Most writers, either unconsciously or not, accumulate property around them. To read more than a page of Evelyn Waugh’s diaries is to be plunged immediately into a world of antique Burges washstands and high-grade cigars. Thackeray’s first act on acquiring the gentleman’s mansion that he thought commensurate with his ancestral dignity was to stock it with vintage wines and fine bindings. The sale of number 2 Palace Green, Kensington’s effects after his death was an auctioneer’s dream. Orwell’s life, on the other hand, seems ominously short on paraphernalia, possessions, aspects of his personality focused on or expressing themselves in things. Practically the only photographs of him to contain artefacts above the level of a beach towel are the ones taken by Vernon Richards in the Canonbury Square flat in 1946. The Orwell who stands drawing an ancient Burmese sword from its scabbard, working at his lathe or lighting a cigarette with a little flash of flame looks oddly puzzled, as if he has only just stumbled upon these objects for the first time, can’t quite fathom how they operate, what makes them tick.
So what were Orwell’s things – the items that lay on the desk beside him as he wrote, on his bedside table, on stray surfaces in the dozen or so habitations that he occupied at one time or another in the years of his maturity? Anthony Powell’s account of the Kilburn maisonette during the war perhaps offers a hint of the ideal environment Orwell would have liked to create around himself in more propitious circumstances – the dark, heavy furniture, the family portraits on the walls – like an eighteenth-century squire’s drawing room set down in London NW6. But this kind of lifestyle takes time, care and money to assemble. Time, care, money … and things. The clothes we know about, those spreading hats unpacked from the Burma trunks that the Portobello Road children remarked on, the pairs of flannel trousers and the shabby jackets that looked more distinguished the shabbier they became. The books and the pamphlets are docketed and accounted for. What about the rest? What about, to take an obvious category, the tools of his professional trade, the legendary implements about which so much posthumous fuss is made? (The Royal Society of Literature, for example, gives incoming fellows bidden to sign the roll the choice of Dickens’ pen or Byron’s quill.) Most of the early letters are written in fountain-pen and ink; in several of the early notes to Leonard Moore Orwell apologises for using a disposable ‘post-office pen’. In the postwar era he took to a Biro – then a newfangled accessory on a par with a modern-day Rolex watch – which cost all of £3 and was lent to friends commissioned to indict ‘must do’ lists as he lay in his hospital bed. His manual typewriter – rather suitably, in the light of his faint anarchist leanings – was later bestowed by Sonia on the 1960s hippy-radical news-sheet, the International Times.
Orwell took an occasional interest in other writers’ possessions: as we have seen, visiting the Brontë museum at Haworth during the Road to Wigan Pier trip he was struck by Charlotte Brontë’s tiny, cloth-topped boots. His own leavings are painfully small. He left hardly any manuscripts: a few pages of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and partial revised typescripts of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are all that survive. With the exception of the Burma gear, he was not a great one for souvenirs: his solitary memento of Spain was an oil-burning peasant’s lamp. The fishing rods that lay in the corner of his room at UCH were given to Warburg’s protégé Michael Kennard, now dead; no one knows what became of them. That elemental biographer’s urge to fetishise – the lock of some Romantic poet’s hair, the page from some literary doodler’s sketchpad – has scant chance of succeeding with Orwell. Not long ago a squat, bulky item turned up along with the piled review copies on the doormat. Torn open, it contained a large, gunmetal stapler – ‘Orwell’s stapler’, according to the friend who had bought it (at considerable expense) at a Tribune fund-raiser. Though treated with every respect – I certainly wouldn’t dream of stapling anything with it – there is nothing to differentiate it from any other example of its genre, nothing that an insurance agent would care to put a value on. This, you feel, is rather typical of Orwell, the approach he took to life and the things – mostly abstract things – he cared about. In the end, only the books endure.