Islands
I know that if I return to London and get caught up in weekly articles I shall never get on with anything longer. – Letter to Anthony Powell, 8 September 1947
We have made ourselves quite comfortable here. – Letter to Helmut Klöse, 19 September 1947
Back in London in the autumn of 1946 Orwell threw himself into his old routines, taking up the ‘As I Please’ column for Tribune and resuming his weekly spot in the Manchester Evening News. He had been away six months and there was much to catch up with, a whole range of alliances – social and professional – to reforge. Three lunch engagements were already booked for the following week, he explained to Julian Symons in early November, deferring their meeting for a fortnight. There were other reunions, culminating in a lunch at the end of the month with Graham Greene. Much of Orwell’s time was taken up with literary business. A decade and a half into his career, he had suddenly become a solid commercial proposition. Translations of Animal Farm were appearing all over Europe (early 1947 brought Dutch and Ukrainian editions). Eager to profit from this interest, Secker & Warburg were keen on the idea of a uniform edition of his works. Orwell agreed, while refusing to sanction reprints of A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying or The Lion and the Unicorn. In some ways this disparagement of his early work is odd. Orwell had worked up a ‘bloody sweat’ on Aspidistra and tried to produce something that could be regarded as a work of art. Eleven years later he preferred to tell friends that the novel had been written merely because he was hard-up and needed Gollancz’s £100 advance. Yet this lack of vanity extended even to those novels which he was prepared to allow back into print. He turned out not to possess copies of Burmese Days and Coming up for Air; the latter proved so difficult to get hold of that it had to be advertised for. There were other signs of his growing status. His radio adaptation of Animal Farm was in the pipeline, to be produced by Rayner Heppenstall. There were even plans to visit America in 1948, if only to spend some of the US royalties that currency restrictions kept on the farther side of the Atlantic. There was a problem with Gollancz, understandably reluctant to let such a valuable property out of his hands, but Orwell was adamant that he wanted to stay with Secker & Warburg. He wanted Warburg to be his regular publisher, he told Moore, because although he might not sell as many books as the streamlined operation in Henrietta Street, ‘I can trust him to publish whatever I write.’
Not all the Islington routines were capable of resuscitation. Susan Watson never came back, although there was no rancour in their parting; Orwell accepted that the tensions of Jura might well have been unendurable. Avril continued to look after the two-year-old Richard. Orwell had turned forty-three in the summer, an age at which most mid-twentieth-century writers would have expected to have thirty or even forty years of literary life before them. But he was tired, conscious of waning powers. Two things now dominated his life, each linked to the other: his failing health and his intense desire to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four. There is no way of knowing quite how ill Orwell was at this time – he was keen to keep away from doctors – but the London of 1946–7, caught in one of the hardest winters for years, was perhaps the worst environment he could have chosen in which to spend the next six months. A year later he told Julian Symons that he believed his health problems ‘really started in the cold of last winter’. In fact his lungs had been quietly hardening – he was later discovered to have a fibrotic form of TB – for some time, but the arctic freeze-up of early 1947, compounded by Dickensian fogs, food shortages and power shutdowns, could only have made them worse. He seems to have admitted to himself that he was seriously ill, while being content to postpone any kind of treatment until the novel was finished. Orwell’s determination to maintain his punishing schedules while physically exhausted had been noticed on Jura by Susan Watson. She remembered him working in bed, lying on the iron bedstead in a dressing-gown, the smoke from his cigarettes clogging an atmosphere already polluted by a defective fire-grate and a paraffin heater.
He was a driven man. But why did he drive himself into areas from which he could easily have kept his distance? By late. November he was ‘swamped under work’ but still managing to take his customarily benevolent interest in his friends’ careers: producing a list of ‘important’ English books for a friend of Helmut Klöse (Klöse was a German anarchist who had fought on the Aragon Front in Spain) who aimed at starting a publishing house in Düsseldorf, putting Paul Potts in touch with Moore in an attempt to settle a dispute with Nicolson & Watson, trying in the following spring to transfer his Manchester Evening News column to Julian Symons. (Orwell, Symons remembered, was ‘determined to do something for me. The editor had never heard my name, but allowed himself to be persuaded into giving me a month’s trial.’) There were domestic cares, too, notably another instalment in the long-running quest to find decent footwear, a saga in which both Warburg and Dwight MacDonald, formerly co-editor of Partisan Review but now in charge of the New York journal Politics, took part. The ‘As I Please’ columns from late 1946 cover a bewildering range of topics: the jury system, four-letter words in literature, ‘good bad books’ (one of his favourite subjects both in talk and journalism), the difficulty of finding a laundry. His Christmas column was prompted by an advertisement suggesting that the four things needed for a successful Christmas were a roast turkey, a Christmas pudding, a dish of mince pies and a tin of the advertiser’s liver salts. Given the world situation it would hardly be possible to have a ‘proper’ Christmas, he mused, even if the materials were available. However, he wished his readers an ‘old-fashioned’ Christmas, and meanwhile half a turkey, three tangerines and a bottle of whiskey at not more than double the legal price.
