1934 – 1938

This was a productive period for Orwell. Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and The Road to Wigan Pier were published and, although Orwell dismissed the second and third of these as potboilers which he did not wish to see reprinted unless they would bring in his heirs a shilling or two, they are not wholly unrewarding. His experiences in the ‘Distressed Areas’ – he travelled around far more than solely to Wigan, of course – and in Spain were formative both to his character and outlook, social and political. He also contributed reviews and essays to literary journals, notably ‘Shooting an Elephant’, which says as much about the decline of the Raj as the collapse of an elephant.

Having delivered the typescript of The Road to Wigan Pier to Victor Gollancz just before Christmas Day 1936, he made his own way to Spain to fight for the Government against Franco. He had intended to join the International Brigade but, as he told Gollancz, partly by accident he enrolled in the POUM – the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista. This he described as ‘one of those dissident Communist parties which have appeared in many countries in the last few years as a result of the opposition to “Stalinism”; i.e. to the change, real or apparent, in Communist policy. It was made up partly of ex-Communists and partly of an earlier party, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc. Numerically it was small, with not much influence outside Catalonia … [where] its strongold was Lérida’ (Homage to Catalonia, pp. 202–3). He would probably not have joined had he known that, long before he left England, the Soviet Communists were determined to eliminate it. In October 1936, Victor Orlov, head of the NKVD in Spain, assured his Headquarters that ‘the Trotskyist organization POUM can easily be liquidated’ (Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive (1996), p. 95). Thus the description of Orwell and Eileen as ‘trotzquistas pronunciados’ (confirmed Trotskyists) in the Report on them to the Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason in Valencia (a document Orwell knew nothing about) was to damn them utterly. Had they been in Spain at the time of the trial of such colleagues as Jordi Arquer* it could have led to their imprisonment or even execution.

Orwell was on leave in Barcelona during ‘the May Events’ when the Communists attempted to eliminate the revolutionary parties (including the POUM). He returned to the Huesca front and, on 20 May 1937, he was shot through the throat. He and Eileen escaped from Spain and they returned to their Wallington Cottage where Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia. In March 1938 he was taken seriously ill with a tubercular lesion and spent over five months in Preston Hall Sanatorium, Kent. On 2 September, he and Eileen left for French Morocco, believing it would restore him to health.

From Orwell’s letter to his mother, 2 December 1911

To Brenda Salkeld*

Tuesday night [late August? 1934]

36 High St

Southwold, Suffolk

Dearest Brenda

Many thanks for your letter. I hope you are enjoying yourself more in Ireland than I am in England. When are you coming back? I am going up to town as soon as I have finished the book I am doing,1 which should be at the end of October. I haven’t settled yet where I am going to stay, but somewhere in the slums for choice. A friend wrote offering me the lease of part of a flat in Bayswater, but it would choke me to live in Bayswater. No, I have never seen a tortoise drinking. Darwin mentions that when he was in the Galapagos Is. the big tortoises there which lived on cactuses & things on the higher ground used to come down into the valley once or twice in the year to drink, & the journey took them a day or two. They stored water in a kind of sack in their bellies.² I have been reading some books by Lafcadio Hearn— tiresome stuff, & he idolises the Japanese, who always seem to me such a boring people.³ I also tried to read Lord Riddell’s diary of the Peace Conference & After.⁴ What tripe! It is amazing how some people can have the most interesting experiences & then have absolutely nothing to say about them. I went to the pictures last week and saw Jack Hulbert in Jack Ahoy which I thought very amusing, & a week or two before that there was quite a good crook film, which, however, my father ruined for me by insisting on telling me the plot beforehand. This week The Constant Nymph is on. I haven’t been to it, of course, but even when I see the posters it makes me go hot all over to think that in my youth—I think I must have been about 23 when it was published in book form—I was affected by it almost to tears O mihi praeteritos etc.⁵ I should think that any critic who lives to a great age must have many passages in his youth that he would willingly keep dark. There must be, for instance, many critics who in the ’nineties went all mushy over Hall Caine or even Marie Corelli—though M.C. isn’t so absolutely bad, judging by the only book of hers I ever read. It was called Thelma & there was a very licentious clergyman in it who wasn’t half bad. Did you, by the way, give me back those books of Swift? It doesn’t matter, only I don’t want to lose them. Yes, Roughing It.6 does ‘date’ a bit, but not enough—because anything worth reading always ‘dates.’ Do come back soon. I am so miserable all alone. I have practically no friends here now, because now that Dennis & Eleanor are married & Dennis has gone to Singapore,⁷ it has deprived me of two friends at a single stroke. Everything is going badly. My novel about Burma made me spew when I saw it in print, & I would have rewritten large chunks of it, only that costs money and means delay as well. As for the novel I am now completing, it makes me spew even worse, & yet there are some decent passages in it. I don’t know how it is, I can write decent passages but I can’t put them together. I was rather pluming myself on having a poem⁸ in the Best Poems of 1934, but I now learn that there are several dozen of these anthologies of the so called best poems of the year, & Ruth Pitter⁹ writes to tell me that she is in 4 of this year’s batch, including one called Twenty Deathless Poems. We are getting delicious French beans from the garden, but I am concerned about the pumpkin, which shows signs of ripening though it is not much bigger than an orange. All my fruit has been stolen by the children next door, as I forsaw° it would. The little beasts were in such a hurry to get it that they didn’t even wait till it was half ripe, but took the pears when they were mere chunks of wood. Another time I must try a dodge Dr Collings told me, which is to paint a mixture of vaseline & some indelible dye, I forget what, on a few of the fruit that are likely to be taken first & then you can spot who has taken it by the stains on their hands. The town is very full & camps of Girl Guides etc. infesting all the commons. I nearly died of cold the other day when bathing, because I had walked out to Easton Broad not intending to bathe, & then the water looked so nice that I took off my clothes & went in, & then about 50 people came up & rooted themselves to the spot. I wouldn’t have minded that, but among them was a coastguard who could have had me up for bathing naked, so I had to swim up & down for the best part of half an hour, pretending to like it. Do come back soon, dearest one. Can’t you come & stay with somebody before the term begins? It is sickening that I have to go away just after you come back. Write soon.

With much love

Eric

[X, 204, pp. 346–8; handwritten]

1. A Clergyman’s Daughter.

2. Orwell had recommended Brenda read The Voyage of the Beagle some eighteen months earlier. His dramatised account of the voyage was broadcast by the BBC on 29 March 1946 (XVIII, 2953, pp. 179–201).

3. Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), writer and translator. Born at Levkás in the Ionian Islands. Lived in the USA, 1869–90, then in Japan, where he became a citizen. Served with distinction as Professor of English at Imperial University, Tokyo. Wrote several books on Japanese life and culture. Three of his ghost stories were made into the Japanese film, Kwaidon, 1965.

4. George Riddell (1865–1934; cr. Baron 1920), Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and After, 1918–23 (1934). He owned, among other newspapers, the News of the World.

5. O mihi praeteritos referat si Iuppiter ^o annos: ‘O would Jupiter restore me the years that are fled!’, Virgil, Aeneid, viii, 560.

6. By Mark Twain (1872): it describes the author’s experiences with silver miners in Nevada a decade earlier. An unsigned review in Overland Monthly, June 1872, said its humour was such that it ‘should have a place in every sick-room, and be the invalid’s chosen companion’.

7. Dennis Collings and Eleanor Jaques married in 1934; he had been made assistant curator at the Raffles Museum in Singapore.

8. ‘On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory (X, 196, pp. 338–9).

9. Ruth Pitter, CBE (1897–1992) had known Orwell since World War I, and he had stayed in her house from time to time in 1930. He later reviewed two of her books of poetry. In 1937 she won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and in 1955 was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. Her Collected Poems appeared in 1991. She ran the Walberswick Peasant Pottery Co. Ltd in the 1930s, illustrated in Thompson, p. 23.

To Brenda Salkeld*

Wed. night [early September? 1934]

36 High St

Southwold

Dearest Brenda

As you complain about the gloominess of my letters, I suppose I must try and put on what Mr Micawber called the hollow mask of mirth, but I assure you it is not easy, with the life I have been leading lately. My novel1 instead of going forwards, goes backwards with the most alarming speed. There are whole wads of it that are so awful that I really don’t know what to do with them. And to add to my other joys, the fair, or part of it, has come back and established itself on the common just beyond the cinema, so that I have to work to the accompaniment of roundabout music that goes on till the small hours. You may think that this is red ink I am writing in, but really it is some of the bloody sweat that has been collecting round me in pools for the last few days. I am glad to hear you enjoyed yourself in the peninsular, as you are pleased to call it. I shall send this to the London address you gave me, hoping they will keep it for you. The garden isn’t doing badly. We had so many cauliflowers that we couldn’t eat them up fast enough, so about twenty have run to seed. I have one marrow—the eighth so far—that is almost Harvest Festival size, and I am letting it get ripe to make jam out of. I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time.2 I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever. I also bought for a shilling a year’s issue of a weekly paper of 1851, which is not uninteresting. They ran among other things a matrimonial agency, and the correspondence relating to this is well worth reading. ‘Flora is twenty one, tall, with rich chestnut hair and a silvery laugh, and makes excellent light pastry. She would like to enter into correspondence with a professional gentleman between the ages of twenty and thirty, preferably with auburn whiskers and of the Established Church.’ The interesting thing to me is that these people, since they try to get married through a matrimonial agency, have evidently failed many times elsewhere, and yet as soon as they advertise in this paper, they get half a dozen offers. The women’s descriptions of themselves are always most flattering, and I must say that some of the cases make me distinctly suspicious—for of course that was the great age of fortune-hunting. You remember that beautiful case in Our Mutual Friend, where both parties worked the same dodge on each other. I wish you could come back here. However, if you can’t it can’t be helped. I could not possibly have come to Haslemere. I most particularly want to get this novel done by the end of September, and every day makes a difference. I know it sounds silly to make such a fuss for so little result, but I find that anything like changing my lodging upsets my work for a week or so. When I said that I was going to stay in a slummy part of London I did not mean that I am going to live in a common lodging house or anything like that. I only meant that I didn’t want to live in a respectable quarter, because they make me sick, besides being more expensive. I dare say I shall stay in Islington. It is maddening that you cannot get unfurnished rooms in London, but I know by experience that you can’t, though of course you can get a flat or some horrible thing called a maisonette. 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 or Ezra or somebody — ‘Woe upon thee, O Israel, for thy adulteries with the Egyptians’ etc etc. The hedgehogs keep coming into the house, and last night we found in the bathroom a little tiny hedgehog no bigger than an orange. The only thing I could think was that it was a baby of one of the others, though it was fully formed—I mean, it had its prickles. Write again soon. You don’t know how it cheers me up when I see one of your letters waiting for me.

With love

Eric

[X, 205, pp. 348–9; typewritten in red]

1. A Clergyman’s Daughter.

2. Ulysses, which was printed in Paris, was liable to be seized by Customs & Excise.

To Brenda Salkeld*

Tuesday night [11? September 1934]

36 High St

Southwold

Dearest Brenda,

Many thanks for your letter. I am so glad to hear you have been having such an interesting time, and only wish I could reciprocate, but the most exciting things I have been doing are to plant out cabbages and make hurried trips into Lowestoft and Norwich in search of bulbs. Last time we were in Lowestoft we saw some Jews selling alarm clocks at sixpence each! Even if they had gone for a month you would have fairly good value for your money. My novel is due to come out in New York tomorrow—I don’t know that it actually will, but that is the day it is scheduled for.¹ Please pray for its success, by which I mean not less than 4000 copies. I understand that the prayers of clergyman’s° daughters get special attention in Heaven, at any rate in the Protestant quarter. I suppose I shall get some copies in about 10 days and some reviews in about 10 days after that. I hope they haven’t put quite such a bloody jacket on it as they did last time. I hope to finish the other one² about the end of the month, and then I must sit down and plan out my next before going up to London. I am pleased with parts of this one I am doing, and other parts make me spew. I don’t believe anyone will publish it or if they do it won’t sell, because it is too fragmentary and has no love-interest. When exactly are you coming back to Southwold? Be sure and let me know so that I can keep Sunday free for you, and please don’t go and tie yourself up with engagements for the whole of the first fortnight so that I never get a chance to see you. I have just been reading Huc’s Travels in Tartary and Thibet,³ which I can reccommend.° The garden is now looking very bare, as we have taken nearly everything up, but we are putting in bulbs etc. I have started taking snuff, which is very nice and useful in places where you can’t smoke. Please write soon and let me know when you are coming. Don’t forget what you are to tell me when you come back.

With much love

Eric

P.S. Don’t forget to bring back my Roughing It,4 will you? I want it to look up some quotes.

[X, 207, pp. 350–1; typewritten]

1. Burmese Days was not published until 25 October 1934.

2. Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

3. Published in French 1850 and in English in 1851, by the French missionary Abbé Évariste Régis Huc (1813–60).

4. See letter to Brenda Salkeld, late August 1934.

The following is one of twenty letters and postcards exchanged between Orwell and René-Noël Raimbault regarding the translation of Down and Out in Paris and London into French. Three more will be found at 29.11.34, 3.1.35, and 22.12.35. All but two of the letters are in French. English translation only is provided here. The sequence gives a fascinating insight into Orwell’s approach to his writing and into his translator’s concerns and reactions to Orwell’s writing (for example his contrast between a novel he has just translated and Orwell’s Burmese Days). The letters not reproduced here and the French originals will be found in The Lost Orwell.

To R. N. Raimbault*

9 October 1934

36 High Street

Southwold, Suffolk

Angleterre

Cher Monsieur Rimbault,^o

I will reply to you in French, hoping that you will forgive my grammatical errors.

It has been a few years since I lived in France and although I tend to read French books I am not able to write your language very accurately. When I was in Paris people always said to me ‘You don’t talk too badly for an Englishman, but you have a fantastic accent’. Unfortunately I have only kept the accent. But I will do my best.

I give below answers to the questions you asked me, and of the dashes on page 239, which represent words which it is forbidden to print in England, but which will not cause, we can hope, any scandal in France. As for the preface, I will be very happy to write it – in English of course – and will send it to you in ten or fifteen days’ time. I am unable to finish it any earlier because I am about to go to London and I will be very busy during the next week.

I am sending you at the same time as this a copy of Down and Out, which I have signed with my pen name, ‘George Orwell’. This is a copy of the American edition. I don’t have a copy of the English edition and given that the book was published eighteen months ago, it would probably be impossible to obtain one without some delay. When the French version is published, I shall, of course, send you a copy.

You must have faced many difficulties in translating a book such as Down and Out and it is very kind of you to propose a translation of my next novel. It is called Burmese Days, and it is about to be published by Harper’s in New York. It is a novel which deals with the lives of the English in Burma (in India) and it is being published in New York because my publisher (Gollancz) would not dare publish it in England owing to the observations I made regarding English imperialism. I hope, however, to find an English publisher soon who has more courage. It doesn’t seem very likely that such a book would interest the French public, but in any case I will tell my literary agent to let you see a copy as soon as we receive some from New York. You will be able to judge for yourself whether a translation might have any success in France.1 By the way, you told me that Mr. André Malraux wrote the preface to a book by William Faulkner that you had translated. If I am not mistaken, Mr. Malraux wrote novels which deal with China, India etc. In this case it is possible that Burmese Days would interest him and if he would also be so kind as to write a preface for me, that would without doubt ensure the success of a book that bore the name of such a distinguished writer.² But you will be able to judge better after having seen a copy of Burmese Days.

In conclusion, it only remains for me to thank you for the great service you have done me by translating my book into French and to hope that, when the book is published, you will receive recompense appropriate to your efforts. I also hope that in writing in French I have not imposed on you an even worse translation task than the other!

Recevez, cher Monsieur, l’expression de mes meillieurs sentiments.

Eric Blair (‘George Orwell’)

For Orwell’s notes the identical paginations of Complete Works I and the Penguin Twentieth-Century editions are given within square brackets after each reference.

Page 228 [170, line 7]: ‘…tum – a thing to make one shudder’ etc. In Hindustani 3 there are two words for ‘you’ – ‘ap’ and ‘tum.’ ‘Ap’ is the more respectful word. ‘Tum’ is only used between close friends or from a superior to an inferior. To say ‘tum’ is nearly the same thing as addressing someone by ‘tu’. An Englishman in India would therefore be very angry if a Hindu addressed him with ‘tum.’

Page 159 [118, 4 lines up] and 240–241 [179, 6 lines up]: ‘Bahinchut’ etc. ‘Bahinchut’ is a Hindustani word that one should never address to a Hindu but which, unfortunately, one uses rather often. It is quite difficult to translate. ‘Bahin’ means ‘sister’ and ‘chut’ means the sexual organ. By saying ‘Bahinchut’ to a man, you are saying ‘I am very familiar with the sexual organs of your sister’ – in other words, I have slept with her. One would perhaps be able to translate ‘bahinchut’ as ‘brother-in-law.’ The English soldiers brought this word home from India in the form ‘barnshoot’, which has been accepted as quite an innocent word in England.

Pages 238–239 [178, lines 12–13]: ‘The current London adjective’ etc. This adjective is ‘fucking.’ ‘Fuck’ means ‘to fuck,’ and ‘fucking’ is the present participle.

Page 239, line 19 [178, lines 27–28]: ‘For example -----.’ The word is ‘fuck.’ The English no longer use this word in the sense of ‘fornicating,’ which was its original meaning, but simply as an expletive.

Page 239, line 23 [178, line 31]: ‘Similarly with----.’ The word is ‘bugger’.

Page 239 line 25 [179, lines 1–2]: ‘One can think etc.’ These words are ‘fuck’ and ‘bugger.’ ‘Fuck’ which takes its origin from the Latin ‘futuo’ originally meant ‘to fornicate,’ but workers use it as a simple expletive in such expressions as ‘I will fuck the lot of them,’ ‘we’re fucked’ etc. etc. The word ‘bougre’ is the same as ‘bugger,’ both being derived from ‘Bulgare’ or ‘Bulgar,’ because in the sixteenth century the Bulgarians, or even the Cathars, were suspected of practising sins against nature. But although the Parisian workers sometimes use the word ‘bugger,’ they do not know, according to my observation, what it originally meant.

Page 256 [191, 4 lines up]: ‘The one bite law.’ According to the English law, if a dog bites two men, its owner is obliged to kill it. The first time the dog is forgiven. This is where the expression ‘one bite law’ comes from.

Page 259 [194, line 7]: ‘Bull shit’ is an expression which means bulls’ excrement. A man says to another ‘you are talking bull shit;’ in other words, ‘You are talking nonsense.’ It is a very impolite expression

[LO, pp. 8–13; X, 210A, p. 353; typewritten]

1. Burmese Days was published in France by Nagel, Paris, as Tragédie Birmane on 31 August 1946. The translation was made by Guillot de Saix. Orwell was paid a royalty of £5 17s 9d on 29 September 1945.

2. André Malraux (1901–76). Novelist and leftist intellectual. He left Paris for Indochina and China when he was 21 and became involved with the revolutionary movements then stirring. Founding the Young Annam League, he later travelled to Afghanistan and Iran and returned to Indochina in 1926. His experiences led to the novels, Les Conquérants (1928), La Voie royale (1930), and then, and most successfully, La Condition humaine (1933). He did not write an introduction for Down and Out, nor for Burmese Days. It was later suggested that he might write a preface to Homage to Catalonia but, despite his having served in Spain, did not do so, perhaps because he moved to the Right, later becoming Minister of Information and then of Culture in General de Gaulle’s government after the war. From 1928 he was a member of Gallimard’s Reading Committee and, from 1929, its Artistic Director.

3. Orwell had passed Indian Police examinations in Hindi, Burmese and Shaw-Karen.

To Leonard Moore*

14 November 1934

3 Warwick Mansions

Pond St

Hampstead NW3

Dear Mr Moore,

Many thanks for your letter—I hope you can read my handwriting—I have left my typewriter down in the shop.

I knew there would be trouble over that novel.1 However, I am anxious to get it published, as there are parts of it I was pleased with, & I dare say that if I had indicated to me the sort of changes that Mr Gollancz wants, I could manage it. I am willing to admit that the part about the school, which is what seems to have roused people’s incredulity, is overdrawn, but not nearly so much so as people think. In fact I was rather amused to see that they say ‘all that was done away with 30 or 40 years ago’ etc, as one always hears that any particularly crying abuse was ‘done away with 30 or 40 years ago.’ As to this part, it is possible that if Mr Gollancz agrees, a little ‘toning down’ might meet the bill. I dont° want to bother you with details about this, however.

As to the points about libel, swearwords etc., they are a very small matter & could be put right by a few strokes of the pen. The book does, however, contain an inherent fault of structure² which I will discuss with Mr Gollancz, & this could not be rectified in any way that I can think of. I was aware of it when I wrote the book, & imagined that it did not matter, because I did not intend it to be so realistic as people seem to think it is.

