Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (87 page)

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.

Orwell’s status as a writer of novels is debatable, but Orwell’s status as a non-fiction writer is unimpeachable. He made reportage not merely a valid literary form but an instrument of social hygiene and personal therapy. Winston Smith becomes ‘the last man in Europe’ (Orwell’s first title for
Nineteen Eighty-Four
) as opposed to a ‘citizen’ (i.e. serf) when he clandestinely buys himself pen and paper and finds a corner beyond the watching eye of the telescreen to write down what actually happened at what? – a public hanging. That, as it happened, was the subject of Orwell’s first significant published essay, ‘A Hanging’ (1931). Winston is by profession a
Times
reporter, AD 1984. It is still the ‘paper of record’ – but its principal activity is destroying or perverting history. ‘He who controls the present, controls the past. He
who controls the past, controls the future’ – so runs the Party slogan. Winston’s day job is to consign awkward material (like the truth) down the ‘memory hole’.

One notes that Orwell also consigned huge chunks of his own personal record down that same hole. Why, asks his latest biographer forlornly, are there so few photographs, no sound recordings, nothing on film? Why did he insist ‘no biography’, and marry, on his deathbed, a woman whom he trusted to carry out that prohibition as a sacred duty? One is thrown back on Orwell’s own accounts. How reliable are they? Did he really shoot the elephant – or was the beast as allegorical as Moby Dick? The biographical framework is clear. He was born Eric Blair in Bengal, India, the only son of a ‘sub-deputy opium agent, 4th grade’ close to retirement. Pooter in a solar topee. Richard Blair is remembered by his son as a remote ‘elderly man forever saying “don’t”’. Orwell calibrated his family’s social standing, with contemptuous exactitude, as ‘lower-upper middle class’.

Eric was bright and went on scholarship to a good ‘prep’ school, St Cyprian’s. Late in life he wrote a scathing account of those schooldays, ‘Such, such were the Joys’. It was not enjoyable. The chronicle begins with eight-year-old ‘Blair’ being beaten for bedwetting. They would never, he claimed, have caned the bare arse of a boy whose parents earned £2,000. Whether or not he was actually thrashed and humiliated has been questioned. If so, it did not stop him cruising to a full scholarship to Eton, with schoolmate Cyril Connolly, whose recollections of St Cyprian’s frankly contradict young Blair’s. In his five years at Eton, 1917–21, he resolutely ‘slacked’. It was the first of many
non serviams
. But he read voraciously and made friendships which, like Connolly, proved useful in his later literary career. University was not an option: his academic record was now too undistinguished and his family too poor.

In a momentary spasm of loyalty to the Crown he was duly gazetted an officer in the Indian Imperial Police, Burma branch. He would spend five years in the tropics, waited on hand and foot by servants, his sexual needs supplied by concubines, buoyed up by the Empire’s indelible sense of racial superiority over the Burmese ‘niggers’. He professed to hate the Empire which he saw as a ‘racket’, but he had as little time for the Burmese – ‘evil spirited little beasts’ – whom he was paid to beat, hang or shoot if they got out of line. Why he joined the India Service is a mystery: why he stayed there five years is a greater mystery. One’s suspicion is that it was the sex.

He resigned and returned to lodge with his retired parents in Southwold while he meditated his next step in life (which would appal them). He resolved to become a tramp. Why? It may have been self-punitive – his forty days in the desert – or it could have been political, inspired by the 1932 Jarrow ‘National Hunger March’.
Or it could have been an act of literary homage to Jack London’s
The People of the Abyss
and W. H. Davies’
Autobiography of a Super-tramp
. In any case, Orwell spent two years slumming it and his tale of two cities was published in 1933 as
Down and Out in Paris and London
. He ‘kipped’ in workhouses and shared hostels with cockneys in the summer hop fields of Kent. A writer whom Orwell valued extravagantly was Henry Miller, whose
Tropics
record an unending Parisian sex orgy. For Orwell, if we believe him, it wasn’t dipping his wick but his arms, up to the pits, in scummy water as a
plongeur
– dish-washer.

