George Orwell: A Life in Letters (96 page)

Arthur Koestler
(1905–83), born in Budapest, joined the Communist Party in 1931, leaving in the late 1930s, and spent a year in the USSR. He worked as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War, was captured and condemned to death. He escaped and was interned in France in 1940 and then imprisoned as an alien by the British but later released. Among books describing his experiences are
Spanish Testament
(1937),
Scum of the Earth
(1941), and
Darkness at Noon
(1940), which Orwell reviewed (XII, pp. 357–9). He became a British citizen in 1945. Orwell’s essay, ‘Arthur Koestler’, was published in 1946; see XVI, pp. 391–402. His second wife, Mamaine, was the twin sister of Celia Kirwan). He and his third wife, Cynthia, both committed suicide in 1983 although she was much younger than was Koestler.

George(s) Kopp
(1902–1951) was born in Petrograd and was Orwell’s commandant in Spain. They remained friends thereafter. Kopp was a mysterious figure. He lived for a significant part of his life in Belgium and created various fictions about himself. It was certain that he was brave and skilful in war. He seems to have served for the Vichy Secret Service and also for MI5 (his handler being Anthony Blunt). Various claims have been made that he and Eileen had an affair, but Eileen’s letter of New Year’s Day, 1938, explodes that theory. He died in Marseilles. Bert Govaerts has done much to discover the truth of Kopp’s background: see
The Lost Orwell,
pp. 83–91.

Jennie Lee
(1904–88; Baroness Lee of Ashridge, 1970), daughter of a Scottish miner who was chairman of his local ILP branch. She served in the Labour governments of 1964–70 and was appointed as the first Minister of the Arts, making a profound impression in that role. She married Aneurin Bevan in 1934.

Captain Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart
(1895–1970) wrote more than thirty books including
History of the Second World War
(1970). He had been military correspondent to the
Daily Telegraph
, 1925–35, and to
The Times
, 1935–39. In 1937 he was personal adviser to the Minister of War. Orwell wrote of him, ‘The two military critics most favoured by the intelligentsia are Captain Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller, the first of whom teaches that the defence is stronger than the attack, and the second that the attack is stronger than the defence. This contradiction has not prevented both of them from being accepted as authorities by the same public. The secret reason for their vogue in left-wing circles is that both of them are at odds with the War Office’ (‘Notes on Nationalism’, 1945, XVII, p. 143).

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko
(1989–1976), Soviet advocate of Lamarckism (roughly, the ability in nature to develop acquired characteristics). His views were supported by Stalin. They dominated Soviet biology from the 1930s leading to the elimination of rival, and far sounder, biologists. In 1948 the Central Committee of the Soviet Union decreed that ‘Lysenkoism’ was correct. Lysenko and his theories were totally discredited following the fall of Khrushchev. The penultimate book Orwell read in 1949 was Julian Huxley’s
Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity (1949)
. Orwell was interested in Lysenko to the last. He pasted a cutting from the
News Chronicle
for 16 December 1949 into his Last Literary Notebook which quoted Lysenko as maintaining that ‘Wheat can become Rye’ (XX, 3725, p. 214).

Dwight Macdonald
(1906–82), libertarian critic, pamphleteer, and scholar. He was an associate editor of
Partisan Review
and later founded
Politics
of which he was editor 1944–49 and to which Orwell contributed, November 1944 and September 1946.

Sally McEwan
(?–1987) was Orwell’s secretary when he was literary editor of
Tribune
. She stayed at Barnhill with her daughter in 1946 and Michael Shelden records that over forty years later she still had happy memories of her time there (Shelden, p. 449).

John McNair
(1887–1968), a Tynesider and indefatigable worker for socialism all his life. He left school when he was twelve, ran into trouble with employers because of his left-wing views, and went to France to find work. He stayed there for twenty-five years, becoming a leather merchant, founding a football club with eight teams, and lecturing on English poets at the Sorbonne. He returned to England in 1936, rejoined the ILP and was its General Secretary, 1939–55. He was the first British worker to go to Spain and was the ILP representative in Barcelona.

Jessica Marshall
(
née
Browne) lived at Byfleet, Surrey. She heard Orwell give a lecture and thereafter read all he wrote. They seem to have had no personal contact. It is typical of Orwell’s generous spirit that, even though he was ill, he took the trouble to write to her at such length.