I wonder if you could be kind enough to arrange an interview for me with Mr Gollancz?3 I should think it would take quite an hour to talk over the various points, if he can spare me that much time. I don’t particularly mind what day or time I see him, so long as I know a day beforehand so as to let them know at the shop.

I have seen one review of Burmese Days in the Herald Tribune. Rather a bad one, I am sorry to say—however, big headlines, which I suppose is what counts.

Yours sincerely

Eric A Blair

P.S. [at top of letter] If you should have occasion to ring up about the interview, my number is Hampstead 2153.⁴

[X, 215, p. 358.; handwritten]

1. Orwell had sent the manuscript of A Clergyman’s Daughter to Moore on 3 October. Victor Gollancz must have read it quickly for on 9 November he wrote to Moore about his reservations. On 13 November Moore wrote to Gollancz to tell him that ‘in view of what you say I think you may like to know that when sending the manuscript to me the author pointed out that “in case the point should come up, the school described in chapter IV is totally imaginary, though of course I have drawn on my general knowledge of what goes on in schools of that type.”’ Moore must have sent Orwell details of this and other objections to the novel; this letter is Orwell’s response. For problems posed by A Clergyman’s Daughter, see III, Textual Note and Crick, pp. 256–8.

2. This may refer to Dorothy’s sudden loss of memory, which is implicitly a belated result of Warburton’s assault on her (p. 41), leading to her finding herself in the New Kent Road, London (Chapter 2). Rape was a taboo subject in the 1930s. The long section about the school where Dorothy taught would have caused Gollancz anxiety because he had published a fictional account of a school in Kensington in Rosalind Wade’s Children Be Happy which had led to a libel action. (See 26.4.32, n. 3.)

3. Annotated in Moore’s office: ‘3.30 Geo Orwell,’ presumably for 19 November 1934.

4. The telephone number of Booklovers’ Corner (see 20.11.34, n. 1).

To Leonard Moore*

20 November 1934

Booklovers’ Corner

1 South End Road

Hampstead NW 3¹

Dear Mr Moore,

Thanks for your letter. I had a talk with Gollancz yesterday, & we decided that it lay between cutting out or ‘toning down’ the part objected to. The former would be easier, but it would I think make the ending of the book too abrupt, so I am going to rewrite that chapter, which will take about a month. I told Gollancz I would send it to him direct.

I am glad M. Raimbault likes Burmese Days. No, I shouldn’t think it would be much use trying it elsewhere. I did, however, hear that Wishart (a publisher I had never heard of)² will publish books that other people are afraid of. No pressing°-cuttings yet from New York, I suppose?³

Yours sincerely

Eric A Blair

[X, 216, p. 359; handwritten]

1. This is written on paper with a printed letterhead. It gives the telephone number (Hampstead 2153), and ‘Francis G. Westrope, Bookseller, &c.’ with a framed line drawing captioned ‘South End Green in 1833, now the Tram Terminus.’

2. Lawrence & Wishart is still active. Ernest Edward Wishart (1902–1987) founded the publishing house of Wishart & Co shortly after completing a degree in history and law at Cambridge. He published Nancy Cunard’s Negro and books by Geoffrey Gorer, Roy Campbell, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell; from 1925 to 1927 Wishart published The Calendar of Modern Letters, edited by Edgell Rickword. Despite his Marxist sympathies, Wishart refused to join the Communist Party. In 1935 he merged with Martin Lawrence. They published the complete works of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

3. Annotated in Moore’s office: ‘Some have crossed this letter.’

To R. N. Raimbault*

29 November 1934

3 Warwick Mansions

Hampstead NW [3]

Cher Monsieur Raimbault,

I would have replied earlier to your very kind letter, but I have had a terrible cold for a few days, thanks to the poor weather that we have had recently. The fog was sometimes so thick that you could not see from one side of the road to the other. Princess Marina,1 who has just arrived to marry Prince George, must have a very bad impression of the weather of her adopted country. But now, thankfully, it is a bit better, and I feel well enough to write letters.

I was, as you can believe, very flattered by your opinion of Burmese Days. Let’s hope that Mr Malraux will be of the same opinion. Regarding La Vache Enragée,² if Mr Francis Carco agrees to write an introduction, I shall, naturally, be extremely grateful. When you told me that you had translated William Faulkner’s books, I thought you must be ‘the nonpareil,’ among translators, as Shakespeare put it.³ Personally, I cannot imagine a more difficult author for a foreigner to translate; but of course, his style, however complicated, is truly distinguished. It seems likely to me that after a century, or even fifty years, English and American will no longer be the same language⁴ – which will be a shame because the Australians and Canadians etc. will probably prefer to follow the Americans.

Having thanked you for your letter, what I should like to do is ask if you would be interested in seeing an article on Mr Malraux which appeared two months ago in the Adelphi (a monthly journal to which I contribute now and again). I can send you a copy without any difficulty. Also, the other day whilst I was looking through my books I found by chance a collection, Nursery Rhymes, and the idea came to me that it might interest you, assuming you don’t already possess such a collection. Nursery Rhymes are usually total nonsense, but they are so well known in England that they are quoted almost unconsciously when writing and they have exerted a big influence on some modern poets such as Robert Graves and T. S. Eliot.⁵ If you think that the book would interest you, I will be very happy to send it to you.

If you have occasion to write to me, my address will be as above. At the moment I am working in a bookshop. It is a job that suits me much better than teaching.⁶ Veuillez agréer, Monsieur, l’expression de mes meilleurs sentiments.

Eric A Blair

[LO, pp.22–4; X, 216B, p. 359; typewritten]

1. Princess Marina of Greece married Prince George, Duke of Kent, on 29 November 1934. She proved with the public a gracious and very popular member of the Royal Family.

2. The title of the French translation of Down and Out. (See 22.12.35, n. 2.)

3. Shakespeare uses the word ‘nonpareil’ in five plays: Twelfth Night, 1.5.254; Macbeth, 3.4.18; Antony and Cleopatra, 3.2.11; Cymbeline, 2.5.8; and The Tempest, 3.2.100. The play to which Orwell refers is unclear. In three the reference is to a woman who is, as in Twelfth Night, ‘the nonpareil of beauty’. Macbeth refers to one of the murderers as a nonpareil and Enobarbus so describes Caesar.

4. For English adopting American practices, see Orwell’s complaint of the use in English of ‘the American habit of tying an unnecessary preposition on to every verb’ (XVII, 2609, p. 31).

5. Orwell continued to be interested in nursery rhymes and fairy tales. His dramatisation of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ was broadcast in the BBC’s Children’s Hour programme on 9 July 1946. Writing to Rayner Heppenstall* on 25 January 1947 he described Cinderella as ‘the tops so far as fairy stories go’ (XIX, 3163, p. 32). And, of course, Animal Farm is subtitled by Orwell, ‘A Fairy Story’.

6. Orwell had taught at Frays College, Uxbridge, Middlesex until December 1933, when he developed pneumonia. He then gave up teaching.

To R. N. Raimbault*

3 January 1935

3 Warwick Mansions

Hampstead NW 3

Dear Monsieur Raimbault,

I wonder if you will forgive my writing in English this time, as I want to make sure that I do not make any misstatements?

Before anything else, I want to thank you very much for making such an extraordinarily good job of the translation of Down and Out. Without flattering you I can truthfully say that I am not only delighted but also greatly astonished to see how good it seems when translated. As to the Paris part, I honestly think it is better in French than in English, and I am delighted with the way you have done the conversations. Allowing for the fact that there are, naturally, a good many slang words that I don’t know, that is exactly how I imagined the characters talking. Let’s hope that the book will have a success proportionate to your efforts, and that we shan’t get into too much trouble with the hotel fraternity – for we must expect at any rate some trouble from them, I am afraid. If I am challenged to fight a duel by any hotel proprietor, perhaps you will second me.¹

I have been through the proofs with great care and have made my corrections in pencil, as you asked. I have made alterations or suggestions [references omitted here]. As to the quarrel between the stevedore and the old age pensioner, I enclose herewith a copy of it with the blanks filled in and the words explained.2 You will be able to use your judgement if you wish to rewrite that speech. In the one or two instances where I have written in the margin ‘it would be better to write so and so,’ I mean, of course, ‘something to that effect,’ as I know that what I suggest is not likely to be in perfect French. I have made my proof-corrections, by the way, in French. I hope you will be able to read and understand them.

I spoke to my agent, Mr Moore, about handing over the Italian rights of Down and Out and Burmese Days. He says that Mr. Amato may certainly have the Italian rights, only, in case of his finding any publisher willing to commission their translation into Italian, will he please communicate with Messrs. Christy and Moore Literary Agents 222 Strand London W.C. By the terms of my contract with him, I have to make all business arrangements through Mr Moore.

Thanking you again, and wishing all success to the book when it appears, I am

Yours very sincerely

Eric A Blair

P. S. I will send the proofs under a separate cover.

[LO, pp. 38–40; X, 221C, p. 367; typewritten
with handwritten PS at head of letter]

1. Orwell was taken to task by M. Umberto Possenti, of the Hotel Splendide, 105 Piccadilly, London, in a letter to The Times (X, 159, pp. 301–2).

2. This does not appear to have survived. However, the French edition has a number of abusive readings which can be found in I, p. 226 at 138/11–16.

To Victor Gollancz [Ltd?]*

10 January 1935

3 Warwick Mansions

Hampstead NW 3

Dear Sir,

I am returning the MS. of A Clergyman’s Daughter herewith. I think there is now nothing in it that could possibly be made the subject of an action for libel. None of the characters are intended as portraits of living individuals, nor are any of the names those of actual persons known to me. As to the localities described, they are imaginary. ‘Knype Hill’ is an imaginary name and so far as I know no place of that name exists; in the story it is mentioned as being in Suffolk, but that is all. In the hop-picking part (chapter 2) there is nothing whatever to indicate an exact locality. In Chapter 4 Southbridge is described as a suburb ten or a dozen miles of° London, but there is now nothing to show which side of London it was. As to the reference to a shop called ‘Knockout Trousers Ltd.’ in Chapter 2, so far as I know there is no shop of any such name, and the house mentioned in the same part as being a refuge of prostitutes is again totally imaginary. It is stated to be somewhere off Lambeth Cut. Lambeth Cut is a longish street, but if this is still considered dangerous, I can easily change Lambeth Cut to a fictitious street in the proof. I enclose a note on the alterations, together with Mr Rubinstein’s letter, herewith.

Yours faithfully

Eric A. Blair1

[X, 223, pp. 367–8; typewritten]

1. Orwell’s list of changes required is omitted here. They include ‘Barclay’s Bank’ which becomes ‘the local bank’; a reference to The Church Times is cut; ‘Lambeth public library’ is changed to ‘the nearest public library’. Gollancz’s libel lawyer, Harold Rubinstein (1891–1975), a perspicacious literary critic, playwright and author as well as a distinguished lawyer, crossed out the statement that The High Churchman’s Gazette had a ‘remarkable^o small circulation’. Orwell said he was not aware there was such a journal but changed the offending passage to ‘a small and select circulation’. (See II, pp. 299–302 for pre-publication revisions, 1934–35.) New information about these changes has emerged and is included here in the appendix New Textual Discoveries.

To Brenda Salkeld*

Tuesday [15 January 1935]

3 Warwick Mansions

Hampstead NW 3

Dear Brenda,

Thanks for your letter. No, I cannot say that Havelock Ellis’s signature, as I remember it, struck me as being at all like what I expected.1 I should have expected him to write a very fine hand and use a thinner nib. We bought recently a lot of books with the authors’ signatures in, and some of them containing autograph letters as well, but they were all sold almost at once. One that pleased me was inscribed ‘From Beverley Nicholls, in all humility.’ There is a subtle humour in that. I often see autographed letters advertised among the lots at book-auctions. I remember distinctly that in one case a letter from Sheila Kaye-Smith was priced higher than one from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (the Queen Anne one.) You often see autographs of Napoleon advertised, but they are usually pretty expensive, and of course they are not letters, only documents signed by him. Towards the end of his life he never seems to have written anything except his signature with his own hand, and apparently his spelling was appalling. I haven’t done much to my new novel,² but I have written a poem that is to be part of it.³ Talking of choosing a new pseudonym, I think it would be rather amusing, as so many women writers have chosen male pseudonyms, to choose a female one. Miss Barbara Bedworthy or something like that. With portrait of the author on the jacket. I have been feeling horribly tired, as for a variety of reasons I have been keeping very bad hours lately. On Sunday night I came away from a friend’s house late, found there were no sort of conveyances running, had to walk several miles through drizzling rain, and then, to crown all, found myself locked out and had to raise hell before I could wake anybody up and get in. Have you ever seen Fowler’s Modern English Usage?⁴ Fowler is the man who did, or at any rate contributed to, the small Oxford dictionary, and he is a great authority on syntax etc. He is very amusing about such things as the split infinitive. I was also reading a rather amusing pamphlet on Dr Watson, which proved among other things, from internal evidence, that Watson was married twice. Also one or two of D. H. Lawrence’s short stories, also Max Beerbohm’s And Even Now, also, for the I don’t know how many-th time, Maupassant’s Boule de Suif ⁵ and La Maison Tellier. I suppose you have read both of those? I must stop now. I hope this letter will be duly waiting for you when you arrive and that you will not be in too unbearably depressed a state. Try and come up to town some time during the term and we will meet. Good bye for the present.

Yours

Eric A. Blair

[X, 224, pp. 368–9; typewritten]

1. Salkeld was then collecting autographs and Orwell was finding them for her.

2. Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

3. ‘St Andrew’s Day, 1935’, printed in The Adelphi in November 1935 and in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, pp. 167–8, with two word changes but untitled.

4. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, was first published in April 1926 and is still not fully superseded.

5. In September 1946 Orwell proposed to the BBC that he dramatise this story (XVIII, 3059, p. 386). The proposal was rejected (XVIII, 3095, n. 2, p. 448).

To Brenda Salkeld*

16 February 1935

Booklovers’ Corner

Dearest Brenda,

Isn’t it sickening, I can’t keep the room I am in at present for more than a few weeks.¹ It was let to me on the understanding that I should have to give it up if somebody offered to take it & another room that are° beside it together, & now somebody has done so. So I shall have fresh miseries of house-hunting, & probably shan’t find another place where I shall be so comfortable & have so much freedom. My present landlady² is the non-interfering sort, which is so rare among London landladies. When I came she asked me what I particularly wanted, 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.’ Not much is happening here.

Gollancz, who has re-read Burmese Days, wrote enthusiastically about it & said he was going to have it thoroughly vetted by his lawyer, after which the latter was to cross-examine me on all the doubtful points. I hope the lawyer doesn’t report against it as he did last time. You notice that all this happened a year ago, & I do not know what has made G. change his mind again. Perhaps some other publisher has wiped his eye by publishing a novel about India, but I don’t seem to remember any this year. Rees* got me a lot more signatures for you, which I will send when I can find them, but at present I have mislaid them. I am living a busy life at present. My time-table is as follows: 7 am get up, dress etc, cook & eat breakfast. 8.45 go down & open the shop, & I am usually kept there till about 9.45. Then come home, do out my room, light the fire etc. 10.30 am—1 pm I do some writing. 1 pm get lunch & eat it. 2 pm—6.30 pm I am at the shop. Then I come home, get my supper, do the washing up & after that sometimes do about an hour’s work. In spite [of] all this, I have got more work done in the last few days than during weeks before when I was being harried all day long. I hope G. does publish Burmese Days, as apart from the money (& my agent has tied him down with a pretty good contract) it will tide over the very long interval there is going to be between A Clergyman’s Daughter & the one I am writing now.3 I want this one to be a work of art, & that can’t be done without much bloody sweat. My mother writes me that she isn’t going away after all, so I will come down to S’wold for a week-end as soon as I can, but it will have to be when my employer’s wife is up & about again. Write soon.

With much love

Eric

[X, 235, pp. 374–5; typewritten]

1. By ‘more than a few weeks’ Orwell was not referring to a few weeks more, but to the total time he had been able to spend in the Westropes’ flat.

2. Mrs Myfanwy Westrope, wife of the owner of Booklovers’ Corner.

3. Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

To Brenda Salkeld*

7 May [1935]

77 Parliament Hill

Hampstead NW 3

Dearest Brenda,

I am afraid this will not reach St Felix¹ before you do, as I only got your letter this evening—I suppose the posts were late owing to the jubilee.² I went down to Brighton, for the first time in my life, for Sunday and Monday. I went there with disagreeable apprehensions, but consoling myself by thinking that sooner or later I was sure to want to mention a trip to Brighton in a novel. However, I was rather agreeably surprised, and I didn’t, in any case, spend much time by the sea shore, but went inland and picked bluebells etc. I found a number of nests, including a bullfinch’s with four eggs, and by the way about a week ago I found a tit’s nest, but I couldn’t get at it, though I saw the bird go off the nest, as it was in the middle of a thorn bush. The crowds in Brighton weren’t so bad, but of course it was an awful business getting back on Sunday,3 the train being so packed that people were hanging out of the windows. On Saturday night I was down in Chelsea, and it took me two hours to get back to Hampstead, the whole centre of London was so blocked with taxis full of drunken people careering round, singing and bellowing ‘Long live the King!’ What surprised me was that most of them were very young—the last people whom you would expect to find full of patriotic emotion; but I suppose they just welcomed the excuse for making a noise. That night I had been to see Rees,* really to borrow some money off him,⁴ as I had forgotten Monday was a bank holiday and had not got any money out of the bank, 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, however—that if he were dictator he would have me shot immediately. I have done quite a lot of work, but oh! what mountains there are to do yet. I don’t know that I shall be able to let you have that piece⁵ to see in June after all, but I will some time—when it is fit to be seen, I mean. I am now getting to the stage where you feel as though you were crawling about inside some dreadful labyrinth. I don’t know that I have read much. I read D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, which is certainly not one of his best. I remember reading it before in 1924—the unexpurgated version that time—and how very queer it seemed to me at that age. I see now that what he was trying to do was to create characters who were at once symbolical figures and recognizable human beings, which was certainly a mistake. The queer thing is that when he concentrates on producing ordinary human characters, as in Sons and Lovers and most of the short stories, he gets his meaning across much better as well as being much more readable. I have also been glancing into some numbers of The Enemy, the occasional paper Wyndham Lewis used to run, which we have in the shop. The man is certainly insane. I have hit on a wonderful recipe for a stew, which is the following: half a pound of ox-kidney, chopped up small, half a pound of mushrooms, sliced; one onion chopped very fine, two cloves of garlic, four skinned tomatoes, a slice of lean bacon chopped up, and salt, the whole stewed very gently for about two and a half hours in a very little beef stock. You eat it with sphagetti° or rather coquillettes. It is a good dish to make, as it cooks itself while you are working. I have been deriving a lot of pleasure from some numbers of the Girls’° Own Paper of 1884 and 1885. In the answers to correspondents two questions crop up over and over again. One, whether it is ladylike to ride a tricycle. The other, whether Adam’s immediate descendents° did not have to commit incest in order to carry on the human species. The question of whether Adam had a navel does not seem to have been agitated, however.

I must stop now, as I don’t think I have any more news. As to your presentiment, or ‘curious feeling’ about me, you don’t say when exactly you had it. But I don’t know that I have been particularly unhappy lately—at least, not more than usual.

With much love and many kisses

Eric

P.S. [at top of first page] Near Brighton I passed Roedean School. It seemed to me that even in holiday time I could feel waves of snobbishness pouring out of it, & also aerial music to the tune of the female version of ‘Forty Years On’ & the Eton ‘Boating Song.’6 Do you play them at hockey, or did they write to you ‘St Felix, who are you?’

[X, 245, p. 385–7; typewritten; handwritten postscript]

1. St Felix School for Girls, Southwold, where Salkeld was the gym mistress.

2. The Silver Jubilee of King George V.

3. Orwell must mean Monday.

4. Although not a direct autobiographical contrast, compare Gordon refusing to borrow £10 from Ravelston, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, pp. 106–7, but sponging on him and taking his money, pp. 212–3.

5. Presumably a portion of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. In his letter to Moore of 14 May 1935 Orwell says he intended to write what became a novel as a book of essays; the ‘piece’ referred to was perhaps one of these essays in process of transformation into a different genre.

6. See 20.7.33, n. 3.

To Rayner Heppenstall*

Tuesday night [24 September 1935]

50 Lawford Rd

Kentish Town NW¹

Dear Rayner,

Many thanks for letter. I hope the enclosed MS. is what you wanted. I infer from what you would no doubt call your handwriting that you were taught script at school; the result is that I can’t read a single word of the manuscript part of your letter, so I may not have followed your instructions exactly.

