George Orwell: A Life in Letters (53 page)

Yours

George

P.S. I don’t think I ever thanked you for our stay. I have a sort of inhibition about that, because as a child I was taught to say ‘Thank you for having me’ after a party, and it seemed to me such an awful phrase.

[XVIII, 2852, pp. 27–9; typewritten]

1
.
Barbara Ward (1914–81;
DBE
, 1
974; Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth, 1976, economist and writer on politics; assistant editor
The Economist
, 1939–57. A Governor of the BBC, 1946–5
0. She was known for her concerns for individual freedom and civil rights.

2
.
Tom Hopkinson (1905–90; Kt. 1978), author, editor, and journalist. He was associated especially with
Picture Post
which he helped launch and edited 1940–50. He taught journalism at British and American universities, 1
967–75 and wrote a British Council pamphlet on Orwell (1953). Of his two biographies,
Of This Our Time
(1982) is concerned with the period when Orwell was working.

3
.
Edward Hulton (1
906–1988; Kt., 1957), lawyer, magazine publisher of liberal views, proprietor of
Picture Post
at this time. His
The New Age
was published in 1943 and reviewed by Orwell in the
Observer
, 15 August 1943 (XV, 2237, 201–2).

4
.
Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church
(Penguin Special, 1943). Orwell had got the wrong Penguin Special, however. In May 1940 Penguin Books published H.G. Wells’s
The Rights of Man, Or, What Are We Fighting For?
Chapter X discussed a Complément à la Déclaration des Droits de l’homme, which had been passed by a congress of the Ligue des Droits de l’homme at Dijon in July 1936. Wells said this document was ‘more plainly feminist and less simply equalitarian in sexual matters’ than what was proposed in his book, and it made ‘a distinction between “travail” and “loisirs” which we do not recognise’. He then gave the text.

5
.
Dr Juan Negrín (1
889–1956), Socialist Prime Minister of Spain from September 1936 for much of the civil war. He went to France in 1939 and set up a Spanish government in exile; he resigned from its premiership in 1945 in the hope of uniting all exiles. (See Thomas, pp. 949–
50.)

6
.
To Orwell’s essay on Koestler.

7
.
Mamaine Koestler (née Paget, 1916–54), Koestler’s wife and twin sister of Celia Kirwan.*

To Geoffrey Gorer*

22 January 1946

27B Canonbury Square

Islington N
1

Dear Geoffrey,

It was too good of you to send all those things. They were greatly appreciated here, especially by Richard, who had a big whack of the plum pudding and seemed none the worse afterwards. I was amused by the ‘this is an unsolicited gift’ on the outside, which I suppose is a formula necessitated by people over here writing cadging letters. I had quite a good Christmas. I went to Wales to stay with Arthur Koestler for a few days while the nurse went away with her own kid.
¹
Richard went out to a lot of parties where he was the only child, and except for occasionally dirtying his trousers (I still can’t get him house-trained) behaved with great aplomb and sat up to table in an ordinary chair. But of course the travelling just before and just after Xmas was fearful. To leave London you had to queue up 2 hours before the train left, and coming back the train was 4 hours late and landed one in town about half an hour after the undergrounds had stopped. However, fortunately Richard enjoys travelling, and I think when you are carrying a child you have a slightly better chance with porters.

It is foully cold here and the fuel shortage is just at its worst. We only got a ton of coal for the whole winter and it’s almost impossible to get logs. Meanwhile the gas pressure is so low that one can hardly get a gas fire to light, and one can only get about 1½ gallons of lamp oil a week. What I do is to light the fires with a little of the coal I have left and keep them damped down all day with blocks of wet peat of which I happen to have a few. It’s so much easier in the country where if you’re absolutely forced to you can go out and scrounge firewood. Otherwise things aren’t bad here. Food is about the same as ever. Yesterday I took Sillone
°
²
and his wife out to dinner. They were only here for a few days and were still in a state of being astonished at the food, all the English in Rome having told them we were starving over here. I am always ashamed when people come to England for the first time like that, and say to them ‘Don’t think England is like this in peacetime,’ but the S.s. said that for cleanness and state of repair London was a dream compared with Rome. They said that in Rome you could get anything if you had enough money, but an overcoat, for instance, cost the equivalent of £120.

Didn’t you tell me you met Dennis Collings* in Malaya? He was an anthropologist, and I think latterly was curator of the museum in Singapore. I used to know him very well. He got home recently and I heard from him the other day. He had been captured in Java and appeared not to have had absolutely too bad a time, having been a camp interpreter.

I forget if I’d started doing weekly articles for the
Evening Standard
before you left. In spite of—by my standards—enormous fees it doesn’t do me much good financially, because one extra article a week just turns the scale and makes it necessary for me to have a secretary.
³
However, even with the extra article she takes a certain amount of drudgery off me, and I am using her to arrange and catalogue my collection of pamphlets.
⁴
I find that up to date I have about 1200, but of course they keep on accumulating. I have definitely arranged I am going to stop doing the
Evening Standard
stuff and most other journalism in May, and take six months off to write another novel. If the Jura place
can be put in order this year I shall go there, otherwise I shall take a furnished house somewhere in the country, preferably by the sea, but anyway somewhere I can’t be telephoned to. My book of reprints ought to be out soon and the American title is
Dickens, Dali and others
. Scribners
⁵
are doing that one, and Harcourt Brace (I think that is the name) are doing
Animal Farm
. I don’t fancy that one will sell in the USA, though of course it
might
sell heavily, as with most books in America it seems you either sell 100,000 copies or nothing. I have arranged a lot of translations of
A.F.,
but the French publishers who signed the first contract have already got cold feet and say it’s impossible at present ‘for political reasons.’ I think it’s sad to think of a thing like that happening, in France of all countries.

