1946 and 1947
Now that Animal Farm is seen as one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, it is remarkable how difficult it was to get it published in England and in the USA. There were simple physical problems in England – paper was in very short supply – but other forces conspired to ensure that Orwell became so desperate over rejections that he considered publishing the book himself. T. S. Eliot, for Faber & Faber, opined on behalf of the directors (of which he was one) that they had ‘no conviction … that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time’ and later, ‘your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals … so that what was needed … was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs’. Warburg was willing but had no paper and when he eventually secured some could only initially print 4,500 copies. No US publisher saw the book’s merits – there was no market, one publisher said, for animal stories – but eventually Harcourt, Brace took the risk and on 26 August 1946 published 50,000 copies. Then as a Book of the Month Club edition there were print runs of 430,000 and 110,000 and Orwell was suddenly earning major royalties: his first advance was $37,500. Foreign versions proliferated (although Orwell never took royalties from oppressed peoples), and sometimes there were comic side-effects. Thus, the French translation was to be Union des Republiques Socialistes Animales – URSA, The Bear. Because that might offend Communists, it was changed to Les Animaux Partout!; Napoleon became César. Misunderstanding abounded. Orwell subtitled his book, A Fairy Story. Only British and Telugu versions in Orwell’s lifetime included this description. It was never acceptable in the USA. Yet one of the origins of Animal Farm is Beatrix Potter’s Pigling Bland, a favourite of Orwell’s and Jacintha Buddicom’s childhood.
Orwell was still busy writing and this period saw the publication of ‘The Prevention of Literature’, ‘Decline of English Murder’, ‘Politics and the English Language’ (one of his most important essays), the delightful ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, ‘Why I Write’, ‘Politics vs Literature’, and ‘How the Poor Die’ (looking back to his time in a hospital in Paris in March 1929). He also wrote three radio plays: ‘The Voyage of the Beagle’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ for Children’s Hour, and his own adaptation of Animal Farm.
From 23 May to 13 October 1946 Orwell rented Barnhill, Jura and started writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, completing about fifty pages that year. He was at Barnhill from 11 April to 20 December 1947 and although he was ill from time to time, it was also a very happy period. He cultivated his land, walked, went fishing, and played with Richard. Despite wishing to get on with Nineteen Eighty-Four, he found time to write ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, which he sent to Warburg but which could not be published until after his death for fear of libel charges.
On 3 May 1946 his older sister, Marjorie, died and he travelled south to attend her funeral. His younger sister, Avril, came to share his life at Barn-hill (see her letter, 1.7.46), and he gave up The Stores in September 1947. By October he had become so ill he had to work in bed, and by the end of the year ‘extensive’ TB (see 23.12.47) had been diagnosed and he left Jura for Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride, near Glasgow.
To Dwight Macdonald*
3 January 1946
27 B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Dwight,
Many thanks for your letter of December 31st. I’m so glad you read Animal Farm and liked it.1 I asked Warburg to send you a copy, but knowing how desperately short he was of copies of the first edition, I wasn’t sure whether you would get one. Neither he nor I now have a copy of that edition. A month or two back the Queen sent to Warburg’s for a copy (this doesn’t mean anything politically: her literary adviser is Osbert Sitwell* who would probably advise her to read a book of that type), and as there wasn’t one left the Royal Messenger had to go down to the Anarchist bookshop run by George Woodcock*, which strikes me as mildly comic. However now a second edition of 10 thousand has come out, also a lot of translations are being done. I have just fixed up to have it done in the USA by a firm named Harcourt & Brace who I believe are good publishers. I had a lot of difficulty to place it in the USA. The Dial Press who had been pestering me for some time for a book rejected it on the ground that ‘the American public is not interested in animals’ (or words to that effect.) I think it will get a bit of pre-publicity in the USA as Time rang up saying they were going to review it and asking me for the usual particulars. I also had an awful fight to get it into print over here. No one except Warburg would look at it, and W. had to hold it up for a year for lack of paper. Even as it is he has only been able to print about half as many copies as he could have sold. Even the M[inistry] O[f] I[information] horned in and tried to keep it out of print. The comic thing is that after all this fuss the book got almost no hostile reception when it came out. The fact is people are fed up with this Russian nonsense and it’s just a question of who is first to say ‘The Emperor has no clothes on.’2
I feel very guilty that I still haven’t done you that article on the ‘comics.’ The thing is that I am inconceivably busy. I have to do on average 4 articles a week and have hardly any energy left over for serious work. However I have roughly sketched out an article which I shall do some time. I am going to call it ‘An American Reverie’ and in it I shall contrast these papers with the American books and papers which I, like most people about my age, was partly brought up on.3 I noticed with interest that the G.Is in Germany were mostly reading this kind of stuff, which seems to be aimed at children and adults indifferently.
I have another book coming out in the USA shortly, a book of reprinted articles, and I have included that one on ‘Miss Blandish’ which you printed. I’m afraid I didn’t ask your permission, but I didn’t suppose you’d mind. I have made the usual acknowledgements.
Did you see Polemic, the new paper Humphrey Slater* has started? I dare say it didn’t get to you as they only did 3000 of the first number. The second number will be 5000 and then they hope to work up to 8000, but they can only become a monthly by stealth. One is not allowed to start new periodicals, but you can get hold of a little paper if you call yourself a publisher, and you have to start off by pretending that what you are publishing is a book or pamphlet. The first number was rather dull and very badly got-up, but I have great hopes of it because we have great need of some paper in which one can do long and serious literary-political articles.
David Martin4 is over in Canada and was going to look you up if he is in New York. He has great schemes for starting an international review in several languages. Arthur Koestler* is also very anxious to start something like what the League for the Rights of Man used to be before it was stalinised. No doubt you will be hearing from him about this.
All the best and thanks for writing.