I am suffering unspeakable torments with my serial, having already been at it four days and being still at the second page. This is because I sat down and wrote what was not a bad first instalment, and then upon counting it up found it was 3500 words instead of 2000. Of course this means rewriting it entirely. I don’t think I am cut out for a serial-writer. I shall be glad to get back to my good old novel where one has plenty of elbow room. I have three more chapters and an epilogue to do, and then I shall spend about two months putting on the twiddly bits.

Even if my serial doesn’t come to anything, and I don’t expect it to, I intend taking a week or so off next month. My people have asked me to come down and stay with them, and if I can get my sister to drive me over, as I don’t think I can drive her present car, I will come over and see you. I don’t know that part of the country, but if it is like ours it must be nice this time of year.

I forwarded a letter this evening which had urgent proofs on it. I hope it gets to you in time, but it had already been to your old address. You ought to let editors and people know that you have changed your address.

You are right about Eileen.2 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. Michael was here last night with Edna³ and we all had dinner together. He told me he has a story in the anthology of stories that is coming out, but he seemed rather down in the mouth about something. I was over at the Fierz’⁴ place on Sunday and met Brenda⁵ and Maurice⁶ whom no doubt you remember, and they were full of a story apparently current among Communists to the effect that Col. Lawrence⁷ is not really dead but staged a fake death and is now in Abyssinia. I did not like Lawrence, but I would like this story to be true.

Au revoir. Please remember me to the Murrys.⁸

Yours

Eric A. Blair

[X, 253, pp. 393–5; typewritten]

1. Orwell moved to this address from Booklovers’ Corner. The flat is illustrated by Thompson, p. 47. It was rented in Orwell’s name but he shared it with Rayner Heppenstall and Michael Sayers (1912–2010) who contributed short stories and reviews to The Adelphi. The relationship was not wholly satisfactory. On one occasion Orwell and Heppenstall came to blows (see Orwell Remembered, pp. 106–15). Orwell remained there until the end of January 1936 when he stopped working at Booklovers’ Corner.

2. Eileen O’Shaughnessy (1905–1945) was to marry Orwell on 9 June 1936. According to Lettice Cooper they met at a party given by Mrs Rosalind Obermeyer at 77 Parliament Hill in March 1935. Before George left the house he said to a friend, ‘The girl I want to marry is Eileen O’Shaughnessy.’ At the time she met Orwell she was reading for a master’s degree in psychology at University College London. For Lydia Jackson’s reminiscences see Orwell Remembered, pp. 66–68. See also Eileen Blair*.

3. Edna Cohen, Michael’s cousin, with whom he was then having an affair.

4. Francis and Mabel Fierz, at whose home in Golders Green Orwell often found refuge when he first came to London. Mabel Fierz introduced Orwell’s writing to Leonard Moore, who, as a result, became his literary agent.

5. Brenda Eason Verstone (1911– ) studied art at the Chelsea School of Art and then worked as a journalist for trade publications concerned with paper and packaging.

6. Maurice Oughton was a leading aircraftman in the Royal Air Force in 1942, when he published a slim volume of poems, Out of the Oblivion, which includes his picture.

7. T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’), who had died as a result of a motor-cycle accident on 19 May 1935.

8. Heppenstall was staying with John Middleton Murry* in Norfolk.

On 9 November 1935, writing on black-bordered paper, M. Raimbault told Orwell that ‘a terrible misfortune’ had befallen his family. They had taken their summer holiday at Batz-sur-Mer: ‘one of my twin daughters fell from a rock, hurt herself, near fatally, on her head, and rolled unconscious into the sea. The weather was bad, all the efforts to save her proved in vain. When it was possible to recover her two hours later nothing could be done to revive her. She was approaching seventeen years of age and was life and joy itself. I was in despair. I am still. I have great difficulty finding the courage to live.’

To R. N. Raimbault*

22 December 1935

50 Lawford Road

Kentish Town NW 5

Dear Raimbault,

I am sorry I have not written for so long. It is mainly because I have been so busy, first with struggling to get my novel finished, then with the extra Christmas work at the shop, that I have had very little time for letters.

I am writing in English this time because I am not certain of expressing myself adequately in French. I just want to tell you how terribly sorry I was to hear the sad news about the death of your daughter. There is not much one can say on these occasions, and the more so as I did not know your daughter myself, but I can imagine something of what your feelings must be, and I would like you to know that, for what they are worth, you have all my sympathies.

I am sorry that I have been rather discourteous to M. Jean Pons, because I have not done anything about his letter.1 I am, however, writing to explain to him that it is on account of press[ure] of work that I have neglected him. I am sorry to hear that La Vache Enragée² didn’t sell. For myself I hardly expected a large sale for it, as the interest is rather specialised, but it is disappointing for you after all the trouble you have had. You ask me whether I have any short stories which might be translateable°. I have made various attempts to write short stories and have always failed. For some reason or another it is a form I cannot manage. It occurs to me, however, that a descriptive sketch I wrote a few years ago might be worth looking at – it is a description of an execution in a jail in Burma and at the time I wrote it I was rather pleased with it. I will look out the copy of the magazine it was in, and send it to you. My novel is almost finished. I had promised to get it done by the end of the year, but I am behind time, as usual. I suppose it will come out some time in the spring.³ I am afraid it is not the kind of thing that would be of any use to you for translation purposes, but I will send you a copy for yourself if you would like one. I forget whether I told you that a Frenchman wrote to me asking whether I would like La Vache Enragée translated into English! He had heard bits of it over the wireless but did not know it was already a translation.

Once again, all my sympathies for you in your sad loss. And my best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.

Yours

Eric A Blair

P.S. If you have occasion to write any time, would you write to 36 High Street, Southwold, Suffolk? I shall be changing my address shortly, but my parents will always forward letters.

[LO, pp. 60–1; X, 263A, p. 406; typewritten in English]

1. Mr Jean Pons, head of the Strand Palace Hotel Kitchens, The Strand, London, WC 2, had written to the French publishers to say that if Orwell would like ‘supporting information’ regarding his account of life in the kitchens of a large hotel, he would be happy to provide it (see LO¸ p. 56). No letter to or from M. Pons has survived.

2. La Vache Enragée was the French title of Down and Out in Paris and London. M. Raimbault explained to Orwell on 15 October 1934 that ‘manger de la vache enragée … nearly enough corresponds to your expression “to go to the dogs”.’ It implies suffering great hardship. It was, though Orwell certainly did not know it, the title of a satirical journal published in Paris in 1896 for which Toulouse-Lautrec designed a fine poster. The contemporary French translation has changed the title to Dans la dèche, an expression Arnold Bennett uses to describe destitution in the Paris scenes of The Old Wives’ Tale (1908): ‘Is he also in the ditch?’ (III, 6, iii).

3. Keep the Aspidistra Flying was published by Gollancz on 20 April 1936. No French edition appeared until 1960 when Gallimard published a translation by Yvonne Davet* as Et Vive l’Aspidistra!

To Leonard Moore*

24 February 1936

22 Darlington Street

Wigan

Lancs1

Dear Mr Moore,

Many thanks for your letter. I have made the alterations Gollancz asked for and sent back the proof and I trust it will now be all right. It seems to me to have utterly ruined the book, but if they think it worth publishing in that state, well and good. Why I was annoyed was because they had not demanded these alterations earlier. The book was looked over and O.K.’d by the solicitor as usual, and had they then told me that no reminiscence (it was in most cases only a reminiscence, not a quotation) of actual advertisements was allowable, I would have entirely rewritten the first chapter and modified several others. But they asked me to make the alterations when the book was in type and asked me to equalise the letters, which of course could not be done without spoiling whole passages and in one case a whole chapter. On the other hand to rewrite the whole first chapter when it was in type would have meant an immense addition to expenses, which obviously I could not ask Gollancz to bear. I would like to get this point clear because I imagine the same trouble is likely to occur again. In general a passage of prose or even a whole chapter revolves round one or two key phrases, and to remove these, as was done in this case, knocks the whole thing to pieces. So perhaps another time we could arrange with Gollancz that all alterations are to be made while the book is in typescript.²

If you manage to get an American publisher to accept the book, I wonder whether you could see to it that what he prints is the version first printed, without these subsequent alterations? I should like there to be one unmutilated version of it in existence.

The above address will find me till Saturday.

Yours sincerely

Eric A Blair

[X, 284, pp. 434–5; handwritten]

1. Orwell was in Lancashire studying conditions. One result would be The Road to Wigan Pier. (See Orwell: Diaries (2009).)

2. Orwell had been rightly exasperated by the many changes required for fear of actions for libel and defamation despite the text having been approved by the libel lawyer. These had to be made to the printed text and changes were restricted to the same number of letters as the original. (See IV, Textual Note, pp. 279–86.) Keep the Aspidistra Flying was not published in the United States until 1956 and it followed the corrupt text. Further details of these changes are included here in the appendix New Textual Discoveries.

To Jack Common*

17 March 1936

4 Agnes Terrace

Barnsley, Yorks

Dear Common,

Would you like a short review of Alec Browne’s° book The Fate of the Middle Classes? Or is someone else doing it for you? I have scrounged a free copy and it seems not an uninteresting book, at any rate it is on an important subject and I thought I might, eg., do a few lines for the Adelphi Forum1 on it.

I have been in these barbarous regions for about two months and have had a very interesting time and picked up a lot of ideas for my next book² but I admit I am beginning to pine to be back in the languorous South and also to start doing some work again, which of course is impossible in the surroundings I have been in. My next novel³ ought to be out shortly. It would have been out a month ago only there was one of those fearful last-minute scares about libel and I was made to alter it to the point of ruining it utterly. What particularly stuck in my gizzard was that the person who dictated the alterations to me was that squirt Norman Collins.⁴ Do you want a copy sent to the Adelphi? If you think you could get it reviewed I will have them send a copy, but not if you haven’t space to spare. I went to the Adelphi offices⁵ in Manchester and saw Higginbottom°⁶ several times, also Meade⁷ with whom I stayed several days. I may tell you in case you don’t know that there are fearful feuds and intrigues going on among the followers of the Adelphi and I will tell you about these when I see you. I didn’t say anything of this to Rees* when I wrote, because I thought his feelings might be hurt.

What about the international situation? Is it war? I think not, because if the government have any sense at all they must realise that they haven’t got the country behind them. I think things will remain uneasily in statu quo and the war will break out later, possibly this autumn. If you notice wars tend to break out in the autumn, perhaps because continental governments don’t care to mobilise until they have got the harvest in.

I heard Mosley8 speak here on Sunday. It sickens one to see how easily a man of that type can win over and bamboozle a working class audience. There was some violence by the Blackshirts, as usual, and I am going to write to the Times about it, but what hope of their printing my letter?⁹

I shall be at the above address till about the 25^th, after that returning to London, by sea if I can manage it. Hoping to see you some time after that,

Yours

Eric A. Blair

[X, 295, pp. 458–9; typewritten]

1. The Adelphi Forum was described by its editor as being ‘open for short topical comments and for the expression of opinion which may be entirely different from our own.’

2. The Road to Wigan Pier.

3. Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

4. Norman Collins (1907–82), writer, journalist and broadcaster. He was deputy chairman of Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1934–41, and then he joined the BBC Overseas Service. Orwell was to cross swords with him in each of his manifestations. Orwell reviewed his best-known novel, London Belongs to Me on 29 November 1945 (XVII, 2805, pp. 399–41). He became Controller of the BBC Light Programme in 1946 and was later a leading figure in commercial television.

5. On the initiative of some of Middleton Murry’s northern admirers, the printing and publishing organisation of The Adelphi was taken over by the Workers’ Northern Publishing Society in Manchester. In the early 1930s Murry* found himself at the head of a breakaway segment of the Independent Labour Party known as the Independent Socialist Party—a short-lived phenomenon. It was from these Adelphi supporters that Richard Rees gave Orwell contacts in the north.

6. Sam Higenbottam (1872–?) was a contributor to The Adelphi, a socialist, and author of Our Society’s History (1939), an account of the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers.

7. Frank Meade was an official of the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers and ran the Manchester office of The Adelphi; he was also business manager of Labour’s Northern Voice, an organ of the Independent Socialist Party.

8. Sir Oswald Mosley, Bt. (1896–1980), was successively a Conservative, Independent, and Labour MP In 1931 he broke away from the Labour Party to form the ‘New Party’. Later he became fanatically pro-Hitler and turned his party into the British Union of Fascists. His followers were known as Blackshirts. He was interned early in the war.

9. He also wrote to the Manchester Guardian. His diary for 20.3.36 concludes, ‘I hardly expected the Times to print it, but I think the M.G. might, considering their reputation.’ Neither did.

Writing to Sir Richard Rees* from Wigan on 22 February 1936 Orwell said, ‘I am arranging to take a cottage at Wallington near Baldock in Hertfordshire, rather a pig in a poke because I have never seen it, but have trusted the friends who have chosen it for me, and it is very cheap, only 7s 6d a week’ (CW, X, 288, p. 442). The friend (there was only one) was his aunt, Nellie Limouzin, who had, until very recently, lived in ‘The Stores’ as the cottage was called. The reasons for choosing this cottage were that its rent was low, it was a congenial place in which to write, the shop which was part of the cottage would earn him enough from the village’s one hundred or so inhabitants to cover the rent without too many distractions, and that it had enough land for him to grow vegetables and keep hens and goats. However, it also came with disadvantages that might have put off anyone less hardy than Orwell. It dated from the sixteenth century and had seen very little modernisation. It was pokey; there were four small rooms, two up and two down, one doubling as the shop area taking up valuable space; the ceilings were very low and Orwell was very tall; there was no inside w.c.; it had a sink but poor drainage; no proper cooking facilities; no electricity – lighting was by oil lamps (see Eileen’s letter to Norah, New Year’s Day, 1938); and a corrugated-iron roof. One might say, without being facetious, it suited Orwell down to the ground.

To Jack Common*

Thursday [16? April 1936]

The Stores

Wallington, Nr. Baldock1

[Herts]

Dear Common,

Thanks for yours. I have now seen my landlord and it is O.K. about the rent, so I have definitely decided to open the shop and have spread the news among the villagers to some extent. I should certainly be very obliged if you would find out about the wholesalers. I didn’t know you had your shop still. I believe there are some wholesalers of the kind at Watford, Kingford or Kingston or some such name. I don’t know whether, seeing that I shall only want tiny amounts at a time (apart from the smallness of the village I haven’t much storage room), they will make any trouble about delivery. I intend, at first at any rate, to stock nothing perishable except children’s sweets. Later on I might start butter and marg. but it would mean getting a cooler. I am not going to stock tobacco because the pubs here (two to about 75 inhabitants!) stock it and I don’t want to make enemies, especially as one pub is next door to me. I am beginning to make out lists, though whether any one wholesaler will cover the lot I am not certain. I suppose what I shall start off° will be about twenty quids’ worth of stuff. Are these people good about giving credit? What I would like to do would be to give a deposit of about £5 and then pay quarterly. I suppose my bank would give me a reference. It is a pity in view of this that I have just changed my branch because the Hampstead branch were getting quite trustful and told me I could overdraw, though I never asked them. I shall want besides stock one or two articles of shop equipment, such as scales, a bell etc. There are some that go with this place but my landlord has them and he is the sort of person who takes a year before he hands anything over. I have got to tidy up the shop premises and repaint, but if I can click with the wholesalers I should be ready to open up in about 3 weeks.

Yes, this business of class-breaking is a bugger. The trouble is that the socialist bourgeoisie, most of whom give me the creeps, will not be realistic and admit that there are a lot of working-class habits which they don’t like and don’t want to adopt. E.g. the typical middle-class socialist not only doesn’t eat with his knife but is still slightly horrified by seeing a working man do so. And then so many of them are the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell who go about spreading sweetness and light and have at the back of their minds a vision of the working class all T.T.1, well washed behind the ears, readers of Edward Carpenter?² or some other pious sodomite and talking with B.B.C. accents. The working classes are very patient under it all. All the two months I was up north, when I spent my entire time in asking people questions about how much dole they got, what they had to eat etc., I was never once socked on the jaw and only once told to go to hell, and then by a woman who was deaf and thought I was a rate-collector. This question has been worrying me for a long time and part of my next book is to be about it.

I will get over when I have a bike or something. If you come over here, either let me know so that there shall be food, or take your chance—but there’ll always be something, of course. The garden is still Augean (I have dug up twelve boots in two days) but I am getting things straight a little. It is awful to think that for nearly three months I have not done a stroke of work. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.³ However I have wads of notes which give me the illusion of not having wasted my time.

Yours

Eric A. Blair

[X, 300, pp. 470–1; typewritten]

1. T.T.: teetotal.

2. Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) was a socialist writer and social reformer whose works include Towards Democracy (1883) and The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (1908).

3. Line 2 of Wordsworth’s sonnet, ‘The world is too much with us; late and soon’ (1807).

To Geoffrey Gorer*

Sat. [23 May 1936]

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Gorer,

Many thanks for your kind offices re. Time & Tide. They gave me some novels to review. I would have written to you before only as usual I lost your letter with the address & it didn’t turn up till this morning. I have had the shop open nearly a fortnight. I took 19/– the first week, this week will be 25/– or 30/–. That is turnover & the profit on it about pays the rent. I think the business could be worked up to £3 or so. It is very little trouble & no hanging about like in a bookshop. In a grocer’s shop people come in to buy something, in a bookshop they come in to make a nuisance of themselves.

I am getting married very shortly—it is fixed for June 9^th at the parish church here. This is as it were in confidence because we are telling as few people as possible till the deed is done, lest our relatives combine against us in some way & prevent it. It is very rash of course but we talked it over & decided I should never be economically justified in marrying so might as well be unjustified now as later. I expect we shall rub along all right—as to money I mean—but it will always be hand to mouth as I don’t see myself ever writing a best-seller. I have made a fairly good start on my new book.1

I was glad to see your book² got such good reviews. I saw a very good one in the Times. The book itself I haven’t seen yet. When you were in that part of the world did you go to Singapore by any chance? I have a great friend there at the Raffles Museum, Dennis Collings his name is, an anthropologist & very gifted in various strange ways—for instance he can do things like forging a medieval sword so that you can’t tell it from a real one. I read your Notes by the Way³ with great interest. What you say about trying to study our own customs from an anthropological point of view opens up a lot of fields of thought, but one thing to notice about ourselves is that people’s habits etc. are formed not only by their upbringing & so forth but also very largely by books. I have often thought it would be very interesting to study the conventions etc. of books from an anthropological point of view. I don’t know if you ever read Elmer Rice’s A Voyage to Purilia. It contains a most interesting analysis of certain conventions—taken for granted & never even mentioned—existing in the ordinary film. It would be interesting & I believe valuable to work out the underlying beliefs & general imaginative background of a writer like Edgar Wallace. But of course that’s the kind of thing nobody will ever print.4

Thank God it has rained at last, after 3 weeks drought, & my vegetables are doing fairly well.

Yours

Eric A. Blair

[X. 311, pp. 481–2; handwritten]

1. The Road to Wigan Pier.

2. Bali and Angkor.

3. Properly, ‘Notes on the Way,’ Time and Tide, 23 May 1936.

4. In proposing study of this kind Orwell was well ahead of his time.

To Denys King-Farlow*

9 June 1936

The Stores

Wallington

Dear King-Farlow,

Of course I remember you. But have you changed your name back to King-Farlow? It was Nettleton most of the time you were at Eton. I only got your letter this morning. It was forwarded by Cyril Connolly*, who has been away. I’m afraid I can’t possibly come along on the 11^th, much as I would like to, first of all because it’s always difficult for me to get away from here, secondly because like the chap in the N.T. I have married a wife & therefore I cannot come.¹ Curiously enough I am getting married this very morning—in fact I am writing this with one eye on the clock & the other on the Prayer Book, which I have been studying for some days past in hopes of steeling myself against the obscenities of the wedding service. When exactly I’ll be up in Town I don’t know. This place as you see by the address used to be the village ‘general’ shop, & when I came here I reopened it as such—the usual little shop stocking groceries, sweets, packets of aspirins etc. It doesn’t bring in much but it does pay my rent for me, & for a literary gent that is a consideration. On the other hand it makes it very difficult to get away from here. But if you are ever passing anywhere near, do drop in. It’s not much off your track if you are going anywhere in a north-easterly direction or eg. to Cambridge. I should always be at home, except on Saturday afternoons & sometimes on Sundays, & should love to see you again.

I am not in touch with many of the Etonians of our time. Connolly came to see me once in town & he has been very kind in reviewing my books. I used to see Alan Clutton-Brock2 in 1928—just recently his wife was killed in a motor smash. It was sad about poor Godfrey Meynell.³ I went & stayed at Cambridge with Gow* when I came back from Burma at the end of ’27, but though he was very kind it seemed to me I had moved out of his orbit & he out of mine. I suppose most of the others we knew are dons, civil servants & barristers. I hear you have been in the U.S.A. a long time & are very rich & flourishing. I have had a bloody life a good deal of the time but in some ways an interesting one. Please excuse this untidy scrawl.