He celebrated the New Year by making a brief trip to Jura to carry out winter planting. The expedition had been planned to allow him to reach Barnhill on New Year’s Eve, but a missed bus obliged him to spend two nights in Glasgow. After a rough crossing from Tarbert, during which he was severely seasick, the weather turned suddenly spring-like, only for rain to set in with a wind so violent that it was difficult to stay on one’s feet. Inspecting the garden, he discovered that the rabbits had eaten most of the vegetables. He planted fruit trees and roses, drew a map to show the layouts and carefully itemised the food supplies that would be needed on his return in the spring. By 9 January he was back in London, in time to hear the Third Programme adaptation of Animal Farm. This was well received – several fan letters and good press notices, he reported to Heppenstall; the sole dissenter, ironically enough, being the Tribune critic. There was still no let-up in the weather. Large-scale power cuts closed the London weekly papers for a fortnight, and one ‘As I Please’ ended up being printed in the Daily Herald. These privations were relative, Orwell supposed – all this would presumably be reckoned ‘normal’ in post-war Paris, he proposed to Dwight Macdonald. All the same, writing in Tribune about the shortage of firewood, he was able to relate, not without a certain pride, that he had ‘kept going’ for a day on the warmth of a blitzed bedstead. Avril recalled that at one point it got so cold that some of Richard’s toys went the same way. Frowsting in the Islington flat he was combining his regular commitments with more substantial work: ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’ for Polemic (a shortened version, intended for Politics, failed to appear), another long essay on the political savant James Burnham for the American New Leader. (Burnham had predicted another war within the next few years; Orwell, while accepting that Burnham was not pro-Stalin, judged that ‘the note of fascination is still there’.) It was probably at about this time that he produced the introduction to British Pamphleteers Volume I, a collection assembled by Reg Reynolds which would be published at the end of the following year. Increasingly, though, his mind was set on the return to Jura. His friends seem to have realised that in future he would be a vagrant figure, returning to London only when he had good cause. However tinged by retrospect, there is an odd sense of finality about some of their glimpses of him at this time, the sense of bridges being burned. Tosco Fyvel’s last memory of Orwell was of having dinner at the home of their Tribune colleague Evelyn Anderson in Bayswater. Before their arrival the fog had been so bad that the Fyvels were obliged to abandon their car. Emerging from the Andersons’, they found conditions worse than ever. The Fyvels decided to stay the night with their hosts. Orwell, taking this as a challenge, was determined to walk home to Islington. Fyvel’s abiding memory was of ‘his tall figure, looking grim and sad-faced, as he strode off and disappeared into the fog’.
There were still difficulties with Gollancz, who had pointed out that legally he had an option on Orwell’s next two works of fiction (Orwell thought that only a single book was covered by this pre-war agreement, and that one of the options had been worked off by Gollancz’s rejection of Animal Farm.) It was not until the end of March, after several letters had been exchanged, that Gollancz was finally persuaded to release him from the contract. He was planning to leave for Jura in the second week of April, he told Brenda Salkeld in March, this time taking a speedier route by plane from Glasgow to Islay. Meanwhile London was still bitterly cold: no fuel left at all, he reported to Brenda. One of the final ‘As I Please’ columns for Tribune at the very end of March strikes a typical Orwell note: intentness, self-absorption, love of nature jumbled unselfconsciously together. For the last five minutes, he revealed, he had been staring out of the window into the square, keeping a lookout for signs of spring. Any hints were of the vaguest kind – a thinnish patch in the clouds with the faintest thought of blue behind it, a sycamore tree with a few notional buds. A careful search of Hyde Park two days before had yielded better results, in the shape of a hawthorn bush that was ‘definitely in bud’ and some birds who, if they were not actually singing, ‘were making a noise like an orchestra tuning up’.
