George Orwell: A Life in Letters (60 page)

Let me hear from you again if you can get round to writing.

Yours

George

[XVIII, 3045, pp. 370–1; typewritten]

1
.
For Anne Popham’s reminiscences of this exchange, see
Remembering Orwell
, pp. 166–67.

2
.
Ruth Beresford, who shared the flat in Canonbury Square with Anne Popham immediately below Orwell’s flat.

3
.
Possibly ‘Politics vs. Literature’,
Polemic
(XVIII, 3089, pp. 417–32.)

To Celia Kirwan*

17 August 1946

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

Dearest Celia,

How marvellous of you to get the brandy and send it off on your own initiative. I enclose cheque for £9–15–0. I hope you weren’t put to any other expense about it—if so please let me know.

I forgot to say, I think one or two of the titles (of pamphlets and so on) in the Swift essay
¹
are incorrect, as I was quoting them from memory, but so long as I see a galley proof it will be easy to put this right.

I am sorry you are pining away in London. It must be lousy being there at this time of year, especially if you have been having such marvellous weather as we have had here for the last week or two. I still haven’t done any work to speak of, there always seems to be so much to do of other kinds, and the journeys one makes are quite astonishing. Susan’s child came up here yesterday, and I was supposed to go to Glasgow to meet her. I set out the day before yesterday morning, but punctured my motor bike on the way and thus missed the boat. I then got a lift first in a lorry, then in a car, and crossed the ferry to the next island in hopes there would be a plane to Glasgow, however the plane was full up, so I took a bus on to Port Ellen, where there would be a boat on Friday morning. Port Ellen was full to the brim owing to a cattle show, all the hotels were full up, so I slept in a cell in the police station along with a lot of other people including a married couple with a perambulator. In the morning I got the boat, picked the child up and brought her back, then we hired a car for the first
20 miles and walked the last five home. This morning I got a lift in a motor boat to where my bike was, mended the puncture and rode home—all this in 3 days. I think we are going to get a motor boat, ie. a boat with an outboard engine, as it is the best way of travelling here when the weather is decent. At present we have only a little rowing boat which is good for fishing but which you can’t go far out to sea in. We go fishing nearly every night, as we are partly dependent on fish for food, and we have also got two lobster pots and catch a certain number of lobsters and crabs. I have now learned how to tie up a lobster’s claws, which you have to do if you are going to keep them alive, but it is very dangerous, especially when you have to do it in the dark. We also have to shoot rabbits when the larder gets low, and grow vegetables, though of course I haven’t been here long enough to get much return from the ground yet, as it was simply a jungle when I got here. With all this you can imagine that I don’t do much work—however I have actually begun my new book and hope to have done four or five chapters by the time I come back in October. I am glad Humphrey
²
has been getting on with his—I wonder how
The Heretics
³
sold? I saw Norman Collins
⁴
gave it rather a snooty review in the
Observer.

Richard now wears real shorts, which another child had grown out of, and braces, and I have got him some real farm labourer’s boots. He has to wear boots here when he goes far from the house, because if he has shoes he is liable to take them off, and there are snakes here. I think you would like this place. Do come any time if you want to. But if you do, try and let me know in advance (it means writing about a week in advance, because we only get letters twice a week here), so that I can arrange about hiring a car. Also, don’t bring more luggage than, say, a rucksack and a haversack, but on the other hand do bring a little flour if you can. We are nearly always short of bread and flour here since the rationing. You don’t want many clothes so long as you have a raincoat and stout boots or shoes. Remember the boats sail on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and you have to leave Glasgow about 8 am. I expect to be here till about the 10th of October.

With love

George

PS. You might ask Freddie
⁵
from me, now that he has a chair in Mental Philosophy, who has the chair in non-mental philosophy.

[XVIII, 3051, pp. 375–7; typewritten]

1
.
‘Politics vs. Literature’,
Polemic
(for which Celia Kirwan worked as an editorial assistant).

2
.
Humphrey Slater,* then editor of
Polemic.

3
.
Orwell had written a reader’s report for Fredric Warburg on Slater’s
The Heretics
.
It was published in April 1946. The report does not appear to have survived.

4
.
For Norman Collins see
17.3.36
, n. 4.

5
.
A. J. Ayer (191
0–89), who had just been appointed Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London. (See also
13.4.46
, n. 5.)

To George Woodcock*

2 September 1946

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

Dear George,

Thanks ever so for the tea—it came just at the right moment because this week the whole of the nearest village is being brought here in lorries to get in the field of corn in front of our house, and of course tea will have to flow like water while the job is on.
¹
We have been helping the crofter who is our only neighbour with his hay and corn, at least when rain hasn’t made it impossible to work. Everything is done here in an incredibly primitive way. Even when the field is ploughed with a tractor the corn is still sown broadcast, then scythed and bound up into sheaves by hand. They seem to broadcast corn, ie. oats, all over Scotland, and I must say they seem to get it almost as even as can be done by a machine. Owing to the wet they don’t get the hay in till about the end of September or even later, sometimes as late as November, and they can’t leave it in the open but have to store it all in lofts. A lot of the corn doesn’t quite ripen and is fed to the cattle in sheaves like hay. The crofters have to work very hard, but in many ways they are better off and more independent than a town labourer, and they would be quite comfortable if they could get a bit of help in the way of machinery, electrical power and roads, and could get the landlords off their backs and get rid of the deer. These animals are so common on this particular island that they are an absolute curse. They eat up the pastures where there ought to be sheep, and they make fencing immensely more expensive than it need be. The crofters aren’t allowed to shoot them, and are constantly having to waste their time dragging carcases of deer down from the hill during the stalking season. Everything is sacrificed to the brutes because they are an easy source of meat and therefore profitable to the people who own them. I suppose sooner or later these islands will be taken in hand, and then they could either be turned into a first-rate area for dairy produce and meat, or else they would support a large population of small peasants living off cattle and fishing. In the 18th century the population here was 10,000—now less than 300.

