Orwell (41 page)

Orwell also proposed to Anne Popham, a young art student he scarcely knew. She told me about this bizarre episode. Orwell invited her to tea, and dismissed his son Richard and the nanny with “Go along, now.” He then told Anne: “Come and sit here. It will be more comfortable on the bed in the corner.” Coming directly to the point, he kissed and embraced her, and asked: “Do you think you could care for me?” Since there was absolutely no courtship, wooing or getting to know him, Anne was deeply embarrassed and shocked by his proposal, which seemed both precipitate and calculating. Feeling intensely uncomfortable, yet aware of his loneliness, she wriggled out of his arms and rejected his offer as gently as possible. Neither of these young, pretty women saw themselves as widowed stepmothers.

Orwell's relations with Sonia Brownell, who became his second wife, developed in this context of desperation and fear of death. David Astor, editor of the
Observer
and a loyal friend who'd helped Orwell in innumerable ways, told me about his deathbed marriage to Sonia—a blooming Renoir beauty with a gaunt El Greco saint. I asked a number of Sonia's friends to describe her role in Orwell's life. The moribund Orwell was deeply in love with the gorgeous Sonia. But why did she agree to marry him in 1949 after rejecting him in 1945? Was she a devoted Florence Nightingale or a mercenary Kate Croy? Sonia herself was perplexed about her motives and said: “The reasons why George married me are perfectly clear. What aren't clear are the reasons why I married George.” Part of the complex answer must be that in 1949 he was a rich and world famous author who made no sexual demands and would soon be dead.

Up to now I've always visited every place where my subjects had lived and traveled, believing that places had a magic influence on people's lives. Since I'd spent several years in London in the 1970s, I felt I knew Orwell's London quite well. At the end of my research trip in November 1998, with a day to spare, I decided to go to Eton, which I'd not seen for many years. Orwell's Eton years had been well documented, and I just wanted to pick
up some local color. But my visit turned out to be a perfect example of how, when you work on a biography, places, people and documents all come together in unpredictable ways.

It was a beautiful fall day, and I was lucky to find the librarian, Michael Meredith, who gave me a whirlwind tour of the College. He showed me the young Orwell's copy of G. K. Chesterton's book of comic verse,
Greybeards at Play
(1900), with his pen-and-ink bookplate, “Eric Blair—His Book,” and his drawing of a rocky, Middle Eastern landscape, with palm trees, domed mosque and fortified castle. The beauty of the College, its atmosphere of learning and privilege, were overwhelming. As we talked about Orwell we got on to the subject of his fateful choice, at the age of eighteen, of going to Burma instead of to Oxford or Cambridge.

The week before I had been to Scotland to see the ninety-five-year-old Sir Steven Runciman—the great scholar of Byzantium and the Crusades, who'd been to Eton with Orwell. (On the telephone he'd said: “I'd be delighted to talk to you, Professor Mayers, about Eric Blair. But I must warn you that I've not seen him for 77 years!”) Attended by two devoted retainers, Runciman lived alone in a huge castle on the Scottish border (“I'm a younger son and had to buy this place myself,” he told me). He still had vivid memories of their days at Eton and of their old tutor, Andrew Gow, a friend of A. E. Housman and, later on, Runciman's irritating colleague at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1969 Gow had written me that Orwell “could not go to University unless he got a scholarship … that there was not the faintest hope of his getting one and that it would be a waste of time to try.” “Not true,” said Runciman, who told me that Gow particularly resented someone like Orwell, who was capable of doing well in classics but was bored by the subject. I now realized that Orwell
could
have gone to university if he had wanted to. He was very good at exams, and as Michael Meredith assured me, could have walked into Oxbridge from Eton, which had generous scholarships for boys who could not pay their own way. He simply chose not to go, and in his teens took on the grave responsibilities of a colonial policeman.