Michael Meyer (
1921–2000), author and translator (most notably of Ibsen and Strindberg). In 1943 he wrote what he later described as a ‘timid letter’ to Orwell and received an invitation to lunch (see XV, p. 65). They met and became good friends. Meyer describes Orwell in
Remembering Orwell
, pp. 132–7.

Henry Miller
(1891–1980), American author who lived in Paris from 1930–39. His fictionalised autobiographies, such as
Tropic of Cancer
(1934), and
Tropic of Capricorn (
1938), were banned in the USA until 1961 for their explicit treatment of sex. For Orwell’s essay on Miller, see ‘Inside the Whale’ (XII, pp. 86–115).

Leonard Moore
(?–1959), of Christy & Moore, became Orwell’s literary agent in 1932 at the suggestion of Mabel Fierz. He succeeded in placing
Down and Out in Paris and London
and was throughout Orwell’s life a patient and skilful supporter of Orwell and his work.

Raymond Mortimer, CBE
(1895–1980), critic and literary editor of the
New Statesman and Nation
and one of the best that paper had.

John Middleton Murry
(1889–1957) was nominally the editor of
The Adelphi
(which he founded in June 1923) for some fourteen years but much of the editing was undertaken by Max Plowman and Sir Richard Rees. Despite his unorthodox Marxism, deeply entrenched pacifism, and later entry to the church, he and Orwell remained good friends, although crossing swords from time to time. In 1948 he renounced pacifism and demanded a preventive war against the USSR despite, as Orwell reminded Dwight Macdonald, writing less than ten years earlier that ‘Russia is the only inherently peaceful country’ (XIX, p. 282).

Norah Myles
née
Symes (1906–94) and Orwell’s wife Eileen became friends when they read English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Her father and husband were physicians in Bristol. Eileen gave no addressee to the letters she wrote and signed them simply as ‘E’ or by a pet-name, ‘Pig’. Norah only met Orwell once or twice and found him ‘rather intimidating’. Eileen thought of her and her husband, Quartus, as carers for Richard Blair should she die under anaesthetic (as she did) but slightly confusingly said, ‘you have never seen either of them’.

C.K. Ogden
(1889–1957), psychologist and teacher. In the 1920s he developed Basic English, in part as a result of discussions with the critic, I.A. Richards. BASIC stands for British American Scientific International Commercial. It comprises 850 words: 400 nouns, 200 picturable objects, 100 general qualities, 50 opposites, and 100 operators such as adverbs and particles. Winston Churchill formed a Cabinet Committee on Basic English in 1943 and in June 1946 Ogden assigned his copyright to the Crown for £23,000. A Basic English Foundation was established by the Ministry of Education in 1947. Reading in Basic proved fairly easy but writing clearly much more difficult.

Gwen O’Shaughnessy
, a doctor and Eileen’s sister-in-law. She lived at 24 Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, SE 10. Her son, Laurence, went to Canada by ship in June 1940 in an evacuation scheme to save children from bombing. The scheme ended after the most successful German submarine, the U-48, sank
City of Benares
on 17 September 1940 on its way to Canada. Of about 300 adults on board, 175 were drowned; 87 of the 100 children were drowned.

Dr Laurence (Eric) O’Shaughnessy
(1900–40), Eileen’s much-loved brother. He was proving an outstanding chest and heart surgeon, being appointed Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, 1933–35. In 1937 he won the Hunter Medal Triennial Prize for research work in surgery of the thorax. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps at the outbreak of war and served at a casualty clearing station in Flanders where he was killed. Her brother’s death greatly affected Eileen (see Fyvel, pp. 105–6 and 136).

Marie O’Shaughnessy
,Eileen’s mother.

Nancy Parratt
(1919– ) joined the BBC on 13 June 1941 and worked for Orwell. She can be seen standing next to Orwell in a photograph of those participating in a ‘Voice’ programme – including T.S. Eliot and Mulk Raj Anand (Crick, plate 22). She left on 15 March 1943 to join the WRNS. She served in the USA, married there and was demobilised in May 1946.

Dorothy Plowman
(1887–1967), wife of Max Plowman. When Orwell was advised to winter in a warm climate, L.H. Myers (1881–1944), the novelist, wished to finance this anonymously and gave Mrs Plowman £300 to enable him to do so. She never told Orwell the source of the money, although he realised that she was acting as an intermediary.

