George Orwell: A Life in Letters (14 page)

Write if or when you feel inclined.

Yours

Eric A. Blair

[X, 323, pp. 495–7; typewritten]

1
.
Orwell’s review of Miller’s
Black Spring
appeared in the
New English Weekly
in September 1936 (X, 325, pp. 499–501). Miller wrote to Orwell to thank him for his ‘amazingly, sympathetic’ review.

2
.
The Road to Wigan Pier
.

3
.
The Rock Pool
(X, 321, pp. 400–1).

4
.
See Gordon Comstock’s (incorrect) sneering bestowal of a knighthood on John Drinkwater in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(IV, p. 138).

Eileen wrote six letters to a friend she had made at Oxford, Norah Symes. Norah also met her future husband, Quartus St Leger Myles, at Oxford. They became engaged when he returned to Clifton as a General Practitioner. They had no children. She died in
1994 and these letters were in her bequest to John Durant. They passed to Mrs Margaret Durant who allowed their inclusion in
The Lost Orwell
. Recently, they were bought by Richard Young who has very kindly allowed them to be reproduced here. The letters give no indication to whom they were written, and, except for the initial ‘E’ at the end of the last letter, are always signed by the pet-name, ‘Pig’. Possibly Norah’s maiden name suggested the name for a character in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
.

Only one of the letters is dated (New Year’s Day, 1938) so dating is conjectural. Fuller notes are given in
The Lost Orwell
.

Eileen Blair* to Norah Myles*

3 or 10 November 1936

36 High Street

Southwold
¹

[
no salutation
]

I wrote the address quite a long time ago & have since played with three cats, made a cigarette (I make them now but not with the naked hand),
²
poked the fire & driven Eric (i.e George) nearly mad – all because I didn’t really know what to say. I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously & really bitterly that I thought I’d save time & just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished. Then Eric’s aunt
³
came to stay & was so dreadful (she stayed
two
months
) that we stopped quarrelling & just repined. Then she went away & now all our troubles are over. They arose partly because Mother drove me so hard in the first week of June
⁴
that I cried all the time from pure exhaustion & partly because Eric had decided that he mustn’t let his work be interrupted & complained bitterly when we’d been married a week that he’d only done two good days’ work out of seven.
⁵
Also I couldn’t make the oven cook anything & boiled eggs (on which Eric had lived almost exclusively) made me sick. Now I can make the oven cook a reasonable number of things & he is working very rapidly.
⁶
I forgot to mention that he had his ‘bronchitis’ for three weeks in July & that it rained every day for six weeks during the whole of which the kitchen was flooded & all food went mouldy in a few hours. It seems a long time ago now but then seemed very permanent.

I thought I could come & see you & have twice decided when I could, but Eric always gets something if I’m going away if he has notice of the fact, & if he has no notice (when Eric my brother arrives
⁷
& removes me as he has done twice) he gets something when I’ve gone so that I have to come home again. For the last few weeks we have been completely broke and shall be now until Christmas because the money we expected in October for
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
won’t be paid until April and the next book won’t earn its advance until December anyway and possibly January. But I must be in London for some days this month. Is there a chance of one of these Wednesdays? If so & if you tell me which I’ll make my visit to fit it. I must see Eric (brother) a bit about his book, the proofs of which I’m now correcting, & also have some intelligence testing to do with Lydia.
⁸
Could you come either on the 18
^th
or on the 25
^th
? I think they’re Wednesdays – anyway I mean Wednesdays. I want passionately to see you. Lydia must have a bit of notice & indeed at any minute is going to descend on me in wrath (against Eric on social grounds not against me, for I am perfection in her eyes) & force me to go to London exactly when I don’t want to. So if you were to send a postcard-------
⁹

This is our address for the rest of this week. We are staying with the Blairs & I like it. Nothing has surprised me more, particularly since I saw the house which is very small & furnished almost entirely with paintings of ancestors. The Blairs are by origin Lowland Scottish & dull but one of them made a lot of money in slaves & his son Thomas who was inconceivably like a sheep married the daughter of the Duke of Westmorland (of whose existence I never heard) & went so grand that he spent all the money & couldn’t make more because slaves had gone out. So his son went into the army & came out of that into the church & married a girl of 15 who loathed him & had ten children of whom Eric’s father, now 80, is the only survivor & they are all quite penniless but still on the shivering verge of gentility as Eric calls it in his new book which I cannot think will be popular with the family.
¹⁰
In spite of all this the family on the whole is fun & I imagine unusual in their attitude to me because they all adore Eric & consider him quite impossible to live with–indeed on the wedding day Mrs Blair shook her head & said that I’d be a brave girl if I knew what I was in for, and Avril the sister said that obviously I didn’t know what I was in for or I shouldn’t be there. They haven’t I think grasped that I am very much like Eric in temperament which is an asset once one has accepted the fact

If I’d written this from Wallington it would have been about the real things of life–goats, hens, broccoli (eaten by a rabbit). But it would be better perhaps to tell you because this has got out of hand. Poor girl, miss it all out except the bit about the Wednesdays & say you can come on the 18
^th
or the 25
^th
to meet

Pig
¹¹

[
LO,
pp. 63–7 (with substantial additional

notes); X, 331A, p. 515; handwritten]

1
.
Orwell’s parents’ home.

2
.
Orwell was able to roll his own cigarettes by hand. Evidently Eileen required a hand-roller.

3
.
Nellie Limouzin had lived in Paris with her husband, Eugène Adam, an ardent Esperantist, when Orwell was living there (1928–29). Adam left Nellie and went to Mexico where, in 1947, he committed suicide.

