George Orwell: A Life in Letters (86 page)

2
.
Dr H. V. Morlock, the specialist whom Orwell had consulted before the war.

3
.
Sweets and chocolate were still rationed when Orwell wrote, but just one week later restrictions were lifted. Unfortunately, this freedom did not last long. Confectionery was rationed again (4 ounces per week) on 14 July, the sugar ration was cut to 8 ounces, and tobacco imports were reduced.

To Sir Richard Rees*

25 April 1949

[The Cotswold Sanatorium]

Cranham

Dear Richard,

Thanks for your letter. I have been sort of up & down in health but on the whole am a little better, I think. I still can’t make any plans, but if I am up & about for the winter, I thought it might not be a bad idea to go abroad somewhere, & Orlando
¹
(I don’t know if you know him, he writes for the
Observer
sometimes) suggested Capri as a good place to stay. It sounds as if it would have good food & wine, & Silone,
²
who is a friend of mine & lives there, would no doubt be able to arrange somewhere for me to stay. Any way it’s worth thinking over. The Tawneys came in the other day. I think they’re going back to London almost immediately, so I’m afraid I may not see them again. For little Richard’s birthday, Inez [Holden] is going to try & get me one of those children’s typewriters you see advertised now, if not too impossibly expensive. I thought if he could be kept from smashing it, it would come in useful when he begins to learn his letters in earnest, & it would also keep him off my typewriter. The Tawneys took that book of yours
³
I had & are going to send it to you. When Brenda [Salkeld] comes I am going to get her to make up some parcels for me & send home some of the books, which are piling up fearfully. I still can’t do any work. Some days I take pen & paper & try to write a few lines, but it’s impossible. When you are in this state you have the impression that your brain is working normally until you try to put words together, & then you find that you have acquired a sort of awful heaviness & clumsiness, as well as inability to concentrate for more than a few seconds. I am reading
Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour
, which I had never read before. I don’t think it’s as good as
Handley Cross
. I also recently re-read
Little Dorrit
⁴
for the first time in a good many years. It’s a dull book in a way, but it contains a really subtle character, William Dorrit, quite unlike most of Dickens’s people. Someone in the USA has managed to get me a copy of Gissing’s
New Grub Street
at last. Don’t lose
The Odd Women
, will you.

Yours

Eric

[XX, 3607, pp. 97–98; handwritten]

l
.
Ruggiero Orlando (1907–1994), journalist, broadcaster, poet, and critic. His passionate, slightly anarchic political views led to his fleeing Italy in 19
39 for Britain. He was engaged by the BBC to broadcast in its external service and did so with great success, achieving a legendary status with colleagues and listeners. After the war he worked for
RAI
, the Italian state broadcasting service, and was its correspondent in the United States for eighteen years. He returned to Italy in 1972 and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies. He was, when in England, a frequent contributor to
Poetry Today
, and he translated Dylan Thomas into Italian.

2
.
Ignazio Silone (1900–1978), Italian novelist. In his essay on Arthur Koestler, Orwell claimed that there had been nothing in English writing to resemble Silone’s
Fontamara
(
1933; English translation, 1934) or Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon
(1940): ‘there is almost no English writer to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside.’

3
.
Probably David Jones’s
In Parenthesis
. (See letter to Sir Richard Rees,
18.1.49
, n. 2.)

4
.
Orwell’s list of his reading for April 1949 includes Dickens’s
Little Dorrit
and Surtees’s
Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour.

To S. M. Levitas

2 May 1949

The Cotswold Sanatorium,

Cranham

Dear Mr Levitas,
¹

Many thanks for your letter of the 21
^st
April. I will do something for you later when I can, but I really am most deadly ill & quite unable to work, & I don’t know how soon this state of affairs will change. I don’t want any payment & certainly not Care packages – the truth is I have no appetite & can’t eat the food I am given already. But next time I do something for you I’ll ask you to pay me by sending one of the books I see advertised in American papers & which one can’t get over here.

The above address will continue to find me, I’m afraid.

Yours sincerely

Geo. Orwell

[XX, 3616, p. 104; handwritten]

1
.
S. M. Levitas (1894–1961) was the editor of the long-running left-wing periodical,
The New Leader
, New York. It closed down in 2006. He replied to Orwell on 3 June saying how willing he was to get ‘any and every book which you would like’. However, he seemed oblivious to Orwell’s repeated protestations that he was very ill and continued to harass him. On this occasion, despite Orwell’s description of his sickness, he asked for ‘an original piece’ and also to write a ‘Guest Columnist Editorial’ of one thousand words ‘on any subject you desire’.

To Sir Richard Rees*

2 May 1949

[The Cotswold Sanatorium]

Cranham

Dear Richard,

I have to hand-write because there is a patient further down the row who is
in articulo mortis
,
¹
or thinks she is, & the typewriter worries her.

About this business of Barnhill etc. I cannot make any real plans until I know if & when I shall get out of bed, but the governing facts are:

1. I can’t in future spend the winters in Jura.

2. Richard must go to school next year, which means somebody being with him, as I don’t want him to go to a boarding school till he is at any rate 10.

3. I don’t want to disrupt the Barnhill ménage.

4. Avril will probably want to stay on at Barnhill, & Bill in any case couldn’t get on without her, or without some female helper.