Yours
Geo. Orwell
[XVIII, 2839, pp. 11–13; typewritten]
1. Macdonald had written to Orwell on 31 December 1945: ‘“Animal Farm” … is absolutely superb. The transposition of the Russian experience into farm equivalents is done with perfect taste and skill, so that what might have been simply a witty burlesque becomes something more—really a tragedy. The pathos of the Russian degeneration comes out more strongly in your fairy tale than in anything I’ve read in a long time. The ending is not a letdown, as I should have thought it would have had to be, but is instead one more triumph of inventiveness. Congratulations on a beautifully done piece of writing.’ He asked if the book were to be published in America; he thought two or three hundred copies could be sold to readers of Politics.
2. Macdonald reprinted the section of Orwell’s letter from ‘A month or two back’ to ‘has no clothes on’ in Politics, March 1946, and then continued: ‘What struck me about Animal Farm, in addition to the literary tact with which it is done so that it never becomes either whimsical or boringly tendentious, was that I had rarely been made so aware of the pathos of the whole Russian experience. This fairy tale about animals, whose mood is reflective rather than indignant, conveys more of the terrible human meaning of Stalinism than any of the many serious books on the subject, with one or two exceptions.’
3. ‘An American Reverie’ was not published and no manuscript has been traced.
4. David Martin (1914–) was a Canadian airman whom Orwell befriended.
To Arthur Koestler*
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Arthur,
I saw Barbara Ward1 and Tom Hopkinson2 today and told them about our project. They were both a little timid, chiefly I think because they realise that an organisation of this type would in practice be anti-Russian, or would be compelled to become anti-Russian, and they are going through an acute phase of anti-Americanism. However they are anxious to hear more and certainly are not hostile to the idea. I said the next step would be to show them copies of the draft manifesto, or whatever it is, when drawn up. I wonder if you have seen Bertrand Russell, and if so, what he said. I have no doubt these two would help to the extent of passing our ideas on to others, but at some stage it might be more useful to contact Hulton3 personally, which I could do. I haven’t found out anything significant about the League for the Rights of Man. No one seems to have much about it in their files. All I can discover is that it is still in existence in France, and that it did exist in Germany up to Hitler, so it must have been an international organisation. There is something about it in Wells’s Crux Ansata4 (which I can’t get hold of), so it is possible that it drew up the Declaration of the Rights of Man which Wells is always burbling about. But I am certain that some years before the war it had become a Stalinist organisation, as I distinctly remember that it refused to intervene in favour of the Trotskyists in Spain: nor so far as I remember did it do anything about the Moscow trials. But one ought to verify all this.
I hope you are all well. I am very busy as usual. I had lunch with Negrín5 the other day, but couldn’t get much information out of him. I never manage to see him quite alone. But I still feel fairly sure that he is not the Russians’ man, as he was credited with being during the civil war. However I don’t suppose it makes much difference, as I am afraid there is not much chance of Negrín’s lot getting back when Franco moves out. I am also having lunch with Beaverbrook next week. If I get a chance to speak to him on equal terms at all I shall ask him about Stalin, whom after all he has seen at close quarters a number of times.
The French publisher who had signed a contract to translate Animal Farm has got cold feet and says it is impossible ‘for political reasons.’ It’s really sad to think a thing like that happening in France, of all countries in the world. However I dare say one of the others will risk it. Did I tell you I had fixed an American edition?
The book of essays is printing and they say they can’t make alterations in the text, but we are going to put in an erratum slip, at any rate about the German-English business.6
Please give my love to Mamaine.7 Richard is very well. Celia came to tea on Tuesday and saw him have his bath.
Yours
George
P.S. I don’t think I ever thanked you for our stay. I have a sort of inhibition about that, because as a child I was taught to say ‘Thank you for having me’ after a party, and it seemed to me such an awful phrase.
[XVIII, 2852, pp. 27–9; typewritten]
1. Barbara Ward (1914–81; DBE, 1974; Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth, 1976, economist and writer on politics; assistant editor The Economist, 1939–57. A Governor of the BBC, 1946–50. She was known for her concerns for individual freedom and civil rights.
2. Tom Hopkinson (1905–90; Kt. 1978), author, editor, and journalist. He was associated especially with Picture Post which he helped launch and edited 1940–50. He taught journalism at British and American universities, 1967–75 and wrote a British Council pamphlet on Orwell (1953). Of his two biographies, Of This Our Time (1982) is concerned with the period when Orwell was working.
3. Edward Hulton (1906–1988; Kt., 1957), lawyer, magazine publisher of liberal views, proprietor of Picture Post at this time. His The New Age was published in 1943 and reviewed by Orwell in the Observer, 15 August 1943 (XV, 2237, 201–2).
4. Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church (Penguin Special, 1943). Orwell had got the wrong Penguin Special, however. In May 1940 Penguin Books published H.G. Wells’s The Rights of Man, Or, What Are We Fighting For? Chapter X discussed a Complément à la Déclaration des Droits de l’homme, which had been passed by a congress of the Ligue des Droits de l’homme at Dijon in July 1936. Wells said this document was ‘more plainly feminist and less simply equalitarian in sexual matters’ than what was proposed in his book, and it made ‘a distinction between “travail” and “loisirs” which we do not recognise’. He then gave the text.
5. Dr Juan Negrín (1889–1956), Socialist Prime Minister of Spain from September 1936 for much of the civil war. He went to France in 1939 and set up a Spanish government in exile; he resigned from its premiership in 1945 in the hope of uniting all exiles. (See Thomas, pp. 949–50.)
6. To Orwell’s essay on Koestler.
7. Mamaine Koestler (née Paget, 1916–54), Koestler’s wife and twin sister of Celia Kirwan.*
To Geoffrey Gorer*
22 January 1946
27B Canonbury Square
Dear Geoffrey,
It was too good of you to send all those things. They were greatly appreciated here, especially by Richard, who had a big whack of the plum pudding and seemed none the worse afterwards. I was amused by the ‘this is an unsolicited gift’ on the outside, which I suppose is a formula necessitated by people over here writing cadging letters. I had quite a good Christmas. I went to Wales to stay with Arthur Koestler for a few days while the nurse went away with her own kid.1 Richard went out to a lot of parties where he was the only child, and except for occasionally dirtying his trousers (I still can’t get him house-trained) behaved with great aplomb and sat up to table in an ordinary chair. But of course the travelling just before and just after Xmas was fearful. To leave London you had to queue up 2 hours before the train left, and coming back the train was 4 hours late and landed one in town about half an hour after the undergrounds had stopped. However, fortunately Richard enjoys travelling, and I think when you are carrying a child you have a slightly better chance with porters.