The following week’s column, discussing press freedom in the event of nationalisation, patent medicines, tobacco-growing and pidgin English, was his last. He left for Jura on 10 April and would never see London again except from the window of a hospital room. There is an odd deliberateness about the way in which, over the following months, Orwell cut himself off from his old London haunts, and indeed the south of England generally. Both the lease on the Islington flat and the Wallington tenancy – the latter dated back to 1936 and the early days of his marriage to Eileen – would soon be given up. Books and furniture went north. Meanwhile he was determined to convert Barnhill into an all-year-round dwelling place rather than makeshift spring and summer quarters. A letter to Helmut Klöse from later in the year – ‘We have made ourselves quite comfortable here’ – implies settlement, permanence, the eye to the long term trained here on the Inner Hebrides. Orwell being Orwell, and prone to long, lugubrious brooding on the perils of international power politics, there was also the thought that, in the last resort, Jura might provide a refuge. One of his old Home Guard comrades, who re-established contact a couple of years later, remembered him prophesying a nuclear holocaust and maintaining that Richard would be ‘safer’ in the far north. On a more mundane level he appreciated the advantages that Jura offered to a two-year-old boy: unlimited space, a healthy environment, fresh air and good food. Richard himself recalled the island as a kind of lost idyll: ‘marvellous for a child, with acres of land to roam’. With other children at the Fletchers’ and a stream of visitors to Barnhill, he was not aware of isolation or loneliness. Perhaps the single most obvious drawback was the distance from medical help. Islay, home of the nearest doctor, was thirty miles away.
No doctor was allowed anywhere near his father. Orwell arrived back on the island on the evening of 11 April 1947, having flown across a Scotland whose high ground was still streaked with snow. The trees and bushes planted in January had survived, he noted; a single primrose seemed to be the extent of the wild flowers. He had been ill in the week before departure. New arrivals to Jura in the early summer of 1947 were struck by his obvious weakness. Bill Dunn, an ex-serviceman who had lost a limb in the war and was lodging with the Darrochs while he took up Robin Fletcher’s offer of agricultural work, realised immediately that ‘he didn’t look well’. There are other Jura testimonies to a visibly sick man, gaunt and preoccupied, who already looked as if he had only a short time to live. But Orwell had other goals in mind, beyond the completion of Nineteen Eighty-Four. One of the first letters he wrote after returning to Barnhill, following up an invitation issued a short time before, was to Sonia Brownell discussing a possible visit. Clearly the plan to inveigle Sonia to Jura had been thoroughly researched, as Orwell also revealed that he had written to her great friend Janetta Woolley (forename characteristically misspelled) asking if she could join the party with her baby daughter. However warmly intended, the letter, with its formidable list of directions, failed to entice (‘The room you would have is rather small, but it looks out on the sea,’ Orwell promised) and Sonia, as did Janetta, stayed away.
There was much to do before he could resume work on his novel. The week after his arrival was taken up in digging, planting bulbs and constructing a hen-house – this despite the fact that he was ‘still not feeling well enough to do much out of doors’. Shortly afterwards the weather turned and a gale blew up, wrenching the hen-house off its base. Subsequently, continuous rains set in. Richard, having gashed his scalp the previous week – it took a day to procure medical help – now went down with measles. Orwell tried to amuse him by making a jigsaw, only to find that the blade of his coping-saw was broken and he could only cut the pieces with a straight edge. There is a curious absorption in Orwell’s domestic diaries. Plainly he was fascinated by Jura, and relished both the mundane tasks and the natural life of the island. Green plovers, spring ploughing, the dispatch of a mouse that had got into the larder: all this is dutifully, but one imagines delightedly, set down. He was still not well enough to do much, in bed for three days at the end of May and dosing himself with M&B tablets. But as the weather improved, so did his health. There are references to his ‘struggling’ with Nineteen Eighty-Four, and by the end of May he could tell Warburg that he had made a fairly good start and completed nearly a third of a rough draft. This was less than he had hoped, he admitted, but the wretchedness of his health had stopped him from writing more.
The Orwell of two or three years before would not perhaps have acknowledged this: one of the features of Orwell’s second stay on Jura was his readiness to admit his failing health not only to himself – always difficult enough – but to other people. Summer visitors began to arrive, notably Richard Rees, who from now on seems to have appointed himself Orwell’s unofficial guardian on Jura. He spent much of the rest of the year at Barnhill, and took a keen interest in the life of the island. It was he, for instance, who suggested that Bill Dunn might like to farm land at Barnhill and put up £1,000 to fund the venture, with himself as sleeping partner. Rees, too, is a key witness to the life of Barnhill and Orwell’s reaction to some of its minor excitements. In early July Avril dislocated her shoulder jumping over a wall. Rees remembered Orwell instantly deferring to his own (presumed) expertise, rushing back to the house to call him to help. ‘You’ve done first aid, haven’t you?’ (Rees had served with an ambulance unit on the Madrid Front). ‘You’ll be able to get it back. You just have to jerk it sharply upwards, isn’t that it?’ Rees was unable to get it back (Orwell made no attempt). The Islay doctor proved similarly unsuccessful. Rees, Dunn and Donald Darroch ended up having to convey Avril by road and boat to the mainland for treatment.
