

I Have Tried to Tell the Truth (194344)

I Belong to the Left (1945)

Smothered Under Journalism (1946)

It Is What I Think (194748)

Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living (194950)

Critical Essays

Narrative Essays

Diaries

Copyright George Orwell

Compilation copyright 2010 by The Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell

Introduction and notes copyright 2010 by Peter Davison

First American Edition 2013

Letters collected from The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, OBE.

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Orwell, George, 19031950.

[Correspondence. Selections]

A life in letters / selected and annotated by Peter Davison. First American edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87140-462-6 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-87140-691-0 (e-book)

1. Orwell, George, 19031950Correspondence.

I. Davison, Peter Hobley, editor of compilation. II. Title.

PR6029.R8Z48 2013

828'.91209dc23

2013004734

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Contents

1.Blair family group ( Orwell Archive, University College London)

2.Ren-Nol Raimbault ( Collection Marie-Annick Raimbault)

3.Jacintha Buddicom with Dr and Mrs Noel Hawley-Burke ( Dione Venables)

4.Jacintha Buddicom ( Dione Venables)

5.Norah Myles ( Margaret Durant)

6.The Stores, Wallington ( Orwell Archive, UCL)

7.Eileen and Orwell at the Spanish front ( Orwell Archive, UCL)

8.Independent Labour Party Conference ( Orwell Archive, UCL)

9.Eileen in Morocco ( Orwell Archive, UCL)

10.Orwell and Mahdjoub Mahommed ( Orwell Archive, UCL)

11.Three legionnaires visiting the Orwells in Morocco ( Orwell Archive, UCL)

12.Orwell with the Home Guard ( Orwell Archive, UCL)

13.Eileen ( Orwell Archive, UCL)

14.Orwell and Richard ( Vernon Richardss Estate; image courtesy of Orwell Archive, UCL)

15.Orwell with catapult ( Orwell Archive, UCL)

16.Sonia Orwell ( Orwell Archive, UCL)

17.Barnhill, Jura ( Orwell Archive, UCL)

Sketches within the body of the text are Orwells own drawings and are copyright The Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell.

George Orwell is in the peculiar position of having been a by-word for fifty years. No, not Orwell of course, but Rudyard Kipling as described by Orwell. However, it is not far off the mark for Orwell himself. Orwell also wrote of Kipling, before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. This may be a little further from the mark but many of those who refer to Orwell seem not to have read much more than Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four , if those. The millions who have heard of Big Brother and Room 101 know nothing of their progenitor. Ignorance of Orwell is also to be found in academic circles and in what would regard itself as the higher reaches of journalism. When Professor Raymond B. Browne of Bowling Green University died he was credited by the Daily Telegraph with having launched popular culture into the mainstream. Brownes Journal of Popular Culture was published in 1967, but Orwell was writing most intelligently about popular culture over twenty-five years earlier. Indeed, when Critical Essays was published in the United States in 1946 as Dickens, Dali and Others it was given the subtitle Studies in Popular Culture . At one extreme Orwell is canonised hence the sub-title, The Making and Claiming of St. George Orwell , of John Roddens excellent study analysing The Politics of Literary Reputation (1989). At the other he is subjected to the vigorous wielding of the hatchet, something Scott Lucas does with remarkable efficiency in his Orwell (2003) according to Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books , 19 June 2003. Where does poor old George stand? Professor Eagleton in his review of the three biographies of 2003, aptly titled, Reach-Me-Down Romantic, suggests that Orwell combined cultural Englishness with political cosmopolitanism, and detested political personality cults while sedulously cultivating a public image of himself. Despite world-wide acclaim, Orwell saw himself as dogged by Failure, failure, failure. Failure, as Eagleton says, was his forte.

I am inclined to think that Orwell had within his deepest self an unresolved conflict that made him so contradictory a character. He was ever in arms against organised religion, especially the Roman Catholic Church. He thought there was no afterlife. Yet he was married in church, had his adopted son Richard baptised, and wished to be buried, not cremated, according to the rites of the Church of England. For so rational a man it was strange that he should ask Rayner Heppenstall to cast a horoscope for Richard (21 July 1944); that he should believe he saw a ghost in Walberswick churchyard (16 August 19 31); and discuss poltergeists with Sir Sachaverell Sitwell (6 July 1940), not to mention the quasi-religious conclusion to A Clergymans Daughter (but that, after all, is only a novel). Perhaps most telling is Sir Richard Rees recalling that Orwell had told him that it gave him an unpleasant feeling to see his real name in print: how can you be sure your enemy wont cut it out and work some kind of black magic on it? Was this mere whimsy, or was it deeply felt? Not some enemy or other but your enemy. Who was that? The title of Reess study sums up his subject perfectly: George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1961). He fled from triumph and sought refuge in Failure, failure, failure.

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bengal, on 25 June 1903. His father, Richard Walmsley Blair was born in 1857 in Milborne St Andrew, Dorset, where his father was the Vicar. Orwells father served in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin, was born in 1875 at Penge, Surrey but her family had a long association with Burma. Indeed, there seems to be a curious survival of the Limouzin family in Moulmein, Myanmar, to this day, as Emma Larkin discovered a year or two ago. She found not only that Orwell was well (if covertly) remembered, but she noticed a street called Leimmaw-zin , the nearest Burmese pronunciation for Limouzin. However, when she asked a passer-by to interpret the name, he confidently offered, Orange-Shelf Street ( Secret Histories , pp. 1456).