It is foully cold here and the fuel shortage is just at its worst. We only got a ton of coal for the whole winter and it’s almost impossible to get logs. Meanwhile the gas pressure is so low that one can hardly get a gas fire to light, and one can only get about 1½ gallons of lamp oil a week. What I do is to light the fires with a little of the coal I have left and keep them damped down all day with blocks of wet peat of which I happen to have a few. It’s so much easier in the country where if you’re absolutely forced to you can go out and scrounge firewood. Otherwise things aren’t bad here. Food is about the same as ever. Yesterday I took Silloneo2 and his wife out to dinner. They were only here for a few days and were still in a state of being astonished at the food, all the English in Rome having told them we were starving over here. I am always ashamed when people come to England for the first time like that, and say to them ‘Don’t think England is like this in peacetime,’ but the S.s. said that for cleanness and state of repair London was a dream compared with Rome. They said that in Rome you could get anything if you had enough money, but an overcoat, for instance, cost the equivalent of £120.
Didn’t you tell me you met Dennis Collings* in Malaya? He was an anthropologist, and I think latterly was curator of the museum in Singapore. I used to know him very well. He got home recently and I heard from him the other day. He had been captured in Java and appeared not to have had absolutely too bad a time, having been a camp interpreter.
I forget if I’d started doing weekly articles for the Evening Standard before you left. In spite of—by my standards—enormous fees it doesn’t do me much good financially, because one extra article a week just turns the scale and makes it necessary for me to have a secretary.3 However, even with the extra article she takes a certain amount of drudgery off me, and I am using her to arrange and catalogue my collection of pamphlets.4 I find that up to date I have about 1200, but of course they keep on accumulating. I have definitely arranged I am going to stop doing the Evening Standard stuff and most other journalism in May, and take six months off to write another novel. If the Jura place can be put in order this year I shall go there, otherwise I shall take a furnished house somewhere in the country, preferably by the sea, but anyway somewhere I can’t be telephoned to. My book of reprints ought to be out soon and the American title is Dickens, Dali and others. Scribners5 are doing that one, and Harcourt Brace (I think that is the name) are doing Animal Farm. I don’t fancy that one will sell in the USA, though of course it might sell heavily, as with most books in America it seems you either sell 100,000 copies or nothing. I have arranged a lot of translations of A.F., but the French publishers who signed the first contract have already got cold feet and say it’s impossible at present ‘for political reasons.’ I think it’s sad to think of a thing like that happening, in France of all countries.
I must knock off now as this is Susan’s day off and I have to go out and do the shopping. Richard has been trying to help me with the typing of this letter. He is now 20 months old and weighs about 32 lbs. He still doesn’t talk but is very alert in other ways and extremely active, in fact you can’t keep him still for a moment. Three times in the last month he got all the radiants out of the gas fire and smashed them to bits, which is a nuisance because they’re very difficult to buy. I think he could talk if he wanted to, but he hardly needs to as he can usually get what he wants by making an inarticulate noise and pointing—at least he does not exactly point but throws both arms out in the general direction of the thing he wants.
Let me hear how you are getting on and how things are in the USA. I hear they hate us more than ever now.
Yours
George
[XVIII, 2870, pp. 52–4; typewritten]
1. Susan Watson (1918–2001), was Orwell’s housekeeper from early summer 1945 to autumn 1946 caring also for Richard. She had married a Cambridge University mathematician but they were in the process of being divorced. She had a seven-year-old daughter, Sally, who was at boarding school. (See her memoir in Orwell Remembered, pp. 217–25 and Remembering Orwell, pp. 156–62 and 175–78.)
2. Ignazio Silone (Secondo Tranquilli) (1900–1978), author and politician, was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party but by the time of his exile in Switzerland after Mussolini’s rise to power he had distanced himself from its aims but remained strongly anti-Fascist. He was at this time editor of Avanti, the organ of the Italian Socialist Party, but he resigned in July 1946. Orwell dramatised his story, ‘The Fox’, for the BBC, broadcast 9 September 1943 (XV, 2270, pp. 230–42).
3. Siriol Hugh-Jones.
4. From 1935 onwards, Orwell had collected pamphlets representing minority views. These he left to the British Museum, and they are now in the British Library.
5. A curious error: Critical Essays was published in New York by Reynal & Hitchcock.
To Dorothy Plowman*
19 February 1946
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N1
Dear Dorothy,
I enclose cheque for £150 as a first instalment of repayment of that £300 anonymously lent to me in 19381—it’s a terribly long time afterwards to start repaying, but until this year I was really unable to. Just latterly I have started making money. I got your address from Richard Rees.* It’s a long time since I heard from you, and I do not think I even wrote to you when Max died. One does not know what to say when these things happen. I reviewed Max’s book of letters for the Manchester Evening News, which you may have seen.2 My book Animal Farm has sold quite well, and the new one, which is merely a book of reprints,3 also seems to be doing well. It was a terrible shame that Eileen didn’t live to see the publication of Animal Farm, which she was particularly fond of and even helped in the planning of. I suppose you know I was in France when she died. It was a terribly cruel and stupid thing to happen. No doubt you know I have a little boy named Richard whom we adopted in 1944 when he was 3 weeks old. He was ten months old when Eileen died and is 21 months old now. Her last letter to me was to tell me he was beginning to crawl. Now he has grown into a big strong child and is very active and intelligent, although he doesn’t talk yet. I have a nurse-housekeeper who looks after him and me, and luckily we are able to get a char as well. He is so full of beans that it is getting difficult to keep him in the flat, and I am looking forward to getting him out of London for the whole summer. I am not quite certain where we are going. I am supposed to be the tenant of a cottage in the Hebrides, but it’s possible they won’t have it in living order this year, in which case I shall probably take him to the east coast somewhere. I want a place where he can run in and out of the house all day with no fear of traffic. I am anxious to get out of London for my own sake as well, because I am constantly smothered under journalism—at present I am doing 4 articles every week—and I want to write another book which is impossible unless I can get 6 months quiet. I have been in London almost the whole of the war. Eileen was working for 4 or 5 years in government offices, generally for 10 hours a day or more, and it was partly overwork that killed her. I shall probably go back to the country in 1947, but at present it’s impossible to get hold of unfurnished houses and so I daren’t let go of my flat.