Down and Out
was taken by the newly established Victor Gollancz, a socialist publisher. It got good reviews, but its author would have been back in the workhouse on the royalties. There followed a year lost to biography. One picks up his trail in 1931 Hampstead, where he was working part-time in a bookshop, doing the odd bit of journalism on the side and working on his first novel. Gollancz and other English publishers (a ‘gutless’ crew, Orwell always thought) were nervous about the libels in his self-hating
Burmese Days
. It was published, belatedly, in the US in 1934. Meanwhile his second novel,
A Clergyman’s Daughter
, was published as his debut work in England in 1935. A dried-up spinster, approaching the horrors of middle age ‘on the shelf’, Dorothy Hare suffers a bout of amnesia, escapes from her Suffolk parsonage to find emotional fulfilment in the hop fields of Kent and the meaning of life in London’s streets. Orwell’s later verdict on the novel was pungent: ‘bollocks’.

He was prouder of his third novel,
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936). Gordon Comstock’s miseries, catering for philistine know-nothings (‘do you have the new Ethel M. Dell?’) in a Hampstead bookshop, draw on Orwell’s own counter-jumper servitude. Gordon dumps the epic poem he is writing, grows up and sells out. He becomes an adman. Winston Smith’s ‘triumph’ is coming to love Big Brother: Gordon comes to love the aspidistra, emblem of the ‘lower-upper middle class’. He has an immediate hit with his ‘Pedic Perspiration’ (‘BO of the Feet!’) campaign. Oddly enough, Orwell might have been a customer for that product; he was morbid about smells. Who else would have analysed the fourth book of
Gulliver’s Travels
in terms of horseshit being sweeter to the nostrils than human shit?

Although he resolutely declined to be a party man, the Socialists saw him as one of theirs. Gollancz advanced him £500 to write about unemployment in the coalmining north. The result was
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937) – wholly displeasing to Gollancz for its critique of party hacks. Orwell was by now able to move into his own house, in Hertfordshire, and to marry. His wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, was an Oxford graduate whom he had met in bookish Hampstead. Virtually nothing is known about the marriage. There would be no children – Orwell claimed to be sterile.

Orwell, whose life never moved in straight lines, resolved – having just married – to fight for the Republic in Spain and joined the anarchist-leaning POUM and saw service on the Aragon front. It was a quiet sector, but a Nationalist sniper got him in the throat. On his return to Barcelona, he found himself at even greater risk of death from the Stalinists, who were ‘purging’ the city in their usual efficient way. Orwell’s disillusion with ‘movements’ crystallised in
Homage to Catalonia
. Gollancz refused it, on the grounds of apostasy but it was taken by Frederic Warburg, Orwell’s most congenial publisher, and sold miserably. If there was one thing the British reading public did not want to know about in 1937 it was war.

The next novel,
Coming Up for Air
(1939), is Orwell’s best. In a virtuoso act of ventriloquism, he took on the voice and personality of George Bowling, a shrewd, tubby, middle-aged insurance salesman, recently possessed of a set of gleaming false teeth. Having come into a seventeen-quid windfall, George resolves to visit that foreign country, his childhood past in Lower Binfield – a place where the sun always shone and the fish always bit. It’s a disaster. You can’t go home again, because history has wiped out home as efficiently as the bombs did Guernica (Picasso’s painting was on display in England at the period). The novel signals a deepening pessimism in Orwell, which would reach its climax in O’Brien’s forecasting the future to Winston – ‘a boot stamping on a human face – forever’. The pigs will always own the farm; innocent boys will always be caned for bedwetting.

When war broke out, Orwell was still primarily a hack journalist. He reviewed over one hundred books in 1940. He was, for the moment, patriotic (‘my country, right or left’), but too old and too sick to carry a rifle any more. He eventually landed a job in a sub-section of the BBC’s World Service (‘half lunatic asylum, half girl’s school’). After a couple of years he moved on to a more comfortable berth as literary editor of the socialist paper,
Tribune
, for whom he produced his finest essays, under the proclamation ‘As I please’. He and his wife (who was dangerously ill – although Orwell seems not to have noticed how seriously) adopted a child, Richard, in 1944.