But Burma, where Orwell spent his crucial early adult years, was out of reach. Since travel was restricted to the area between Rangoon and Mandalay, I would not be able to visit Moulmein (southeast of Rangoon), where Orwell shot the elephant, or Katha (north of Mandalay), his last post and the setting of
Burmese Days.
Apart from his own writing very little is known about Orwell's years there, and colonial police records have been either transferred to London or destroyed in the war. I studied maps and gazetteers of India and Burma to recreate the atmosphere of his obscure birthplace—Motihari, India—not in the province of Bengal, but in Bihar, and
placed Orwell's role as policeman in the context of colonial history. Once again, memoirs of other administrators and visitors, including Somerset Maugham, helped to flesh out the picture of conditions there. (In August 2000, just before my book was published, I did get to Burma. I lectured on an Orient Express cruise up the Irrawaddy from Mandalay to Bhamo, near the Chinese border, and with a month's visa was able to visit nearly all the places where Orwell had worked.)

One obscure source, May Hearsey's privately published memoir of Burma,
Land of Chindits and Rubies
(1982), gave an interesting view of Orwell as policeman. She provides a telling snapshot of his kindness to a young Irish officer who had just been posted to Moulmein. When the new man confessed that he didn't know Burmese well enough to take on his new job, Orwell was sympathetic and advised him to transfer to the River Police, where the language was not essential. Decent and kind himself, he was very different from the type of martinet officer he satirized in
Burmese Days.

The journey to Orwell's house on Jura—in the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, where he lived in the late 1940s and wrote
Nineteen Eighty-Four
—is almost as difficult as getting to Burma. The train from London to Glasgow, bus to the coast, boat to the island of Kintyre, bus across Kintyre, boat to Jura and taxi from Craighouse to Ardlussa still takes forty-eight hours. The last seven miles—along a grueling, badly rutted cart-track, full of enormous potholes—has to be negotiated on foot. His old house, Barnhill—a cross between Wuthering Heights and Cold Comfort Farm—is closed up and there's nothing else to see when you finally get there. Since I went to Britain in November and December, when Jura is sometimes cut off from the mainland for weeks by stormy seas, I abandoned the idea and based my descriptions of Jura on travel books, Orwell's diary and accounts of friends who visited him.

Susan Watson, who as a young woman worked as a nanny for Orwell's adopted son in London and Jura, recounted her bitter quarrels in Jura with Orwell's sister, Avril, about who would control his household. I went to visit David Holbrook, now a Cambridge don but in the late 1940s a young writer and, for a time, Susan's boyfriend. Holbrook made the trek to visit Susan on Jura, where Orwell and Avril, suspecting he was a Communist spy, treated him as an unwelcome guest. Holbrook gave me his unpublished novel, with an account of his visit he assured me was based on reality. I had always felt that Orwell's decision to live on the damp and dreary Jura virtually killed him. Talking to Susan Watson, David Holbrook, David Astor, who had first told him about the island, to Orwell's family, who'd spent summers there, and to two of his doctors, confirmed this belief.

The important questions were: why did he go there? what was it like? why was he so reluctant to leave, despite the acute discomfort, the cold and the impossibility of getting secretarial help when he was working on
Nineteen Eighty-Four
? Jura is still unspoiled, very much as it was when Orwell lived there. He idealized the place, and gave it up reluctantly. He was not a very social person, and sought austerity and isolation. He was fleeing London, the grime and destruction of the blitz, and the struggle of life in the postwar years. The setting of Jura must have heightened the dark images of London that filled his mind when he was writing
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Details of behavior, dress and speech help build the central character and the atmosphere surrounding him. His former pupil, Geoffrey Stevens, told me how Orwell, a conscientious teacher, would prod the boys' stomachs while urging them to respond to his queries. His nieces and nephew—Jane, Lucy and Henry Dakin—visited Orwell on Jura. Lucy remembered her uncle's dour response when she first arrived at the house, exhausted after the rail journey, the ferry and the miles of rutted dirt track. “Ah, there you are, Lu,” he said, as if she had just come back from a shop round the corner. Lucy and Henry were with him when he misread the tidal tables, steered his twelve-foot dinghy into one of the most perilous whirlpools in Europe and came very close to drowning them all. After their boating accident he infuriated them by refusing their rescuer's offer to drop them off at Barnhill, and casually remarked, “That's all right. We'll walk back.” They had lost their shoes in the whirlpool and had to go barefoot over three miles of rough country.