Richard Rees* is living in Chelsea and has kept his beard, although demobilised. Rayner Heppenstall* has a job in the BBC and seems to be quite liking it. It’s funny that you should be at Royston, so near where we used to live.4 I have got to go down some time to the cottage I still have there, to sort out the furniture and books, but I have been putting it off because last time I was there it was with Eileen and it upsets me to go there. What has become of Piers?5 I hope all goes well with you both.
Yours
Eric Blair
[XVIII, 2903, pp. 115–6; typewritten]
1. L.H. Myers had, unknown to Orwell, financed his and Eileen’s stay in Morocco. The Plowmans acted as intermediaries.
2. He did write at the time of Max’s death (see 20.6.41). Orwell reviewed Bridge into the Future: Letters of Max Plowman in the Manchester Evening News, 7 December 1944, (XVI, 2589, pp. 492–4).
3. Critical Essays.
4. Wallington (where Orwell rented a cottage).
5. The Plowmans’ son.
To Arthur Koestler*
This letter lacks a strip torn off down its right-hand side. The missing words, conjecturally reconstructed, are given here in square brackets.
5 March 1946
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Arthur,
It’s funny you should send me Czapsky’s°1 pamphlet, which I have been trying for some time [to get] someone to translate and publish. Warburg wouldn’t do it b[ecause] he said it was an awkward length, and latterly I gave it t[o the] Anarchist (Freedom Press) group. I don’t know what decisi[on they’ve] come to. I met Czapsky° in Paris and had lunch with him. T[here is] no doubt that he is not only authentic but a rather exce[ptional] person, though whether he is any good as a painter I do[n’t know. He] is the person who made to me a remark which I may or ma[y not have] retailed to you—I forget. After telling me something [of the priv-]ation and his sufferings in the concentration camp, he [said some-]thing like this: ‘For a while in 1941 and 1942 there w[as much] defeatism in Russia, and in fact it was touch and go [whether the] Germans won the war. Do you know what saved Russia at [that time? In] my opinion it was the personal character of Stalin—I [put it down to] the greatness of Stalin. He stayed in Moscow when the [Germans nearly] took it, and his courage was what saved the situation.2 [Considering] what he had been through, this seemed to me sufficie[nt proof of] Czapsky’s reliability. I told him I would do what I [could about the] pamphlet here. If the Freedom Press people fall thro[ugh, what about] Arthur Ballard, who is now beginning to publish pamp[hlets? He might] take it.3 Do you want this copy back? The Anarchists [have mine] and it’s a rather treasured item of my collection.
The Observer say, will you write for them some [reviews. I am] scouting round for people to do the main review, wh[ich must be done] by the same person every week—I do it every other [week and will] be stopping at the end of April. Apart from the mai[n review I] intend quite soon to start having essays of about 8[00 words on the] middle page under the main article. You would get a [good fee, I] think, for either of these jobs.
I’d love to come up to your place, but I dou[bt whether I can] get away. I have such a lot to do winding everythi[ng up, arranging for] the furniture to be sent and all sorts of things t[o do, almost like] stocking up a ship for an arctic voyage. Love to Ma[maine.]
Yours
George
[XVIII, 2919, pp. 136–8; typewritten]
1. Joseph Czapski (1896–1993), wrote to Orwell on 11 December 1945 at the suggestion of ‘mon ami Poznanski’ because he thought Orwell could find an English publisher for his pamphlet (a quite sizeable booklet) Souvenirs de Starobielsk. This had originally been published in Polish as Wspomnienia Starobielskia in 1944; Italian and French translations followed in 1945. Czapski, a Polish painter and author, but born in Prague, studied in St Petersburg, 1912–17, and witnessed the Russian Revolution; in 1920 he returned to Poland and from 1924 to 1931 he studied and worked as a painter in Paris, being shown there and in Geneva. He fought with the 8th Polish Lancers against the Germans and then the Russians in 1939, and was taken prisoner by the Soviets. He was one of 78 of nearly 4,000 prisoners at Starobielsk prison camp transferred to a prison camp at Gryazovets. He spent twenty-three months in these camps. When the Germans invaded Russia, he was allowed to join other Polish prisoners, many of whom had suffered terrible privations, in a Polish Army under General Anders to fight the Germans. It is known that some 15,700 Poles were murdered by the Russians at Katyn and other camps (Czapski’s figures, Souvenirs de Starobielsk, 1945, p. 18). A further 7,000 from camps in the Komi Republic were packed into barges which were deliberately sunk in the White Sea, causing their deaths by drowning (The Inhuman Land, pp. 35–36). Czapski remained in Paris after the war and was one of the founders of the influential Polish cultural monthly journal, Kultura.
2. See 17.3.45 for the change to Animal Farm to reflect Stalin’s staying in Moscow.
3. Orwell and Koestler were unsuccessful. Despite the booklet’s having what Czapski called ‘une certaine actualité’ in the light of what was being presented in evidence at the Nuremberg Trial of War Criminals, Souvenirs de Starobielsk was not then translated into English and has never been published in Britain.
To Anne Popham*
15 March 1946
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
I call you that because it is what I have heard other people call you—I don’t know what you like to be called, really. It must be nearly a fortnight since you left. I would have written earlier, but I have been ill all this week with something called gastritis. I think a word like that tells you a lot about the medical profession. If you have a pain in your belly it is called gastritis, if it is in your head I suppose it would be called cephalitis and so on. Any way it is quite an unpleasant thing to have, but I am somewhat better and got up for the first time today. Richard has been quite offensively well and prancing all over the place. I have at last got one of those pens that don’t have any ink in them,1 so I have been able to suppress the inkpot, which he had got hold of three times in the last week or two. He has got a new waterproof cape in which he looks quite dashing, and when we go away for the summer he is going to have his first pair of boots.
