George Orwell: A Life in Letters (29 page)

If you would like some news about Morocco I’ll send you a picture postcard. The markets are fascinating if you smoke (preferably a cigar) all the time & never look down. At first we lived in Marrakech itself,
en pension
(after the first night which we spent in a brothel owing to Cooks’ lists being a bit out of date). Marrakech crawls with disease of every kind, the ringworm group, the tuberculosis group, the dysentery group; & if you lunch in a restaurant the flies only show themselves as flies as distinct from black masses when they hurry out for a moment to taste a corpse on its way to the cemetery.
⁶
Now we live in a villa several kilometres out. It is furnished with grass & willow chairs made to order for six francs (armchairs they are, rather comfortable), two rugs & a praying mat, several copper trays, a bed & several camel-hair ‘couvertures’, three whitewood tables, two charcoal braziers for cooking, about a third of the absolutely essential crockery & some chessmen. It looks rather attractive. The house stands in an orange grove & everything belongs to a butcher who cultivates the orange-grove but prefers to live with his meat. The only neighbours are the Arabs who look after the oranges. We have an Arab too, called Mahjroub
⁷
His life history is ‘Moy dix ans et dooje ans avec Francais – soldat.’ He says a lot of good things, sort of biblical. ‘Dire gaz’ means ‘If you put oil in the methylated spirits cup of a Primus it make fumes’ – which you could hardly tell apart from Mizpah.
⁸
He has been worried lately because he never can remember the French for fish but this week he’s really learnt it – it’s oiseau
⁹
. We understand each other very nicely now (he often calls me Mon vieux Madame) though I seldom know whether he is talking French or Arabic & myself often speak English. He does the shopping & pumps the water & washes the floors (Moy porty sack chitton) & I do the cooking & curiously enough the washing. The laundries are very expensive (10 francs for a sheet, 11 francs for a shirt, 14 francs for a dress) & generally take two or three weeks. I think probably no one uses them except me so they have to engage a staff every time I send anything. We have two goats who used to give half a pint a day between them at two milkings (the milking being done by Eric while Mahjroub holds head & hind leg) but now their yield has fallen off. Our hens however lay very well. We bought
12, 4 died immediately & the remainder have laid 10 eggs in three days; the answer is a Record for a Moroccan Hen. We have people at the back door wanting to buy them. We also have two doves. They don’t lay eggs but if they think of it will doubtless nest in our pillows as they spend most of the day
walking
about the house – one behind the other.

A thing I must remember is Eric’s sister. I was going to Put you in Touch during that weekend. They only came to Bristol about July. Their name is Dacombe:
¹⁰
Marjorie
aetat
40, Humphrey rather older I suppose,
Jane 15, Henry 10, Lucy 7. They live in St. Michael’s Hill – 166 I think. Deep in my heart I dislike Marjorie who isn’t honest but I always enjoy seeing her. We all spent Christmas together & Humphrey wanted to tell me a story that wasn’t fit for the children. It was a very long story, lasting through every passage & always converging on the larder which was colder than any place I remember. I never knew what the story was about, though the children explained several bits to me, but it was a good story. The children are nice children. If you were to call on them it would be kind & you might like them. Humph rather reminds me of Frank Gardner
¹¹
but it’s libellous because he hasn’t the same habits. I’m really fond of him. If you don’t call the meeting shall take place when I fetch Marx in the spring but the call would be better for my reputation. The whole family by the way is generally in a state of absolute penury. Of course the
nicest
Blair is Mr Blair who’s dying but the poor old man is 82 & he doesn’t have any pain which is something.

Choosing your mother’s Christmas card is always one of my treats but this year I’ve missed it. Partly because of the Christmas cards. Partly because a fortnight ago I suddenly got violent neuralgia & a fever. Normally I go into Marrakech on a red bicycle made in Japan for someone with very short legs & the biggest hands in the world, but for this occasion I had a taxi to go for an X-ray. It seemed obvious that I had another cyst – indeed I even packed a bag in case I had to go into hospital again. There was nothing whatever the matter with my jaws & the fever just went away two or three days ago & today I went out for the first time with a handkerchief round my head. I sent off two parcels & filled in 12 forms & paid more for the postage than I had for the contents. But it’s too late for Christmas cards so give your mother my love instead for the moment, & your father, & Ruth, Jean, Billy, Maurice, June, Norman, John, Elizabeth. Even Quartus, & yet uniquely Norah is loved by

Pig.