4
.
Eileen’s mother, Marie O’Shaughnessy, evidently spent the week before the wedding with her daughter and Orwell, doubtless preparing for the event. Given the cramped and bare conditions, the lack of electricity, bathroom or indoor w.c., coupled with pre-wedding tensions, it is plain why Eileen was so distressed – and also why she found Aunt Nellie’s long stay burdensome.

5
.
On 12 June Orwell submitted ‘Shooting an Elephant’ to John Lehmann, editor of
New Writing
. He published it in
New Writing
,
2, Autumn, 1936 (X, 326, pp. 501–6).

6
.
As well as sending off ‘Shooting an Elephant’, between his wedding and leaving for Spain, Orwell was very busy earning money from book reviewing and was writing
The Road to Wigan Pier
, which he completed just before he left for Spain about 23 December 1936. In this period he wrote twelve reviews of thirty-two books.

7
.
Confusingly, especially in letters Eileen was to write from Spain, her brother, Dr Laurence O’Shaughnessy* was also known in the family as Eric. The proofs to which she refers are her brother’s and Sauerbruch’s
Thoracic Surgery.

8
.
Lydia Jackson.*

9
.
This is as written by Eileen: nothing has been left out.

10
.
The family background is well summarised by Sir Bernard Crick in
A Life
, pp. 46–7 and in the family bible. Orwell’s mother, though born in Penge, South London, lived most of her early life in Moulmein, Burma. As Emma Larkin reports in
Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop
(2004), there is a street sign, ‘Leimmawzin’, which means Orange-shelf Street but is a corruption of Limouzin Street (pp. 145–6). The phrase ‘on the shivering verge of gentility’ does not sound like Orwell; it does not appear in his ‘new book’, presumably
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, published by Victor Gollancz on 20 April 1936, nor in the one he was writing,
The Road to Wigan Pier
. This may suggest it appeared in a draft read by Eileen. If so, that suggests a greater involvement by Eileen in Orwell’s writing (other than for
Animal Farm
, where it is well established) than has been suspected.

11
.
It is ironical that Eileen’s pet name should have been that of the animals Orwell pilloried in
Animal Farm.

Jennie Lee* on Orwell’s Arrival in Barcelona

Orwell saw Gollancz on the 21
^st
December 1936 about the publication of
The Road to Wigan Pier
. He arrived in Barcelona about the 26
^th
(Crick, p. 315
). After Orwell’s death, Jennie Lee wrote on 23 June 1950 to a Miss Margaret M. Goalby of Presteigne, Radnorshire, who had asked her about Orwell. This is part of that letter.

In the first year of the Spanish Civil War I was sitting with friends in a hotel in Barcelona when a tall thin man with a ravished
°
complexion came over to the table. He asked me if I was Jennie Lee, and if so, could I tell him where to join up. He said he was an author: had got an advance on a book from Gollancz,
¹
and had arrived ready to drive a car or do anything else, preferably to fight in the front line. I was suspicious and asked what credentials he had brought from England. Apparently he had none. He had seen no-one, simply paid his own way out. He won me over by pointing to the boots over his shoulder. He knew he could not get boots big enough for he was over six feet. This was George Orwell and his boots arriving to fight in Spain.

I came to know him as a deeply kind man and a creative writer. . . . He was a satirist who did not conform to any orthodox political or social pattern. . . . The only thing I can be quite certain of is, that up to his last day George was a man of utter integrity; deeply kind, and ready to sacrifice his last worldly possessions – he never had much – in the cause of democratic socialism. Part of his malaise was that he was not only a socialist but profoundly liberal. He hated regimentation wherever he found it, even in the socialist ranks.

[XI, 355A, p. 5]

1
.
This advance was for
The Road to Wigan Pier
.

Eileen Blair* to Norah Myles*

[16 February 1937?]

24, Croom’s Hill

Greenwich
¹

[
no salutation
]

A note to say that I am leaving for Spain at 9 a.m. tomorrow (or I think so, but with inconceivable grandeur people ring up from Paris about it, and I may not go until Thursday). I leave in a hurry, not because anything is the matter but because when I said that I was going on the 23
^rd
, which has long been my intention, I suddenly became a kind of secretary perhaps to the I.L.P. in Barcelona. They hardly seem to be amused at all. If Franco had engaged me as a manicurist I would have agreed to that too in exchange for a
salvo conducto
,
²
so everyone is satisfied. The I.L.P. in Barcelona consists of one John McNair,*
³
who has certainly been kind at long distances but has an unfortunate telephone voice and a quite calamitous prose style in which he writes articles that I perhaps shall type. But theoretically George gets leave at the end of this month
⁴
and then I shall have a holiday, willy John nilly John. By the way, I suppose I told you George was in the Spanish Militia? I can’t remember. Anyway he is, with my full approval until he was well in. He’s on the Aragon front, where I cannot help knowing that the Government ought to be attacking or hoping that that is a sufficient safeguard against their doing so. Supposing that the Fascist air force goes on missing its objectives and the railway line to Barcelona is still working, you’ll probably hear from there some day. But letters take 10-15 days as a rule, and if the railway breaks down I can’t think how long they’ll take. Meanwhile it would be a nice gesture if you were to write a nice letter yourself, addressing it c/o John McNair, Hotel Continental, Boulevard de las Ramblas, Barcelona.
⁵
I am staying at the Continental too to begin with, but as we have now spent practically all the money we shall have until November, when the Left book Club wealth will be available,
⁶
I think I may be doing what the Esperantists call sleeping on straw – and as they are Esperantists they
mean
sleeping on straw. The I.L.P. of course is not contributing to my support, but the Spanish Government feeds George on bread without butter and ‘rather
rou
g
h
food’ and has arranged that he doesn’t sleep at all, so he has no anxieties.