Orwell was still hoping to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four early the following year. But the fine summer weather was a distraction, encouraging picnics and sailing trips, camping at Glengarrisdale on the Atlantic side of Jura and fishing for trout in Loch nan Eilean. A storm hit the island with such ferocity that a small patch of the garden appeared to have been struck by lightning. There were more guests – his dead sister Marjorie’s three children – and he seems to have made a conscious effort to entertain them. The junior Dakins – teenage Lucy, her elder sister Jane, who had just left the Women’s Land Army, and their brother Henry, on leave from the army – got on well with their uncle and enjoyed his company, while noting the occasional awesome level of detachment. This was particularly evident in a mid-August boat trip to Glengarrisdale, when on the return journey they were nearly drowned in the famous Corryvreckan whirlpool. Orwell’s account of the incident is laconic, while admitting the danger they had been in. It was left to his nephew to provide what, in retrospect, seems a pattern account of Orwell being Orwell.
The six of them – Orwell, Avril, the Dakins and Richard – had spent two or three days on the coast – there was an ancient shepherd’s hut to provide shelter – before deciding to return home. Avril and Jane opted to walk; the others took the small motorised boat. Asked previously if he had consulted the tide tables, Orwell had remarked airily ‘Oh yes, yes, I’ve looked it all up.’ A slight misreading was enough to put them in grave danger. The waves grew bigger. Then, as they drifted towards the edge of the whirlpool, there was a cracking noise, and the engine sheared away from its mounting and disappeared into the sea. Perhaps they ought to row out, Orwell suggested. However, taking to the oars produced no visible effect. Suddenly a seal popped up in front of them. ‘Curious thing about seals,’ Orwell remarked. ‘Very inquisitive creatures.’ By this stage the whirlpool had begun to recede. Oar power brought them to a rocky outcrop a mile from the Jura coast. As they reached the cliff Henry leapt out, but as the boat went down it rolled against the edge of the cliff and turned over. Orwell, Lucy and Richard managed to extricate themselves from beneath it and were hauled up on to the rock. There, exhausted and shivering, they tried to establish the best course of action. Proposing that they ought to have something to eat – a single cold potato which had been salvaged from the boat was fed to Richard – Orwell tramped off. Half an hour later he was back, empty-handed, but clearly enthused by something he had seen on the way. ‘Extraordinary birds, puffins … They make their nests in burrows … I did see some baby seagulls, but I didn’t have the heart to do anything about it.’ Eventually they were rescued by a passing lobster boat whose crew had seen a fire they had lit, taken back to the Jura coast and obliged to walk the four or five miles back to Barnhill. The contents of the boat were lost for ever.
To the Dakins the incident seemed to sum up a good deal about their uncle: ‘typical of him’, Lucy thought, ‘sweet and kind but in another world’. The others noted his hard work (‘colossal amounts of typing’) and wretched appearance, the perpetual cough made worse by chain-smoking, an obvious debility that was never discussed. Richard, then aged three, had only vague memories of the accident, other than that the soaking did Orwell’s lungs no good. Within a couple of months he was seriously ill. By the end of August a drought set in, drying up the runner beans and the late peas and turning the local river, the Lealt, into a series of disconnected pools full of wary, irretrievable fish. There had been no water in the taps for nearly a fortnight, he told Brenda Salkeld at the start of September: the household had been forced to carry buckets back and forth from the well 200 yards away. At this point he seems to have been planning to return to London in November. The rough draft would be finished in October, he told Warburg. Mrs Christen, to whom he had sublet the Islington flat, had been typing it up since the early summer, occasionally calling on the Powells in Chester Gate to keep them abreast of the plot. At the same time he was wary of staying for more than a few weeks. He knew that if he got caught up once more in the world of journalism he would never get on with anything more substantial, he told Anthony Powell, ending rather ominously: ‘One just seems to have a limited capacity for work nowadays and one has to husband it.’ Already the autumn was setting in, with rain blowing east from the Atlantic. Writing to Powell, regretfully declining a request to review a new edition of Gissing’s A Life’s Morning for the Times Literary Supplement, where Powell was now fiction editor, he noted the gloom of the October afternoons, the lamps lit at half-past five, enveloping blackness waiting to move in. There were advantages, though, in this remote, island life. They had more coal than in London and in contrast to Canonbury Square the roof was at least waterproof.