[
LO
, pp. 75–9;
XI, 512A, p. 254; handwritten]

1
.
Laurence O’Shaughnessy Jnr was born on 13 November
1938; 4½ weeks thereafter would be about 14 December and five weeks thereafter about the 17 December.

2
.
Writing to Frank Jellinek on 20 December 1938 (
CW,
XI, 513, p. 257), Orwell says ‘I have heard today from George Kopp,* who was my commandant at the front, and who has just got out of Spain . . .’ but Orwell initially typed ‘jail’ before ‘Spain’ and then crossed it through. There may have been slight confusion between Orwell’s and Eileen’s understanding of precisely when Kopp left jail and Spain.

3
.
Orwell thought he was in debt because he considered he had financed the stay in French Morocco by £300 borrowed from the novelist, L. H. Myers*. In fact, it was a gift from Myers, but that was kept concealed from Orwell; indeed, he did not even know the name of his benefactor because the money was transferred via Max Plowman, whom he had known from his time writing for
The Adelphi
. When Orwell had sufficient money (from the sales of
Animal Farm
) he repaid the gift via Max Plowman’s widow, Dorothy (see
19.2.46
).

4
.
Coming Up for Air
, published by Gollancz on 12 June 1939.

5
.
Eileen’s description of her dearly-loved brother as ‘a Nature’s Fascist’ suggests that, doubtless for the best of reasons, Laurence attempted to deceive Orwell as to his condition.

6
.
Compare the opening of Orwell’s essay, ‘Marrakech’ (and see
4.10.38
,
n. 2).

7
.
Also known as Mahdjoub Mahommed. In his Morocco Diary for
22 November 1938, Orwell says Mahdjoub served in an Arab line regiment for about fifteen years and received a pension of about Frs 5 a day – roughly 3p in today’s coinage but perhaps very roughly £1.20 at today’s values.

8
.
Mizpah: A Palestinian place-name referred to in Genesis 31.49 and used as a word or token expressing close association: ‘The Lord watch between me and thee’, often inscribed on brooches or rings exchanged between lovers.

9
.
Mahdjoub has confused
oiseau
(bird) with
poisson
(fish).

10
.
It was actually Dakin. Jenny Joseph suggests that Eileen mistakenly gave the surname of a contemporary at St Hugh’s, Ursula Dacombe. The Dakins* though not well off on a civil servant’s salary, were hardly ‘in a state of absolute penury’.

11
.
Unidentified.

To Jack Common*

26 December 1938

Boîte Postale 48

Marrakech

Dear Jack,

Thanks so much for yours. I’m really frightfully sorry about these blasted hens. We seem to have saddled you with a herd of white elephants. I can’t think what it can be. It seems to me that if it were any definite illness they would die off and not merely stop laying. As to its being the ground, I don’t think there can be anything in that. To begin with, wherever they are in the field they must be on ground they ranged over before with good results. The hens of old Desborough, who had the field up to end of 1935 or so, died of coccidiosis, but I doubt to start with whether the disease germs would remain in the ground so long, secondly why haven’t they developed it before, thirdly you probably wouldn’t mistake coccidiosis, which makes the fowls weak and droopy even when they don’t die, as most of them do. The thing I really don’t understand is why the old fowls (there are a few, aren’t there?) don’t lay. As to the pullets, it does sometimes happen that they just miss coming into lay in August-September, and then what with the moult and the cold weather don’t start till spring. But meanwhile you are being saddled with the food-bills. In a few days I’ll try and send you a few quid (I’m afraid at best it’ll have to be a few) towards ex[pens]es. I’ve written recently to my bank to know whether I’ve got any money left, and I’ll get their reply in a few days. Of course this journey, which at any rate was made on borrowed money, has been very expensive and I don’t think I’ll have any money to speak of coming in for three or four months. The novel ought to be done beginning of April. It’s really a mess but parts of it I like and it’s suddenly revealed to me a big subject which I’d never really touched before and haven’t time to work out properly now. I can’t tell you how deeply I wish to keep alive, out of jail, and out of money-worries for the next few years. I suppose after this book I shall write some kind of pot-boiler, but I have very dimly in my mind the idea for an enormous novel in several volumes and I want several years to plan it out in peace. Of course when I say peace I don’t mean absence of war, because actually you can be at peace when you’re fighting, but I don’t think what I mean by peace is compatible with modern totalitarian war. Meanwhile the Penguin people are making moves towards reprinting one or other of my books, and I hope they’ll do so, because though I don’t suppose there’s much dough in it it’s the best possible advert. Besides it’s damned annoying to see your books out of print. One of mine,
Down and Out
, is so completely out of print that neither I nor anyone else known to me except my mother possesses a copy—this in spite of the fact that it was the most-taken-out book in the library at Dartmoor. I’m glad Warburg* has struck it lucky with at any rate one book. I must say for him that he has enterprise and has published a wider range of stuff than almost anyone. My Spain book sold damn all, but it didn’t greatly matter as my agent had got the money out of him in advance and the reviews were O.K.