I wonder what sort of journey you had and how bearable it is in Germany now. I think in that sort of life a lot depends on having a vehicle of your own and being able to get away from the others a bit. Write and tell me what it is like and any bits of gossip you hear about what the Germans are saying about us now. I think you said you would be back in England in July. I’m not sure where we shall be by then—I intend to get out of London for the whole summer, but we haven’t yet fixed where. I have definitely arranged to drop all journalistic work for 6 months and am pining for that time to start. I’ve still got a few ghastly jobs, ie. outside my routine ones, hanging over my head, and being ill like this puts everything back. The rubbishy feature I was writing for the BBC got finished at last, but I now have to write a pamphlet for the British Council on English cookery. I don’t know why I was such a fool as to let myself in for it—however it will be quite short so I can probably knock it off in a week.2 After that I haven’t any actual tripe to write. When I get away I am going to start on a novel. It is 6 years or so since I wrote any such thing and it will probably be an awful job to start, but I think with six clear months I could break the back of it.
I wonder if you were angry or surprised when I sort of made advances to you that night before you went away. You don’t have to respond—what I mean is, I wouldn’t be angry if you didn’t respond. I didn’t know till you told me about your young man.3 I thought you looked lonely and unhappy, and I thought it just conceivable you might come to take an interest in me, partly because I imagined you were a little older than you are. But I fully realise that I’m not suited to someone like you who is young and pretty and can still expect to get something out of life. There isn’t really anything left in my life except my work and seeing that Richard gets a good start. It is only that I feel so desperately alone sometimes. I have hundreds of friends, but no woman who takes an interest in me and can encourage me. Write and tell me what you think about all this. Of course it’s absurd a person like me wanting to make love to someone of your age. I do want to, but, if you understand, I wouldn’t be offended or even hurt if you simply say no. Any way, write and tell me what you feel.
I wonder if there is anything I can do for you or send you. Are there any books you want? Or any papers? Would you like to be sent Tribune, for instance? I should think some of your brother officers wouldn’t approve of it much. Talking of books I have been able to get some of Henry Miller’s books again—they seem to be reprinting them in Paris and a few copies get into this country illegally. I don’t know what else of interest has appeared lately. Nearly all the books I get to review are such trash one doesn’t know what to say about them. Would you like to be sent Polemic? The third number is supposed to appear towards the end of April, but lord knows whether it will, as there is always some mess-up about the printing. They now have some wild scheme of printing it in Eire, but then one might bump up against the censorship. Write to me soon and tell me whether there is anything you would like, and how you are getting on, and what you feel about things.
Yours
Geo. Orwell
P.S. I am not sure how to stamp this letter, but I suppose threepence is right?
[XVIII, 2931, pp. 153–4; typewritten]
1. A Biro. Orwell had first tried to buy one in February 1946. They were then quite hard to obtain and very expensive – about £3 (over half-a-week’s wage for an unskilled worker). Orwell found them particularly useful because, when ill, he could write in bed. His use of a Biro can be a clue to when he wrote certain letters and documents.
2. The ‘rubbishy feature’ for the BBC was probably the dramatisation The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’, broadcast 29 March 1946 (XVIII, 2953, pp. 179–201). The text of the booklet, British Cookery, is reproduced in XVIII, 2954, pp. 201–13. Although it was considered to be excellent it was decided not to publish it to avoid offending continental readers at a time of such stringency (though the recipes are hardly exotic). Orwell was paid £31 10s for his script.
3. He had been killed when serving in the RAF (Crick, p. 485).
To Arthur Koestler*
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Arthur,
The Manchester Evening News want to know whether, when I stop my reviewing for them (ie. end of April), you would like to take over my job for 6 months. I told them I didn’t think it was awfully likely you would, but that I would ask you. It’s rather hackwork, but it’s a regular 8 guineas a week (that is what they pay me—I expect you could get a bit more out of them) for about 900 words, in which one can say more or less what one likes. The chief bore is reading the books; on the other hand one gets out of this from time to time by doing general articles or dealing with reprints which one knows already. One retains the second rights. You might let me know as soon as possible if this idea has any attraction for you, as otherwise they will have to scout round for someone else.
Love to Mamaine.
Yours
George
P.S. [handwritten] I’ve contacted Malory° Brown1 who thinks he will probably be able to come up at Easter. I’m going to have lunch with him on April 3rd & talk it over. Meanwhile could you let me know exactly what date he should come up to your place?
[XVIII, 2941, pp. 164–5; typewritten with handwritten postscript]
Koestler replied on 23 March. He decided not to take on the work for the Manchester Evening News— ‘for once I shall let puritanism get the upper hand over hedonism (dig)’, a reference to Orwell’s statement that there is ‘a well-marked hedonistic strain in his writings’ in the penultimate paragraph of Orwell’s essay on Koestler.
1. Mallory Browne was then the London editor of the Christian Science Monitor. On 22 October 1944 he contributed ‘The New Order in France’ to the Observer.
To Arthur Koestler*
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Arthur,
I enclose a letter from the IRRC1 people, about whom I wrote to you before, and a copy of their bulletin. The part of [it] about Jennie Lee* and Michael Foot2 is rather vague and I am not sure what it is he wants me to do, but I hope to see Jennie Lee* tomorrow and will speak to her about it. Michael is in Teheran, I think.
I am seeing Malory° Brown on Wednesday and will tell him the Easter conference is off. Has anyone told Michael?
I think my Jura cottage is going to be ready by May and I am arranging to send my furniture up about the end of April and then, if all is well, go up there early in May. If anything falls through I shall go somewhere else, but in any case I shall leave London and do no writing or anything of the kind for two months. I feel desperately tired and jaded. Richard is very well and active but still not talking.