For all his distance from the torn and cratered landscape of post-war London, the world Orwell was creating on his desk placed him at the heart of his old metropolitan life. The topography of Nineteen Eighty-Four would be instantly recognisable to anyone who, like Orwell, had spent the war years wandering around the three or four square miles centred on Oxford Street and its immediate hinterlands. The Ministry of Truth, for example, in which Winston labours at his falsification of the past, ‘an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete’, can be identified with the University of London Senate House, where the Ministry of Information had been based during the war. Its interior, on the other hand, reproduces the BBC studios at 200 Oxford Street. ‘Victory Square’ is Trafalgar Square, where Nelson has been replaced by a statue of Big Brother. There is an eerie scene in which Mr Charrington, the junk shop proprietor who furnishes Winston and Julia with their love-nest, recites the nursery rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’ and is asked by Winston to explain the line about ‘the bells of St Martin’s’. Winston realises that the church in ‘Victory Square’ has been turned into a propaganda museum full of waxwork tableaux depicting enemy atrocities. Even Mr Charrington’s shop looks as if it has its origins in an Evening Standard piece from the autumn of 1946. The geographical precision which can be brought to Nineteen Eighty-Four – where once again like Gordon and Rosemary, hero and heroine end up at a version of Burnham Beeches – is intriguing in itself, but there are wider implications. Like the political arrangements beyond it, the landscape of the novel is a projection from existing material, anchored in the physical present and the physical present’s consciousness. Previous dystopias had tended to be set on remote islands or in transparent never-never lands. The appeal – and the resonance – of Nineteen Eighty-Four to many of its original readers stemmed from the fact that it depicted a world that, by and large, they already knew.
A departure date for the London trip was set for early November. Late October found Orwell carrying out the round of pre-winter tasks: pruning the gooseberry bushes and manuring the apple trees. But his health was in steep decline and he knew it. By the end of the month he was confined to bed with what he told Moore was ‘inflammation of the lungs’. He was reluctant to abandon the idea of travelling south – there were things to sort out with Moore, and others – while acknowledging that it would be several weeks before he would be fit to travel. By 7 November, the date on which he had planned to set out, the prospect of moving from Jura seemed yet more remote, ‘unless for a very short business trip’. His overriding need was to stay in bed and try to get himself into some sort of shape. By this stage the draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four was practically finished. Mrs Christen, who had continued to type up batches of material sent to Canonbury Square, remembered that the initial manuscript stopped a few hundred words short of its eventual end. But it was clear that Orwell would be able to do no more work on it until at least the New Year.
It was obvious to everyone – to Rees, who was still staying at Barnhill, and to Orwell himself – that he was seriously ill. His letters to friends from the early winter are full of foreboding as to what the year spent ‘staving off’ might have done to him, and faint hopes that he might still be well. He had been very bad for several months, he acknowledged to Koestler, speculating that he might need a month’s enforced rest in a nursing home. By the end of November he was suggesting to Anthony Powell that, though still ill, he might be getting a little better. Eventually, in early December, a chest specialist was summoned from Glasgow and Mrs Fletcher prepared a room at Ardlussa where he could be examined. The doctor confirmed what Orwell had feared: ‘seriously ill’, he reported to Moore; ‘TB, as I suspected’. But this was not the whole story. The doctor who examined him was so alarmed by his state that he suggested that it might be better to keep him at Ardlussa: the trip back to Barnhill over the primitive Jura roads was quite capable of setting off a haemorrhage. Characteristically, Orwell refused and was driven home by Rees, but the gravity of the situation impressed itself on him. He was resigned to spending several months in a sanatorium, though keen to assure his friends – he was probably right – that the time spent on Jura was not responsible for his damaged lungs. A fortnight later, in the week before Christmas, he was removed to Hairmyres Hospital near Glasgow. A letter sent to the Observer a couple of days later strikes the usual indefatigable note. The paper had invited him to go to South Africa to report on the forthcoming general election. This, Orwell acknowledged, was beyond him. On the other hand he wondered if they would let him have some books to review.