Yours

Eric A. Blair

[X, 316, p. 485; handwritten]

1. Gospel according to St Luke, xiii, 20.

2. Alan Clutton-Brock (c. 1903–1976), a contemporary of Orwell’s at Eton. He became art critic of The Times and was Slade Professor of Fine Art, Cambridge, 1955–58.

3. Godfrey Meynell, a contemporary at Eton, had joined the army and was killed on the North West Frontier of India leading his native troops in action. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

To Henry Miller*

26–27 August 1936

The Stores

Dear Miller,

Many thanks for your letter. It made me feel rather bad all the same, because I had been meaning for weeks to write to you and had been putting it off. Well, Black Spring arrived all right and I liked part of it very much, especially the opening chapters, but I do think, and shall say in reviewing it¹, that a book like Tropic of Cancer, dealing with events that happened or might have happened in the ordinary three-dimensional world, is more in your line. I liked Tropic of Cancer especially for three things, first of all a peculiar rhythmic quality in your English, secondly the fact that you dealt with facts well known to everybody but never mentioned in print (eg. when the chap is supposed to be making love to the woman but is dying for a piss all the while), thirdly the way in which you would wander off into a kind of reverie where the laws of ordinary reality were slipped just a little but not too much. You do this also in Black Spring, eg. I like very much your meditation beginning in a public urinal pp. 60–64, but I think on the whole you have moved too much away from the ordinary world into a sort of Mickey Mouse universe where things and people don’t have to obey the rules of space and time. I dare say I am wrong and perhaps have missed your drift altogether, but I have a sort of belly to earth attitude and always feel uneasy when I get away from the ordinary world where grass is green, stones hard etc. It is also, I know, pretty bloody when you have written one unusual book to be blamed for not writing another exactly like it. But I don’t want you to think there wasn’t a lot in Black Spring that I enjoyed. The quality of the prose is fine too, especially that passage I referred to before about the dung and the angels. When I read a piece like that I feel as you feel when you are galloping a really good horse over ground where you don’t have to look out for rabbit holes. I will do what I can in the way of reviews. The Adelphi told me I could do a short bit on it, but they are soon going to become a quarterly, and I shall also do it for the New English, but they have shut up shop for August as they always do, so the reviews will be a bit late I expect, but I suppose in your case that doesn’t matter so much as with the ordinary twopenny halfpenny novel that is genius for a week and then is sold off as a remainder. I have got to go and milk the goat now but I will continue this letter when I come back.

27.8.36. I am glad you managed to get hold of a copy of Down and Out. I haven’t one left and it is out of print, and I was going to send you a copy of the French translation (I suppose it was the English version you saw) when I got your letter. Yes, it was published in America too but didn’t sell a great deal. I don’t know what sort of reviews it got in France—I only saw about two, either because the press-cutting people didn’t get them or because I hadn’t arranged to have copies sent out with flattering letters to leading critics, which I am told you should do in France. Some others of my books have also been published in America. My second book, Burmese Days, was published there before being published in England, because my publisher was afraid the India Office might take steps to have it suppressed. A year later my English publisher brought out a version of it with various names etc. altered, so the American edition is the proper one. That is the only one of my books that I am pleased with— not that it is any good qua novel, but the descriptions of scenery aren’t bad, only of course that is what the average reader skips. My third book, A Clergyman’s Daughter which came out in England about a year ago, was published in America last week. That book is bollox, but I made some experiments in it that were useful to me. My last book, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, won’t, I imagine be published in America, because it is a domestic sort of story with an entirely English theme and the American public are getting restive about what I believe is called ‘British sissy-stuff.’ I noticed also when I worked in the bookshop that it is harder and harder to sell American books in England. The two languages are drifting further and further apart.

Yes, I agree about English poverty. It is awful. Recently I was travelling among the worst parts of the coal areas in Lancashire and Yorkshire—I am doing a book2 about it now—and it is dreadful to see how the people have collapsed and lost all their guts in the last ten years. I reviewed Connolly’s novel for the N[ew] E[nglish] W[eekly], but though it amused me I didn’t think a lot of it³. It surprised me that he should be in such a stew about the book ‘dating’as though every book worth reading didn’t ‘date!’ I see from the blurb on Black Spring that you got a pretty good write-up from Eliot & Co, also that I am mentioned among them. That is a step up for me—the first time I have been on anybody else’s blurb. So no doubt I shall be Sir Eric Blair yet.⁴

Write if or when you feel inclined.

Yours

Eric A. Blair

[X, 323, pp. 495–7; typewritten]

1. Orwell’s review of Miller’s Black Spring appeared in the New English Weekly in September 1936 (X, 325, pp. 499–501). Miller wrote to Orwell to thank him for his ‘amazingly, sympathetic’ review.

2. The Road to Wigan Pier.

3. The Rock Pool (X, 321, pp. 400–1).

4. See Gordon Comstock’s (incorrect) sneering bestowal of a knighthood on John Drinkwater in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (IV, p. 138).

Eileen wrote six letters to a friend she had made at Oxford, Norah Symes. Norah also met her future husband, Quartus St Leger Myles, at Oxford. They became engaged when he returned to Clifton as a General Practitioner. They had no children. She died in 1994 and these letters were in her bequest to John Durant. They passed to Mrs Margaret Durant who allowed their inclusion in The Lost Orwell. Recently, they were bought by Richard Young who has very kindly allowed them to be reproduced here. The letters give no indication to whom they were written, and, except for the initial ‘E’ at the end of the last letter, are always signed by the pet-name, ‘Pig’. Possibly Norah’s maiden name suggested the name for a character in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Only one of the letters is dated (New Year’s Day, 1938) so dating is conjectural. Fuller notes are given in The Lost Orwell.

Eileen Blair* to Norah Myles*

3 or 10 November 1936

36 High Street

Southwold¹

[no salutation]

I wrote the address quite a long time ago & have since played with three cats, made a cigarette (I make them now but not with the naked hand),2 poked the fire & driven Eric (i.e George) nearly mad – all because I didn’t really know what to say. I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously & really bitterly that I thought I’d save time & just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished. Then Eric’s aunt³ came to stay & was so dreadful (she stayed two months) that we stopped quarrelling & just repined. Then she went away & now all our troubles are over. They arose partly because Mother drove me so hard in the first week of June⁴ that I cried all the time from pure exhaustion & partly because Eric had decided that he mustn’t let his work be interrupted & complained bitterly when we’d been married a week that he’d only done two good days’ work out of seven.⁵ Also I couldn’t make the oven cook anything & boiled eggs (on which Eric had lived almost exclusively) made me sick. Now I can make the oven cook a reasonable number of things & he is working very rapidly.⁶ I forgot to mention that he had his ‘bronchitis’ for three weeks in July & that it rained every day for six weeks during the whole of which the kitchen was flooded & all food went mouldy in a few hours. It seems a long time ago now but then seemed very permanent.

I thought I could come & see you & have twice decided when I could, but Eric always gets something if I’m going away if he has notice of the fact, & if he has no notice (when Eric my brother arrives⁷ & removes me as he has done twice) he gets something when I’ve gone so that I have to come home again. For the last few weeks we have been completely broke and shall be now until Christmas because the money we expected in October for Keep the Aspidistra Flying won’t be paid until April and the next book won’t earn its advance until December anyway and possibly January. But I must be in London for some days this month. Is there a chance of one of these Wednesdays? If so & if you tell me which I’ll make my visit to fit it. I must see Eric (brother) a bit about his book, the proofs of which I’m now correcting, & also have some intelligence testing to do with Lydia.⁸ Could you come either on the 18^th or on the 25^th? I think they’re Wednesdays – anyway I mean Wednesdays. I want passionately to see you. Lydia must have a bit of notice & indeed at any minute is going to descend on me in wrath (against Eric on social grounds not against me, for I am perfection in her eyes) & force me to go to London exactly when I don’t want to. So if you were to send a postcard-------9

This is our address for the rest of this week. We are staying with the Blairs & I like it. Nothing has surprised me more, particularly since I saw the house which is very small & furnished almost entirely with paintings of ancestors. The Blairs are by origin Lowland Scottish & dull but one of them made a lot of money in slaves & his son Thomas who was inconceivably like a sheep married the daughter of the Duke of Westmorland (of whose existence I never heard) & went so grand that he spent all the money & couldn’t make more because slaves had gone out. So his son went into the army & came out of that into the church & married a girl of 15 who loathed him & had ten children of whom Eric’s father, now 80, is the only survivor & they are all quite penniless but still on the shivering verge of gentility as Eric calls it in his new book which I cannot think will be popular with the family.¹⁰ In spite of all this the family on the whole is fun & I imagine unusual in their attitude to me because they all adore Eric & consider him quite impossible to live with–indeed on the wedding day Mrs Blair shook her head & said that I’d be a brave girl if I knew what I was in for, and Avril the sister said that obviously I didn’t know what I was in for or I shouldn’t be there. They haven’t I think grasped that I am very much like Eric in temperament which is an asset once one has accepted the fact

If I’d written this from Wallington it would have been about the real things of life–goats, hens, broccoli (eaten by a rabbit). But it would be better perhaps to tell you because this has got out of hand. Poor girl, miss it all out except the bit about the Wednesdays & say you can come on the 18^th or the 25^th to meet

Pig¹¹

[LO, pp. 63–7 (with substantial additional
notes); X, 331A, p. 515; handwritten]

1. Orwell’s parents’ home.

2. Orwell was able to roll his own cigarettes by hand. Evidently Eileen required a hand-roller.

3. Nellie Limouzin had lived in Paris with her husband, Eugène Adam, an ardent Esperantist, when Orwell was living there (1928–29). Adam left Nellie and went to Mexico where, in 1947, he committed suicide.

4. Eileen’s mother, Marie O’Shaughnessy, evidently spent the week before the wedding with her daughter and Orwell, doubtless preparing for the event. Given the cramped and bare conditions, the lack of electricity, bathroom or indoor w.c., coupled with pre-wedding tensions, it is plain why Eileen was so distressed – and also why she found Aunt Nellie’s long stay burdensome.

5. On 12 June Orwell submitted ‘Shooting an Elephant’ to John Lehmann, editor of New Writing. He published it in New Writing, 2, Autumn, 1936 (X, 326, pp. 501–6).

6. As well as sending off ‘Shooting an Elephant’, between his wedding and leaving for Spain, Orwell was very busy earning money from book reviewing and was writing The Road to Wigan Pier, which he completed just before he left for Spain about 23 December 1936. In this period he wrote twelve reviews of thirty-two books.

7. Confusingly, especially in letters Eileen was to write from Spain, her brother, Dr Laurence O’Shaughnessy* was also known in the family as Eric. The proofs to which she refers are her brother’s and Sauerbruch’s Thoracic Surgery.

8. Lydia Jackson.*

9. This is as written by Eileen: nothing has been left out.

10. The family background is well summarised by Sir Bernard Crick in A Life, pp. 46–7 and in the family bible. Orwell’s mother, though born in Penge, South London, lived most of her early life in Moulmein, Burma. As Emma Larkin reports in Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop (2004), there is a street sign, ‘Leimmawzin’, which means Orange-shelf Street but is a corruption of Limouzin Street (pp. 145–6). The phrase ‘on the shivering verge of gentility’ does not sound like Orwell; it does not appear in his ‘new book’, presumably Keep the Aspidistra Flying, published by Victor Gollancz on 20 April 1936, nor in the one he was writing, The Road to Wigan Pier. This may suggest it appeared in a draft read by Eileen. If so, that suggests a greater involvement by Eileen in Orwell’s writing (other than for Animal Farm, where it is well established) than has been suspected.

11. It is ironical that Eileen’s pet name should have been that of the animals Orwell pilloried in Animal Farm.

Jennie Lee* on Orwell’s Arrival in Barcelona

Orwell saw Gollancz on the 21^st December 1936 about the publication of The Road to Wigan Pier. He arrived in Barcelona about the 26^th (Crick, p. 315). After Orwell’s death, Jennie Lee wrote on 23 June 1950 to a Miss Margaret M. Goalby of Presteigne, Radnorshire, who had asked her about Orwell. This is part of that letter.

In the first year of the Spanish Civil War I was sitting with friends in a hotel in Barcelona when a tall thin man with a ravished^o complexion came over to the table. He asked me if I was Jennie Lee, and if so, could I tell him where to join up. He said he was an author: had got an advance on a book from Gollancz,1 and had arrived ready to drive a car or do anything else, preferably to fight in the front line. I was suspicious and asked what credentials he had brought from England. Apparently he had none. He had seen no-one, simply paid his own way out. He won me over by pointing to the boots over his shoulder. He knew he could not get boots big enough for he was over six feet. This was George Orwell and his boots arriving to fight in Spain.

I came to know him as a deeply kind man and a creative writer…. He was a satirist who did not conform to any orthodox political or social pattern…. The only thing I can be quite certain of is, that up to his last day George was a man of utter integrity; deeply kind, and ready to sacrifice his last worldly possessions – he never had much – in the cause of democratic socialism. Part of his malaise was that he was not only a socialist but profoundly liberal. He hated regimentation wherever he found it, even in the socialist ranks.

[XI, 355A, p. 5]

1. This advance was for The Road to Wigan Pier.

Eileen Blair* to Norah Myles*

[16 February 1937?]

24, Croom’s Hill

Greenwich¹

[no salutation]

A note to say that I am leaving for Spain at 9 a.m. tomorrow (or I think so, but with inconceivable grandeur people ring up from Paris about it, and I may not go until Thursday). I leave in a hurry, not because anything is the matter but because when I said that I was going on the 23^rd, which has long been my intention, I suddenly became a kind of secretary perhaps to the I.L.P. in Barcelona. They hardly seem to be amused at all. If Franco had engaged me as a manicurist I would have agreed to that too in exchange for a salvo conducto,² so everyone is satisfied. The I.L.P. in Barcelona consists of one John McNair,*³ who has certainly been kind at long distances but has an unfortunate telephone voice and a quite calamitous prose style in which he writes articles that I perhaps shall type. But theoretically George gets leave at the end of this month⁴ and then I shall have a holiday, willy John nilly John. By the way, I suppose I told you George was in the Spanish Militia? I can’t remember. Anyway he is, with my full approval until he was well in. He’s on the Aragon front, where I cannot help knowing that the Government ought to be attacking or hoping that that is a sufficient safeguard against their doing so. Supposing that the Fascist air force goes on missing its objectives and the railway line to Barcelona is still working, you’ll probably hear from there some day. But letters take 10-15 days as a rule, and if the railway breaks down I can’t think how long they’ll take. Meanwhile it would be a nice gesture if you were to write a nice letter yourself, addressing it c/o John McNair, Hotel Continental, Boulevard de las Ramblas, Barcelona.5 I am staying at the Continental too to begin with, but as we have now spent practically all the money we shall have until November, when the Left book Club wealth will be available,⁶ I think I may be doing what the Esperantists call sleeping on straw – and as they are Esperantists they mean sleeping on straw. The I.L.P. of course is not contributing to my support, but the Spanish Government feeds George on bread without butter and ‘rather rough food’ and has arranged that he doesn’t sleep at all, so he has no anxieties.

This is longer than I meant it to be – (that should be a long dash, but you have to move the carriage.) Write the letter, because I think it likely that I may loathe Barcelona, though I’d like to see some of the excitements that won’t happen.⁷ I don’t know of course how long we’ll be there. Unless George gets hurt I suppose he’ll stay until the war qua war is over – and I will too unless I get evacuated by force or unless I have to come and look for some money. But to-day’s news suggests that the war may not last very long – I doubt whether Mussolini or even Hitler would feel enthusiastic about trying to push Franco across Catalonia, and certainly they’d need a lot more men to do it.⁸

The dinner gong is going. Is it not touching to think that this may be the last dinner unrationed available for

Pig.

Give everyone my love – even yourself. Eric is lecturing at Bristol,⁹ but I think not till May. Hey Groves¹⁰ came to the heart lecture at the College of Surgeons and then invited him to talk to you, but the date isn’t settled yet. He has some pretty pictures. I could have come with him – perhaps after all I shall come with him. If you meet Hey Groves tell him to make the date after the war is over.

Could you tell Mary¹¹ (not urgently) that I simply hadn’t time to write separate letters to the two old Oxford Friends – which is simply true.

[LO, pp. 68–70; XI, 361A, p. 12; typewritten]

1. The O’Shaughnessy family home in London, SE 10.

2. salvo conducto: safe conduct.

3. John McNair* was a Tynesider so his ‘unfortunate telephone voice’ might have been his Geordie accent, with which Eileen, who came from South Shields, would have been familiar. She was probably being comically ironic.

4. Leave was not given.

5. No such letter survives.

6. It is a common mistake to believe that Orwell was commissioned to go to Wigan and to write The Road to Wigan Pier by the Left Book Club. In fact the Club had not been formed when he left for Wigan and it was not decided by the Club to adopt the book until January 1937, well after Orwell had handed in his manuscript.

7. She tells her mother on 22 March, after her return from the front, ‘I’m enjoying Barcelona again’, so her worst fears were not realised though she would experience in all their pain the ‘May Events’ in Barcelona when their Communist ‘allies’ violently suppressed the POUM.

8. Orwell was shot through the throat (see note preceding 2.7.37). Communist attacks on the POUM meant they had to leave surreptitiously on 23 June 1937 (with John McNair and the young Stafford Cottman).

9. Eric here is her brother Laurence, called Eric (from his middle name, Frederick) by his family.

10. Ernest William Hey Groves (1872–1944), was a distinguished surgeon specialising in reconstructive surgery of the hip; he developed the use of bone grafts.

11. Bertha Mary Wardell graduated with Eileen. She married Teddy (A.E.F.) Lovett, a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He was serving on HMS Glorious which, with her two escorting destroyers, Ardent and Acasta, was sunk off Norway on 8 June 1940, there being only 40 survivors from Glorious, two from Ardent and one from Acasta.

Eileen Blair* to her mother, Marie O’Shaughnessy

22 March 1937

Seccion Inglesa

10 Rambla de los Estudios

Barcelona¹

Dearest Mummy,

I enclose a ‘letter’ I began to write to you in the trenches! It ends abruptly—I think I’ve lost a sheet—& is practically illegible but you may as well have a letter written from a real fighting line, & you’ll read enough to get the essential news. I thoroughly enjoyed being at the front. If the doctor had been a good doctor I should have moved heaven & earth to stay (indeed before seeing the doctor I had already pushed heaven & earth a little) as a nurse—the line is still so quiet that he could well have trained me in preparation for the activity that must come. But the doctor is quite ignorant & incredibly dirty. They have a tiny hospital at Monflorite in which he dresses the villagers’ cut fingers etc. & does emergency work on any war wounds that do occur. Used dressings are thrown out of the window unless the window happens to be shut when they rebound onto the floor—& the doctor’s hands have never been known to be washed. So I decided he must have a previously trained assistant (I have one in view—a man). Eric did go to him but he says there is nothing the matter except ‘cold, over-fatigue, etc’ This of course is quite true. However, the weather is better now & of course the leave is overdue, but another section on the Huesca front made an attack the other day which had rather serious results & leave is stopped there for the moment. Bob Edwards2 who commands the I.L.P. contingent has to be away for a couple of weeks & Eric is commanding in his absence, which will be quite fun in a way. My visit to the front ended in a suitable way because Kopp* decided I must have ‘a few more hours’ & arranged a car to leave Monflorite at 3:15 a.m. We went to bed at 10 or so & at 3 Kopp came & shouted & I got up & George³ (I can’t remember which half of the family I write to) went to sleep again I hope. In this way he got 2 nights proper rest & seems much better. The whole visit’s unreality was accentuated by the fact that there were no lights, not a candle or a torch; one got up & went to bed in black dark, & on the last night I emerged in black dark & waded knee deep in mud in & out of strange buildings until I saw the faint glow from the Comité Militar where Kopp was waiting with his car.

On Tuesday we had the only bombardment of Barcelona since I came. It was quite interesting. Spanish people are normally incredibly noisy & pushing but in a° emergency they appear to go quiet. Not that there was any real emergency but the bombs fell closer to the middle of the town than usual & did make enough noise to excite people fairly reasonably. There were very few casualties.

I’m enjoying Barcelona again—I wanted a change. You might send this letter on to Eric & Gwen, whom I thank for tea. Three lbs of it has just come & will be much appreciated. The contingent is just running out, Bob Edwards tells me. The other message for Eric is that as usual I am writing this in the last moments before someone leaves for France & also as usual my cheque book is not here, but he will have the cheque for £10 within 2 weeks anyway & meanwhile I should be very grateful if he gave Fenner Brockway⁴ the pesetas. (In case anything funny happened to the last letter, I asked him to buy £10 worth of pesetas & give them to Fenner Brockway to be brought out by hand. Living is very cheap here, but I spend a lot on the I.L.P. contingent as none of them have had any pay & they all need things. Also I’ve lent John [McNair]* 500 ps. because he ran out. I guard my five English pounds, which I could exchange at a fairly decent rate,⁵ because I must have something to use when we—whoever we may be—cross the frontier again.)