God knows when that parcel will turn up. From what I know of French post offices it wouldn’t surprise me if it was just in time for Xmas 1939.
Actually I left it and a lot of others to be sent off by the shopkeeper, because I was fatigued by a long afternoon of shopping, which is really tiring in this country as in most oriental countries. Arabs are even greater bargainers than Indians and one is obliged to conclude that they like it. If the price of an article is a shilling, the shopman starts by demanding two shillings and the buyer starts by offering threepence, and they may well take half an hour to agree on the shilling, though both know from the start that this is the right price. One thing that greatly affects one’s contacts in foreign countries is that English people’s nerves are not so durable as those of some other races, they can’t stand noise, for instance. I like the Arabs, they’re very friendly and, considering their position, not at all servile, but I’ve made no real contact, partly because they mostly speak a kind of bastard French and so I’ve been too lazy to learn any Arabic. The French in this country seem dull and stodgy beyond all measure, far worse than Anglo-Indians. I doubt whether there’s any real political movement among the Arabs. The left-wing parties have all been suppressed (by the Popular Front) but I don’t think they can ever have amounted to much. The people are entirely in the feudal stage and most of them seem to think they are still ruled by the Sultan, which by a fiction they are. There’ve been no echoes of the Tunis business except in the French press. If a big Arab movement ever arises I think it’s bound to be pro-Fascist. I am told the Italians in Libya treat them atrociously, but their main oppressors have been the democracies, so-called. The attitude of the so-called left wing in England and France over this imperialism business simply sickens me. If they went on in the same vein they would end by turning every thinking coloured person into a Fascist. Underlying this is the fact that the working class in England and France have absolutely no feeling of solidarity with the coloured working class.

You asked where Marrakech was. It’s somewhere near the top left hand corner of Africa and immediately north of the Atlas Mountains. Funnily enough we’ve been having the cold snap even here and on Xmas eve there was a heavy frost—don’t know whether that is usual here, but judging by the vegetation I don’t think it can be. I had the queer and rather pleasant experience of seeing the oranges and lemons on the trees frosted all over, which apparently didn’t damage them. The effects of the frost were very curious. Some nasturtiums I had sown earlier were withered up by it, but the cactuses and the Bougainvillea, which is a tropical plant from the South Pacific, weren’t affected. The mountains have been covered with snow even on their lower slopes for some time past. As soon as I’ve done the rough draft of my novel we’re going to take a week off and go into the mountains. The Romans thought they were the end of the world, and they certainly look as if they might be. It’s generally fine and bright in the day time, but we have fires all the time. The only fuel is olive wood, because there simply isn’t a wild tree for miles and miles. This is one of those countries which are very nearly desert and which just exactly support a small population of men and beasts who eat every eatable thing and burn every burnable thing on the surface, so that if there were one more person there’d be a famine. And to think that in Roman times North Africa was full of magnificent forests full of lions and elephants. There are now practically no wild animals bigger than a hare, and I suppose even the human population is smaller. I’ve just been reading about approximately these parts in Flaubert’s
Salammbô
, a book which for some reason I’d always steered clear of but which is simply stunning.