George Orwell: A Life in Letters (45 page)

But I have remembered what I really wanted to write to you about. It was a confession. Lettice Cooper* and her sister went down to the cottage for the week-end. Barbara the sister is in the act of recovering from a nervous breakdown and this life is not good for her. She won’t go away without Lettice and Lettice couldn’t free herself for the week-end until just before it came. Then she did but of course it was too late to make any ordinary arrangements. They had a
lovely
time they say. Mrs. Anderson
²
swore she would clean on Tuesday and I hope she did but Lettice has a curious liking for housewifery and doubtless did clean quite well herself; the real crisis was about the sheets as usual—they carried one but couldn’t well do more than that. Anyway I hope you don’t mind. It seemed a pity to have the place empty for the bank holiday and I couldn’t contact you. Seeing how much they enjoyed it and how well they looked I rather hoped that all these babies wouldn’t like the place after all. It would be fun to send people down all the time and I don’t think it need have been empty for a night for the rest of the summer anyway. But of course it won’t be
empty
!

Can I come to tea? It’s a bit of a job because we are going North with Gwen on the 17
^th
[August] to help with the luggage primarily. But I could manage Saturday or Monday—or Sunday I suppose but the travelling back is so ungodly. It’ll have to be a compressed trip because we are also more or less in the act of moving. We have a flat in Canonbury Square—at least references are now being taken up and we shall have it unless the bombs beat us to the post which is rather likely. It’s a top floor flat and there have been numbers of bombs in the vicinity though the square itself has lost nothing but a window or two. I rather like it, in fact in some ways I like it very much indeed. The outlook is charming and we have a flat roof about three yards by two which seems full of possibilities. Disadvantage is that to get to it you climb an uncountable number of stone stairs—to get to the flat I mean; to get to the roof you climb one of those fire-escape ladders with very small iron rungs. I don’t know how Richard will be managed if the bombing ever stops. I thought we might have a crane and sling and transport him the way they do elephants in the films but George thinks this unsuitable.

Which day? With preference Saturday or Monday. No. Posts being as they are, I think I’ll come on Saturday unless I hear to the contrary, and hope to see you. I expect I shan’t get on the bus anyway but I’ll come some time in the afternoon and leave in the late afternoon, having put away the papers and possibly collected one or two things. When and if Richard comes I’ll be wanting a few things but probably the best thing to do will be to leave them for the moment in the linen chest so that they don’t get bombed before they’re used. I meant to brood on this when I went over with Mrs. Horton but she had to get back and we only had half an hour in the cottage which didn’t leave much time for brooding.

See you on Saturday I hope.

With love

Eilee.
³

[
Handwritten postscript
] (One thing I want to do
with
you is to check up on the things you want out of the garden. Kay wants you to have the crops of course but she’d better be forewarned so that the apple disaster isn’t repeated the day they arrive.

Also I want to arrange to buy the coal and the Calor Gas.

[XVI, 2528A, pp.323–6; typewritten with handwritten postscript]

1
.
Mrs Horton was evidently the new tenant of The Stores at Wallington.

2
.
Mrs Anderson was one of the Orwells’ neighbours at Wallington; she often looked after their affairs in their absence.

3
.
Eileen signs off with an indecipherable scrawl. She possibly writes ‘With best wishes/Eilee.’ but it is a little more likely that it is ‘With love/Eilee.’—and the degree of scrawl is indicated by interpretations that see two and three words here. What is clear is that there is no final ‘n’ to ‘Eilee’, which may have been a name she was familiarly called at the Ministry of Food.

To Leonard Moore*

15 August 1944

Care of
The
Tribune

Dear Mr Moore,

Thanks for your letter of 14th August. Yes, it is O.K. about Gollancz retaining the rights of
Wigan Pier
.

I think Warburg is going to publish
Animal Farm
—I say ‘I think’, because although W. has agreed to do so there
may
be a slip-up about the paper. But so long as we can lay hands on the paper he will do it. So that will save me from the trouble of doing it myself.

I am now doing that essay I spoke to you of,
¹
& I shall then be able to compile the book of essays, but I shall have to find someone to do the typing as I have not time to do it myself.

We are, I think, taking a flat in Islington at the end of this month, & I will let you have the address when we move in.

Yours sincerely

E. A. Blair

[XVI, 2533, p. 335; handwritten]

1
.
‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’ was completed on 28 August 1944, according to Orwell’s Payments Book. It was published in
Horizon
, October 1944 (XVI, 25
38, pp. 345–58).

To Leonard Moore*

29 August 1944

Care of
The
Tribune

Dear Mr Moore,

I have just seen Warburg. He has definitely arranged to publish
Animal Farm
about March 1945, so perhaps you can get in touch with him about the contract. He is willing to pay an advance of £100, half of this to be paid about Christmas of this year.
I shall give him an option on all my future books, but this can be arranged in such a way as not to tie me down if for some special reason I want to take a book elsewhere. I have finished the final essay for the book of essays, & as soon as possible I will get the whole thing typed & send you a copy. Warburg presumably won’t be able to do it till some time next year, but meanwhile we should make an attempt at an American edition. The Dial Press have asked to see this book & I more or less promised to send it to them.

Yours Sincerely

E. A. Blair

P.S. My address as from Sept. 1st will be 27B Canonbury Square
Islington London N. 1 but I probably shan’t move in there till Sept. 8th, so
Tribune
is the safest address for the time being.

