BOOKLOVERS’ CORNER was owned by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope. It is now the Prompt Corner, a chess players’ café on the corner of South End Green, Hampstead, but it remained a bookshop until the mid-1950s. South End Green marks the beginning of Hampstead “proper” when approached up the hill from Kentish Town, a working-class and heavily Irish district. It was social borderland (and boarderland). In Orwell’s day a tram route from the City brought crowds up to the famous Hampstead Heath fairs on Bank Holidays, and brought East Enders for Sunday outings. Hampstead was, and is, a place for intellectuals (both real and pretend) to live; and in the 1930s there were still many houses with cheap bedsitters, a favourite area for young writers and artists on the make or on the mend, as well as for the established who could afford small Georgian or ample Victorian houses.
Hampstead and Chelsea were thought to be, indeed to a large extent were, London’s artistic inner suburbs, only yielding intellectual precedence to Bloomsbury. Unlike Bloomsbury, however, Hampstead possessed a broad middle class, less extreme in its social divisions than upper-middle-class true Bloomsbury and déclassé sub-Bloomsbury. Booklovers’ Corner sold a range of second-hand books that reflected the broader Hampstead range, and matched the description in the opening pages of Keep the Aspidistra Flying: “There were high brow, middle brow and low brow books, new and second-hand all jostling together, as befitted this intellectual and social borderland.” I bought books there as a student just after the War and it was still just such an extraordinary diversity. Gordon’s caustic comments on the merits of the types of books, authors and customers may be taken as Orwell’s satiric exaggeration of his own general attitude to contemporary writing: “dead stars above, damp squibs below. Shall we ever again get a writer worth reading?” Lawrence was “all right”, and Joyce “even better before he went off his coconut”.1 Above all he railed at the “snooty, refined books . . . by those moneyed young beasts who slide so gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and from Cambridge to the literary reviews”.2 “Beasts” and “beastly” are somewhat overworked words by Orwell at this time.
The bookshop fortified Orwell’s interest in popular culture. Even though Gordon Comstock mocks, George had read and understood emphatically a good deal more of the sources of popular taste than most other intellectuals. So many seemed over-concerned to break with the past, whether seen as the English literary heritage or their own youthful readings, whereas Orwell liked the best of both worlds, Dickens and Wells as well as Joyce and Miller. His main motive, however, in coming to London, to which he was not particularly attached, must have been to enjoy the company of other writers, perhaps of intellectuals generally. He had been through a long period of isolation, thinking a great deal but rarely discussing books and ideas; indeed, there had been few literary friends in his life since his school-days, apart from walks, talks and letters with Eleanor Jaques and Brenda Salkeld. Neither as Blair nor even as Orwell did he like to talk about his current writing. He believed that those who talked about their writing rarely wrote, but in this period in his life he showed the need to talk about other related problems, literary, social or political; and Hampstead was a good place to meet young writers and radicals with whom he could argue as an equal.
Orwell did see more of Richard Rees and others of The Adelphi circle. Rees became deeply fond of Orwell. Just before he died, Rees told Melvyn Bragg that he respected Orwell as a writer for not being “trendy” or for trying to be “with it” (Rees kept up with new idioms to the last). He was always reliable in a good old-fashioned way, both as a friend and as a contributor.3 Rees had already noted sadly that there were “Left Intellectuals who criticised The Adelphi for its ‘rotten Liberal reformism’ or its ‘muddleheaded mystical idealism’ …” and that “apart from George Orwell” he had met very few “literary equalitarians of whom it is quite certain that their equalitarianism is even, in the ordinary and simple sense of the word, sincere”. Orwell, Rees asserted, “had an essentially simple mind . . . and was only able to see one point at a time.”4 If that was so, it had been a rare quality indeed in the kaleidoscopic world of Middleton Murry and Rees in the Adelphi days. But perhaps Orwell’s mind was neither so simple nor so uncritically friendly, if we assume that “Ravelston” in Keep the Aspidistra Flying is even in part modelled on Sir Richard Rees. Ravelston, the rich socialist editor, masochistically enjoys guilt feelings about the unemployed as he tucks into a thick and bloody steak:
Ravelston lived on the first floor and the editorial offices of Antichrist were downstairs. Antichrist was a middle-to-high-brow monthly, Socialist in a vehement but ill-defined way. In general, it gave the impression of being edited by an ardent Nonconformist who had transferred his allegiance from God to Marx, and in doing so had got mixed up with a gang of vers libre poets. This was not really Ravelston’s character; merely he was softer-hearted than an editor ought to be, and consequently was at the mercy of his contributors. Practically anything got printed in Antichrist if Ravelston suspected that its author was starving.5
If Rees recognised himself in this, he may have blushed a little, but he took no offence. Perhaps in his good Christian heart he expected each fallen mouth he fed to bite his hand a little, and he not merely forgave them but revelled in their independence and, occasionally, success. Others were to say that Orwell was equally soft-hearted when he became literary editor of Tribune.
Orwell developed circles of his own in Hampstead partly through the bookshop and partly through Mabel Fierz. Though he made it out to be extravagantly boring, even a bit shoddy and dishonest, his job in fact interested him; and into the shop came some genuinely interesting people, not just as Comstock declaims “poseurs, bores and lunatics”.6 Over cups of strong tea, poor coffee or mugs of bottled beer, he would sit with his friends in their rented rooms (he never entertained himself at the Westropes’), talking things over, setting the world aright and damning fashionable reputations. Almost all these friends were younger men, for his years in Burma had made him at 31 older than most of those beginning to make their way as writers.
“With the fine scorn of the unpublished, Gordon knocked down reputation after reputation. Shaw, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Huxley, Lewis, Hemingway—each with a careless phrase or two was shovelled into the dustbin.”7 Either Gordon or George was not wholly consistent about Joyce. Edwin Muir, the Scots poet, who lived in Downshire Hill, described in his autobiography this time as when “Hampstead was filled with writing people and haunted by young poets despairing over the poor and the world, but despairing together, in a sad but comforting communion”.8 Orwell was about ready for this limited form of sociability.
For his first six months in Hampstead, Orwell lived in the Westropes’ own flat in Warwick Mansions, above the bookshop. Jon Kimche (later to become editor of Tribune, then of the Jewish Observer and Middle East Review) also lodged in the same flat, where he had arrived a month or two before Orwell to work in the shop during the mornings in return, like Orwell, for a rent-free room. So Orwell had the mornings and evenings to write, serving in the shop for the afternoon. He occasionally went out to buy books for the proprietor from private houses, so he must have shown some aptitude in the trade beyond a love of books.