My love to Inge. I hope to be back in London about October 13th.

Yours

George

[XVIII, 3058, p. 385; typewritten]

1
.
In his study of Orwell,
The Crystal Spirit
, Woodcock explains this gift of tea and comments on Orwell’s description of life on Jura: ‘Knowing Orwell’s passion for tea, my wife and I, coffee drinkers, would save up our rations and every now and again send him a packet of Typhoo Tips, which produced the dark, strong brew he liked. One of these packets . . . evoked a letter in which Orwell described existence on Jura; it reflected the intense interest he always took in the concrete aspects of life—particularly rural life—and also in its social overtones’ (p. 36). The tea ration had been increased in July 1945 from 2 ounces a week to 2½, but it was still a meagre amount, especially for someone who drank as much strong tea as Orwell did. Although Orwell was desperate for tea, his first thought on receiving this gift was that he could share it with the harvesters.

To Rayner Heppenstall*

19 September 1946

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

Dear Rayner,

The version of
Boule de Suif
I was projecting would be a featurisation of the story, with a narrator but no critical talk or biographical material, so I suppose it would be ‘drama.’ If you can interest the relevant person, you might say that the way I would want to do it would be the way in which we did various stories for the Eastern Service in 1943, and also that version of
Little Red Riding Hood
which you kindly placed for me. In my experience the
BBC
, although making a minimum of 6 copies of everything, can never find a back number of a script, but the stories I would like to draw attention to are
Crainquebille
(Anatole France,)
The Fox
(Silone,) and
A Slip Under the Microscope
(H.G. Wells.) We did all these in featurised form sticking to the text of the story as closely as possible and not mucking it up with meaningless patches of music, but dramatising all the dialogue and using a number of different voices. If anyone is interested enough to look up these scripts, you might tell him I had to write them in desperate haste, as I was overwhelmed with administrative work, and in each case could give only a day to the job. I could do it better if I were doing it for the Home Service and had a bit more time.
¹

As to Pontius Pilate, I am not pining to write a script about him, but I have always felt he has had a raw deal and thought one might make a good dialogue out of it somehow.
²
Boule de Suif
is a test of whether the C programme
³
is really nothing barred. Incidentally I don’t believe it has ever been well translated into English (at least the only translation I have seen was damnable).

I expect to be back in London on October 13th. The weather here has been shocking for about a fortnight past and they are having a fearful job to get the harvest in. We stove in the bottom of our boat in the recent stormy weather. However we had had a good season’s fun out of it and a lot of fish and lobsters, and next year I shall get a bigger one with a motor on it, which will help solve our transport problem. Transport is really the only big problem here, and wouldn’t be a problem in normal times when one could lay in several months’ stores at one go. Even as it is we have done better in food and fuel than one can in London, but at the expense of a good deal of labour and some terrifying journeys. Hoping to see you in town. My love to Margaret.

Yours

Eric

[XVIII, 3074, pp. 400–1; typewritten]

1
.
On Rayner Heppenstall’s behalf, June Seligmann sent Orwell’s suggestion to Laurance Gilliam, Director of Features, on 24 September 1
946 who passed it on to the Drama Department. His memorandum is annotated, ‘Sorry—no can do!’ and the answer is marked for Heppenstall’s attention. Except for
Little Red Riding Hood
, broadcast in
BBC
Children’s Hour
, the scripts to which Orwell refers were written when he was broadcasting to India.

2
.
In a letter to Heppenstall on 5 September 1946 (XVIII, 3059, p. 386–7), Orwell had in mind an imaginary conversation between Pontius Pilate and Lenin – for ‘one could hardly make it J.C.’!

3
.
What was to become the Third Programme of the
BBC
, now Radio 3. Laurence Brander, the
BBC
’s Intelligence Officer for India when Orwell worked for the
BBC
, wrote in 1954 that Orwell ‘was the inspiration of that rudimentary Third Programme which was sent out to the Indian student’ (
George Orwell
, pp. 8–9).

To Humphrey Slater*

26 September 1946

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

Dear Humphrey,

Can you come to lunch at the flat on Sunday October 13th, and if possible bring one of our mutual friends with you? I am getting back to town that morning, but my sister is arriving with Richard a day or two earlier. I think there’ll be a goose for lunch, unless it somehow goes astray on the journey. We shall have one goose left when we leave, which we shall take with us or send on ahead, and if so we’ll need someone to help eat it.

I sent the documents to Cyril
¹
as requested in your wire, and hope he got them in time, but I couldn’t send them very promptly because of the difficulty of there only being two posts a week here and a telegram not moving any faster than a letter once it gets on to the island. I hope he makes good use of them. It is all pretty tough but only what you would expect. I thought the most interesting feature was what you too pointed out—the ambivalence all the way through, the writers constantly complaining that literature is dull and unimaginative and then wanting to cure this by clipping the artist’s wings a little shorter.