[XVI, 2539, p. 358; handwritten]

[Ivor Brown]* to Dr Thomas Jones*

1
4 October 1944

Dear T. J.,

I would be very grateful for your opinion on this review by George Orwell, which I held out of the paper this week.
¹
It came in very late and there was not time to talk it over with him. It seems to me that the whole tone of it breathes a distaste for Christianity, which would be offensive to a great many of our readers and, almost certainly, to Lord Astor. I dont,° myself, complain as a member of the Faith who is pained, but simply as the Editor of a paper having a tradition of Protestant christianity, which I believe the Chairman of Directors is eager to maintain. That does not mean that a reviewer like Orwell need be barred from such topics, but it does mean that he should endeavour to express himself in a different way.

The effect his review had on me was this: I felt that the reader who is a churchman, or chapelman, would say to himself ‘This man so dislikes us and our ideas that we will never get any justice out of him’. I may be quite wrong in feeling this and that is why I am asking your opinion. Do you think the review as a whole is likely to create the impression that I have suggested, and that a few minor alterations would put it right, or do you think that a few changes, such as I have pencilled in, would put the matter right?

I am sorry to trouble you, but this is a case where the atmosphere built up by a review is of great importance, and I very much want your sense of the atmosphere.

Yours ever,

[
unsigned
]

[XX, 2563B, pp. 557–8; typewritten copy]

1
.
This must refer to a review of
Beyond Personality
by C. S. Lewis, which the
Observer
did not publish. It was set in type and is published in XVI, 2567, pp. 437–9
from its galley-proofs.

Whilst waiting for her operation in Newcastle upon Tyne Eileen stayed at the O’Shaughnessy family home, Greystone. Meanwhile, Orwell had gone abroad as War Correspondent for the
Observer
and the
Manchester Evening News
, reporting from France and later Germany and Austria. See the Chronology for details of his reports.

Eileen Blair* to Leonard Moore*

2 March 1945

Greystone

Carlton

Near Stockton-on-Tees

Co. Durham
¹

Dear Mr. Moore,

Thank you very much for your letter and various press cuttings. I am sorry to have been so dilatory but I had to go to London to complete the adoption of the son that Eric may have told you about and was held up there by illness while my mail waited for me here.

I am afraid I can’t sign the letter on his behalf. If I had been in London while he was getting ready to go I should probably have a power of attorney as before, but as it is I have only the most informal authority. So I have sent the letter on to him and I suppose it will be back in about three weeks. I have had one letter and that took eleven days. I have also written to Warburg about the letter—I know Eric spoke to Frederick° Warburg about it and I imagine there will be no trouble about it, though I quite see that from your point of view these loose ends are very unsatisfactory.

I have no real news from Eric.He wrote the day after arriving in Paris and had seen little except his hotel which seems to be full of war correspondents and quite comfortable—with central heating on. I expect the next letter will be more informative, though it will mostly concern this son we have adopted in whom Eric is passionately interested. The baby is now nine months old and according to his new father very highly gifted— ‘a very thoughtful little boy’ as well as very beautiful. He really is a very nice baby. You must see him sometime. His name is Richard Horatio.

Yours sincerely,

Eileen Blair

[XVII, 2630, p. 81; typewritten]

To Mrs Sally McEwan*

12 March 1945

Room 329

Hotel Scribe
¹

Rue Scribe

Paris 9e

Dear Sally,

I hope you are getting on O.K. I won’t say without me but in my absence. I haven’t had a copy of
Tribune
yet, thanks to the condition of the posts I suppose. I expect you also got via the
Observer
some frantic S.O.Ss for tobacco, but at the moment the situation isn’t so bad because I got a friend who was coming across to bring me some. None has arrived by post, needless to say. Our Paris opposite number,
Libertés
, with whom I want
Tribune
to arrange a regular exchange, are never able to get the paper commercially but see copies at the Bibliothèque Nationale and frequently translate extracts. I went to a semi-public meeting of their readers and also to the paper’s weekly meeting which was very like
Tribune
’s Friday meeting but on a higher intellectual level I thought. I don’t know whether Louis Levy
²
came and saw Bevan and Strauss about his idea of a continental edition of
T
., but if that can’t be arranged it would certainly be a good idea if they could manage to send a few copies over here weekly, even say 50. A lot of British and American papers are sold regularly here, and there is a considerable public which would be glad to get hold of
T
.

I am trying to arrange to go to Cologne for a few days, or, if not Cologne, at any rate some where in occupied territory. After that I fancy I shall go to Toulouse and Lyons, then return to Paris and come back to England towards the end of April. By the time the posts seem to take, I don’t think it would be worth forwarding any letters after about the 10th of April. Otherwise they are liable to arrive here after I have left and then will probably be lost for good. But it’s all right forwarding letters while I am out of Paris because I should come back here to pick up my stuff in any case. I wonder whether you could be kind enough to do one thing for me. I only rather hurriedly saw, before leaving, Stefan Schimanski
³
who had had a war diary of mine from which he thought he might like to use extracts in some book or other. I wonder if you could ring him up (I think he is at Lindsay Drummonds°) and impress upon him that if he does want to use such extracts, he must in no case do so without my seeing them beforehand.

I dare say you heard that the court case went off all right and little Richard is now legally mine. I hear that he has 5 teeth and is beginning to move about a bit. I saw the other day a knitted suit in a shop that I thought would be nice for him, so I went in and asked the price and it was Frs. 2500, ie. about £12.10s.
⁴
That is what prices are like here. If you take two people out to lunch it costs at least Frs 1000 for the three. However it isn’t me that is paying. I am glad I managed to bring a lot of soap and coffee across with me because you can produce a terrific effect by distributing small quantities of either, also English cigarettes. Luckily it isn’t at all cold. I’ve taken to wearing a beret, you’ll be glad to hear. Please give everyone my love and impress on them again not to expect any silk stockings because there just aren’t such things here. The Americans bought them all up long ago.