Orwell wrote to Brenda Salkeld about his “employer’s wife” being ill (though according to Kimche it was her husband who was ailing)9 but he comments quite favourably of her that:
My present landlady is the non-interfering sort, which is so rare among London landladies. When I came she asked me what I particularly wanted, and I said “The thing I most want is freedom”. So she said, “Do you want to have women up here all night?” I said, “No,” of course, whereat she said, “I only meant that I didn’t mind whether you do or not.”10
Apart from being a motherly, pleasant and helpful type, his “employer’s wife” may well have been so indulgent since she was, in fact, a good friend of his Aunt Nellie Limouzin who had written to her on 23 September 1934 from Paris:
I had a letter from Eric yesterday. . . . He intends finishing his third novel [sic] by the end of this month and will then go up to London and “stay some months”. I shall give him your address and hope you will be able to see him. I shall advise him to write to you first, for no doubt you are both very busy with the shop, the house and I.L.P. work. He may possibly be staying in Golders Green for I know he has a friend there, and, if so, would be “contagious” to you.11
Kimche knew the Westropes through their activities in the Independent Labour Party (Left-wing, egalitarian, a strange English mixture of secularised evangelism and non-Communist Marxism) and assumed that Orwell had met them by the same route. Even though they lived in the same house and talked to each other a lot, Kimche did not know that Orwell had met the Westropes through a family connection rather than through I.L.P. meetings at the Conway Hall. And Orwell did not tell Brenda Salkeld either. She can only remember him grumbling, when they met either at Southwold one weekend or in London some time that year, about “his remote and gradgrind employers”—rather as Comstock does in the novel. When in an essay the following year he actually referred to “my employer’s kindness to me”, he still said “employer”, not “friend”.
Orwell did like to keep his small worlds apart. Perhaps in his distortion of the kindly, unworldly and basically poor Westropes, he was trying to act out the hero (or the anti-hero) of his coming novel, suppressing the more benign and mundane real world. Gordon Comstock’s life in the bookshop is an imaginative projection of what things could have been if Orwell had had no friends or had not, at last, got his first two books published and a third in the press. If the physical descriptions both of people and places in Keep the Aspidistra Flying are transparently Hampstead (Willowbed Road for Willoughby Road and Coleridge Grove for Keats Grove, for instance), most of the acute sense of personal failure and pessimism that permeates the novel must refer back to the four or five previous years of Orwell’s life.
The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought. He grasped, as though it were a new discovery, that you do not escape from money merely by being moneyless. [p. 63]
Life on two quid a week ceases to be a heroic gesture and becomes a dingy habit. Failure is as great a swindle as success. [p. 72]
For the rest, in two whole years he had produced nothing except a handful of short poems—perhaps a score in all. It was so rarely that he could attain the peace of mind in which poetry, or prose for that matter, has got to be written. The times when he “could not” work grew commoner and commoner. Of all types of human being, only the artist takes it upon him to say that he “cannot” work. But it is quite true; there are times when one cannot work. [p. 41]
Gordon Comstock’s character, vivid though it is and one of the best Angry Young Men in English literature before John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, yet exhibits somewhat contradictory traits: many of his diatribes seem intended to satirise self-pity, but others show the author’s own lingering self-pity. A gloomy man mocks a morbid man. By 1935 Orwell had achieved enough success, self-confidence and hope of living decently by his pen to be ironical about Gordon and his old self, but had not distanced himself enough to take out all autobiography.
The Westropes’ precise political orientation is highly significant and was concealed equally from old and later friends by Orwell. For dramatic effect, as has been shown already, he talked in both The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia as if he entered the socialist camp, and in the particular Left-wing but anti-Communist way he did, as a direct and immediate consequence of the events he describes. In fact, without committing himself, he had been brooding over such a socialism for a long time. Almost certainly the Westropes and their friends influenced him politically, just as it is certain that he found it congenial to work for people whose political convictions he was coming to share. Kimche does not remember him as talking much about politics then, except that he held forth a great deal about the iniquities of the Roman Catholic Church; he thought of him “as a kind of intellectual anarchist”. Orwell’s individualism, his “Tory anarchism”, would not allow him to come near the organised Communist Party; the Labour Party would have appeared in those days of the National Government as both discredited and too milk and water; but he knew a lot more about Marxism than readers of the second section of The Road to Wigan Pier might suppose—the I.L.P. Marxists whom he met in Spain all agree on that. Perhaps St Paul had for a long time been ambivalent and broodingly tortured about Christianity but had found his final commitment both easier to explain and more convincing to others if he expressed it in terms of sudden illumination on the road to Damascus.
Myfanwy Westrope had been a member of the I.L.P. since 1905 and by 1935 was a veteran of the women’s rights movement. It seems her pacifism kept her out of the militant Pankhurst suffragettes. Francis Westrope was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the First World War, where he met the pianist Frank Merrick and Fenner Brockway . Merrick says that Westrope and he became interested in Esperanto by accident while in prison: a grammar was the only mind-stretching book available, apart from theological works. Perhaps there was some accident about Westrope’s interest, but Esperanto had an ideology of brotherhood of man and international fraternity about it that must have appealed: the tower of Babel, not Mammon or Eve’s apple, was to him the primal curse. Given one language, there would be perpetual peace. But the Esperantist cause was nothing if not eclectic and ecumenical: it could sail alongside or take up on board many another great cause or small crankery—including vegetarianism in the Westropes’ case. Esperanto led them to meet Nellie Limouzin and Eugène Adam . Like Adam, Myfanwy Westrope had visited the Soviet Union (in 1931), and she too had returned profoundly disillusioned, not with socialism but with what she saw there. She plunged into I.L.P. activity even more heartily on her return.12
The I.L.P. was a striking mixture of optimism and pessimism, of heavens and of hells. Domestically, the capitalist system was breaking down, a revolution would occur—it need not be forced—but it would be resisted by counter-
revolutionary forces, so these forces had to be anticipated. However, the socialist movement must maintain both internal party democracy and extend to all, not destroy, what the Communist Party called “mere bourgeois liberty”. The I.L.P. was divided on the Hitler question, whether he was a witness to the last days and death-throes of capitalism or a new autonomous force to be actively resisted by arms. But internationally, most of the I.L.P. saw war as both imminent and as a purely nationalist, capitalist occurrence, a phenomenon of the final era of a capitalism tearing itself apart. This would provoke, after terrible devastation, an international general strike of working men. And in all this, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its affiliates had become little better than the new Fascist regimes: an historically specific form of state monopoly capitalism. While not strictly pacifist, the I.L.P.’s anti-militarism made working alliances with pacifists easy; and while declaring itself revolutionary, the I.L.P. appealed to Left-wing activists in the existing British Labour movement, still picking itself up slowly after its betrayal by Ramsay MacDonald .
The “friend in Golders Green” referred to in Nellie Limouzin’s letter was of course Mabel Fierz, who herself knew the Westropes. So twice in his early career Orwell was exposed to broadly the same range of ideas that he was to meet, but much more vividly, among the Spanish socialists and anarchists; and exposed indeed to the same association of socialism and assorted crankeries that he was to attack in The Road to Wigan Pier. To Brenda Salkeld, if not to Mabel Fierz, he was keeping up his pose of “Tory anarchist” as late as May 1935, when he told her that he had called on Richard Rees to borrow money, having forgotten it was a Bank Holiday: “. . . but he was at some sort of Socialist meeting and they asked me in and I spent three hours with seven or eight socialists harrying me, including a South Wales miner who told me—quite good-naturedly—that if he were dictator, he would have me shot immediately.”13 All that can be certain is his proximity at that time to Left-wing socialist ideas, but not yet his full commitment. Mosley’s Blackshirts were also very active on the periphery of Hampstead and could have been a powerful negative influence in putting him on the road to Catalonia.