I hope everyone is well—& I hope for a letter soon to say so. Gwen wrote a long letter which was exciting—even I fall into the universal habit of yearning over England. Perhaps the same thing happens in the colonies. When a waiter lit my cigarette the other day I said he had a nice lighter & he said ‘Si, si, es bien, es Ingles!’ Then he handed it to me, obviously thinking I should like to caress it a little. It was a Dunhill—bought in Barcelona I expect as a matter of fact because there are plenty of Dunhill & other lighters but a shortage of spirit for them. Kopp, Eric’s commander, longed for Lea & Perrins° Worcester Sauce. I discovered this by accident & found some in Barcelona—they have Crosse & Blackwell’s pickles too but the good English marmalade is finished although the prices of these things are fantastic.

After seeing George I am pretty confident that we shall be home before the winter—& possibly much sooner of course. You might write another letter to the aunt6 some time. I have never heard from her & neither has Eric,⁷ which worries me rather. I think she may be very sad about living in Wallington. By the way, George is positively urgent about the gas-stove—he wanted me to write & order it at once, but I still think it would be better to wait until just before our return, particularly as I have not yet heard from Moore about the advance on the book.⁸ Which reminds me that the reviews are better than I anticipated, as the interesting ones haven’t come through yet.

I had a bath last night—a great excitement. And I’ve had 3 superb dinners in succession. I don’t know whether I shall miss this café life. I have coffee about three times a day & drinks oftener, & although theoretically I eat in a rather grim pension at least six times a week I get headed off into one of about four places where the food is really quite good by any standards though limited of course. Every night I mean to go home early & write letters or something & every night I get home the next morning. The cafés are open till 1.30 & one starts one’s after-dinner coffee about 10. But the sherry is undrinkable—& I meant to bring home some little casks of it!

Give Maud⁹ my love & tell her I’ll write some time. And give anyone else my love but I shan’t be writing to them. (This letter is to the 3 O’Shaughnesseys¹⁰ who are thus ‘you’ not ‘they’.) It is a dull letter again I think. I shall do this life better justice in conversation—or I hope so.

Much love

Eileen

[XI, 363, pp. 13–15; handwritten]

1. Offices of the POUM journal The Spanish Revolution.

2. Robert Edwards (1905–90), unsuccessful Independent Labour Party parliamentary candidate in 1935, was a Labour and Co-operative MP from 1955 to 1987. In January 1937 he was Captain of the ILP contingent in Spain, linked to the POUM. He left Spain at the end of March to attend the ILP conference at Glasgow. In 1926 and 1934 he led delegations to the Soviet Union meeting Trotsky, Stalin and Molotov; was General Secretary of the Chemical Workers’ Union, 1947–71; National Officer, Transport and General Workers’ Union, 1971–76; and member of the European Parliament, 1977–79. (See Orwell Remembered, pp. 146–48, and especially Shelden, pp. 264–65, which demolishes Edwards’s accusation that Orwell went to Spain solely to find material for a book.)

3. Eileen started to write ‘Eric’ but overwrote ‘George.’

4. Fenner Brockway (1888–1988; Lord Brockway, 1964) was General Secretary of the ILP, 1928, 1933–39, and its representative in Spain for a time. A devoted worker for many causes, particularly peace, he resigned from the ILP in 1946 and rejoined the Labour Party, which he represented in Parliament, 1950–64.

5. In a footnote to Homage to Catalonia (p. 151), Orwell gives the purchasing value of the peseta as ‘about fourpence’ in pre-metric currency; 500 pesetas would be about £8 6s 8d – say £320 at today’s values.

6. Orwell’s aunt Nellie Limouzin, then living at The Stores, Wallington, the Orwells’ cottage.

7. Eileen must here mean her husband.

8. The Road to Wigan Pier.

9. Possibly an aunt of Eileen’s whose second name was Maud.

10. Eileen’s mother, her brother, ‘Eric’ and his wife Gwen.

To Eileen Blair*

[5? April 1937]

[Hospital, Monflorite]

Dearest,

You really are a wonderful wife. When I saw the cigars my heart melted away. They will solve all tobacco problems for a long time to come. McNair* tells me you are all right for money, as you can borrow & then repay when B[ob] E[dwards] brings some pesetas, but don’t go beggaring yourself, & above all don’t go short of food, tobacco etc. I hate to hear of your having a cold & feeling run down. Don’t let them overwork you either, & don’t worry about me, as I am much better & expect to go back to the lines tomorrow or the day after. Mercifully the poisoning in my hand didn’t spread, & it is now almost well, tho’ of course the wound is still open. I can use it fairly well & intend to have a shave today, for the first time in about 5 days. The weather is much better, real spring most of the time, & the look of the earth makes me think of our garden at home & wonder whether the wallflowers are coming out & whether old Hatchett1 is sowing the potatoes. Yes, Pollitt’s review² was pretty bad, tho’ of course good as publicity. I suppose he must have heard I was serving in the POUM militia. I don’t pay much attention to the Sunday Times reviews³ as G[ollancz] advertises so much there that they daren’t down his books, but the Observer was an improvement on last time. I told McNair that when I came on leave I would do the New Leader an article, as they wanted one, but it will be such a come-down after B.E’s that I don’t expect they’ll print it. I’m afraid it is not much use expecting leave before about the 20^th April. This is rather annoying in my own case as it comes about through my having exchanged from one unit to another—a lot of the men I came to the front with are now going on leave. If they suggested that I should go on leave earlier I don’t think I would say no, but they are not likely to & I am not going to press them. There are also some indications—I don’t know how much one can rely on these—that they expect an action hereabouts, & I am not going on leave just before that comes off if I can help it. Everyone has been very good to me while I have been in hospital, visiting me every day etc. I think now that the weather is getting better I can stick out another month without getting ill, & then what a rest we will have, & go fishing too if it is in any way possible.

As I write this Michael, Parker & Buttonshaw4 have just come in, & you should have seen their faces when they saw the margarine. As to the photos, of course there are lots of people who want copies, & I have written the numbers wanted on the backs, & perhaps you can get reproductions. I suppose it doesn’t cost too much—I shouldn’t like to disappoint the Spanish machine-gunners etc. Of course some of the photos were a mess. The one which has Buttonshaw looking very blurred in the foreground is a photo of a shell-burst, which you can see rather faintly on the left, just beyond the house.

I shall have to stop in a moment, as I am not certain when McNair is going back & I want to have this letter ready for him. Thanks ever so much for sending the things, dear, & do keep well & happy.⁵ I told McNair I would have a talk with him about the situation when I came on leave, & you might at some opportune moment say something to him about my wanting to go to Madrid etc. Goodbye, love. I’ll write again soon.

With all my love

Eric

[XI, 364, pp. 15–17; handwritten]

1. Old Hatchett was a neighbour at Wallington who often helped Orwell in his garden.

2. Harry Pollitt (1890–1960), a Lancashire boiler-maker and founder-member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920, became its general secretary in 1929. With Rajani Palme Dutt (1896–1974, expelled from Oxford in 1917 for disseminating Marxist propaganda; member of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party and from 1936–38 editor of the Daily Worker) he led the party until his death. He was, however, removed from leadership in the autumn of 1939 until Germany’s invasion of Russia in July 1941 for his temporary advocacy of a war of democracy against fascism. His review of The Road to Wigan Pier appeared in the Daily Worker, 17 March 1937.

3. The Road to Wigan Pier was reviewed by Edward Shanks in the Sunday Times and by Hugh Massingham in the Observer, 14 March 1937.

4. Michael Wilton (English), also given as Milton, Buck Parker (South African), and Buttonshaw (American) were members of Orwell’s unit. Douglas Moyle, another member, told Ian Angus, 18 February 1970, that Buttonshaw was very sympathetic to the European left and regarded Orwell as ‘the typical Englishman—tall, carried himself well, well educated and well spoken’.

5. Orwell would not have realised the irony in his use of ‘happy’. Sir Richard Rees wrote in his For Love or Money (1960), p. 153, of the strain of Eileen’s experience in Barcelona: ‘In Eileen Blair I had seen for the first time the symptoms of a human being living under a political Terror.’

Eileen Blair* to Dr Laurence (‘Eric’) O’Shaughnessy*

1 May 1937

10 Rambla de los Estudios

Barcelona

Dear Eric,

You have a hard life. I mean to write to Mother with the news, but there are some business matters. Now I think of these, they’re inextricably connected with the news so Mother must share this letter.

George is here on leave. He arrived completely ragged, almost barefoot, a little lousy, dark brown, & looking really very well. For the previous 12 hours he had been in trains consuming anis, muscatel out of anis bottles, sardines & chocolate. In Barcelona food is plentiful at the moment but there is nothing plain. So it is not surprising that he ceased to be well. Now after two days in bed he is really cured but still persuadable so having a ‘quiet day’. This is the day to have on May 1^st. They were asked to report at the barracks, but he isn’t well enough & has already applied for his discharge papers so he hasn’t gone. The rest of the contingent never thought of going. When the discharge is through he will probably join the International Brigade.¹ Of course we—perhaps particularly I—are politically suspect but we told all the truth to the I.B. man here & he was so shattered that he was practically offering me executive jobs by the end of half an hour, & I gather that they will take George. Of course I must leave Barcelona but I should do that in any case as to stay would be pointless. Madrid is probably closed to me, so it means Valencia for the moment with Madrid & Albacete in view but at long distance. To join the I.B. with George’s history is strange but it is what he thought he was doing in the first place & it’s the only way of getting to Madrid. So there it is. Out of this arises a further money crisis because when I leave Barcelona I shall leave all my affiliations—& my address & even my credit at the bank; & it will take a little time to get connected again perhaps. Meanwhile we spend immense sums of money for Spain on new equipment etc. I did write to you about getting money through banks—i.e. your bank buys pesetas with your pounds & instructs a bank in Barcelona to pay me the number of pesetas you bought. If this can be done will you do it (about another 2000 pesetas I should think), & will you ask the bank to cable. Probably I shall be here for a couple of weeks but I’m not sure where I shall go next & I want if possible to have some money in hand before leaving. If the bank business can’t be done I frankly don’t know what can—i.e. I must use the credit at 60 to the £. before leaving here & find some method of getting money through my new friends, whoever they may be (I have met the Times correspondent at Valencia).

The other business is the cottage. I gather & hear from Mrs Blair that the aunt is not only tiring but tired, & I have written to her suggesting evacuation with all the arrangements under headings. You take over in a manner of speaking. If she shows you the letter it may alarm you, but twenty minutes will settle most of the problems. There are several things to be paid, but they’re all matters of shillings & the shop may have—should have—a few pounds in hand. The shop will be closed. I’ve said you can buy any perishables. It is not of course suggested that you should pay for these, except in the aunt’s eyes, but she will never give anything away so you might dump doubtful stuff in the car & dispose of it anyhow you like. If Mother is at Greenwich she might perhaps go over after the aunt is out & see that there is nothing to attract mice. There is a chance that Arthur Clinton,2 who was wounded, may go & recuperate in the cottage. He is perhaps the nicest man in the world & I hope he may be able to use it. He’ll return to England unfit, ineligible for dole & penniless. If he wants the cottage he’ll ask you about it of course.

We shall owe you money. We have money in our sense of the word, but I haven’t much fancy for sending cheques if they get lost in the post.

I must take this to the office now—one of the contingent is going home tomorrow & will take it. I have in progress an immense letter to mother, started two or three weeks ago, which will arrive in due course. I am very well.

About the L.C.C. pay I fully agree that there must be no sessional payment— it is a vicious system.³

My love to Gwen. By the way, I gather from the correspondence that she isn’t coming. If this is wrong & she is coming of course I’ll wait in Barcelona.

Yours

Eileen.

For the bank’s information my name is Eileen Maud Blair & my passport number 174234.

I really am sorry for you—but what can I do?

[XI, 367, pp.20–2; handwritten]

1. The International Brigade was composed of foreign volunteers, mostly Communist, and played an important part in the defence of Madrid. Its headquarters was at Albacete where the Brigade’s prison was sited. George Woodcock commented that Orwell ‘would not long have survived the attention of Marty’s political commissars if he had joined the International Brigade’. André Marty (1886–1956) a leading member of the French Communist Party, was known as Le Boucher d’Albacete. He claimed to have executed some 500 brigaders – and there were slightly fewer than 60,000 foreigners in the International Brigade.

2. A member of the ILP contingent. He was with Orwell in the Sanatorium Maurín (see Homage to Catalonia, VI, p. 153).

3. Eileen was objecting to payment by the London County Council of a fee for each session worked instead of at an annual rate. If one was booked for a session but not required, time had been set aside for no financial recompense.

To Victor Gollancz*

9 May 1937

Hotel Continental

Barcelona

Dear Mr Gollancz,

I didn’t get an opportunity earlier to write & thank you for the introduction you wrote to Wigan Pier, in fact I didn’t even see the book, or rather the L[eft] B[ook] C[lub] edition of it, till about 10 days ago when I came on leave, & since then I have been rather occupied. I spent my first week of leave in being slightly ill, then there was° 3 or 4 days of street-fighting in which we were all more or less involved, in fact it was practically impossible to keep out of it. I liked the introduction very much, though of course I could have answered some of the criticisms you made. It was the kind of discussion of what one is really talking about that one always wants & never seems to get from the professional reviewers. I have had a lot of reviews sent on to me, some of them very hostile but I should think mostly good from a publicity point of view. Also great numbers of letters from readers.

I shall be going back to the front probably in a few days & barring accidents I expect to be there till about August. After that I think I shall come home, as it will be about time I started on another book. I greatly hope I come out of this alive if only to write a book about it. It is not easy here to get hold of any facts outside the circle of one’s own experience, but with that limitation I have seen a great deal that is of immense interest to me. Owing partly to an accident I joined the P.O.U.M. militia instead of the International Brigade, which was a pity in one way because it meant that I have never seen the Madrid front; on the other hand it has brought me into contact with Spaniards rather than Englishmen & especially with genuine revolutionaries. I hope I shall get a chance to write the truth about what I have seen. The stuff appearing in the English papers is largely the most appalling lies—more I can’t say, owing to the censorship. If I can get back in August I hope to have a book ready for you about the beginning of next year.

Yours sincerely,

Eric A. Blair

[XI, 368, pp. 22–3; handwritten]

Orwell was shot through the throat by a sniper at 5.00 a.m. on 20 May 1937. He discusses the incident in Homage to Catalonia, VI, pp. 137–39. Eileen sent a telegram from Barcelona at noon on 24 May 1937 to Orwell’s parents in Southwold. This read: ‘Eric slightly wounded progress excellent sends love no need for anxiety Eileen.’ This reached Southwold just after 2.00 p.m. Orwell’s commandant, George Kopp,* wrote a report on his condition on 31 May and 1 June 1937. When this report was lost, Kopp wrote another, for Dr Laurence O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s brother-in-law, dated ‘Barcelona, the 10^th of June 1937’. It differs slightly from the version given in Orwell Remembered, pp. 158–61. Kopp illustrated his report with a drawing of the bullet’s path through Orwell’s throat:

Bert Govaerts, who uncovered details of Kopp’s life, suggests that this shows his training in engineering drawing. (See XI, 369, pp. 23–6.)

To Sergei Dinamov,* Editor, International Literature, Moscow

Professor Arlen Blyum of the St Petersburg Academy of Culture, in ‘An English Writer in the Land of the Bolsheviks’ (The Library, December 2003) records the fascinating exchange of letters between Dinamov and Orwell. International Literature was allowed considerable leeway and introduced such writers as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and John Dos Passos to its readers, so creating ‘a favourable image of the Land of the Soviets’. The editor wrote to Orwell on 31 May 1937 saying he had read reviews of The Road to Wigan Pier and asked for a copy so that it could be introduced to the journal’s readers. This is Orwell’s reply, found in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art.

2 July 1937

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Comrade,

I am sorry not to have answered earlier your letter dated May 31^st, but I have only just got back from Spain and my letters have been kept for me here, rather luckily, as otherwise some of them might have been lost. I am sending separately a copy of The Road to Wigan Pier. I hope parts of it may interest you. I ought to tell you that parts of the second half deal with subjects that may seem rather trivial outside England. I was preoccupied with them at the time of writing, but my experiences in Spain have made me reconsider many of my opinions.

I have still not quite recovered from the wound I got in Spain, but when I am up to writing again I will try and write something for you, as you suggested in your earlier letter. I would like to be frank with you, however, and therefore I must tell you that in Spain I was serving in the militia of the P.O.U.M., which as you know° doubt know, has been bitterly denounced by the Communist Party and was recently suppressed by the Government; also that after what I have seen I am more in agreement with the policy of the P.O.U.M. than with that of the Communist Party. I tell you this because it may be that your paper would not care to have contributions from a P.O.U.M. member1, and I do not wish to introduce myself to you under false pretences.

The above is my permanent address.

Yours fraternally,

George Orwell

[LO, pp. 99–100; XI, 374B, p. 37; typewritten]

1. The journal responded that Orwell’s association with the POUM ensured that International Literature could ‘have no relations’ with him (XI, 362, p. 12).

To Rayner Heppenstall*

31 July 1937

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Rayner,

Thanks so much for your letter. I was glad to hear from you. I hope Margaret1 is better. It sounds dreadful, but from what you say I gather that she is at any rate up and about.

We had an interesting but thoroughly bloody time in Spain. Of course I would never have allowed Eileen to come nor probably gone myself if I had foreseen the political developments, especially the suppression of the P.O.U.M., the party in whose militia I was serving. It was a queer business. We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy and ended by slipping over the border with the police panting on our heels² Eileen was wonderful, in fact actually seemed to enjoy it. But though we ourselves got out all right nearly all our friends and acquaintances are in jail and likely to be there indefinitely, not actually charged with anything but suspected of ‘Trot­skyism.’ The most terrible things were happening even when I left, wholesale arrests, wounded men dragged out of hospitals and thrown into jail, people crammed together in filthy dens where they have hardly room to lie down, prisoners beaten and half starved etc., etc. Meanwhile it is impossible to get a word about this mentioned in the English press, barring the publications of the I.L.P., which is affiliated to the P.O.U.M. I had a most amusing time with the New Statesman about it. As soon as I got out of Spain I wired from France asking if they would like an article and of course they said yes, but when they saw my article was on the suppression of the P.O.U.M. they said they couldn’t print it. To sugar the pill they sent me to review a very good book which appeared recently, The Spanish Cockpit,³ which blows the gaff pretty well on what has been happening. But once again when they saw my review they couldn’t print it as it was ‘against editorial policy,’ but they actually offered to pay for the review all the same— practically hush-money. I am also having to change my publisher, at least for this book.⁴ Gollancz is of course part of the Communism-racket, and as soon as he heard I had been associated with the P.O.U.M. and Anarchists and had seen the inside of the May riots in Barcelona, he said he did not think he would be able to publish my book, though not a word of it was written yet. I think he must have very astutely foreseen that something of the kind would happen, as when I went to Spain he drew up a contract undertaking to publish my fiction but not other books. However I have two other publishers on my track and I think my agent is being clever and has got them bidding against one another. I have started my book but of course my fingers are all thumbs at present.

My wound was not much, but it was a miracle it did not kill me. The bullet went clean through my neck but missed everything except one vocal cord, or rather the nerve governing it, which is paralysed. At first I had no voice at all, but now the other vocal cord is compensating and the damaged one may or may not recover. My voice is practically normal but I can’t shout to any extent. I also can’t sing, but people tell me this doesn’t matter. I am rather glad to have been hit by a bullet because I think it will happen to us all in the near future and I am glad to know that it doesn’t hurt to speak of. What I saw in Spain did not make me cynical but it does make me think that the future is pretty grim. It is evident that people can be deceived by the anti-Fascist stuff exactly as they were deceived by the gallant little Belgium stuff, and when war comes they will walk straight into it. I don’t, however, agree with the pacifist attitude, as I believe you do. I still think one must fight for Socialism and against Fascism, I mean fight physically with weapons, only it is as well to discover which is which. I want to meet Holdaway5 and see what he thinks about the Spanish business. He is the only more or less orthodox Communist I have met whom I could respect. It will disgust me if I find he is spouting the same defence of democracy and Trotsky-Fascist stuff as the others.

I would much like to see you, but I honestly don’t think I shall be in London for some time, unless absolutely obliged to go up on business. I am just getting going with my book, which I want to get done by Xmas, also very busy trying to get the garden etc. in trim after being so long away. Anyway keep in touch and let me know your address. I can’t get in touch with Rees*. He was on the Madrid front and there was practically no communication. I heard from Murry* who seemed in the weeps about something. Au revoir.