As the war drew to a close, he tried every major publisher with his Swiftian satire on totalitarianism,
Animal Farm
. It was initially turned down on the grounds of (a) ‘Let’s not be beastly to the Russians’; (b) as T. S. Eliot put it, the pigs were, after all, extremely intelligent, and should run the farm. When the Iron Curtain descended, in 1945, Orwell’s fable would become a textbook for the ‘free world’: Martin Secker and Warburg published it in this year in the UK and it was taken by Harcourt Brace in the US in 1946. Everyone now wanted to be beastly to the Russians.

Eileen died as the war ended. Now, at last, in the £1,000-a-year class, Orwell moved to his own animal farm, on the island of Jura, with his younger sister as housekeeper. The western island was one of the few places which might survive the
atomic war he confidently expected. In this outpost, and terminally ill with tuberculosis, he worked on his last book,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949). The new antibiotics arrived months too late to save him. He ended his days in University College Hospital in London where he married Sonia Brownell (popularly believed to be depicted as Julia in his last novel) in October 1949. The marriage, one assumes, was unconsummated. He died three months later. A professed atheist, but contrarian to the end, he decreed he should be buried according to the rites of the Church of England. It recalls his best poem:

A happy vicar I might have been

Two hundred years ago

One remembers that Swift was a vicar two hundred years ago. But hardly happy.

We resemble a man going round a castle seeking vainly for an entrance, and sometimes sketching the façades.
Arthur Schopenhauer,
The World as Will and Idea

The country house – emblematically Brideshead – is central in any consideration of Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh. ‘Waugh Hall’, at least, is implied by that barrage of forenames. There was, as it happened, no such structure, around his birthplace at 11 Hillfield Road. The novelist Dan Jacobson, not a passionate admirer, suggests that on the front wall of that humble bungalow in Golders Green (nowadays nestled alongside a drive-through car wash) there should be no memorial blue plaque but a large exclamation mark. As a young man, Waugh is alleged to have tramped to the Hampstead post office, to get a more distinguished London district stamp on his correspondence. If not true, it ought to be.

‘Doubting Hall’ is the name of one of the acceptably grand edifices in Waugh’s fiction. It alludes to Christian’s imprisonment, by Giant Despair, in
The Pilgrim’s Progress
. Waugh’s principal doubt – and occasional despair – in life was which entrance he should use. If he could not, until his fourth decade, possess such property by right of birth, the attitudes that went with it were easily adopted. He had, noted his first biographer Christopher Sykes, an ‘instinctive dislike of the working
classes’, as if such a thing was irrational, like a fear of heights. In fact it was entirely rational and founded in horror at what was happening to ‘his’ England.

What was it, in Waugh’s view, that had been so fatally lost in the twentieth century? Deference, principally: that quality which, Walter Bagehot argued, held England together and revolution at bay. Carlyle more bluntly called it ‘servant-ship’. In one of his startlingly candid remarks about himself, Waugh proclaimed that, in the lower classes, he tolerated ‘servility’ but abominated ‘familiarity’. The only likeable working-class character one recalls in his twenty-novel-strong dramatis personae is Nanny Hawkins at Brideshead. Like the undimmed lamp-light in the chapel (whose walls Charles has dutifully decorated, in his own act of higher servantship), she survives. Like the chapel, her utter servility is a beacon of hope. Is Lord Marchmain’s soul more important than Hooper’s? asked Conor Cruise O’Brien, alluding to Charles Ryder’s jumped-up junior officer. Yes, Waugh would have answered, were he being honest. And Nanny’s soul? Yes, too, although unlike Hooper she would get entrance into Heaven on the Marchmain ticket – someone must iron those celestial robes. Whole classes of society and even whole nations come under Waugh’s sentence of dismissal. In a novel set entirely in America,
The Loved One
(1948), there is not a single admired American – and lots of Jews (or ‘Five-to-twos’ as Sir Ambrose vulgarly calls them). Waugh’s idea of the ‘melting pot’ (i.e. miscegenation) is conveyed in the star Baby Aaronson, surgically mutilated first into Juanita del Pablo, ‘surly, lustful, and sadistic’, then, when the League of Decency steps up its pressure, remutilated into the Irish Colleen – with false teeth to match: ‘She never had to smile before and her own set were good enough for a snarl. Now she’ll have to laugh roguishly all the time. That means dentures.’