If the political Orwell is beginning to emerge, the literary Orwell was enduring typical difficulties. Gollancz was driven to commission three lengthy opinions. A Clergyman’s Daughter was a curate’s egg—everyone who read it agreed that it was “good in parts”. Gerald Gould, his chief reader (and a regular novel reviewer for The Observer), said that it was “an extraordinary book”, was “very original”, and “on literary merit I think it certainly ought to be published”; but drew attention to “snags and difficulties”. These included, again, the fear of libel, since “the author is so particular and exact in his geographical indications”. The terrible school where Dorothy teaches is said, for instance, to be “at Southbridge, about twelve miles from London” (as is Uxbridge where Blair had taught). This fear of libel is a good measure of how autobiographical readers assumed the book to be. Despite that, however, Gould found the school-teaching scenes completely implausible and “quite ludicrous as a representation of what could possibly go on today” (which Orwell was firmly to deny—indeed to show a sardonic delight in the fact that Gollancz and his advisers found it implausible). Gould thought the night scene in Trafalgar Square, when Dorothy loses her memory among tramps, “extremely powerful” and “a mixture of James Joyce in the ULYSSES period and O’Casey in his latest mood”. But he saw its “change of mood and manner” as “a distinct artistic mistake”.
As usual, Gollancz’s solicitor, Harold Rubinstein, to whom it was sent straight away, gave more than legal advice. The difficulties of libel raised by Gould could, he thought, be quite easily overcome; but not those of structure. He said that the book fell into five distinct and far too loosely related sections: (a) Dorothy’s life as a drudge for the parish church and housekeeper for her bigoted and incompetent father; (b) her life as a hop-picker when her memory fails and, following the attempted seduction by the literary gentleman, she runs away; (c) her night in Trafalgar Square with the tramps and down-and-outs; (d) her life as a schoolmistress under the ignorant and despotic proprietor; and (e) her return, somehow defeated, somehow resolute, to the routines of the old parish life. Rubinstein briskly called the first section “good”, the second “much better”, the third “magnificent”, the fourth “puerile” and the fifth “unconvincing”. He concluded that the “fine qualities” of the book would be hopelessly prejudiced if it went out without drastic revision.
Gollancz was in a quandary. He had great faith in Orwell, perhaps not in A Clergyman’s Daughter, but then a publisher has to keep a new author going, setting his sights on future successes so long as actual loss can be avoided in the present. So he asked for a formal opinion from Norman Collins, his young fellow-director. Collins wrote to him on New Year’s Day 1935 to say that it was in many ways the oddest manuscript he had ever read. He agreed wholeheartedly with the solicitor’s excellent literary criticism, saw that drastic changes to the structure would improve it, possibly it should be three different books rather than one. But how would the author react?
His reply to such suggestions would, I am convinced, be precisely what O’Casey’s reply was to the Abbey Theatre when they turned down his play—and that was a perfectly plain and unequivocal “Go to hell”. I think then that it is up to us to publish the book, making a ballyhoo of the fact that in many respects this is perhaps the most remarkable novel that we have ever published, etc, etc.
I know nothing of Orwell, but it is perfectly clear (to adopt a convenient phraseology) that he has been through hell, and that he is probably still there. He would certainly be a plum for a practising psycho-analyst. There is in his work, either latent or fully revealed, almost every one of the major aberrations. . . . The whole of this report adds up to this, I should certainly publish it as it stands rather than let it go, but I would certainly put it up to the author that he makes the sort of alterations which I have suggested . . . rather than publish in its present form.14
However, Gollancz meanwhile made up his mind to publish with only minor revisions, perhaps fearing that Orwell would prove as difficult as O’Casey.* But Orwell, in a letter to Moore six weeks before Collins wrote his report, had already said that he would be willing to do “a little toning down” of the school scene to meet Gollancz’s incredulity; and he had assured him that questions of libel and obscenity were but “a small matter” to be put right “by a few strokes of the pen”.15 By 22 January 1935 Orwell thanked Moore for getting such good terms from Gollancz for the book, asked that a reference to Burmese Days be included, and cheerfully remarked “I am afraid he is going to lose money this time, all right.”16 He at least did not lose. Four thousand copies were printed and, though the type was distributed, none was remaindered: a good, modest piece of estimating on Gollancz’s part. The reviews were very mixed, indeed most reviewers did not know how to place the book, rather like the reports made for Gollancz. Orwell himself had had such doubts when he had told Moore with half-gloomy and half-cheerful frankness, “It was a good idea, but I am afraid I have made a muck of it.”17 When he presented a copy to Brenda Salkeld he said that it was “tripe”, apart from the Trafalgar Square night-scene.18 This was endearingly modest and honest but also obsessively perfectionist. He was to say such things again about his other writings, with far less cause.
Years later when Orwell was putting his affairs in order, he renounced it entirely. He left instructions that it was not to be translated or reprinted, and wrote to a friend that it was a book he was ashamed of and that: “This was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for money, ditto when I wrote Keep the A. At that time I simply hadn’t a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in a £100 or so.”19 But his contemporary letters to Brenda Salkeld make clear that he was writing it for publication and that, while certainly an experiment in seeing whether different styles and perspectives could be combined in one narrative as Joyce had done, it was not a mere exercise. He had already had plenty of exercise in producing writing that did not get published. Also he was not “half-starved”, even if still very hard up, at the time he was writing either A Clergyman’s Daughter in Southwold or Keep the Aspidistra Flying in Hampstead. His worst times had been in the immediately preceding years. He wanted to make money with these books, if not enough to live on then almost enough, so he drove himself hard, and far from “not having a book” in him, he moved from one to another with great speed and determination. At this stage in his life he lacked time, tranquillity and security, certainly, which money would help provide; but he did not lack ideas.