I must knock off now as this is Susan’s day off and I have to go out and do the shopping. Richard has been trying to help me with the typing of this letter. He is now 20 months old and weighs about 32 lbs. He still doesn’t talk but is very alert in other ways and extremely active, in fact you can’t keep him still for a moment. Three times in the last month he got all the radiants out of the gas fire and smashed them to bits, which is a nuisance because they’re very difficult to buy. I think he could talk if he wanted to, but he hardly needs to as he can usually get what he wants by making an inarticulate noise and pointing—at least he does not exactly point but throws both arms out in the general direction of the thing he wants.

Let me hear how you are getting on and how things are in the USA. I hear they hate us more than ever now.

Yours

George

[XVIII, 2870, pp. 52–4; typewritten]

1
.
Susan Watson (1918–2001
), was Orwell’s housekeeper from early summer 1945 to autumn 1946 caring also for Richard. She had married a Cambridge University mathematician but they were in the process of being divorced. She had a seven-year-old daughter, Sally, who was at boarding school. (See her memoir in
Orwell Remembered
, pp. 217–25 and
Remembering Orwell
, pp. 156–
62 and 175–78.)

2
.
Ignazio Silone (Secondo Tranquilli) (1900–1978), author and politician, was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party but by the time of his exile in Switzerland after Mussolini’s rise to power he had distanced himself from its aims but remained strongly anti-Fascist. He was at this time editor of
Avanti
, the organ of the Italian Socialist Party, but he resigned in July 1946. Orwell dramatised his story, ‘The Fox’, for the BBC, broadcast 9 September 1943 (XV, 2270, pp. 230–42
).

3
.
Siriol Hugh-Jones.

4
.
From 1935 onwards, Orwell had collected pamphlets representing minority views.
These he left to the British Museum, and they are now in the British Library.

5
.
A curious error:
Critical Essays
was published in New York by Reynal & Hitchcock.

To Dorothy Plowman*

19 February 1946

27B Canonbury Square

Islington N1

Dear Dorothy,

I enclose cheque for £150 as a first instalment of repayment of that £300 anonymously lent to me in 1938
¹
—it’s a terribly long time afterwards to start repaying, but until this year I was really unable to. Just latterly I have started making money. I got your address from Richard Rees.* It’s a long time since I heard from you, and I do not think I even wrote to you when Max died. One does not know what to say when these things happen. I reviewed Max’s book of letters for the
Manchester Evening News
, which you may have seen.
²
My book
Animal Farm
has sold quite well, and the new one, which is merely a book of reprints,
³
also seems to be doing well. It was a terrible shame that Eileen didn’t live to see the publication of
Animal Farm
, which she was particularly fond of and even helped in the planning of. I suppose you know I was in France when she died. It was a terribly cruel and stupid thing to happen. No doubt you know I have a little boy named Richard whom we adopted in 1944 when he was 3 weeks old. He was ten months old when Eileen died and is 21 months old now. Her last letter to me was to tell me he was beginning to crawl. Now he has grown into a big strong child and is very active and intelligent, although he doesn’t talk yet. I have a nurse-housekeeper who looks after him and me, and luckily we are able to get a char as well. He is so full of beans that it is getting difficult to keep him in the flat, and I am looking forward to getting him out of London for the whole summer. I am not quite certain where we are going. I am supposed to be the tenant of a cottage in the Hebrides, but it’s possible they won’t have it in living order this year, in which case I shall probably take him to the east coast somewhere. I want a place where he can run in and out of the house all day with no fear of traffic. I am anxious to get out of London for my own sake as well, because I am constantly smothered under journalism—at present I am doing 4 articles every week—and I want to write another book which is impossible unless I can get 6 months quiet. I have been in London almost the whole of the war. Eileen was working for 4 or 5 years in government offices, generally for 10 hours a day or more, and it was partly overwork that killed her. I shall probably go back to the country in 1947, but at present it’s impossible to get hold of unfurnished houses and so I daren’t let go of my flat.

Richard Rees* is living in Chelsea and has kept his beard, although demobilised. Rayner Heppenstall* has a job in the
BBC
and seems to be quite liking it. It’s funny that you should be at Royston, so near where we used to live.
⁴
I have got to go down some time to the cottage I still have there, to sort out the furniture and books, but I have been putting it off because last time I was there it was with Eileen and it upsets me to go there. What has become of Piers?
⁵
I hope all goes well with you both.

Yours

Eric Blair

[XVIII, 2
903, pp. 115–6; typewritten]

1
.
L.H. Myers had, unknown to Orwell, financed his and Eileen’s stay in Morocco. The Plowmans acted as intermediaries.

2
.
He did write at the time of Max’s death (see
20.6.41
). Orwell reviewed
Bridge into the Future: Letters of Max Plowman
in the
Manchester Evening News
, 7 December 1944, (XVI, 2589, pp. 492–4).

3
.
Critical Essays
.

4
.
Wallington (where Orwell rented a cottage).

5
.
The Plowmans’ son.

To Arthur Koestler*

This letter lacks a strip torn off down its right-hand side. The missing words, conjecturally reconstructed, are given here in square brackets.