He was entering the final phase of his life: a world of hospital beds, enforced idleness and long hours of brooding. Of the next twenty-four months, only four would be spent outside a medical ward. How much did he know, or suspect? In the dead weeks of late 1947 when he lay in bed at Barnhill he had several long conversations with Robin Fletcher. There was an affinity between the two men: though his landlord was some years younger, both were Old Etonians. Robin Fletcher was sure, as he put it to his wife, that Orwell knew, and that his solitary wish was to get his novel finished while there was still time. Certainly he was very seriously ill. Bruce Dick, the consultant who examined Orwell at Hairmyres, diagnosed ‘chronic’ tuberculosis, consisting of a largish cavity in his left lung and a small patch at the top of the right. Provided that he could be induced to rest, however, his prospects were not uniformly bleak. Fibrotic TB hardens the lungs rather than causing them to disintegrate at breakneck speed to produce the ‘galloping consumption’ of the Victorian novel. Orwell had already survived for some years. Given suitable conditions, there was a good chance he could survive for several more. As for treatment, although the first stirrings of the new wonder drug streptomycin could be heard on the other side of the Atlantic, all that could be done at present was to ‘rest’ Orwell’s worst-affected lung and give the lesions a chance to heal. This was done by paralysing the phrenic nerve by piercing it with a pair of forceps, collapsing the lung and then pumping in air. It was a painful intervention requiring regular ‘refills’ and Orwell, though never complaining, came to dread it. There was also a need to build him up: he had lost a stone and a half in weight over the preceding weeks. But already, a fortnight into his stay, he claimed to be feeling better: no longer subject to night-sweats and with a better appetite. He liked the hospital, he told Gwen O’Shaughnessy, with whom Mr Dick had been in professional communication. Everybody was very kind and the amenities even extended to a New Year party where all the beds were dragged into a single ward and the patients entertained by singers and a conjuror. If there was a drawback it lay in the sparse visiting times – an hour three afternoons a week with an extra session on Tuesday evenings. There was little chance of seeing friends, although several people made the long trip up from London. The person whom he most wanted to see he scarcely dared let into his presence. The possibility of Richard contracting the disease terrified Orwell, to the extent that if the boy held out his hands he would try to push him away.
Flat on his back, with only one lung working, he took solace in letters to friends. He was not feeling quite so death-like, he told Symons early in the New Year, and was eating more. Nineteen Eighty-Four was ‘a mess’ and would not be touched again until he was well. There was a typical letter to George Woodcock on Freedom Defence Committee business. It was time something was done to counter the continual demands to outlaw Sir Oswald Mosley and his supporters (Mosley had spent the war in Holloway but was now politically active once more). Tribune’s attitude he thought shameful. The fellow-travelling Labour MP Konni Zilliacus, with whom he had several times crossed swords in the past, had appeared in its columns demanding what amounted to Fascist legislation. The point, Orwell argued, was that Mosley would never attract mass support. No one, not even a Fascist, should be prosecuted for expressing an opinion when it could be shown that there was no substantial threat to the state. Meanwhile, his own condition was showing signs of progress. The treatment would probably take a long time, he told Helmut Klöse, but the doctors seemed optimistic about their ability to patch him up. He was even putting on weight.
Orwell’s principal confidant seems to have been David Astor, who came several times to see him and discussed his condition with the hospital staff. (In the course of these conversations it came out that Bruce Dick had served with the Nationalist side in Spain.) Alerted to developments in pulmonary medicine on the further side of the Atlantic, the Hairmyres staff was keen to treat Orwell with streptomycin. There were, however, various impediments. The drug was expensive, procurable only in the US and, given that it had only been discovered three or four years previously, in the very early stages of use, so there was no real agreement as to what kind of dosage should be administered to patients. In response to a letter from Orwell, written on 1 February 1948, Astor volunteered to take the case up: a task that, in the regulatory labyrinth of the post-war era, needed all his ingenuity and high-level contacts. In the end the request for permission to import went as far as Orwell’s old Tribune editor, Aneurin Bevan, by now Secretary of State for Health in the Attlee government. By the middle of the month the first 70-gram shipment was on the way – not before time, Orwell thought, as he believed that the doctors’ confidence had slipped back a notch or two. He had stopped gaining weight, he noted, and fancied he was getting weaker, ‘though mentally I am more alert’. He was, he discovered when the streptomycin arrived, a virtual guinea-pig. His doctors had no experience of using the drug and simply administered it to him in what turned out to be hugely excessive doses. There were distressing side-effects, including sore throats and flaking skin (all of which Orwell recorded dispassionately in his diary) but the general effect on his condition seemed positive. He felt much better and even started to do a little reviewing. The progress of his professional life was brought back into focus by a visit from Warburg, who brought specimen bindings for the proposed uniform edition of his work. Perhaps remembering the long, speculative conversations with Jacintha Buddicom from thirty years before, Orwell professed himself ‘dismayed’ by the light green covers that Warburg dangled before him. A uniform edition should be ‘chaste-looking’, he complained, preferably dark blue. Perhaps Warburg could try and get hold of some darker stuff?