A Clergyman’s Daughter may not be consistently excellent, but it is better, in parts, than many, including Orwell himself, were to believe. The central character of Dorothy, slaving for her useless father, is a real type and the description of her claustrophobic life rings true, the sociological detail of middle-class poverty and pretension is fascinating, even if psychologically the character remains shallow; but he was simply not that kind of novelist, and there is this other kind of novel. The breakdown following an attempted seduction that moves her into the company of tramps and the hop-picking fields is absurdly arbitrary and implausible; but once established in another closed world, the description is rich, vivid and compelling. The night scene, written as dialogue between the tramps in Trafalgar Square, is, in its own right, astoundingly awful and, as a straight crib from Joyce’s Ulysses (fully deserving O’Casey’s abuse), embarrassing; it is only interesting for picaresque detail better placed in his essays and documentaries. Then her life as a schoolmistress, when she surfaces again, is another compelling creation of a closed world, the remorseless detail of which was drawn, like the tramping scenes, directly from his own experience. Someone else must have furnished the details of life in a poor vicarage, for his own home had nothing of such poverty and despair. But the three good chapters out of five, all studies in closed societies, have no real relationship to each other and could just as well have been separate short stories. The final chapter, when Dorothy’s father allows her home again, is as unresolved and ambiguous as the ending of Keep the Aspidistra Flying was to be. She simply forsakes any hope of freedom and resumes the old life, just as Gordon Comstock was to go back to the advertising agency and forsake his poetry. Material circumstances defeat them both. We leave her making cheap costumes once again for the school play:
The problem of faith and no faith had utterly vanished from her mind. It was beginning to get dark, but, too busy to stop and light the lamp, she worked on, pasting strip after strip of paper into place, with absorbed, with pious concentration, in the penetrating smell of the gluepot.
But is she defeated (as Gordon could be said to be) by the Money God, or is she (as Gordon could be said to be) reconciled to what is at least the “best of all possible worlds”? Is the final tone sardonic mockery or sardonic pity? The author seems undecided. Orwell himself seems unresolved. If mockery, he can only be the spectator, however good a writer; but if pity, then something should be done about it, while remaining a true writer.
Yet if there was no sign of political commitment in the book, the very first paragraph contained symbols and concepts strangely prescient of his very last great work.
As the alarm clock on the chest of drawers exploded like a horrid little bomb of bell metal, Dorothy, wrenched from the depths of some complex, troubling dream, woke with a start and lay on her back looking into the darkness in extreme exhaustion.
Whatever Orwell revealed about himself in A Clergyman’s Daughter (and Norma n Collins plainly read too much into it—had he met Orwell he would have been astonished at how ordinary and commonsensical he appeared), he did not reveal his politics.
Orwell had a girlfriend in Hampstead, who was a member of the Labour League of Youth, but she remembers that he talked very little about politics except to curse the Empire and “the Scots by whom he appeared to imagine it dominated”. He had several friends at this period with whom he was on occasional “walking out together” terms, but there were two “steady” or “regular” girls. “Sally” (a pseudonym) seems to have been, like Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a commercial artist; but unlike Rosemary she kept the real George more or less at arm’s length. She gave way, with some overlap, to Kay.20 Kay worked in a secretarial agency near Russell Square; someone of literary tastes, she liked to do typing for literary people and therefore meet them and mingle with their lives. Orwell met her in the late autumn of 1934 when she came into the shop. She lived very close and knew the Westropes. She was both more down to earth and political than the lesser lights, who seemed to Geoffrey Gorer —in a rather suspect collective memory—to be “arty” types: “candles and sandals”, given to wearing dirndl skirts and carrying The New Statesman and Nation like a talisman. Eric liked the rôle of a kindly, wiser, older brother, a young girl’s guide to literature. He must have been pleased to have a girl both serious and merry to talk to, to walk with, and occasionally when luck and circumstances permitted (for it was always “to leave by midnight” in those dark days beyond recall), go to bed with. He told her to read Dickens and Conrad and to repair lack of knowledge of the great tradition before tackling the moderns, like Lawrence and Joyce.21 But Kay needed little such advice: she was already widely read and used to splitting her votes between the ancient and the moderns. A contemporary described her as “a jolly, smiling, warm-hearted, open, marvellously calm lady”.
Orwell did not even talk to Kay about his writing. He was, in fact, somewhat secretive. Making love was nice enough, but it stirred no great warmth in him, no confessions or soul-baring. Somehow a story grew that he carefully closed a big notebook before sharing his bed one night and, on another occasion, placed a tea-towel modestly over a pile of manuscript. Kay did learn that he was writing a verse epic of the history of the English from the times of Chaucer and in a Chaucerian manner. His aspiration to be a poet still lingered. No trace of this epic survives. The only echoes of this in Orwell’s work are the title-page device from Chaucer to Down and Out—“O scathful harm, condition of poverte”—and a snatch of dialogue in Keep the Aspidistra Flying:
“Have you read Chaucer’s Man of Lawe’s Tale?”
“The Man of Lawe’s Tale? Not that I remember. What’s it about?”
“I forget. I was thinking of the first six stanzas. Where he talks about poverty. The way it gives everyone the right to stamp on you. . . .”22
Orwell talked to Kay mainly about literature or else volubly and knowledgeably about birds as they walked Hampstead Heath together. He loved birds and he also loved cats. He grumbled to her about cats killing birds: he could not accept this contradiction in nature. She can only remember discussions about politics in the company of other friends: it was clear he was strongly “pacifist”, she said, or more likely anti-militarist, and strongly anti-colonialist; but she has no memory of any specific socialism.
By early March Orwell was well into his new novel, and due to the illness of Myfanwy Westrope, he said (Jon Kimche remembered it as Frank Westrope), he had to find rooms outside. The ever-active Mabel Fierz found him a room in a first-floor flat at 77 Parliament Hill, the last house in the road right on the edge of Hampstead Heath: Parliament Hill itself, on which young and old still fly kites, was framed in his window. The flat was owned by a psychologist of Jungian persuasion, Mrs Rosalind Obermeyer (later Mrs Henschel), who was taking the postgraduate psychology course at University College, London. She let out two rooms, the other to a medical student, Janet Grimpson; and the three of them shared the sitting-room. Rosalind Obermeyer had met him briefly a few years before when Orwell was staying at the Fierzs. Now Mabel asked her friend to let Orwell have the room specifically because it would give him fresh air from the Heath that he badly needed for his weak chest. Neither Jon Kimche nor Kay realised that he had a weak chest. “Just a bit of a cough sometimes, a bit chesty, you know”—people remember Orwell saying things like that, part confiding, part forbidding inquiry and sympathy. Two new friends were only aware that Orwell had bronchitis “each winter”.
He brought Kay to his room at Parliament Hill to meet these two new friends, Rayner Heppenstall and Michael Sayers . Heppenstall, new to London after reading English at Leeds University, was beginning to write for The Adelphi. He became a novelist and a poet, and later a famous producer on the B.B.C.’s Third Programme in its early days. One evening earlier that spring, Richard Rees had asked Heppenstall to join him for dinner at Bertorelli’s restaurant in Charlotte Street to meet a fellow contributor—George Orwell. Heppenstall brought another writer with him, whose poems were beginning to appear in The Adelphi, Dylan Thomas . Both he and Thomas, Heppenstall relates, were “already pretty well stoked up on Henekey’s cider”, and “There was a good deal of nonsense that evening . . . but nothing which casts much light upon either Dylan or ‘George Orwell’”.23 Almost immediately, Heppenstall and Orwell met again at the house of T. Sturge Moore, a white-bearded poet in a skull cap who was the original of A. E. Housman’s much-travelled remark, “a sheep in sheep’s clothing”. Through Heppenstall Orwell met Michael Sayers, poet, writer and Communist fellow-traveller who later emigrated to the United States. He asked them both to dinner, cooked a good steak for them on his newly-purchased “Bachelor Griller”, and they drank beer out of wooden “tree pattern” mugs that he was then collecting (as Heppenstall states, but Kay is very firm that he collected pewter tankards, and only had one such arty “tree pattern”, that she had given him as a joke).