Yours

Eric

[XI, 381, pp. 53–4; typewritten]

1. Mrs Rayner Heppenstall.

2. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell tells how his hotel room was searched by six plain-clothes policemen, who took away ‘every scrap of paper we possessed’, except, fortunately, Eileen’s and his passports and their cheque-book. He learned later that the police had seized some of his belongings, including a bundle of dirty linen, from the Sanatorium Maurín (see VI, p. 164). More than fifty years later, a document was discovered by Karen Hatherley in the National Historical Archive, in Madrid, that precisely confirmed this (XI, 374A, pp. 30–7).

3. Orwell’s review of The Spanish Cockpit by Franz Borkenau appears in XI, 379, pp. 51–2. When reviewing his The Communist International in 1938 he wrote that he still thought the former ‘the best book on the subject’. Dr Borkenau (1900–57) was an Austrian sociologist and political writer. From 1921–29 he was a member of the German Communist Party. He emigrated to Britain in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. Orwell greatly admired him and his work.

4. Homage to Catalonia.

5. N.A. Holdaway was a schoolmaster and Marxist theorist, a member of the Independent Socialist Party, contributor to The Adelphi, and Director of the Adelphi Centre.

To Charles Doran*

2 August 1937

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Doran,

I don’t know your address, but I expect they will know it at the I.L.P. summer school, where I am going on Thursday. I was also there yesterday, to hear John McNair* speak.

I was very relieved when I saw young Jock Branthwaite,1 who has been staying with us, and learned that all of you who wished to had got safely out of Spain. I came up to the front on June 15^th to get my medical discharge, but couldn’t come up to the line to see you because they kept sending me about from hospital to hospital. I got back to Barcelona to find that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed in my absence, and they had kept it from the troops so successfully that on June 20^th as far down the line as Lérida not a soul had heard about it, though the suppression had taken place on the 16^th–17^th. My first intimation was walking into the Hotel Continental and having Eileen and a Frenchman named Pivert,² who was a very good friend to everyone during the trouble, rush up to me, seize me each by one arm and tell me to get out. Kopp* had just recently been arrested in the Continental owing to the staff ringing up the police and giving him away. MacNair°, Cottman* and I had to spend several days on the run, sleeping in ruined churches etc., but Eileen stayed in the hotel and, beyond having her room searched and all my documents seized, was not molested, possibly because the police were using her as a decoy duck for MacNair° and me. We slipped away very suddenly on the morning of the 23^rd, and crossed the frontier without much difficulty. Luckily there was a first class and a dining car on the train, and we did our best to look like ordinary English tourists, which was the safest thing to do. In Barcelona one was fairly safe during the daytime, and Eileen and I visited Kopp several times in the filthy den where he and scores of others, including Milton,3 were imprisoned. The police had actually gone to the length of arresting the wounded P.O.U.M. men out of the Maurín [Hospital], and I saw two men in the jail with amputated legs; also a boy of about ten. A few days ago we got some letters, dated July 7^th, which Kopp* had somehow managed to send out of Spain. They included a letter of protest to the Chief of Police. He said that not only had he and all the others been imprisoned for 18 days (much longer now, of course) without any trial or charge, but that they were being confined in places where they had hardly room to lie down, were half starved and in many cases beaten and insulted. We sent the letter on to McNair, and I believe after discussing the matter Maxton⁴ has arranged to see the Spanish ambassador and tell him that if something is not done, at any rate for the foreign prisoners, he will spill the beans in Parliament. McNair also tells me that there is a credible report in the French papers that the body of Nin,⁵ also I think other P.O.U.M. leaders, has been found shot in Madrid. I suppose it will be ‘suicide,’ or perhaps appendicitis again.⁶

Meanwhile it seems almost impossible to get anything printed about all this … [Here Orwell repeats what he had written to Rayner Heppenstall* on 31 July 1937 about the reactions of the New Statesman and Gollancz.*]

I went up to Bristol with some others to take part in a protest meeting about Stafford Cottman* being expelled from the Y.C.L.⁷ with the words ‘we brand him as an enemy of the working class’ and similar expressions. Since then I heard that the Cottmans’ house had been shadowed by members of the Y.C.L. who attempt to question everyone who comes in and out. What a show! To think that we started off as heroic defenders of democracy and only six months later were Trotsky-Fascists sneaking over the border with the police on our heels. Meanwhile being a Trotsky-Fascist doesn’t seem to help us with the pro-Fascists in this country. This afternoon Eileen and I had a visit from the vicar, who doesn’t at all approve of our having been on the Government side. Of course we had to own up that it was true about the burning of the churches, but he cheered up a lot on hearing they were only Roman Catholic churches.

Let me know how you get on. Eileen wishes to be remembered.

Yours

Eric Blair

P.S. [handwritten] I forgot to say that when in Barcelona I wanted greatly to write to you all & warn you, but I dared not, because I thought any such letter would simply draw undesirable attention to the man it was addressed to.

[XI, 386, pp. 64–6; typewritten]

1. Jock Branthwaite (d. 1997) was the son of a miner. He served with Orwell in Spain. He remembered copies of The Road to Wigan Pier arriving at the Front and said the book did not offend his working-class sensibilities. He told Stephen Wadhams that Orwell was not a snob: ‘I thought he was a wonderful man.’ He got out of Spain on the last refugee boat from Barcelona to Marseilles. (See Remembering Orwell, pp. 83–4, 93, 99.)

2. Marceau Pivert was a contributor to Controversy.

3. Harry Milton was the only American serving with Orwell’s unit. He and Orwell were talking when Orwell was shot through the throat (Homage to Catalonia, p. 138). He was Trotskyist and regarded Orwell as ‘politically virginal’ on arrival in Spain. They spent hours together discussing politics. Orwell was ‘as cool as a cucumber’ and ‘a very disciplined individual’ (see Remembering Orwell, pp. 81, 85, 90).

4. James Maxton (1885–1946), Independent Labour Party MP, 1922–46; Chairman of the ILP, 1926–31, 1934–39.

5. Andrés Nin (1892–1937), leader of the POUM; he had once been Trotsky’s private secretary in Moscow, but broke with him when Trotsky spoke critically of the POUM. He was murdered by the Communists after the customary Soviet interrogation in May 1937. (See Thomas, p. 523.)

6. This refers to Bob Smillie, thrown into jail in Valencia where according to his captors he died of appendicitis. (See Homage to Catalonia, p. 149.)

7. Young Communist League.

Orwell and The Road to Wigan Pier were subjected to vicious attacks by Communists and the extreme Left Press. Ruth Dudley Edwards describes Orwell as being ‘blackguarded’ by Harry Pollitt, leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the Daily Worker, 17 March 1937 (Victor Gollancz (1987), p. 248). Pollitt wrote: ‘Here is George Orwell, a disillusioned little middle-class boy who, seeing through imperialism, decided to discover what Socialism had to offer … a late imperialist policeman …. If ever snobbery had its hallmark placed upon it, it is by Mr Orwell…. I gather that the chief thing that worries Mr Orwell is the “smell” of the working-class, for smells seem to occupy the major portion of the book…. One thing I am certain of, and it is this – if Mr Orwell could only hear what the Left Book Club circles will say about this book, then he would make a resolution never to write again on any subject that he does not understand.’ Attacks on Orwell continued during the summer and finally Orwell sought Gollancz’s help.

To Victor Gollancz*

20 August 1937

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Mr Gollancz,

I do not expect you will have seen the enclosed cutting, as it does not refer to anything you published for me.

This (see underlined words) is the—I think—third reference in the Daily Worker to my supposedly saying that the working classes ‘smell.’ As you know I have never said anything of the kind, in fact have specifically said the opposite. What I said in Chapter VIII of Wigan Pier, as you may perhaps remember, is that middle-class people are brought up to believe that the working classes ‘smell,’ which is simply a matter of observable fact. Numbers of the letters I received from readers of the book referred to this and congratulated me on pointing it out. The statement or implication that I think working people ‘smell’ is a deliberate lie aimed at people who have not read this or any other of my books, in order to give them the idea that I am a vulgar snob and thus indirectly hit at the political parties with which I have been associated. These attacks in the Worker only began after it became known to the Communist Party that I was serving with the P.O.U.M. militia.

I have no connection with these people (the Worker staff) and nothing I said would carry any weight with them, but you of course are in a different position. I am very sorry to trouble you about what is more or less my own personal affair, but I think perhaps it might be worth your while to intervene and stop attacks of this kind which will not, of course, do any good to the books you have published for me or may publish for me in the future. If therefore at any time you happen to be in touch with anyone in authority on the Worker staff, I should be very greatly obliged if you would tell them two things:

1. That if they repeat this lie about my saying the working classes ‘smell’ I shall publish a reply with the necessary quotations, and in it I shall include what John Strachey1 said to me on the subject just before I left for Spain (about December 20^th). Strachey will no doubt remember it, and I don’t think the C.P. would care to see it in print.

2. This is a more serious matter. A campaign of organised libel is going on against people who were serving with the P.O.U.M. in Spain. A comrade of mine, a boy of eighteen whom I knew in the line,² was recently not only expelled from his branch of the Y.C.L. for his association with the P.O.U.M., which was perhaps justifiable as the P.O.U.M. and C.P. policies are quite incompatible, but was also described in a letter as ‘in the pay of Franco.’ This latter statement is quite a different matter. I don’t know whether it is libellous within the meaning of the act, but I am taking counsel’s opinion, as, of course, the same thing (ie. that I am in Fascist pay) is liable to be said about myself. Perhaps again, if you are speaking to anyone in authoritative position, you could tell them that in the case of anything actionable being said against me, I shall not hesitate to take a libel action immediately. I hate to take up this threatening attitude, and I should hate still more to be involved in litigation, especially against members of another working-class party, but I think one has a right to defend oneself against these malignant personal attacks which, even if it is really the case that the C.P. is entirely right and the P.O.U.M. and I.L.P. entirely wrong, cannot in the long run do any good to the working-class cause. You see here (second passage underlined) the implied suggestion that I did not ‘pull my weight’ in the fight against the Fascists. From this it is only a short step to calling me a coward, a shirker etc., and I do not doubt these people would do so if they thought it was safe.

I am extremely sorry to put this kind of thing upon you, and I shall understand and not be in any way offended if you do not feel you can do anything about it.3 But I have ventured to approach you because you are my publisher and may, perhaps, feel that your good name is to some extent involved with mine.

Yours sincerely

Eric Blair

[X, 390, pp.72–4; typewritten]

1. John Strachey (1901–63), political theorist, Labour MP, 1929–31, then stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for Oswald Mosley’s New Party (of Fascist inclination), then supported Communism. He was Labour Minister of Food, 1945–50 and Secretary of State for War, 1950–51.

2. Stafford Cottman.*

3. Gollancz told Orwell he was passing his letter on ‘to the proper quarter’. That proved to be the Communist Party’s offices in King Street, London. To Pollitt, he wrote, ‘My dear Harry, you should see this letter from Orwell. I read it to John [Strachey] over the telephone and he assures me that he is quite certain that he said nothing whatever indiscreet.’ What Strachey said is not known. However, the attacks did, for the moment, cease.

To Geoffrey Gorer*

15 September 1937

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Geoffrey,

Thanks so much for your letter. I am glad you are enjoying yourself in Denmark, though, I must admit, it is one of the few countries I have never wanted to visit. I rang you up when I was in town, but of course you weren’t there. I note you are coming back about the 24^th. We shall be here till the 10^th October, then we are going down to Suffolk to stay at my parents’ place for some weeks. But if you can manage it any time between the 24^th and the 10^th, just drop us a line and then come down and stay. We can always put you up without difficulty.

What you say about not letting the Fascists in owing to dissensions between ourselves is very true so long as one is clear what one means by Fascism, also who or what it is that is making unity impossible. Of course all the Popular Front stuff that is now being pushed by the Communist press and party, Gollancz and his paid hacks etc., etc., only boils down to saying that they are in favour of British Fascism (prospective) as against German Fascism. What they are aiming to do is to get British capitalist-imperialism into an alliance with the U.S.S.R. and thence into a war with Germany. Of course they piously pretend that they don’t want the war to come and that a French-British-Russian alliance can prevent it on the old balance of power system. But we know what the balance of power business led to last time, and in any case it is manifest that the nations are arming with the intention of fighting. The Popular Front boloney boils down to this: that when the war comes the Communists, labourites etc., instead of working to stop the war and overthrow the Government, will be on the side of the Government provided that the Government is on the ‘right’ side, ie. against Germany. But everyone with any imagination can foresee that Fascism, not of course called Fascism, will be imposed on us as soon as the war starts. So you will have Fascism with Communists participating in it, and, if we are in alliance with the U.S.S.R., taking a leading part in it. This is what has happened in Spain. After what I have seen in Spain I have come to the conclusion that it is futile to be ‘anti-Fascist’ while attempting to preserve capitalism. Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism when the pinch comes. We like to think of England as a democratic country, but our rule in India, for instance, is just as bad as German Fascism, though outwardly it may be less irritating. I do not see how one can oppose Fascism except by working for the overthrow of capitalism, starting, of course, in one’s own country. If one collaborates with a capitalist-imperialist government in a struggle ‘against Fascism,’ ie. against a rival imperialism, one is simply letting Fascism in by the back door. The whole struggle in Spain, on the Government side, has turned upon this. The revolutionary parties, the Anarchists, P.O.U.M. etc., wanted to complete the revolution, the others wanted to fight the Fascists in the name of ‘democracy,’ and, of course, when they felt sure enough of their position and had tricked the workers into giving up their arms, re-introduce capitalism. The grotesque feature, which very few people outside Spain have yet grasped, is that the Communists stood furthest of all to the right, and were more anxious even than the liberals to hunt down the revolutionaries and stamp out all revolutionary ideas. For instance, they have succeeded in breaking up the workers’ militias, which were based on the trade unions and in which all ranks received the same pay and were on a basis of equality, and substituting an army on bourgeois lines where a colonel is paid eight times as much as a private etc. All these changes, of course, are put forward in the name of military necessity and backed up by the ‘Trotskyist’ racket, which consists of saying that anyone who professes revolutionary principles is a Trotskyist and in Fascist pay. The Spanish Communist press has for instance declared that Maxton is in the pay of the Gestapo. The reason why so few people grasp what has happened in Spain is because of the Communist command of the press. Apart from their own press they have the whole of the capitalist anti-Fascist press (papers like the News Chronicle) on their side, because the latter have got onto the fact that official Communism is now anti-revolutionary. The result is that they have been able to put across an unprecedented amount of lies and it is almost impossible to get anyone to print anything in contradiction. The accounts of the Barcelona riots in May, which I had the misfortune to be involved in, beat everything I have ever seen for lying. Incidentally the Daily Worker has been following me personally with the most filthy libels, calling me pro-Fascist etc., but I asked Gollancz to silence them, which he did, not very willingly I imagine. Queerly enough I am still contracted to write a number of books for him, though he refused to publish the book I am doing on Spain before a word of it was written.

I should like to meet Edith Sitwell1 very much, some time when I am in town. It surprised me very much to learn that she had heard of me and liked my books. I don’t know what° I ever cared much for her poems, but I liked very much her life of Pope.

Try and come down here some time. I hope your sprue² is gone.

Yours

Eric

[XI, 397, pp. 80–81; typewritten]

1. Edith Sitwell (1887–1964; DBE, 1954), poet and literary personality. Her first book of poems was published at her own expense in 1915, and she continued to write throughout her life. She achieved lasting and widespread recognition for Façade, which was read in a concert version, with music by William Walton, in January 1922. She encouraged many young artists and was greatly interested in Orwell’s work. Her Alexander Pope was published in 1930.

2. Here, a throat infection.

To H. N. Brailsford*

10 December 1937

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Mr Brailsford,

I cannot exactly claim your acquaintance, though I believe I did meet you for a moment in Barcelona, and I know you met my wife there.

I have been trying to get the truth about certain aspects of the May fighting in Barcelona. I see that in the New Statesman of May 22^nd you state that the P.O.U.M. partisans attacked the Government with tanks and guns ‘stolen from Government arsenals.’ I was, of course, in Barcelona throughout the fighting, and though I cannot answer for tanks I know as well as one can be certain about such a thing that no guns were firing anywhere. In various papers there occurs a version of what is evidently the same story, to the effect that the P.O.U.M. were using a battery of stolen 75 mm. guns on the Plaza de España. I know this story to be untrue for a number of reasons. To begin with, I have it from eye-witnesses who were on the spot that there were no guns there; secondly, I examined the buildings round the square afterwards and there were no signs of gunfire; thirdly, throughout the fighting I did not hear the sound of artillery, which is unmistakeable if one is used to it. It would seem therefore that there has been a mistake. I wonder if you could be kind enough to tell me what was the source of the story about the guns and tanks? I am sorry to trouble you, but I want to get this story cleared up if I can.

Perhaps I ought to tell you that I write under the name of George Orwell.

Yours truly

Eric Blair

[XX, 413A, pp. 309–10; typewritten]

To H. N. Brailsford*

18 December 1937

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Mr Brailsford,

Thank you very much for your letter.1 I was very interested to know the source of the story about tanks and guns. I have no doubt the Russian ambassador told it you in good faith and from what little I know myself I should think it quite likely it was true in the form in which he gave it you. But because of the special circumstances, incidents of that kind are apt to be a little misleading. I hope it will not bore you if I add one or two more remarks about this question.

As I say, it is quite conceivable that at some time or other the guns were stolen, because to my own knowledge, though I never actually saw it done, there was a great deal of stealing of weapons from one militia to another. But people who were not actually in the militia do not seem to have understood the arms situation. As far as possible arms were prevented from getting to the P.O.U.M. and Anarchist militias, and they were left only with the bare minimum that would enable them to hold the line but not to make any offensive action. There were times when the men in the trenches actually had not enough rifles to go round, and at no time until the militias were broken up was artillery allowed to get to the Aragon front in any quantity. When the Anarchists made their attacks on the Jaca road in March–April they had to do so with very little artillery support and had frightful casualties. At this time (March–April) there were only about 12 of our aeroplanes operating over Huesca. When the Popular Army attacked in June a man who took part in the attack tells me that there were 160. In particular, the Russian arms were kept from the Aragon front at the time when they were being issued to the police forces in the rear. Until April I saw only one Russian weapon, a sub-machine gun, which quite possibly had been stolen. In April two batteries of Russian 75 mm. guns arrived—again possibly stolen and conceivably the guns referred to by the Russian ambassador. As to pistols and revolvers, which are very necessary in trench warfare, the Government would not issue permits to ordinary militiamen and militia officers to buy them, and one could only buy them illegally from the Anarchists. In these circumstances the outlook everyone had was that one had to get hold of weapons by hook or by crook, and all the militias were constantly pilfering them from one another. I remember an officer describing to me how he and some others had stolen a field gun from a gun-park belonging to the P.S.U.C.,² and I would have done the same myself without any hesitation in the circumstances. This kind of thing always goes on in war-time, but, coming together with the newspaper stories to the effect that the P.O.U.M. was a disguised Fascist organisation, it was easy to suggest that they stole weapons not to use against the Fascists but to use against the Government. Owing to the Communist control of the press the similar behaviour by other units was kept dark. For instance there is not much doubt that in March some partisans of the P.S.U.C. stole 12 tanks from a Government arsenal by means of a forged order. La Battalia, the P.O.U.M. paper, was fined 5000 pesetas and suppressed for 4 days for reporting this, but the Anarchist paper, Solidaridad Obrera, was able to report it with impunity. As to the guns, if stolen, being kept in Barcelona, it seems to me immensely unlikely. Some of the men at the front would certainly have heard of it and would have raised hell if they had known weapons were being kept back, and I should doubt if you could keep two batteries of guns concealed even in a town the size of Barcelona. In any case they would have come to light later, when the P.O.U.M. was suppressed. I do not, of course, know what was in all the P.O.U.M. strongholds, but I was in the three principle° ones during the Barcelona fighting, and I know that they had only enough weapons for the usual armed guards that were kept on buildings. They had no machine guns, for instance. And I think it is certain that there was no artillery-fire during the fighting. I see that you refer to the Friends of Durruti3 being more or less under P.O.U.M. control, and John Langdon-Davies⁴ says something to the same effect in his report in the News Chronicle. This story was only put about in order to brand the P.O.U.M. as ‘Trotskyist.’ Actually the Friends of Durruti, which was an extremist organisation, was bitterly hostile to the P.O.U.M. (from their point of view a more or less right-wing organisation) and so far as I know no one was a member of both. The only connection between the two is that at the time of the May fighting the P.O.U.M. are said to have published approval of an inflammatory poster which was put up by the Friends of Durruti. Again there is some doubt about this—it is certain that there was no poster, as described in the News Chronicle and elsewhere, but there may have been a handbill of some kind. It is impossible to discover, as all records have been destroyed and the Spanish authorities would not allow me to send out of Spain files even of the P.S.U.C. newspapers, let alone the others. The only sure thing is that the Communist reports on the May fighting, and still more on the alleged Fascist plot by the P.O.U.M., are completely untruthful. What worries me is not these lies being told, which is what one expects in war-time, but that the English left-wing press has refused to allow the other side a hearing. Eg. the papers made a tremendous splash about Nin⁵ and the others being in Fascist pay, but have failed to mention that the Spanish Government, other than the Communist members, have denied that there was any truth in the story. I suppose the underlying idea is that they are somehow aiding the Spanish Government by allowing the Communists a free hand. I am sorry to burden you with all this stuff, but I have tried to do all I can, which is not much, to get the truth about what has happened in Spain more widely known. It does not matter to me personally when they say that I am in Fascist pay, but it is different for the thousands who are in prison in Spain and are liable to be murdered by the secret police as so many have been already. I doubt whether it would be possible to do much for the Spanish anti-Fascist prisoners, but some kind of organised protest would probably get many of the foreigners released.