Orwell made idiosyncratic remarks that people remembered all their lives. Connolly remembered him saying at prep school: “whoever wins this war, we shall emerge a second-rate nation.” William Empson heard Orwell, when he worked in the wartime BBC, arguing with an Indian colleague. In a self-consciously cockney accent he exclaimed through the thin partition of his office: “The FACK that you're black … and that I'm white, has
nudding whatever to do wiv it.”
(Oddly enough, the Indian did not reply: “But I'm
not
black.”) When Susan Watson prepared a particularly appetizing dish, Orwell, like the schoolboy he once was, would turn to baby Richard and remark: “Gosh, boys, this looks good!” David Astor captured the atmosphere of their weekly London lunches during the war. He recalled Cyril Connolly (alluding to a British general and their mutual friend Tosco Fyvel and imitating Arthur Koestler's strong Hungarian accent) asking: “The great kvestion iss: ‘Who vill vin ze desert var? Wavell, Fyvel or Orvell?'”

Orwell—like Samuel Johnson and Anton Chekhov—was a great-hearted and admirable man. But he also had his human failings. He yearned to be
rich, handsome and a devil with the ladies. Women were always important to him, and his weird proposals to Celia Paget and Anne Popham revealed the hopelessly romantic side of his character. His desperate longing for love—a theme in all his novels—lies at the core of his life and work, and was responsible for his deathbed marriage to Sonia, the model for Julia in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Orwell who emerges from my book is darker than the legendary figure. He had a noble character, but was also violent, capable of cruelty, tormented by guilt, masochistically self-punishing, sometimes suicidal.

EPILOGUE

After writing twenty-two lives, I've formulated twelve principles of biography.

This is how I think lives should be written and what they ought to achieve.

1. Read everything in print and follow up every lead.

2. Be persistent and see everyone who will talk to you.

3. Weigh all the evidence like a lawyer. A biographer is “an artist on oath.”

4. Get the subject born in the first five pages. Nothing is duller than genealogy.

5. Describe the subject's personal habits and tastes.

6. Portray the minor characters as fully as possible.

7. Illuminate the recurrent patterns of the life. Look at the big picture, not the small details.

8. Keep up the dramatic narrative, employing the same techniques as the novelist, and concentrate on your readers' interests rather than your own obsessions.

9. Don't focus on the events of the life, but on what they
mean.

10. Be selective rather than exhaustive, analytical rather than descriptive. Aim for four hundred pages and remember that a shorter book, though much harder to write, is easier to read than a long one.

11. Complete the book in a few years, at most, or you will begin to hate the subject for eating up
your
life.

12. Always remember the responsibility of the biographer to do justice to his subject.

NOTES

1. O
RWELL
's P
AINFUL
C
HILDHOOD

1.
Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1939; London, 1962), p. 106.

2.
G. S. Fraser,
Lawrence Durrell:
A
Study
(London, 1968), p. 31.

3.
William Thackeray,
The Newcombes
, in
Works
, ed. George Saintsbury (London, 1908), 14:66.

4.
Rudyard Kipling, “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” in
Works
(New York, n.d.), pp. 960, 975. Orwell considered “Baa Baa Black Sheep” one of the ten best short stories in English. Unlike Thackeray and Kipling, Orwell's description of childhood, though entirely subjective, has no self-pity or false pathos.

5.
Orwell,
Coming Up for Air
(1939; London, 1962), p. 134.

6.
Orwell's father, who was fifty when Orwell was four, was separated from his family in 1907 and spent the next four years in India. See Gordon Ray,
Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity
(New York, 1955), p. 62: “In later life Thackeray's recollections of his first years in his ‘native country' were scanty. He ‘could just remember' his father, writes Lady Ritchie, ‘a very tall, thin man, rising out of a bath.'”

7.
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell
, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 volumes (New York, 1968), 4:330–369.

8.
Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
, p.104. See also
Coming Up for Air
, p. 46; “Boys' Weeklies” (1940), 1:473; “Decline of the English Murder” (1946), 4:98; and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(New York, 1949), p.96.