“Curious,” wrote George to Brenda Salkeld on 7th March,
. . . that you should mention that review of Joad’s book, because Heppenstall, the man who wrote it, stayed at my place the night before last—in fact he was having breakfast with me when I was reading your letter. I did not tell him what you said about “second-rate highbrows”. As a matter of fact, he is very nice—a Yorkshireman, very young, twenty-four or five, I would say, and passionately interested in the ballet. . . . I cannot tell you how I am looking forward to coming down next weekend. I do hope it won’t fall through.24
He also introduced Rayner to Mabel Fierz, who delightedly took him under her wing as a young hopeful, as she had taken Eric some years before.
George and Rayner were welcome, Kay remembers, at literary “At Homes” given by such as Edwin Muir and his wife, Willa. Orwell refused to go, indeed he crossed the street rather than pass the Muirs, so strong was his irrational dislike, they all noted, of the Scots. (In fact the Muirs came from Orkney and Shetland.) He railed against “the whisky-swilling Scottish drunks” who misgoverned and maltreated the Burmese; and perhaps some hate lingered from the time when Mrs Wilkes favoured the kilted Scottish lordlings in St Cyprian’s days. More speculatively, an obsessively long incident, six whole pages, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying might furnish a more specific reason. Gordon, invited to a party by “Paul Doring” and his wife in “Coleridge Grove” (Keats Grove is next to Downshire Hill) finds, on his arrival, that the house is empty. He may have got the wrong night but they may have done it to him deliberately.
Otherwise, Orwell seemed to be in a mood for company. He sometimes dined at small restaurants in Soho on half-crown set meals; so even if money was very tight, he was no longer precisely poverty-stricken. At one such dinner, Rayner Heppenstall was impressed by George sending back a bottle of red wine to have the chill taken off. He joked that the experience of the Paris plongeur was socially one up on his own student days in Leeds or in provincial France. Nevertheless, without ever quite discussing it, Heppenstall and Sayers thought that Orwell was only half-educated compared with their own fine selves.* Any university degree was better than none, and they were certainly in highbrow mood, Heppenstall attending and writing about ballet and chasing ballet girls, and Sayers leading what he held to be a poet’s life. Heppenstall was to claim (something that no one else can remember) that all Orwell’s women at that time were ugly, as if there were more than one, and imputes some kind of masochism to his amatory forays. Sayers and he saw something a little comic in Eric, “a nice old thing, and kindly eccentric”, going on and on about Dickens, Samuel Butler and Gissing, and something odd in his collection of comic postcards. Also Orwell was found reading The Magnet and The Gem,25 children’s comics. Plainly culture had to be defended against the masses, even in a Marxist mode, whereas Orwell was beginning to show signs of actually appreciating what Herbert Read was to mean by saying, in the title of a once-famous essay, “To Hell With Culture”; and his interest in popular culture had something anthropological about it (anticipating the great days of Picture Post).
This attitude received reinforcement from a long friendship that followed an unexpected letter from Geoffrey Gorer, the social anthropologist. He had read Burmese Days and wrote to its author:
Will you allow me to tell you how very much indeed I admire your novel Burmese Days: it seems to me an absolutely admirable statement of fact told as vividly and with as little bitterness as possible. It is difficult to praise without being impertinent; it seems to me that you have done a necessary and important piece of work as well as it could be done. I wonder if you intend your stricture on the Burmese sahib-log who are “living a lie the whole time” to apply to their domestic counterparts; it seems to me to work admirably.
My most sincere congratulations.
Geoffrey Gorer26
This soon led to a meeting (when Orwell cooked him liver and bacon, to his distaste). Years later Gorer recalled:
I found he was one of the most interesting people I’ve ever known. I was never bored in his company. He was interested in nearly everything. And his attitudes were original. He didn’t take accepted ideas. . . . I would have said he was an unhappy man. He was too big for himself. I suppose if he’d been younger you would have said “coltish”. He was awfully likely to knock things off tables, to trip over things. I mean, he was a gangling, physically badly coordinated young man. I think his feelings that even the inanimate world was against him which he did have at some times, I mean any gas stove he had would go wrong, any radio would break down. . . . He was a lonely man—until he met Eileen, a very lonely man. He was fairly well convinced that nobody would like him, which made him prickly.27
Burmese Days was reviewed by Cyril Connolly in The New Statesman and Nation. The prep-school friends had drifted apart at Eton, and there had been no contact since.
Burmese Days is an admirable novel. It is a crisp, fierce and almost boisterous attack on the Anglo-Indian. The author loves Burma, he goes to great lengths to describe the vices of the Burmese and the horror of the climate, but he loves it, and nothing can palliate, for him, the presence of a handful of inefficient, complacent public school types who make their living there. The . . . vigour and rapidity of his extremely biased book. . . . His novel might have been better had he toned down the ferocious partiality of the Lawrence-Aldington school, but personally I liked it and recommend it to anyone who enjoys a spate of efficient indignation, graphic description, excellent narrative, excitement, and irony tempered with vitriol.28
This led to an invitation to dinner, “a ‘bifteck aux pommes’ cooked by himself” Connolly remembered. Later he was to admit, with rare empathy, that it was quite natural for their renewed acquaintance to have been so delayed: “when Orwell came back from Burma he did not care for Oxford and Cambridge intellectuals, the easy livers, ‘the Pansy Left’ as he called them.”29 “His greeting was typical, a long but not unfriendly stare and his characteristic wheezy laugh, ‘Well, Connolly, I can see that you’ve worn a good deal better than I have’. I could say nothing, for I was appalled by the ravaged grooves that ran down from cheek to chin. My fat cigar-smoking persona must have been a surprise to him.”30 From then on,* Connolly bestirred himself to introduce Orwell to people and, particularly during the War, to encourage and publish his essays. Theirs was a friendship of unlike characters. They must have looked at each other like two strange, noble beasts of different species, happening to share the same waterhole, not hostile but generically remote. Connolly admired Orwell for his integrity, authenticity, and eccentricity; but was faintly condescending about his wasting time over the social question rather than concentrating on high literature, while Orwell admired Connolly for his erudition, his knowingness and sociability, but was faintly condescending about his wasting time with l’art pour l’art rather than advancing the good old cause. Both seem to have thought that they were patronising the other by renewing and pursuing (after thirteen years) their ironical but warm friendship. They each had secondary characteristics, however, which were close to the other’s dominant one: Connolly then shared the fashionable Left-trending views, as shown by his enthusiastic account of a brief visit to revolutionary Barcelona the following year (which he republished in The Condemned Playground); and Orwell had hoped, in A Clergyman’s Daughter, to write a novel as an exercise in style. None the less, what Connolly would repeat years after his friend’s death sums it up well enough: “I was a stage rebel, Orwell was a true one.”