All this being so, it seems to me that if I am in circulation again later this year, I had best go abroad or somewhere like Brighton for the winter, & then next spring set up a second establishment in London or Edinburgh where I can have Richard with me & where he can go to day-school. He can spend his holidays in Jura, & I hope I shall be able to spend my summers there as well. This will mean having another nurse-maid or housekeeper or something. However,
provided
I can work I can easily earn enough money for this; in any case it was agreed between Avril & me that if she stopped looking after R. I should reduce the amount I paid her. If I remain bedridden, or at any rate have to remain under medical care, which I suppose is a possibility, I shall move to a sanatorium somewhere near London, where it is easier for friends & business associates to come & see me, & set up an establishment for Richard near there, with a housekeeper or something. That is as much as I can plan at present.

Thanks so much for drying off all the books. I don’t agree with you about
The Great Gatsby
—I was rather disappointed by it. It seemed to me to lack point,
²
&
Tender is the Night
, which I read recently, even more so.
³
I’ve just read Geoffrey Gorer’s book on the Americans—very amusing & shallow, as usual. I’ve at last got hold of May Sinclair’s
The Combined Maze
—a forgotten good bad novel which I’ve been trying to get a copy of for years. I must get some more books rebound before long. Re my unsuccessful efforts to get Gissing reprinted, it’s struck me that the Everyman Library might do one of them. They have no Gissing on their list. I wonder how one approaches them, & whether there is a string one can pull.

In spite of his chumminess with ‘Zilli’
⁴
(who he of course thinks can help him in his political career), I don’t believe Mikardo is a crypto. Apart from other things, if he were a crypto, Michael Foot
⁵
would probably know it & wouldn’t have him on
Tribune
. They got rid of Edelmann°
⁶
for that reason. It’s of course true that ‘objectively’ people like Laski
⁷
are a lot more useful to the Russians than the overt Communists, just as it is true that ‘objectively’ a pacifist is pro-war & pro-militarist. But it seems to me very important to attempt to gauge people’s
subjective
feelings, because otherwise one can’t predict their behaviour in situations where the results of certain actions are clear even to a self-deceiver. Suppose for example that Laski had possession of an important military secret. Would he betray it to the Russian military intelligence? I don’t imagine so, because he has not actually made up his mind to be a traitor, & the nature of what he was doing would in that case be quite clear. But a real Communist would, of course, hand the secret over without any sense of guilt, & so would a real crypto, such as Pritt. The whole difficulty is to decide where each person stands, & one has to treat each case individually.

The weather has rather gone off here. I sat outside in a deck chair one or two days, but latterly it’s been too cold. A man came from the
E
[
vening
].
Standard
to ‘interview’ me,
⁸
rather an intimidating experience, also Paul Potts,
⁹
who has just got back from Palestine, together with the wife of A. J. P. Taylor,
¹⁰
the chap who turned traitor at the Wroclaw conference. I gather from her that Taylor has since turned a good deal more anti-CP.

Yours

Eric

[XX, 3617, pp. 104–6; handwritten]

1
.
‘at the moment of death’.

2
.
Orwell’s letter has been annotated here, ‘NO!’

3
.
Orwell’s letter has been annotated here, ‘Yes.’

4
.
Konni Zilliacus (see
2.1.48,
n. 5).

5
.
Michael Foot (see
31.3.46
,
n. 2).

6
.
Maurice Edelman (
1911–1975), educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, entered the plywood business which led to visits to the
USSR
, about which he then wrote. He was a war correspondent in North Africa and in Normandy and a Labour
MP
in 1945, re-elected in 1950.

7
.
Harold Laski (see
20.9.47
, n. 1).

8
.
Charles Curran, who ‘tired me so . . . arguing about polities’ (see
16.5.49
).

9
.
Paul Potts (see letters to Humphrey Dakin of
1.7.46
, n. 5 and to Sally McEwan of
5.7.46
, n. 1).

10
.
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990), historian and journalist. At this time he was Tutor in Modern History, Magdalen College, Oxford (to 1963); Fellow, 1938–76. He wrote prolifically and authoritatively (if not always uncontroversially), especially on Germany and World Wars I and II. The Wroclaw Conference was a Communist-front Conference of Intellectuals, August 1948, attended by scientists, writers, and cultural leaders from forty countries. It passed a resolution condemning the revival of Fascism. The conference backfired on the organisers; some participants saw through the proceedings, Taylor among them, and walked out.

To Fredric Warburg*

16 May 1949

Cranham

Dear Fred,

Thanks so much for your letter. As she may have told you, I had to put Sonia Brownell* off. I am in most ghastly health, & have been for some weeks. I am due for another X-ray picture, but for some days I have been too feverish to go over to the X-ray room & stand up against the screen. When the picture is taken, I am afraid there is not much doubt it will show that both lungs have deteriorated badly. I asked the doctor recently whether she
¹
thought I would survive, & she wouldn’t go further than saying she didn’t know. If the ‘prognosis’ after this photo is bad, I shall get a second opinion. Can you give me the name of that specialist you mentioned? Then I will suggest either him or Dr. Morlock, another specialist whom I consulted before the war. They can’t
do
anything, as I am not a case for operation, but I would like an expert opinion on how long I am likely to stay alive. I do hope people won’t now start chasing me to go to Switzerland, which is supposed to have magical qualities. I don’t believe it makes any difference where you are, & a journey would be the death of me. The one chance of surviving, I imagine, is to keep quiet. Don’t think I am making up my mind to peg out. On the contrary, I have the strongest reasons for wanting to stay alive. But I want to get a clear idea of
how long
I am likely to last, & not just be jollied along the way doctors usually do.