My wife wishes to be remembered to you. Neither of us suffered any ill-effects from being in Spain, though, of course, the whole thing was terribly distressing and disillusioning. The effects of my wound passed off more quickly than was expected. If it would interest I will send you a copy of my book on Spain when it comes out.

Yours sincerely

Eric Blair

[XX, 413B, pp. 310–12; typewritten]

1. Brailsford replied on 17 December 1937 (XI, 424, p. 119). He said he had the information from the Soviet Consul General, Vladimir Antonov-Ovsëenko (1884–1937) in Barcelona. He ‘has since been purged’. He and his wife, Sofia, were recalled to the USSR after the ‘May Events’ and arrested in October 1937 with their daughter, Valentina (aged 15). The parents were shot on 8 February 1938. For the daughter’s future life, see Orlando Figes, The Whisperers (2007; Penguin 2008), pp. 336–8.

2. Partido Socialists Unificado de Cataluña (The United Catalan Socialist Party, a communist party).

3. The Friends of Durruti was an extreme anarchist group within the Federación Anarquista Ibérica. (See Homage to Catalonia, pp. 219, 220, and 237, and Thomas, p. 656, n. 1.) It was named after Buenaventura Durruti (1896–1936) who had been mortally wounded fighting in Madrid and thereafter became a ‘legendary anarchist warrior’ (see Thomas, p. 36).

4. John Langdon-Davies (1897–1971), journalist and author. He wrote for the News Chronicle in Spain and was joint secretary with the Communist lawyer Geoffrey Bing of the Comintern-sponsored Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Breaches of the Non-Intervention Agreement in Spain (see Thomas, pp. 397–8). Orwell’s refusal to ‘accept the politics of liquidation and elimination’ led to sneering by ‘harder Communists’, of which Langdon-Davies was one (see Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, 1988, p. 4). Following his experiences in Barcelona, he wrote Air Raid (1938), advocating large-scale evacuation and underground highways.

Eileen* to Norah Myles*

The Stores had no electricity. This letter, because seemingly typed by the light of a candle, which towards the end is guttering, has a small number of typographical errors. These have been silently corrected.

New Year’s Day 1938

The Stores, Wallington

[no salutation]

You see I have no pen, no ink, no glasses and the prospect of no light, because the pens, the inks, the glasses and the candles are all in the room where George is working and if I disturb him again it will be for the fifteenth time tonight. But full of determined ingenuity I found a typewriter, and blind people are said to type in their dark.

I have also to write to a woman who has suddenly sent me a Christmas present (I think it may be intended for a wedding present after an estrangement of five or ten years, and in looking to see whether I had any clues to her address I found a bit of a letter to you, a very odd hysterical little letter, much more like Spain than any I can have written in that country. So here it is. The difficulty about the Spanish war is that it still dominates our lives in a most unreasonable manner because Eric George (or do you call him Eric?) is just finishing the book about it and I give him typescripts the reverse sides of which are covered with manuscript emendations that he can’t read, and he is always having to speak about it and I have returned to complete pacifism and joined the P.P.U.1 partly because of it. (Incidentally, you must join the P.P.U. too. War is fun so far as the shooting goes and much less alarming than an aeroplane in a shop window, but it does appalling things to people normally quite sane and intelligent – some make desperate efforts to retain some kind of integrity and others like Langdon-Davies make no efforts at all but hardly anyone can stay reasonable, let alone honest.) The Georges Kopp*² situation is now more Dellian³ than ever. He is still in jail but has somehow managed to get several letters out to me, one of which George opened and read because I was away. He is very fond of Georges, who indeed cherished him with real tenderness in Spain and anyway is admirable as a soldier because of his quite remarkable courage, and he is extraordinarily magnanimous about the whole business – just as Georges was extraordinarily magnanimous. Indeed they went about saving each other’s lives or trying to in a way that was almost horrible to me, though George had not then noticed that Georges was more than ‘a bit gone on’ me. I sometimes think no one ever had such a sense of guilt before. It was always understood that I wasn’t what they call in love with Georges – our association progressed in little leaps, each leap immediately preceding some attack or operation in which he would almost inevitably be killed,4 but the last time I saw him he was in jail waiting, as we were both confident, to be shot, and I simply couldn’t explain to him again as a kind of farewell that he could never be a rival to George. So he has rotted in a filthy prison for more than six months with nothing to do but remember me in my most pliant moments. If he never gets out, which is indeed most probable, it’s good that he has managed to have some thoughts in a way pleasant, but if he does get out I don’t know how one reminds a man immediately he is a free man again that one has only once missed the cue for saying that nothing on earth would induce one to marry him. Being in prison in Spain means living in a room with a number of others (about fifteen to twenty in a room the size of your sitting-room) and never getting out of it; if the window has steel shutters, as many have, never seeing daylight, never having a letter; never being charged, let alone tried; never knowing whether you will be shot tomorrow or released, in either case without explanation; when your money runs out never eating anything but a bowl of the worst imaginable soup and a bit of bread at 3 p.m. and at 11 p.m.

On the whole it’s a pity I found that letter because Spain doesn’t really dominate us as much as all that. We have nineteen hens now – eighteen deliberately and the other by accident because we bought some ducklings and a hen escorted them. We thought we ought to boil her this autumn so we took it in turns to watch the nesting boxes to see whether she laid an egg to justify a longer life, and she did. And she is a good mother, so she is to have children in the spring. This afternoon we built a new henhouse – that is we put the sections together – and that is the nucleus of the breeding pen. There is probably no question on poultry-keeping that I am not able and very ready to answer. Perhaps you would like to have a battery (say three units) in the bathroom so that you could benefit from my advice. It would be a touching thing to collect an egg just before brushing one’s teeth and eat it just after. Which reminds me that since we got back from Southwold, where we spent an incredibly family Christmas with the Blairs, we have eaten boiled eggs almost all the time. Before we had only one eggcup from Woolworths’ – no two from Woolworths’ and one that I gave George with an Easter egg in it before we were married (that cost threepence with egg). So it was a Happy Thought dear, and they are such a nice shape and match your mother’s butter dish and breadboard, giving tone to the table.

We also have a poodle puppy. We called him Marx to remind us that we had never read Marx⁵ and now we have read a little and taken so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can’t look the dog in the face when we speak to him. He, the dog, is a French poodle, supposed to be miniature and of prize-winning stock, with silver hair. So far he has black and white hair, greying at the temples, and at four and a half months is rather larger than his mother. We think however he may take a prize as the largest miniature. He is very appealing and has a remarkable digestion. I am proud of this. He has never been sick, although almost daily he finds in the garden bones that no eye can have seen these twenty years and has eaten several rugs and a number of chairs and stools. We weren’t going to clip him, but he has a lot of hairs which are literally dripping mud on the driest day – he rolls on every cushion in turn and then drips right through my lap – so we thought we would clip him a little. But now we shall never get him symmetrical till we shave him. Laurence6 (it is a dreadful thing that you have never seen Laurence) bears with him in a remarkable way and has never scratched even his nose.

I went to stay with Mary.⁷ You will have heard about the domestic changes. She went to stay with that pregnant cousin and read a book on infant feeding, from which she discovered that everything Nanny did was wrong. So of course she had to come home and tell her so, because otherwise she would have killed the children. Now they have a Norwegian nurse. I think she is better but it’s bad luck for David who was hopelessly spoilt by fat Nanny and is not approved of by the Norwegian – who never raises her voice but puts him in the corner. Mary herself has become a good mother – when the children are there, I mean. She is perfectly reasonable with them. I don’t know what happened. David is very intelligent and makes me slightly jealous because I should like a son and we don’t have one. Mary and I summed up human history in a dreadful way when I was there – I was in the throes of pre-plague pains, which had happened so late that I was wondering whether I could persuade myself that I felt as though I were not going to have them, and Mary wasn’t having any pre-plague pains at all and was in a fever and going to the chemist to try to buy some ergot or other corrective. We had two parties – we went to see Phyl Guimaraens and the MAMMETT CAME TO TEA.⁸ She might just as well have been in Girl Guide uniform but now she organises play-readings, when all the old St. Hugh’s girls go to her house and read Julius Caesar. Mary went once but she thought they would be given something to eat and they weren’t, not even a bun or a cup of tea, so she is embittered and not being a good old girl any more. David and the Mammett had a nice conversation. David had told me earlier in the day that she was coming to tea and he knew her very well, so I repeated this to her and she was delighted. When he was brought into the room this happened:

‘Well, little David (holding out the hand), and do you think you know who I am?’

‘Yes – you’re granny’ (with complete confidence, allowing his hand to be held and stroked).

‘No (ever so kindly), I’m not granny.’

‘Oh? What are you then?’

Phyl is just the same as she used to be in her most charming moments. It was fun seeing her again. I think perhaps we might have a proper reunion some day. Couldn’t you come and stay with her and while she is at the office eat potato crisps at the Criterion (Mary and I did this as much for old times’ sake as because it was cold)? It seems to me superlatively clever for anyone to keep herself on the Stock Exchange, as she says she does. I wonder about it all the time I’m with her.

The last candle is guttering, and there isn’t any good way out of this letter. But perhaps it has broken a spell. Does yours mean that June is at Oxford? I just didn’t know. Anyway she can’t be more than fifteen. Norman? John? Elisabeth? Jean? Ruth? Your mother? Your father?9 I don’t think I want any news of you and Quartus because I am quite sure I know all about you and it would be so dreadful to hear something quite different. The only thing I can do is to come and see. I am supposed to be having a holiday when the book is finished, as it will be this month, only we sha’n’t have any money at all, and we were so rich.¹⁰ When are you coming to the sales? Or are you? I don’t know whether I can get away even for a day because the book is late and the typescript of the final draft is not begun and Eric is writing a book in collaboration with a number of people including a German and I keep getting his manuscript to revise and not being able to understand anything at all in it¹¹ – but if you were coming to the sales these things would all be less important to

Pig.

Did I wish you a happy new year?

Please wish all your family a happy new year from me.

Eric (I mean George) has just come in to say that the light is out (he had the Aladdin lamp because he was Working) and is there any oil (such a question) and I can’t type in this light (which may be true, but I can’t read it) and he is hungry and wants some cocoa and some biscuits and it is after midnight and Marx is eating a bone and has left pieces in each chair and which shall he sit on now.

[LO, pp. 70–5; XI, 415A, p. 109; typewritten]

1. Peace Pledge Union. Orwell has been said to have been a member but this is almost certainly not so. Orwell bought some of their pamphlets and a receipt, no. 20194, exists in the Orwell Archive for 2s 6d, dated 12 December 1937, from Mrs E. Blair – Eileen. That was thought to be a receipt for pamphlets but it seems to have been her subscription.

2. George(s) Kopp* was Orwell’s commander in Spain. They were then very close friends but their friendship cooled in the late 1940s. It was Kopp who did much to care for Orwell after he was wounded in the throat. Eileen’s opening her heart to Norah here tells us much more than has previously been conjectured about their supposed relationship.

3. Either Dellian for Delian, related to the Greek island of Delos, home of an oracle who posed obscure and convoluted responses to questions put to it; or an ironic reference to the romantic novels of Ethel M. Dell about whom Orwell is scathing in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, p. 3.

4. Such operations give an impression of greater activity on the Huesca front than Orwell himself modestly suggested.

5. There has been disagreement as to when Orwell first read Marx (see XI, pp. 65–6, n. 1). Richard Rees records in George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1961) that everyone at the Adelphi Summer School in 1936 was astonished by his knowledge of Marx (p. 147). (See Crick, p. 629, n. 49.)

6. This must be Eileen’s brother, Laurence O’Shaughnessy. Laurence’s son, also called Laurence, was not born until 13 November 1938.

7. Presumably Bertha Mary Wardell who had graduated with Eileen. (See 16.2.37 n. 11.)

8. Phyllis Guimaraens read Modern Languages at St Hugh’s. Her father was a shipper of port wine; they lived at Petridge Wood, Redhill, Surrey. She married Harold Gabell 5 June 1926 at St Peter’s, Eaton Square, London. Jenny Joseph suggested privately that The Mammett was a one-time tutor at St Hugh’s or connected with the Senior Members’ Association.

9. Norah had two sisters, Jean and Ruth. Jean married Maurice Durant and was the mother of John, Margaret Durant’s husband.

10. Orwell took a second, carbon, copy of Homage to Catalonia to his agent, Leonard Moore, on 10 February 1938. Eileen’s reference to their being so rich may be ironic but could refer to royalties received for the Left Book Club edition of The Road to Wigan Pier – some £600 though much of that must have been spent in Spain. The ‘holiday’ to which Eileen refers might have been delayed because of Orwell’s illness and then spent at Chapel Ridding, Windermere, about the middle of July. Whom she went to stay with there is not known.

11. There is possibly confusion of Eric/husband and Eric/brother here. Eileen may well be referring to the latter and a medical book on which he was collaborating.

On 5 February 1938 Orwell wrote to the editor of Time and Tide, which had published his review of Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit, regarding its rejection on political grounds by ‘another well-known weekly paper’. Raymond Mortimer, critic and literary editor of the New Statesman and Nation wrote to Orwell on 8 February 1938 in protest, saying: ‘It is possible of course that the “well known weekly paper” to which you refer is not the New Statesman but I take this as reference to us, and so no doubt will the majority of those who read your letter.’ The offices of the New Statesman were bombed during the war, so all the correspondence of that time has been lost, but among his papers Orwell kept the originals of letters from Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman and Raymond Mortimer and a carbon copy, reprinted here, of his reply to Mortimer.

To Raymond Mortimer*

9 February 1938

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Mortimer,

With reference to your letter of February 8^th. I am extremely sorry if I have hurt your or anybody else’s feelings, but before speaking of the general issues involved, I must point out that what you say in it is not quite correct. You say ‘Your review of The Spanish Cockpit was refused, because it gave a most inadequate and misleading description of the book. You used the review merely to express your own opinions and to present facts which you thought should be known. Moreover, last time I saw you you acknowledged this. Why then do you now suggest, quite mistakenly, that the review was refused because it “controverted editorial policy”? Are you confusing the review with the previous refusal of an article, which you submitted, and which the editor turned down because we had just printed three articles on the same subject’

I attach a copy of Kingsley Martin’s letter1. You will see from this that the review was refused because it ‘controverts the political policy of the paper’ (I should have said ‘political policy’ not ‘editorial policy’.) Secondly, you say that my previous article had been turned down ‘because we had just printed three articles on the same subject’. Now, the article I sent in was on the suppression of the P.O.U.M., the alleged ‘Trotsky-Fascist’ plot, the murder of Nin, etc. So far as I know the New Statesman has never published any article on this subject. I certainly did and do admit that the review I wrote was tendentious and perhaps unfair, but it was not returned to me on those grounds, as you see from the letter attached.

Nothing is more hateful to me than to get mixed up in these controversies and to write, as it were, against people and newspapers that I have always respected, but one has got to realise what kind of issues are involved and the very great difficulty of getting the truth ventilated in the English press. So far as one can get at the figures, not less than 3000 political prisoners (ie. anti-Fascists) are in the Spanish jails at present, and the majority of them have been there six or seven months without any kind of trial or charge, in the most filthy physical conditions, as I have seen with my own eyes. A number of them have been bumped off, and there is not much doubt that there would have been a wholesale massacre if the Spanish Government had not had the sense to disregard the clamour in the Communist press. Various members of the Spanish Government have said over and over again to Maxton, McGovern, Felicien Challaye2 and others that they wish to release these people but are unable to do so because of Communist pressure. What happens in Loyalist Spain is largely governed by outside opinion, and there is no doubt that if there had [been] a general protest from foreign Socialists the anti-Fascist prisoners would have been released. Even the protests of a small body like the I.L.P. have had some effect. But a few months back when a petition was got up for the release of the anti-Fascist prisoners, nearly all the leading English Socialists refused to sign it. I do not doubt that this was because, though no doubt they disbelieved the tale about a ‘Trotsky-Fascist’ Plot, they had gathered a general impression that the Anarchists and the P.O.U.M. were working against the Government, and, in particular, had believed the lies that were published in the English press about the fighting in Barcelona in May 1937. To mention an individual instance, Brailsford* in one of his articles in the New Statesman was allowed to state that the P.O.U.M. had attacked the Government with stolen batteries of guns, tanks etc. I was in Barcelona during the fighting, and as far as one can ever prove a negative I can prove by eye-witnesses etc. that this tale was absolutely untrue. At the time of the correspondence over my review I wrote to Kingsley Martin to tell him it was untrue, and more recently I wrote to Brailsford to ask him what was the source of the story. He had to admit that he had had it on what amounted to no authority whatever. (Stephen Spender* has his letter at present, but I could get it for you if you wanted to see it). Yet neither the New Statesman nor Brailsford has published any retraction of this statement, which amounts to an accusation of theft and treachery against numbers of innocent people. I do not think you can blame me if I feel that the New Statesman has its share of blame for the one-sided view that has been presented.

Once again, let me say how sorry I am about this whole business, but I have got to do what little I can to get justice for people who have been imprisoned without trial and libelled in the press, and one way of doing so is to draw attention to the pro-Communist censorship that undoubtedly exists. I would keep silent about the whole affair if I thought it would help the Spanish Government (as a matter of fact, before we left Spain some of the imprisoned people asked us not to attempt any publicity abroad because it might tend to discredit the Government), but I doubt whether it helps in the long run to cover things up as has been done in England. If the charges of espionage etc. that were made against us in the Communist papers had been given a proper examination at the time in the foreign press, it would have been seen that they were nonsense and the whole business might have been forgotten. As it was, the rubbish about a Trotsky-Fascist plot was widely circulated and no denial of it was published except in very obscure papers and, very half-heartedly, in the [Daily] Herald and Manchester Guardian. The result was that there was no protest from abroad and all these thousands of people have stayed in prison, and a number have been murdered, the effect being to spread hatred and dissension all through the Socialist movement.

I am sending back the books you gave me to review. I think it would be better if I did not write for you again, I am terribly sorry about this whole affair, but I have got to stand by my friends, which may involve attacking the New Statesman when I think they are covering up important issues.

Yours sincerely

[XI, 424, pp. 116-20; typewritten with handwritten addition]

Handwritten on a separate sheet is a note by Orwell which, because there is no salutation, was almost certainly sent to Raymond Mortimer with the typewritten letter above. Orwell enclosed the letter from H. N. Brailsford which he said Spender had. (See XI, p.118.)

1. Basil Kingsley Martin (1897–1969), left-wing writer and journalist, was editor of the New Statesman and Nation, 1931–60.

2. John McGovern (1887–1968), ILP MP, 1930–47; Labour MP, 1947–59, led a hunger march from Glasgow to London in 1934. Félicien Challaye, French left-wing politician, member of the committee of La Ligue des Droits des Hommes, a liberal, anti-Fascist movement to protect civil liberty throughout the world. He resigned in November 1937, with seven others, in protest against what they interpreted as the movement’s cowardly subservience to Stalinist tyranny.

Raymond Mortimer quickly sent Orwell a handwritten note saying, ‘Dear Orwell, Please accept my humble apologies. I did not know Kingsley Martin had written to you in those terms. My own reasons for refusing the review were those that I gave. I should be sorry for you not to write for us, and I should like to convince you from past reviews that there is no premium here on Stalinist orthodoxy.’ On 10 February, Kingsley Martin wrote to Orwell: ‘Raymond Mortimer has shown me your letter. We certainly owe you an apology in regard to the letter about The Spanish Cockpit. There is a good deal else in your letter which suggests some misunderstanding and which, I think, would be better discussed than written about. Could you make it convenient to come and see me some time next week? I shall be available on Monday afternoon, or almost any time on Tuesday.’ It is not known whether Orwell accepted Martin’s invitation, but he probably did. Orwell’s review of Galsworthy’s Glimpses and Reflections was published in the New Statesman on 12 March 1938, and he contributed reviews to the journal from July 1940 to August 1943. However, as is recorded in conversation with friends, he never forgave Martin for his ‘line’ on the Spanish civil war.