A lot of things happened at once. Through Connolly, Orwell was to meet the wife of his last days, but through his landlady he now met the wife of his great creative period. With all these new friends, sociability almost went to the solitary man’s head. He decided to give a small party. This meant asking his landlady to let him use some of her space, so it was agreed they would give one together.
After about three months in which we rarely met (I engrossed in my studies, he often writing his latest novel), he asked me one day, could we not give a joint party as his bedsitter was too small. I know he said one of the people he would invite was Richard Rees and was it Heppenstall? As far as I can remember, he had not invited any women friends, but I remember clearly inviting Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a fellow student at University College, and a lay psychotherapist, Dr Jennings White, who was on the Committee of the Institute for the psychological treatment of delinquency, where I had obtained work as a social worker, and I invited also one or two men students also in the Psychology Department of University College.
When our very pleasant evening ended, I remember Eric accompanied the guests to the nearby buses and trains at the bottom of the hill—on his return he came into my sitting-room, I had noticed that he had paid a good bit of attention to Eileen and Eric said, “Now that is the kind of girl I would like to marry!” I was delighted to hear this, as I, too, felt they had much to give each other. She was a very attractive, very feminine Irish woman, with lively interests and a gay, infectious laugh. So I replied, “Fine! I’ll invite her when I see her again in two days’ time, and you tell me which evenings would suit you, and both come and have dinner with me.”
At College I saw she was already reading Burmese Days (perhaps he had lent it to her). Our small dinner party two days after was a very gay affair. I left them quite soon (after the meal) in my sitting-room and went out to nearby friends.31
Soon after, George took Eileen horse-riding on Blackheath—some old habits die hard—close to where she lived at Greenwich. Two or three weeks later she told another student who had been at the party, Lydia Jackson * that he had as good as proposed to her. She had not said yes, but she had not said no.32
Eileen Maud O’Shaughnessy was of Irish stock, born in 1905 and brought up in Sunderland on Tyneside. She had won a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, from where she graduated in 1927 with a Second Class Honours degree in English. She tried teaching in a girls’ boarding-school but could not stand it, held various odd jobs, including reading to the aged Dame Elizabeth Cadbury and some social work, but then took a secretarial course, eventually taking over sometime in 1931 a small firm herself, “Murrells Typing Agency” in Victoria Street, London, S.W. 1. The office junior, or “the oil rag”, then 15 years old, remembers her well as a “vivid personality”, happy but unbusinesslike. Instead of copytyping the thesis of a White Russian émigré, she rewrote it: the office thought that she should have got the doctorate. Eileen tried to educate young “oil rag” and prepare her for university, but the girl’s mother would have none of it.33
Eileen became interested in psychology, sold the agency and entered University College, London in 1934, passing a qualifying examination for the M.A. in Psychology. In 1935–36 she completed the course work for the degree, though she was never to finish her thesis (something to do with measuring imagination in school children, undertaken on the advice of the Professor, Cyril Burt). She also acted as secretary during this time to her brother, a surgeon and chest specialist. A fellow student and her experimental partner (it was the high court of scientific and experimental method, allegedly), John Cohen (later Professor of Psychology at Manchester), remembers her as “rather stiff and austere”, but also bright, argumentative and provocative. Her great concern for her brother’s work was also evident.34
Eileen was socialist in her convictions, but did not belong to any organisations or political parties. Indeed, like her future husband, she distrusted parties even if she was prepared to espouse ideologies. The closest she came to activism was teaching two short courses in Psychology for the Workers’ Educational Association while at University College. In appearance, Eileen was small, dark and fine-boned. No one called her “beautiful” but everyone remembers her as either remarkably “pretty” or “handsome”—even Rayner Heppenstall admitted this, allowed her to be an exception to his dubious generalisation that George only cared for ugly girls. However, Eileen did not care too much how she dressed, usually in shabby and unbrushed but “good” black suits. Cyril Connolly remembered her as “very charming . . . intelligent . . . and she loved him, and she was independent, and although she didn’t wear make-up or anything like that, she was very pretty, and totally worthy of him as a wife; he was very proud of her.”35 Her friends are vehement that she understood people far better than George, and that her range of interests was almost as wide. They were not to be perfect together, but always a good match. She fought his fights and looked after him as well as he would allow—although she was a woman careless of creature comforts herself. She indulged, even enjoyed, his eccentricities. Brenda Salkeld thought well of her, believed her to be the kind of woman George needed. Some of Eileen’s friends, however, were not so sure that George was the right man for her, and were puzzled that such an emancipated and forceful woman was so willing to play second fiddle to what appeared to be a rather self-absorbed and gawky minor novelist.
Eileen gave George a new optimism. So unsure of himself with people, he found it marvellous to be loved by a woman like this who did not nag him to look for a steady job, not try to change his bohemian habits. He is likely to have viewed marriage rather conventionally. Having lived alone for so long, he saw the institution of marriage as partly a surrender of liberty in return for security. He did not think that two “free souls” such as theirs would, in uniting, make a marriage of a unique kind; rather that marriage was a bit of a compromise, forcing the partners to take on many bourgeois conventions.
Perhaps Eileen’s arrival in his life could account for the sudden, strange and rather ambivalent “happy ending” of Gordon Comstock’s odyssey—when he decides to take the soul- or poetry-destroying job in the advertising agency and marry Rosemary. Luckily Orwell did not himself do anything so drastic as look for a full-time job again.
Our civilisation is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras—they lived by the money code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They “kept themselves respectable”—kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do.36
He wanted children very much, more so than Eileen. But he told Heppenstall one thick night three years later, on a rare occasion when his tongue was loosened by trying to keep up with his Alcibiadian companion, that he believed himself to be sterile (which is confirmed, at least his belief is confirmed, by Eileen telling a friend the same thing).37 Precisely why he believed this is unclear. Perhaps it was simply that, as he told a woman friend ten years later, they had tried to have children and failed. But odd that he should shoulder the blame so self-critically: it takes two to make a child.