Max Plowman
(1883–1941) worked on
The Adelphi
from 1929 until his death. He was Warden of the Adelphi Centre, 1938–41, an ardent supporter of the Peace Pledge Union from its foundation in 1934 and its General Secretary 1937–38. His publications include
Introduction to the Study of Blake
(1927)
, A Subaltern on the Somme
(as Mark VII, 1928) a product of his experiences in the front line, and
The Faith Called Pacifism
(1936). He and his wife, Dorothy, remained lifelong friends of Orwell.

Anne Popham
studied the history of art and joined the Arts Council. She married Virginia Woolf’s nephew, Quentin Bell in 1952, and, as Anne Olivier Bell, edited Virginia Woolf’s
Diaries 1915–41
with Andrew McNeillie (1977–85). In 1946 she had a flat on the floor below Orwell’s at 27b Canonbury Square.

Anthony Powell, CH
(1905–2000), novelist and editor, famous for the novel series,
A Dance to the Music of Time
(1951–75). He served from 1939 –45 in the Welch Regiment and the Intelligence Corps.

Lady Violet Powell
(1912–2002), when Lady Violet Pakenham she married Anthony Powell.

Philip Rahv
(1908–1973; born Ivan Greenberg), prominent Marxist literary critic and member of the John Reed Club. With William Phillips he founded
Partisan Review
and earlier was a contributor to
New Masses.

R.N. Raimbault
(1882–1962), a distinguished wood engraver, painter, writer and translator. He taught French Literature, Greek and Latin at the Lycée du Mans. He was a particularly distinguished translator of American literature, especially of William Faulkner. He was the first translator of Orwell, who greatly admired his work.

Sir Herbert Read
(1893–1968), poet, critic, educator and interpreter of modern art. He served in the First World War being awarded the DSO and MC. He was particularly influential in the thirties and forties. His major works include
Form in Modern Poetry
(1932),
Art Now
(1933),
Art and Society
(1936), and
Poetry and Anarchism
(1938) – reprinted as
Anarchy and Order
(1954). His
Education through Art
, 1943, had an important post-war influence. He was the most influential British intellectual to support anarchism before World War II and was closely associated with anarchism until he was knighted.

Sir Richard Rees
(1900–70), editor, painter and critic. He was an attaché at the British Embassy in Berlin, 1922–23, a lecturer for the Workers’ Educational Association, 1925–27, and editor of
The Adelphi
, 1930–37. He introduced a more political and less-consciously literary tone to the journal. He gave much encouragement to Orwell from this period until his death. Ravelston of
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
owes something to his generous nature. He partnered Orwell on Jura and showed him great kindness throughout his life. He became Orwell’s literary executor jointly with Sonia Orwell and wrote
George Orwell: A Fugitive from the Camp of Victory
(1961).

Vernon Richards
(born Vero Recchione, 1915–2001), edited
Spain and the World
and its successor,
Revolt!
, 1936–39, which presented the Spanish Civil War from an anti-Stalinist stance. He was then one of the editors of
Freedom through Anarchism,
1939–49. Born in Soho, London, he was a civil engineer, journalist, and anarchist. Orwell met him through the International Anti-Fascist Solidarity Committee to which Emma Goldman had introduced Orwell in 1938. He took many photographs of Orwell and his son: see
George Orwell at Home
(1998).

Sir Steven Runciman
(1903–2000) was a King’s Scholar at Eton in the same Election as Orwell. He became a distinguished historian and published
A History of the Crusades,
3 volumes (1951–4),
The Sicilian Vespers
(1958), and
The Fall of Constantinople (
1965). To celebrate his 97
^th
birthday he managed a visit to Mount Athos to observe the consecration of a monastery which he had helped pay to be restored.

L.F. Rushbrook Williams, CBE
(1890–1978), BBC Eastern Service Director, one-time Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford; Professor of Modern History, Allahabad University, 1914–19, and Director of the Central Bureau of Information, India, 1920–26. Director of the BBC Indian Service, 1941 to November 1944 then joined
The Times
to 1955. His enlightened attitude to India is well expressed in
India
, an Oxford Pamphlet on World Affairs, 1940. In papers prepared for Sir Stafford Cripps comments on him include ‘has spent his life in the service of Indian Princes . . . Sails with the wind’.