I have at last got hold of a book by that scientist I spoke to you of, John Baker.3 He is evidently one of the people we should circularise when we have a draft proposal ready. He could probably also be useful in telling us about other scientists who are not totalitarian-minded, which is important, because as a body they are much more subject to totalitarian habits of thought than writers, and have more popular prestige. Humphrey [Slater]* got Waddington,4 who is a borderline case, to do an article for Polemic, which I think was a good move, as it will appear in the same number as our opening volley against the Modern Quarterly.5 Unfortunately it was a very bad article.
Love to Mamaine. It is beautiful spring weather at last and daffodils out all over the place. Each winter I find it harder and harder to believe that spring will actually come.
Yours
George
[XVIII, 2955, pp.213–4; typewritten]
1. International Rescue and Relief Committee.
2. Michael Foot (1913–2010), politician, writer, and journalist, for much of his life on the extreme left of the Labour Party, was MP for Devonport, 1945–55; for Ebbw Vale, 1960–92 and Leader of the Labour Party (in Opposition), 1980–83. For Tribune he was assistant editor, 1937–38; Managing Director, 1945–74; editor, 1948–52, 1955–60. His many books include Guilty Men (with Frank Owen and Peter Howard, 1940), The Pen and the Sword (1957), The Politics of Paradise (1988).
3. John Randal Baker (1900–1984), Reader in Cytology, Oxford University, 1955–67; joint editor of the Journal of Microscopical Science, 1946–64; Professorial Fellow, New College Oxford, 1964–67. He received the Oliver Bird Medal for researches into chemical contraception in 1958. Baker was an important influence on Orwell (see 19.3.47).
4. Conrad Hal Waddington (1905–1975) was Buchanan Professor of Animal Genetics, University of Edinburgh. His publications include The Scientific Attitude (1941), and The Ethical Animal (1960). Orwell, while at the BBC, engaged him to broadcast talks to India.
5. The Modern Quarterly, founded 1938, aimed at contributing to a realistic, social revaluation of the arts and sciences, devoting special attention to studies based upon the materialistic interpretation of the universe. It lapsed during the war and was revived in December 1945, with Dr John Lewis as editor. Marxist in outlook, with many eminent scientists as contributors, it attacked, among other things, what it called ‘persistent attempts to confuse moral issues’, for example, Orwell’s ‘sophistries’ in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ in Polemic (XVII, 2668, pp. 141–57), which was translated and published in French, Dutch, Italian, and Finnish journals.
To Yvonne Davet*
8 April 1946
27B Canonbury Square,
Islington, N 1
Chère Madame Davet,
I have just received your letter of the 6th. Two or three days ago I met Mademoiselle Odile Pathé, the publisher who is going to bring out Animal Farm. I didn’t know she was in London, but she rang me up. I told her you had translated Homage to Catalonia, and that you had sent her the translation, but I suppose she won’t be back in France until next week. She seemed to me to have a lot more courage than most publishers, and she explained that because she is in Monaco, she has less to fear1 than the others, except for the paper. In any case Homage to Catalonia is a much less dangerous book than Animal Farm. It seems that the Communists now exert direct censorship on French publishers (I have heard they have ‘prohibited’ Gallimard publishing Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls), and it’s quite clear that they wouldn’t let Animal Farm get through if they could find a way of suppressing it. If Mademoiselle Pathé has the courage to publish one book, she would have the courage to publish the other, if it seemed worth her while financially.
As for the essays, let me explain how things stand. In 1940 I published a book, Inside the Whale, which didn’t sell very well, and shortly afterwards nearly all the copies were destroyed in the blitz. The book I’ve just published contains two of the original essays (there were only three), and eight others that I’d published in magazines in the last five years. One, or perhaps two, have a purely English interest. (One is on boys’ weeklies, the other on comic postcards—which are after all pretty similar in France.) At the moment Nagel Paris have a copy of Inside the Whale—they asked for it before the publication of Critical Essays. I can’t quite remember whether a copy of Critical Essays was sent to a French publisher,2 but I’ll ask my agent. If there was a question of translating one or the other, naturally it would be better to choose Critical Essays. Anyway, I’ll send you a copy as soon as possible, but I haven’t got one at the moment. The first edition is out of print, and the second edition hasn’t come out. One could easily publish the book without the essays of purely local interest. I certainly think the essay on Dickens is worth translating.
Recently I had a letter from Victor Serge,3 who is in Mexico, and who is going to send me the manuscript of his memoirs. I hope my publisher, Warburg, will publish them.
At the end of April I’m going to leave London to spend six months in Scotland, but I’m not sure precisely when I’m going, as there will certainly be problems in sending on the furniture. My house is in the Hebrides, and I hope to be fairly quiet so that I can start a new novel. In the last few years I’ve been writing three articles a week, and I’m dreadfully tired. My little boy is very well. I’m sending a photograph of the two of us. It looks as if I’m giving him a good spanking, but really I’m changing his trousers.4 Before I go I’ll send you my new address.
Très amicalement
George Orwell
[XVIII, 2963, pp. 226–8; typewritten; original in French]
1. From Communist pressure.
2. Three publishers were tried.
3. Victor Serge (pseudonym of Viktor Kibal’chiche, 1890–1947), edited L’Anarchie, Paris; imprisoned 1912–17 because of his political activities. He attempted to return to Russia in 1917 but was interned and only got to Russia in 1919. He worked with the International Secretariat until disillusioned following the Krondstadt incident, 1921 (see 15.12.46, n. 3). He then worked in Berlin and Vienna for the Comintern. In 1926 returned to Russia and allied himself with Trotsky but was expelled from the Party and in 1933 internally exiled to Orenburg. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936. He became Paris correspondent of the POUM during the Spanish civil war. He settled in Mexico in 1941 where he died impoverished. His Case of Comrade Tulayev was published by Penguin (2004).
4. Presumably the photograph reproduced as plate 69 in The World of George Orwell, edited by Miriam Gross (1971).
To Inez Holden*
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Inez,
I’m sorry I didn’t answer your earlier letter. I’ve been smothered under work as usual. Your second one, dated March 31st, reached me yesterday. You seem to be having quite an eventful time. I’m glad you got over your illness—I always say that being ill is part of the itinerary in a trip like that. It’s due to draughts or the change of diet or something. I have wondered several times whether I detected some of your stuff in the Observer—or are you only collecting stuff to write when you come back? I thought you’d probably notice more about what people were eating and so on than the average observer, and I thought perhaps you had done part of ‘Peregrine’1 one week.