Some time in September 1935 Orwell was to write to Heppenstall, “You are right about Eileen. She is the nicest person I have met for a long time. However, at present alas! I can’t afford a ring, except perhaps a Woolworth’s one.” And in October he told him that “Eileen says she won’t marry me as yet” until she had finished her course and was earning some money. “Perhaps I shall be earning more next year,” he said vaguely. “On the other hand by next year we may all have been blown sky-high. I was down at Greenwich the other day and looking at the river I thought what wonders a few bombs would work among the shipping.”38
Keep the Aspidistra Flying was nearing completion when he wrote these cheerful words which make Comstock and Orwell sound so very close to each other. The work as a whole is not political, the diatribe against the “money god” is not put in socialist terms but seeks to show the damage done to individual (almost individualist) artistic impulse by both commercialism and sheer lack of money (the two perspectives do not always focus together). But there is a definite recurrent theme which, while it is unrelated to the plot, is an extension of the hero’s “apocalyptic relish”: bombing. Even before the Spanish War many novels and poems worked in the theme of the coming of bombing planes, either in straightforward fear or as a desperate hope for the collapse and purgation of a rotten civilisation, as well as odd bits of Futurist servility to anything metallic, shiny and inhuman.39 But Orwell’s concern with bombing reflects some of the specific concerns of the immediate company he kept. By 1935 Orwell, through friends like Michael Sayers and the Westropes, was being introduced more and more to advanced Left-wing thinking. Mrs Westrope’s younger brother had even introduced him to the abrasive Reg Groves, one of the leading Trotskyites of the Thirties. He might pretend to Brenda Salkeld that he was keeping his distance from these socialists, who would like to see him shot, but Orwell was not convincing, either to her or to Kay, whom he told that “what England needed was to follow the kind of policies in Chesterton’s G. K.’s Weekly” (a kind of anti-capitalist, agrarian “Merrie England” medievalism). Orwell knew that such retreats were impossible precisely because of the likelihood of a new and specific kind of war.
And the reverberations of future wars. Enemy aeroplanes flying over London; the deep threatening hum of the propellers, the shattering thunder of the bombs. [pp. 23–24]
Gordon squinted up at the leaden sky. Those aeroplanes are coming. In imagination he saw them coming now; squadron after squadron, innumerable, darkening the sky like clouds of gnats. With his tongue not quite against his teeth he made a buzzing blue-bottle-on-the-window-pane sound to represent the humming of aeroplanes. It was a sound which, at the moment, he ardently desired to hear. [p. 29]
You can’t look at it without thinking of French letters and machine-guns. Do you know that the other day I was actually wishing war would break out? I was longing for it—praying for it, almost. [p. 106]
The electric drills in our streets presage the rattle of machine guns. Only a little while before the aeroplanes come. Zoom—bang! A few tons of T.N.T. to send our civilisation back to hell where it belongs. [p. 282]
In part this imagery of bombing is no more than, once again, that “this age makes me so sick that sometimes I am almost impelled to stop at a corner and start calling down curses from heaven like Jeremiah ”.40 Indeed, his Burma poem had already called down a violent doom, part retributive and part sadistic, not merely on the Empire but on England herself. The specific images in Keep the Aspidistra Flying not only make a remarkably good prophecy put forward in 1935 of events in 1939–45 but also offer a clear anticipation of some of the precise imagery and the general intensity of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The anti-militarist and pacifist rhetoric in the novel, however, shows the specific kind of discussions going on in the Left-wing circles in which Orwell moved. They all believed, as did many military theorists, that the bombing aeroplane would be utterly, drastically and quickly decisive in any future war. And that from the bombed-out ruins of capitalist civilisation, an organised working-class movement would spontaneously arise (to the I.L.P. aerial war, not mass poverty, would mark the breakdown of capitalism). If a Guernica did not occur quite on that scale, all “thinking people” expected it to happen long before it did. The imagery of bombing gives some measure of how much Orwell in 1935 was already penetrated by one other great political theme of his time, war as well as unemployment and poverty.
The main literary consciousness of the mid-1930s was gradually, under the pressure of external events, in danger of becoming wholly or overly politicised. Some writers felt the need, as when Yeats in his poem “Politics” mocked Thomas Mann, to defend the very existence and irrelevance of poetry (much as Mann himself in the 1920s had defended the “ivory tower” against his brother’s advocacy of descent into the political arena). Jack Common reminisced:
After Down and Out, . . . Orwell was well and truly launched as a novelist. That is he was always well-reviewed and could count on a faithful readership likely to grow. The danger was, this being the Thirties, that [his novels] might come to seem irrelevant. It was typical of the way things were going that The Adelphi, formerly a monthly ivory tower sheltering or gathering together the devotees of truth-beauty, beauty-truth in writing, was now a political lighthouse in which doughty polemicists argued about which way to direct the beam.41
Along with his immersion in cultural and political pessimism (which was as a tendency quite as evident in contemporary literature as “commitment”), Orwell remained positive and tender towards nature and the traditions of the common people—in all, an almost pietistic exaltation in the texture of everyday life, aspidistras and all. He was also brooding on themes that we would now call “environmentalist”, looking back with horror at the suburban sprawl over the countryside around such places as Uxbridge. Apart from one poem, these themes did not appear in print until 1939 in Coming Up For Air. There was a three-year gap until his next novel (indeed last true novel) during which time the subject matter of his writing became dominated (whether against his natural inclination or not) by his moral reaction to political events; but not before.
That August he began to write regularly for The New English Weekly which A. R. Orage had founded in 1932. It is doubtful if Orwell ever met Orage, who died in 1934. It was his successor, Philip Mairet, whom Orwell principally wrote for, two years of a gruelling “Some Recent Novels” column, appearing about once a month. Mairet knew Orwell well. (Orwell only ceased to write for his weekly when, in 1940, it stuck to a pacifist line and Orwell changed to support for the war.) The New English Weekly paid almost nothing, but it was a good way to obtain books. Orwell wrote his column conscientiously, obviously reading all the books carefully. If he was harsh to bad (and especially to pretentious) authors, it was clear that he had suffered in reading their work, not just snatched at the jacket and a few random pages. In December 1935 he made a revealing comment in a brief review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer —it showed the general effect he was trying to achieve in Keep the Aspidistra Flying—“Man is not a Yahoo, but he is rather like a Yahoo and needs to be reminded of it from time to time.”42
He had moved house in August, perhaps to gain more privacy. Grateful though he must have been to Rosalind Obermeyer for introducing him to Eileen, there were difficulties in having his fiancée’s fellow-student as landlady. He was still seeing Kay, who had accepted her secondary role, but perhaps he wanted, nevertheless, to put space between himself and her. But the move was precipitated by Mabel Fierz and Rayner Heppenstall. Rayner had lost his digs because of an intolerant landlady, and rucksack on back had fled to Golders Green and Mabel. She had suggested that the three of them, Heppenstall, Sayers and Orwell, find a flat together—to be her “junior republic”, she said, a joke none of them found very funny. They found a flat at 50 Lawford Road, a working-class area just off Kentish Town High Street, so only twenty minutes away from the bookshop where Orwell continued to work each afternoon. The house was small, a yellow-brick early Victorian terrace house, and their flat of three rooms and a kitchen was on the first floor. On the ground floor there was a tram-driver and his wife, and in the basement a plumber. George took a weekly bath in the public baths, Rayner went up to Mabel’s at weekends for his; and Michael only used the flat for assignations.43
Part of that summer Heppenstall had been away at the first of the Adelphi summer schools at Caerleon, when Middleton Murry, then in mystical Marxist or Christian-Socialist phase,* decided that a “fellowship” should be founded; and then Heppenstall went to stay with Middleton Murry in Norfolk. George had been driven over to Norfolk from Southwold by his sister Avril (the Blairs could run a small motor-car), and had taken Brenda Salkeld for the ride. Almost as soon as Rayner returned to London that August the thought took him to become a Catholic. He actually went to Oxford for instruction under Father D’Arcy . He soon gave it up. Michael Sayers, as the winds blew him, either veered towards or away from the Communist Party. They made a most unlikely pair of flat-mates for a man who was already anti-Catholic and anti-Communist. The presence of Rayner and Michael may prove that friendship knows no barriers, or on the other hand it may have been a sign of his slow ferment in trying to place himself politically and morally. The three of them got on, at first, reasonably well. Heppenstall later admitted that they rather exploited “old Eric”. The rent-book was in Orwell’s name and Michael was forgetful about the rent, though he always paid up in the end; but Rayner often had no money by the end of the week. George was first up each morning. He had a certain dignity and formality: unlike Rayner, he would not attempt any serious writing while unshaven and in his dressing-gown. It was George who cooked breakfast, washed up, did most of the cooking; and Rayner stretched himself to fetch the beer for dinner each evening in a jug from the Duke of Cambridge pub on the corner. He and Michael did not seem to take George too seriously; they continued to think of him as “a nice old thing”. He was ten years older, indeed, than Sayers and eight than Heppenstall. His time-out in Burma had made him older than most of the young writers still leading this kind of “floating life”; but it also gave him an emotional detachment from them and immunised him from fashion.