To Cyril Connolly*

14 March 1938

The Stores

Wallington

Dear Cyril,

I see from the New Statesman & Nation list that you have a book coming out sometime this spring.1 If you can manage to get a copy sent me I’ll review it for the New English, possibly also Time & Tide. I arranged for Warburg to send you a copy of my Spanish book² (next month) hoping you may be able to review it. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

I am writing this in bed. I may not be going to India after all & any way not before the autumn. The doctors don’t think I ought to go. I’ve been spitting blood again, it always turns out to be not serious, but it’s alarming when it happens & I am going to a Sanatorium in Kent³ to be X rayed.° I’ve no doubt they’ll find as before that I am O.K. but any way it’s a good excuse for not going to India, which I never wanted to.⁴ This bloody mess-up in Europe has got me so that I really can’t write anything. I see Gollancz has already put my next novel⁵ on his list tho’ I haven’t written a line or even sketched it out. It seems to me we might as well all pack our bags for the concentration camp. King Farlow* was here the other day & I am going to stay next week-end with him after leaving the Sanatorium. When in town I’ll try & look you up. Could you be kind enough to write me a line to 24 Croom’s Hill, Greenwich S.E. 10,⁶ to let me know your telephone address, which of course I’ve lost again, & then if occasion arises I can ring you up. Please remember me to your wife.

Yours

Eric Blair

[XI, 431, p. 127; handwritten]

1. Enemies of Promise (see Orwell’s letter to Connolly of 14.12.38).

2. Homage to Catalonia.

3. Orwell’s Preston Hall Sanatorium records show he coughed blood when ill in 1929, 1931, and 1934; that he had pneumonia in 1918, 1921, 1933, and 1934; and dengue fever when in Burma.

4. Orwell had been invited to write leaders and book reviews, and sub letters for The Pioneer, Lucknow in Pakistan. (See XI, 426, pp. 120–2.)

5. Coming Up for Air. Orwell is not being quite fair here: he had suggested that this be done (see his letter to Leonard Moore, 6 December 1937, XI, 412, pp. 100–1).

6. Home of Eileen’s brother.

The sequence of events leading to Orwell’s admission to Preston Hall Sanatorium is uncertain and complicated by doubts about the dating of Eileen’s letter to Jack Common. Orwell’s Case Record (found by Michael Shelden) shows that Orwell was admitted to Preston Hall on Tuesday, 15 March, and discharged that same day; and that he was re-admitted on Thursday, 17 March, and remained until 1 September 1938. The records also include an analysis of X-rays of Orwell’s lungs dated 16 March. It might reasonably be assumed that he was rushed to the hospital on 15 March; that the heavy bleeding described by Eileen was then stopped, and that X-rays were taken; after these were examined on the following day, he was admitted for treatment. This involved complete rest, colloidal calcium injections and vitamins A and D until pulmonary tuberculosis could be definitely excluded.

Preston Hall Sanatorium, Aylesford, Kent, was a mile or two north of Maidstone. It was a British Legion hospital for ex-servicemen (hence the name of Orwell’s ward, after the World War I Admiral, Jellicoe). Initially Orwell was given a single room; this aroused comments about preferential treatment, but he insisted on mixing with the others and got on easily with them. (See Crick, 358–60; Shelden, 316–19, and for a fuller note, XI, 432, pp. 127–8.)

Eileen Blair* to Jack Common*

Monday [and Tuesday, 14–15 March 1938]

24 Croom’s Hill

Greenwich

Dear Jack,

You’ll probably have heard about the drama of yesterday. I only hope you didn’t get soaked to the skin in discovering it.1 The bleeding seemed prepared to go on for ever & on Sunday everyone agreed that Eric must be taken somewhere where really active steps could be taken if necessary—artificial pneumothorax to stop the blood or transfusion to replace it. They got on to a specialist who visits a smallish voluntary hospital near here & who’s very good at this kind of thing & he also advised removal, so it happened in an ambulance like a very luxurious bedroom on wheels. The journey had no ill-effects, they found his blood pressure still more or less normal—& they’ve stopped the bleeding, without the artificial pneumothorax. So it was worth while. Everyone was nervous of being responsible for the immediate risk of the journey, but we supported each other. Eric’s a bit depressed about being in an institution devised for murder, but otherwise remarkably well. He needn’t stay long they say,² but the specialist has a sort of hope that he may be able to identify the actual site of haemorrhage and control it for the future.

This was really to thank you for being so neighbourly from such a distance, & in such weather. One gets hysterical with no one to speak to except the village who are not what you could call soothing.

I’ll let you know what happens next. I have fearful letters to write to relations.

Love to Mary & Peter,3

Eileen

[XI, 432, pp. 127–9; handwritten]

1. Although Common lived only some half-dozen miles from Wallington, the journey was awkward and he had no car.

2. He did not leave the sanatorium until 1 September 1938.

3. Jack Common’s wife and son.

Orwell wrote to Spender on 2 April. Spender, in an undated reply told him that he had arranged to review Homage to Catalonia for the London Mercury. He then broached the matter of Orwell’s attitude to him. Knowing nothing of Spender, Orwell had, he said, attacked him, but he was ‘equally puzzled as to why when still knowing nothing of me, but having met me once or twice, you should have withdrawn those attacks’, and wanted to discuss this. In the meantime, saying how sorry he was to hear Orwell was ill, he sent him his play, Trial of a Judge, which he thought Orwell might care to read if he had little else to do: ‘If you can’t bear the thought of it, don’t look at it: I won’t be offended.’

To Stephen Spender*

Friday [15? April 1938]

Jellicoe Pavilion

Preston Hall

Aylesford, Kent

Dear Spender,

Thank you so much for your letter and the copy of your play. I waited to read the latter before replying. It interested me, but I’m not quite sure what I think about it. I think with a thing like that one wants to see it acted, because in writing you obviously had different scenic effects, supplementary noises etc. in mind which would determine the beat of the verse. But there’s a lot in it that I’d like to discuss with you when next I see you.

You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, & on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you. I don’t know that I had ever exactly attacked you, but I had certainly in passing made offensive remarks about ‘parlour Bolsheviks such as Auden & Spender’ or words to that effect. I was willing to use you as a symbol of the parlour Bolshie because a. your verse, what I had read of it, did not mean very much to me, b. I looked upon you as a sort of fashionable successful person, also a Communist or Communist sympathiser, & I have been very hostile to the C.P. since about 1935, & c. because not having met you I could regard you as a type & also an abstraction. Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realise immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don’t mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to, like the Labour M.Ps. who get patted on the back by dukes & are lost forever more.

It is very kind of you to review my Spanish book. But don’t go & get into trouble with your own Party—it’s not worth it. However, of course you can disagree with all my conclusions, as I think you would probably do anyway, without actually calling me a liar. If you could come & see me some time I would like it very much, if it’s not much of an inconvenience.1 I am not infectious. I don’t think this place is very difficult to get to, because the Green Lines°² buses stop at the gate. I am quite happy here & they are very nice to me, but of course it’s a bore not being able to work and I spend most of my time doing crossword puzzles.

Yours

Eric Blair

[XI, 435, pp. 132–3; handwritten]

1. Spender did visit Orwell at Aylesford. Others who made what was often a long and difficult journey were former comrades from the Spanish contingent, who hitchhiked there, Jack Common, Rayner Heppenstall, and Max and Dorothy Plowman, who brought the novelist L. H. Myers.

2. Green Line buses were long-distance, limited stop, buses that ran from one suburban or country district to another on the outer limits of London proper.

Homage to Catalonia was published on 25 April 1938, but, as is customary, review copies had been sent out in advance. On a Saturday before Orwell’s letter to Gorer, probably 16 April, Gorer sent him a short note to say how ‘absolutely first-rate’ he thought Homage to Catalonia, as well as a carbon copy of his review for Time and Tide, ‘in case they object to its inordinate length’, and so that Orwell could let him know before the proof arrived if there were any errors. The review appeared on 30 April.

To Geoffrey Gorer*

18 April 1938

Jellicoe Pavilion

Aylesford

Dear Geoffrey,

I must write to thank you for your marvellous review. I kept pinching myself to make sure I was awake, but I shall also have to pinch myself if T. & T. print it—I’m afraid they’ll think it’s too long & laudatory. I don’t think they’ll bother about the subject-matter, as they’ve been very good about the Spanish war. But even if they cut it, thanks ever so for the intention. There were just one or two points. One is that you say the fighting in Barcelona was started by the Assault Guards. Actually it was Civil Guards.1 There weren’t any Assault Guards there then, & there is a difference, because the Civil Guards are the old Spanish Gendarmerie dating from the early 19^th century & in reality a more or less pro-Fascist body, ie. they have always joined the Fascists where it was possible. The Assault Guards are a new formation dating from the Republic of 1931, pro-Republican & not hated by the working people to the same extent. The other is that if you are obliged to shorten or otherwise alter the review, it doesn’t particularly matter to insist, as you do now, that I only took part in the Barcelona fighting to the extent of doing sentry. I did, as it happens, but if I had been ordered to actually fight I would have done so, because in the existing chaos there didn’t seem anything one could do except obey one’s own party & immediate military superiors. But I’m so glad you liked the book. Various people seem to have received review copies, but I haven’t had any myself yet & am wondering uneasily what the dust-jacket is like. Warburg talked of decorating it with the Catalan colours, which are easily mistaken for a. the Spanish royalist colours or b. the M.C.C.² Hope all goes well with you. I am much better, in fact I really doubt whether there is anything wrong with me.³ Eileen is battling with the chickens etc. alone but comes down once a fortnight.

Yours

Eric Blair

[XI, 436, pp, 133–4; handwritten]

1. Orwell was wrong about this. He was later to ask that if a second edition of Homage to Catalonia were published – there was only one English edition in his lifetime and the US and French editions did not appear until after his death – this error should be rectified. The correction has been made in the Complete Works edition (see VI, p. 253 and p. 257, note 102/15).

2. Marylebone Cricket Club, the then ruling cricket authority. Its tie has broad red and yellow stripes.

3. According to Orwell’s Blood Sedimentation Test on 27 April (and on 17 May), his disease was ‘moderately active’. It was not until 4 July that it became ‘quiescent’. It is never shown as normal.

Eileen Blair* to Leonard Moore*

30 May 1938

[The Stores] Wallington

Dear Mr. Moore,

I promised Eric I would write and tell you the news about him, which is that he is to go abroad for the winter, staying at Preston Hall until he leaves England—that is, probably until August or September. After that we hope he will be able to come home, though not to this house. We think of trying to find somewhere to live in Dorset. All this does not of course mean that he is worse, but only that the position has been made clearer to him. As a matter of fact, the original diagnosis was wrong: he had bronchiectasis and probably no phthisis.1 Apparently there is no point in treating bronchiectasis by the absolute rest that sometimes cures phthisis, and I think he is going to be allowed up as soon as the weather is reasonable.² He ought also to be able to do some gentle work on the novel in July or August. Of course it’s not easy to work in a sanatorium, where people constantly walk about and impose a timetable that probably interferes with the work timetable, but the book seethes in his head and he is very anxious to get on with it. I ought to have written to you some time ago about this novel, when Eric first realised that he couldn’t finish it by October, but he then wanted Gollancz to be told that it would be ready anyway before Christmas. Now he thinks that it will be ready in the spring and this seems quite probable. I should be very grateful if you could give Gollancz a message about it in whatever terms you think proper.

I hear there is a wonderful review of Homage to Catalonia in the Observer,³ but I haven’t seen it yet. On the whole the reviews have really been very good don’t you think? It’s interesting that the C.P. have decided not to be rude— and extremely clever of them to be reticent in the definitely Communist press and to say their little piece anonymously in the T.L.S. and the Listener.⁴ By the way, do you know when Warburg proposes to pay an advance? We thought he was to pay £75 in January and £75 on publication, but perhaps that’s wrong.

Eric is still being extraordinarily amenable and placid about everything, and everyone is delighted with his general condition.

Yours sincerely,

Eileen Blair

[XI, 447, pp. 154–5; typewritten]

1. Bronchiectasis: chronic viral disease affecting the bronchial tubes; phthisis: tuberculosis.

2. Orwell was allowed up for one hour a day from 1 June and for three hours a day a week later.

3. The review, on 29 May 1938 was by Desmond Flower (1907–97; MC), author, editor, publisher. He was Director of Cassell & Co in 1931, then Literary Director, 1938, and Chairman, 1958–70. He was also founder/editor, with A. J. A. Symons, of Book Collector.

4. The Times Literary Supplement. The Listener was published by the BBC and, amongst other things, printed talks it had broadcast (often shortened). Orwell reviewed for The Listener and it published some of his talks. (See letter of 16.6.38 regarding the review in The Listener.)

To the Editor, The Listener

16 June 1938

Aylesford

Review of Homage to Catalonia

Your reviewer’s¹ treatment of facts is a little curious. In his review of my book Homage to Catalonia in The Listener of May 25 he uses about four-fifths of his space in resurrecting from the Communist Press the charge that the Spanish political party known as the P.O.U.M. is a ‘fifth column’ organisation in the pay of General Franco. He states first that this accusation was ‘hyperbolical’, but adds later that it was ‘credible’, and that the leaders of the P.O.U.M. were ‘little better than traitors to the Government cause’. Now, I leave on one side the question of how it can be credible that Franco’s ‘fifth column’ could be composed of the poorest of the working class, led by men most of whom had been imprisoned under the regime Franco was trying to restore, and at least one of whom was on Franco’s special list of ‘persons to be shot’. If your reviewer can believe in stories of that kind, he is entitled to do so. What he is not entitled to do is to repeat his accusation, which is incidentally an accusation against myself, without even indicating from whom it came or that I had had anything to say about it. He leaves it to be inferred all through that the absurd charges of treachery and espionage originated with the Spanish Government. But, as I pointed out in great detail (Chapter XI of my book), these charges never had any footing outside the Communist Press, nor was any evidence in support of them ever produced. The Spanish Government has again and again repudiated all belief in them, and has steadfastly refused to prosecute the men whom the Communist newspapers denounced. I gave chapter and verse from the Spanish Government’s statements, which have since been repeated several times. Your reviewer simply ignores all this, no doubt hoping that he has so effectually put people off reading the book that his misrepresentations will pass unnoticed.

I do not expect or wish for ‘good’ reviews, and if your reviewer chooses to use most of his space in expressing his own political opinions, that is a matter between him and yourself. But I think I have a right to ask that when a book of mine is discussed at the length of a column there shall be at least some mention of what I have actually said.

George Orwell

[XI, 452, pp. 160–2]

Orwell’s complaint drew this response from The Listener’s reviewer:

We have sent the above letter to our reviewer, who replies:

‘Mr. Orwell’s letter ignores the major fact that conditions in Barcelona at one time became so bad that the Spanish Government was forced to send in armed police to put down what amounted to an insurrection. The leaders of that insurrection were the extreme anarchist elements allied with the P.O.U.M. It is not a question of “resurrecting” charges from the Communist Press, but of historic fact. I have spent a considerable part of the Spanish war in Spain, and have not relied upon newspaper reports for my information.

‘As I made clear in my review, it was not the intention of the rank and file of the P.O.U.M. to do other than fight against Franco. Being poor and ignorant men, the complexities of the revolutionary situation were beyond them; their leaders were to blame. As for being part of Franco’s fifth column, there is no doubt that whoever declined to co-operate with the central government and to abide by the law was, in fact, weakening the authority of that government and thus aiding the enemy. I submit that in time of war ignorance is as reprehensible as malicious sabotage. It is effect that matters, not the reasons for action.

‘I am sorry if Mr. Orwell thinks that I wanted to put readers off a magnificently written book: I didn’t: I want people to read it even if, in my opinion, his analysis is wrong. It is the essence of a democracy in peace time that all views should be available to everybody’.

We are bound to say, in printing our reviewer’s reply, that we consider it hardly meets the points made by Mr. Orwell, to whom we express our regrets.—Editor, THE LISTENER2

1. Philip Furneaux Jordan (1902–1951), journalist, novelist, and reviewer. He was on the staff of the Paris Daily Mail and edited the Riviera edition of the Chicago Tribune. In 1936 he joined the News Chronicle and served as its correspondent in Spain, 1936–37. He later became its features editor and then its foreign correspondent. In 1946–47 he was First Secretary at the British Embassy, Washington, and thereafter Public Relations Adviser to Prime Minister Clement Attlee.

2. J. R. Ackerley (1896–1967) was literary editor, 1935–59. His support for Orwell despite his reviewer’s explanation is telling. (See Ackerley by Peter Parker (1989).)

Eileen Blair* to Denys King-Farlow*

22 June 1938

[The Stores] Wallington

Dear Denys,

When I told you on the telephone that I was more or less writing to you it was quite true. But I was also having flu, although at that time incredulously because the time even of this year seems so odd.

I hadn’t forgotten this money: indeed I have thought of it often with growing appreciation as the ‘advance’ on the Spanish book went on not coming. Eventually it was extracted by instalments! Poor man—I mean poor publisher. I hope it was time that you didn’t need. As a matter of fact I shouldn’t have kept the cheque if I’d had any doubt about repaying it almost at once. Or I think not.

Eric isn’t so ill as they thought, as you’ll have gathered. He of course has never believed that he was ‘ill’, but for the first two months or so he appeared to have phthisis in both lungs which could have been pretty hopeless. Now it turns out to be bronchiectasis, which people do go on having more or less indefinitely under really favourable conditions. I suppose he told you that we can probably go abroad for the winter together instead of his going to a sanatorium, & after that we have to find a perfect cottage in one of the southern counties at an inclusive rental of about 7/6. I shall come back early to do this— They even think that he might leave Preston Hall in August & spend a month or so under normal conditions in England—he must of course be very ‘careful’ but the treatment really only consists in resting a great deal & eating a lot. We might perhaps stay on a farm somewhere. By that time this cottage will be handed over either to the landlord or to an unfortunate old uncle of Eric’s who is suggested as a tenant.1

I’m so glad you went to see Eric & took him out. I think it’s really more depressing for him to be in this semi-confinement than to be in bed, & he loved having a party.² It was particularly nice of you to send that money instead of offering to.

With many thanks,

Yours sincerely,

Eileen Blair

[XI, 455A, pp. 164–5; handwritten]

1. Although Orwell’s parents had seventeen brothers and sisters between them, the only uncles to whom Eileen could be referring were Charles Limouzin, at one time secretary of a golf club at Parkstone, Bournemouth; George Limouzin, who was married to Ivy; and Eugène Adam, who was married to Nellie Limouzin. None took the cottage.

2. If the party was to celebrate anything, it might have been for the publication of Homage to Catalonia on 25 April; or a party slightly ahead of Orwell’s thirty-fifth birthday, 25 June.

To Jack Common*

5 July 1938

New Hostel

Preston Hall

Aylesford, Kent

Dear Jack,

You know I have to go abroad for the winter, probably for about 6 months starting about end of August. Well, would you like to have our cottage rent free & in return look after the animals? I’ll tell you all the facts & you can work out the pros & cons for yourself.

i. The doctors say I must live somewhere further south. That means giving up the cottage when we come back at latest. But I don’t want to scrap the livestock, because we have now worked the flock of fowls up to about 30, which can be worked up to about 100 next year, & it would also mean selling the hen-houses, which cost a lot but which you don’t get much for if you sell them. We have therefore the choice of getting someone to inhabit the cottage, or of paying someone to look after the animals, which plus storage of furniture works out at about the same expense as keeping on the rent of the cottage.

ii. You know what our cottage is like. It’s bloody awful. Still it’s more or less livable. There is one room with a double bed & one with a single, & I fancy there is enough linen etc. to do for 2 people & a kid. When there is sudden rain in winter the kitchen tends to flood, otherwise the house is passably dry. The living room fire, you may remember, smokes, but I think the chimney will have been seen to before we leave—anyway it doesn’t need anything very drastic doing to it. There is water laid on, but no hot, of course. There is a Calor Gas stove, which is expensive (the gas, I mean), but there is also a little oil oven that can be resuscitated. As to produce, there won’t be many vegetables, as of course Eileen alone couldn’t cope with all of the garden, but at any rate there will be potatoes enough to see you through the winter. There’ll also be milk, about a quart a day, as the goat has just kidded. A lot of people are prejudiced against goats’ milk but really it’s no different from cow & is said to be good for kids.

iii. As to the looking after animals. This means feeding etc. about 30 fowls & feeding & milking the goats. I’ll leave careful instructions about food etc. & arrange for the corn merchant to deliver supplies & send the bill on to me. You could also sell the eggs (the butcher who calls twice a week buys any quantity) & put the money aside for us. There won’t be many eggs at first, as most of the birds are young pullets hatched this year, but by early spring they should be laying about 100 a week.

Let me know would you whether you would like to take this on. It would suit us, & for you at any rate I dare say it would be a quiet place to work in.1

All the best to Mary & Peter.

Yours

Eric Blair

[XI, 461, p. 171; handwritten]

1. They did take the cottage