Not a great deal has happened here. I expect to go away about the end of the month, but there’s still a lot of nightmares about repairs to the house and sending furniture. It’s unfortunate that Susan has been ill and may have to go into hospital. If she does I shall have to park Richard at a nursery school for a couple of months, because I can’t manage him singlehanded for that length of time and anyway I want to go up and get the Jura house livable as soon as the repairs are done. I’m going down to Wallington tomorrow to sort out the furniture and books, and then I hope Pickford’s man will come along and tell me when he can remove the stuff. I’ve also got to buy a lot of stuff. This kind of thing is a complete nightmare to me, but I’ve no one I can shove it on to.
It’s been quite nice spring weather here, on and off. Richard is extremely well, but is still not talking. He learned to blow a whistle lately, which was rather an affliction for a few days, however luckily he got tired of it. Animal Farm is being translated into 9 languages altogether and one or two of the translations have arrived. It is due to come out in the USA soon. I met the person who is publishing it in France, who turns out to be a woman who has her establishment in Monte Carlo, where she is a little safer than she would be in France. It seems the unofficial censorship in France itself is awful now.
I’ll write and tell Karl2 about his parents. I haven’t seen him since you left. He was very down in the mouth about not being allowed to go back to Germany—at the same time, of course, other people who don’t want to go back to their own countries are being made to. You didn’t say when you are coming back. As soon as we have the Jura house running I hope you’ll come and stay. I think it could be very nice there in the summer once the house is in proper trim.
With love
George
P.S. Isn’t it strange, we got a vacuum cleaner recently and Richard is terrified of it. He starts yelling as soon as he sees it, even before it is turned on, and in fact we can’t use it when he is in the house. My theory is that he gets some kind of vibration from it which gives him an electric shock.
[XVIII, 2965, pp. 230–1; typewritten]
1. A gossip column.
2. Karl Schnetzler (1906– ), German electrical research engineer. He worked in England, 1935–39, but was then interned (though a refugee) until 1943. He was naturalised British in 1948. He accompanied Eileen when she visited Orwell at Preston Hall Sanatorium. None of his letters to Orwell or those from Orwell to him have been traced. Orwell attempted, through Michael Foot, M P, to again permission for him to visit Germany to see his parents but this was unsuccessful. (See also 1.3.39, n. 1.)
To Philip Rahv*
9 April 1946
27 B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Rahv,
Thanks for your letter of April 4th. I note that you want the next ‘London Letter’ by about May 20th, and I will despatch it early in May. I am going to drop all my journalistic work here and go to Scotland for 6 months as from about the end of April, but I haven’t definitely fixed the date of leaving yet. As soon as I do I’ll send you my new address, but any way letters sent to the above would get to me.
Yes, I saw the article in Time,1 which was a bit of good luck. I have no doubt the book2 will be subject to some boycotting, but so far as this country is concerned I have been surprised by the unfriendly reactions it didn’t get. It is being translated into 9 languages. The most difficult to arrange was French. One publisher signed a contract and then said it was ‘impossible’ for political reasons, others made similar answers—however, I have fixed it with a publisher who is in Monte Carlo and thus feels a bit safer. She is a woman, Odille Pathé, and worth keeping in mind for people who have unpopular books to translate, as she seems to have courage, which is not common in France these last few years. I have no doubt what Camus said was quite true. I am told French publishers are now ‘commanded’ by Aragon3 and others not to publish undesirable books (according to my information, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was one such). The Communists have no actual jurisdiction in the matter, but it would be in their power, eg., to set fire to a publisher’s buildings with the connivance of the police. I don’t know how long this kind of thing will go on. In England feeling has undoubtedly been growing against the C.P. In France a year ago I got the impression that hardly anyone cares a damn any longer about freedom of the press etc. The occupation seemed to me to have had a terrible crushing effect even upon people like Trotskyists: or maybe a sort of intellectual decadence had set in years before the war. The only Frenchman I met at that [time] to whom I felt I could talk freely was a man named Raimbaud, a hunchback, who was one of the editors of the little near-Trotskyist weekly Libertés. The queer thing is that with all this moral decay there has over the past decade or so been much more literary talent in France than in England, or than anywhere else, I should say.
I don’t know whether you have seen Polemic, the new bi-monthly review. In the third number I have a long article on James Burnham which I shall reprint afterwards as a pamphlet.4 He won’t like it—however, it is what I think.
Yours
Geo. Orwell
[XVIII, 2966, pp. 231–2; typewritten]
1. The article appeared in Time, 4 February 1946, and was prompted by the publication of Animal Farm in England. Publication in the United States was more than six months later.
2. Animal Farm.
3. Louis Aragon (1897–1984), novelist, poet, journalist, and Communist activist, was a leading figure in the Surrealist school; see his first volume of poems, Feu de joie (1920), and his first novel Le Paysan de Paris (1926; English translation, The Night-Walker, 1950). He became a Communist following a visit to Russia in 1930 and he edited the Communist weekly Les Lettres Françaises, 1953–72.
4. ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’, Polemic, 3, May 1946, XVIII, 2989, pp. 268– 84. As a pamphlet it was titled James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, 1946.
The following letter, sent from Quakenbrück, Northern Germany, urges the need for a translation of Animal Farm for the benefit of refugees, and particularly for those from the Ukraine, and vividly describes readings Ihor Szewczenko1 gave in his own translation for Soviet refugees.
Ihor Szewczenko* to Orwell
11 April 1946
c/o K. A. Jeleński, P40–OS, B.A.O.R.2
Dear Mr. Orwell,
About the middle of February this year I had the opportunity to read Animal Farm. I was immediately seized by the idea, that a translation of the tale into Ukrainian would be of great value to my countrymen.