Spring was coming. Lying in the hospital bed he found his mind moving backwards. Astor had invited him to stay at his home in Oxfordshire during the summer. He was captivated by the prospect of fishing in the Thames. He had caught some good fish at Eton, he reminisced, ‘but hardly anyone outside college knew the place, as it was in the backwater joining College Field’. Celia Paget had worked in Paris, which prompted several elegiac sorrowings over past time, and a world that in the light of recent Parisian history now seemed extraordinarily remote. He was also concerned, in his characteristic, ruminative way, to analyse the effect of illness on his mental state. Weak and without appetite, if not actually in pain, you had the impression that your brain was functioning quite normally, he decided. It was only when you began to write that you realised the extent of the deterioration inside your skull. Yet his own mind was moving back into gear, planning to review a reissue of Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism for the Observer and meditating a long essay for Dwight MacDonald on a writer who was coming to occupy an ever more significant place in his private literary pantheon. This was his late-Victorian hero, George Gissing. Orwell’s career is dotted with literary enthusiasms, each of them capable of spilling over into his work. In the early 1930s it had been Joyce. The weeks spent re-reading Dickens in the Moroccan winter of 1938–9 had produced his first substantial piece of literary criticism. But there is an eeriness about the Gissing fixation that coloured the last years of his life. Irrespective of the similarities between their work – both were social investigators with an eye for low-life detail, each was a brilliant Dickensian – they died at the same age of lung disease. Whether or not Orwell was aware of the physical connection, he spent much of the late 1940s in pursuit of his Victorian avatar: seeking out copies of New Grub Street for friends, trying to get Gissing’s novels reprinted, mentioning at one point a publisher’s idea that he should write a biography. With its fascinated glimpses of urban working-class life and grimy backdrops, Nineteen Eighty-Four, too, is demonstrably a novel written in Gissing’s shadow.
Come April his health seemed definitely to be improving. Despite his severe reaction to the streptomycin overdose – which induced rashes, ulceration and hair loss – he had put on 3 pounds in weight. Three sputum tests in a row had proved negative. The mild spring weather made him long to get out of bed, if only to sit in a chair. There was a hope that he could be discharged in summer, he told Moore. Past life continued to stir before him. Settling down to sleep one night, he had a curious dream of being shown a government document so secret that the minister or secretary responsible for it had orders not to let it out of his hands: Orwell had to come round to the further side of the desk and read it over the man’s shoulder. Considering the incident – and the diary is much annotated, showing how hard Orwell had tried to remember it accurately – he realised that the man must have been Cripps’ secretary, David Owen, and that the document concerned postwar British policy towards Burma. There was a vague memory, too, of telling a Burmese contact in London that he should not trust the British government. Had he given this warning it would have amounted to a betrayal of trust. Perhaps this was why until now the memory had lain dormant in his mind. But why should it return to haunt him five years later?
He was definitely better, reporting to Astor early in May that he was allowed to leave his bed for an hour a day and even put on a few clothes. Another sputum test had shown up negative. There was a plan that he could be discharged and stay somewhere near the hospital, perhaps in Richard Rees’ Edinburgh flat, and receive treatment as an out-patient. Shortly afterwards he told Moore that the doctors thought he should stay until August; he felt so well, however, that he thought he might get on with the second draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was pining to be back on Jura: his letters are full of wistful remarks about Barnhill or, in a letter to Michael Kennard, a young protégé of Warburg’s who was staying on the island, details of the local fishing. By the end of May, although ‘frightfully weak and thin’, he was getting up for two hours a day and taking laborious walks – he was still very short of breath – in the hospital grounds. In this improved state he was keen to work. Books for review piled up at his bedside: Graham Greene’s new novel, The Heart of the Matter, an ‘interim’ biography of Attlee by the young Labour MP, Roy Jenkins. The Heart of the Matter, dragging him back once more to the question of ‘belief’ in a world where there was no prospect of an afterlife, prompted a mordant attack on Greene’s Catholicism, a world in which hell resembled ‘a glorified nightclub’. Greene’s cult of the sanctified sinner seemed to him to be merely ‘frivolous’; when people really believed in hell, he maintained, they were not so fond of striking stylish attitudes on its brink. On the long summer afternoons he played croquet and was interested to talk to one of his fellow-patients, the editor of the boys’ weekly the Hotspur. Early in July, a week after his forty-fifth birthday, he told Julian Symons that the doctors seemed to think he was ‘pretty well all right now’, though he would have to take things extremely quietly for a long time. A few days before the end of the month he made the long journey westward to Jura.