Eileen came to see George on Sundays, and George and she would head off by train or Green Line bus for walks in the country. On one such Sunday they set off for Epsom, George carrying a shooting-stick. Rayner himself (he later wrote in self-deprecatory comic vein) went to the Ballet Club at Notting Hill Gate. The business manager was aware of his over-attentiveness to one of the girls and had been told off to ply him with whisky to divert his attention until the girl had had a chance to dress and depart. On his way home to Kentish Town, Rayner passed out twice and made the final ascent up the stairs on his hands and knees. Orwell was waiting up for him.
“. . . . Bit thick you know . . . This time of night . . . Wake up the whole street. . . . I can put up with a lot . . . A bit of consideration. . . . After all. . . .” All exemplary sentiments, but somehow at the time they seemed inappropriate.
“Eric,” I said, “do shut up and go away.”
“. . . . Time of night. . . . Put up with a lot. . . . Bit thick . . . the neighbours. . . . I do think. . . .”
“Eric,” I said, “go away. If you don’t go away, I shall hit you.”44
Eric did not go away. Rayner swung at him feebly and relates that he came to ten minutes later on the floor with a bloodied nose. Unable to clean the blood off his floor, he crawled into the absent Michael’s room and bed. Orwell then locked him in. Rayner started to kick the door; and when Orwell opened it, Rayner saw that he was armed with his shooting stick.
I pushed it [the stick] aside and sprang at him. He fetched me a dreadful crack across the legs and then raised the shooting-stick over his head. I looked at his face. Through my private mist I saw in it a curious blend of fear and sadistic exaltation. I moved sideways, caught up Michael’s chair. I had raised it sufficiently to receive on it the first crash of the descending metal-fitted stick.45
“Sadistic exaltation” is, of course, meant to demolish more of Orwell’s achievements than his lack of Adelphi Quaker-Marxist virtues in dealing with a difficult friend. Heppenstall was not alone in pointing to this dark side of Orwell’s character, even if he may have exaggerated it. The account written some twenty years later raises the same kind of problems as Orwell’s own autobiographical writings. The incident certainly occurred, as Mabel Fierz confirms, to whom the battered Rayner retreated the next morning—but she puts it down simply to his “silly behaviour”.46 It is more reasonable to infer from it that when Heppenstall wrote this account, he had come to think that Orwell’s writings were grossly overestimated or that he intended his account to be a symbolic criticism of Orwell’s character, rather than to believe that he saw the incident in just such terms at the time.
The “junior republic” broke up, but Orwell and Heppenstall met again, perfectly amicably, the following summer when Orwell went to lecture at Middleton Murry’s new Adelphi centre in Essex. Heppenstall took the chair for him. They retired afterwards to a pub together, “with perfect contentment”, for Rayner to tell George personal news of an old friend of Hampstead days, days already behind them both. Orwell was by then married, settled in the country, and had returned from a crucial journey. They remained friends, albeit not close friends, and Rayner Heppenstall was a constant visitor in the last days. “His friendships were constant, but seldom close,” as Cyril Connolly remarked.47
* The mention of Sean O’Casey’s name was to give Gollancz an idea. He sent him a proof copy asking him for a puff for the jacket—a tactic V. G. so often pursued. He must have said something about the Trafalgar Square scene being in the manner of Joyce, for O’Casey replied that “Orwell had as much chance of reaching the stature of Joyce as a tit has of reaching that of an eagle.” And for fair measure he says that he called it “a bastard ballet of lamentation”; but by the time he wrote that (in Sunset and Evening Star, London, 1954, pp. 133-35), he was working off old scores against Orwell from a book review. (Orwell, to complete the tale, had reviewed his Drums Under the Windows in 1945: “W. B. Yeats once said that a dog does not praise its fleas, but this is somewhat contradicted by the special status enjoyed in this country by Irish nationalist writers … the basic reason is probably England’s bad conscience. It is difficult to object to Irish nationalism without seeming to condone centuries of English tyranny and exploitation…. So literary judgment is perverted by political symnpathy and Mr O’Casey and others like him are able to remain almost immune from criticism”—almost. (The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. IV, pp. 13–15)).
* Michael Sayer’s attitude emerges in this sting in the tail of his double review of Burmese Days and A Clergyman’s Daughter. “One feels he has ideas about the novel, and that his future work is going to be unusually interesting. At present Mr Orwell seems to be most concerned with presenting his material in the clearest and honestest way. Being a man of considerable and diverse experience this problem naturally comes to him before any aesthetic consideration… .”(The Adelphi, August 1935, p. 316).
* Denys King-Farlow said to the editors of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters that Orwell had told him that “Without Connolly’s help I don’t think I would have got started as a writer when I came back from Burma.” (Vol. I, p. 162) But King-Farlow’s memory must have been at fault. On Connolly’s own testimony, they did not meet until 1935 when Orwell already had two books out, a good publisher, a small reputation and a known character.
* Her pen name was Elizaveta Fen. She was born in Russia in 1899, coming to England in 1925 and meeting Eileen at University College, London in 1934. She remained a close friend of them both.
* Murry had concluded a few years before that Marx was essentially a religious teacher: “… . Communism is the enemy of all ‘religions’, because it is itself the one religion” (The Necessity of Communism, [Cape, 1932], p. 111, a book that Orwell almost certainly had read). “Murry believed in a change of heart,” wrote Rayner Heppenstall long afterwards: “He believed in the class war, but insisted that it should be waged without hatred.” (Four Absentees [Barrie Rockcliff, 1960] p. 33).