Was all the talk about being ‘pretty well all right’ simple self-delusion? Orwell’s doctors agreed that when he left Hairmyres he was substantially better. Bill Dunn noted how well he seemed in comparison to the frail spectre that had left the island eight months before. Yet being diagnosed as free of TB germs did not mean that he would necessarily recover. In the years before he had received proper treatment, the arteries in his lungs had become dangerously exposed. A period of quiet convalescence might have maintained his improvement. However, this was exactly what Orwell was secretly scheming to deny himself. Back on Jura and ‘very glad to get home’, he gratefully resumed his domestic diary, inspecting the state of the garden and making lists of items required. The house that summer was full of visitors. Inez Holden came to stay for several months, annoying Avril by bringing many unnecessary items, including a female cat which over-stimulated the local toms. Richard Rees had the additional excuse of his partnership with Bill Dunn, the visible sign of which was the purchase of a farm truck. So great was the press of guests that at one point they overflowed into tents in the Barnhill garden. In his semi-invalid state Orwell pottered about the garden and played with Richard, even allowing him to smoke a cigarette in the hope that this might curb his interest. The experiment worked. Richard was violently sick. A fortnight later bad weather set in. The six hours of each day that Orwell had been ordered to spend in bed proved no hardship. He was ill towards the end of September – the note ‘Unwell. Stayed in bed’ chimes through the diary like the responses to a litany – recovered, but went back to Hairmyres to be examined. Mr Dick declared himself pleased, but Orwell was aware that any kind of exercise exhausted him. Even going out in the evening to milk the cows gave him a temperature, he told Astor. There was a plan to visit London, but everything was subordinate to the book. It was the worst possible time to be making the mental and physical effort needed to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four. As the pages of the second draft piled up, so did the signs of increasing feebleness. ‘Pain in side very bad.’ ‘Pain in side very bad on & off.’ Unquestionably the lurid and faintly unreal quality that the novel possesses – a ragged sense of a mind running out of its natural groove – derives from the mental state in which the final version of it was written: a desperate race towards a finishing line that would carry its own built-in defeat. By the end of October the manuscript was nearly complete and ready for typing. Here another problem presented itself. In bed most of the time, Orwell flinched from the effort of typing a fair copy. Worse, it was ‘an unbelievably bad ms’. No one else would be able to do the work without on-the-spot guidance. Could Warburg find anyone – ideally a typist who could stay at Barnhill and complete the work under his supervision? Mrs Christen, who might perhaps have been inveigled north, had returned to the Far East. Warburg said he would try.
Already here in October, a bare three months after his discharge, Orwell knew that his condition had rapidly deteriorated. He was resigned to spending the worst part of the winter in a sanatorium. Waiting for the result of Warburg’s attempt to procure a typist, he mused over Sartre’s Portrait of the Anti-Semite, which the Observer had sent him for review. It was ‘nonsense’, he thought, for his Jewish friend Tosco Fyvel to claim that Eliot was anti-Semitic. Doubtless there were anti-Jewish remarks in his early work, but such things were common-place at the time. A distinction had to be made between what was said before and after the first evidence of Nazi policy towards the Jews. All the same, Orwell admitted, if six million English people had recently been killed in gas ovens, he imagined he would feel insecure if he even saw a joke in a French comic paper about Englishwomen’s buck teeth. Roger Senhouse wrote in early November, still in search of a ‘Scots lassie’ who could do the work, but the pursuit was proving difficult. Stenographers were in short supply, even in London. To find someone prepared to travel to the Inner Hebrides at the onset of winter was nearly impossible.
Meanwhile the weather was bad and now the roof leaked. To walk even a few hundred yards incapacitated him, Orwell discovered. He could not so much as pull up a weed in the garden. ‘Whatever I do, it seems my temperature rises,’ he told Avril. There was still no typist, so in mid-November he began on the ‘grisly job’ of typing it himself. Orwell knew exactly what he was doing – he was already fixing up a sanatorium bed through Mr Dick and Gwen O’Shaughnessy – making a final effort that would have a shattering effect on his already weakened frame. Sitting up in bed, the paraffin heater wheezing at his side, still smoking his endless hand-rolled cigarettes, he laboured on. Ironically, it could all have been avoided. Leonard Moore, whose help Orwell had enlisted, had managed to find a typist but feared to close on the deal in case Senhouse, working through his niece in Edinburgh, also came up with someone. Orwell was beyond help even had it arrived. In any case the work was nearly done. He would send off the manuscript on 7 December, he told Moore. ‘Feeling unwell’, ‘feeling very unwell’, runs the diary. By the middle of the month the work was complete. He could not write anything, he was very ill, he told Fyvel, announcing his departure early in the New Year to a sanatorium in the Cotswolds. The diary lapses, although shortly before Christmas he marshalled his resources to write to Astor apologising for his inability to fulfil his Observer commitments. ‘I just must try & stay alive for a while because apart from other considerations I have a good idea for a novel.’
He spent Christmas and New Year in bed. Then one evening in the first week in January Bill Dunn drove him down to Ardlussa on the first stage of his journey to Gloucestershire. The weather had been bad and Dunn’s Austin 12 got bogged down. The farm truck was summoned, and Orwell and Richard sat together in the car, as the rain drummed on the roof, talking and eating boiled sweets. He was quite cheerful, Richard remembered, anxious amid the cold and the icy Jura rain to make it appear that there was nothing wrong.