Quite apart from the benefit it would bring to our intelligentsia, only too incidentally acquainted with modern English literary life, a condition due partly to a certain remoteness from the West, such a translation would have a broader ‘moral’ influence which cannot be too much stressed. It is a matter of fact, that the attitude of the Western World in many recent issues roused serious doubts among our refugees. The somewhat naïve interpretation of this attitude oscillated between two poles. For many it looked something like the famous ‘tactics’, a miscalculated and disastrous device, dictated subconsciously by fear. It seemed to be miscalculated, because the other side is much stronger in this sort of tactics. It was deemed disastrous, because it would lead to a disappointment on the part of the European masses, only too willing to identify the democratic principles with democratic acts.
By the others this attitude was attributed to the perfect skill with which English public opinion is influenced from outside, to the misconception of the Soviet state and institutions being to a great extent like those of the West, to the inability to penetrate a deliberately created state of confusion, caused by a lack of adequate information, or to something like this.
Whatever the roots of this alleged attitude might be, the predominance of such an opinion has had a disintegrating influence. The refugees always tend to ‘lean against’ and to localise their best hopes and their idea of what they consider ‘moral perfection’. Such object lacking or failing to justify the expectations, purposelessness and cyni[ci]sm ensue.
This part° of our emigrants who found themselves in exile moved not purely by nationalistic considerations but by what they vaguely felt to be a search for ‘human dignity’ and ‘liberty’ were by no means consoled if some right-wing intellectual raised the so called warning voice. They were especially anxious to hear something of this sort from the Socialist quarters, to which they stood intellectually nearer. They wondered how it were possible that nobody ‘knew the truth’. The task then was to prove that this assumption of the ‘naïveté’ was at least only partially true. Your book has solved the problem. I can judge it from my own feelings I had after having read it. I daresay the work can be savoured by an ‘Eastern’ reader in a degree equal to that accessible to an Englishman, the deformation a translation is bound to bring about being outweighed by the accuracy with which almost every ‘traceable’ sentence of the tale can be traced down to the prototype. For several occasions I translated different parts of Animal Farm ex abrupto. Soviet refugees were my listeners. The effect was striking. They approved of almost all of your interpretations. They were profoundly affected by such scenes as that of animals singing ‘Beasts of England’ on the hill. Here I saw, that in spite of their attention being primarily drawn on detecting ‘concordances’ between the reality they lived in and the tale, they very vividly reacted to the ‘absolute’ values of the book, to the tale ‘types’, to the underlying convictions of the author and so on. Besides, the mood of the book seems to correspond with their own actual state of mind.
For these and similar reasons I ask you for an authorisation to translate Animal Farm into Ukrainian, a task which is already begun.
I hear from Mr. Jeleński3 that his mother4 has already talked over with you the delicate question of publishing the translation in present conditions.5 I must ask you therefore not to mention my name overmuch and to consider the whole business unofficial for the present.
Reading this kind of book one is often tempted to speculate about the ‘real’ opinions of the author. I myself confess to having indulged in this sort of guessing, and I have many questions to put to you, mainly related to your appreciation of certain developments in the USSR, but also many of more technical character, such as the translation of proper names. But this requires a separate letter. For the meantime I apologise for the long delay in addressing you. I was away in South Germany and your letter to Mme Jeleńska had not reached me until now.
Yours sincerely
Ihor Szewczenko
[XVIII, 2969, pp. 235–8]
1. Ihor Szewczenko was, in April 1946, commuting between Munich (where his then wife and mother-in-law, both Soviet-Ukrainian refugees, and he lived) and Quakenbrück in the British Zone of Germany, where a daily newspaper for the Second Polish, the Maczek, Division was published. Szewczenko, who was then twenty-five, had been ‘found’ after the war by one of its editors, André de Vincenz (a school friend from Warsaw), and, though Ukrainian, given work on the newspaper. He was engaged to survey the British Press and paid particular attention to Tribune (picking out ‘As I Please’). Another editor, Konstanty (‘Kot’) Jeleński, put him in touch, through his mother, with Orwell in order that he might ask permission to publish the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm, upon which he worked every day after lunch in Quakenbrück and in the evenings in Munich.
2. B.A.O.R.: British Army of the Rhine.
3. Konstanty A. Jeleński was the son of a Polish diplomat. In April 1946 he held the rank of lieutenant. He was familiar with the English literary scene and later achieved some prominence in Paris, where he contributed to Épreuves and the important Polish monthly Kultura, which published four of Orwell’s articles in Polish. The first three were translated by Teresa Jeleńska and the fourth by Teresa Skórzewska all ‘with the author’s authority’. Jeleński died about 1989.
4. Mme Teresa Jeleńska, Konstanty Jeleński’s mother, was the intermediary who on Szewczenko’s behalf broached with Orwell the possibility of the publication of a Ukrainian translation. No correspondence between her and Orwell has been traced. Mme Jeleńska made a translation into Polish of Animal Farm and that, with illustrations by Wojciecha Jastrzebowskiego, was published by the League of Poles Abroad, London, under the title Folwark Zwierzecy, in December 1946.
5. The translation into Ukrainian was published in Munich in November 1947; the translator’s name was given as Ivan Cherniatync’kyi and the title as Kolhosp Tvaryn. It was intended for displaced persons. Orwell wrote a special Preface for this translation and it is printed as Appendix II of the Complete Works and Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics editions.
To Andrew S. F. Gow*
13 April 1946
27B Canonbury Square Islington N 1
Dear Mr Gow,
It was very nice to hear from you after all this time. I heard almost simultaneously from M. D. Hill,1 who wrote to me appropos° of the Gem and Magnet2 and George Lyttelton,3 who is now editing a series for Home & Van Thal and wanted me to write something. To my sorrow I had to say no, at any rate for the time being, because I am just on the point of dropping all journalism and other casual work for six months. I may start another book during the period, but I have resolved to stop hackwork for a bit, because I have been writing three articles a week for two years and for two years previous to that had been in the BBC where I wrote enough rubbish (news commentaries and so on) to fill a shelf of books. I have become more and more like a sucked orange and I am going to get out of it and go to Scotland for six months to a place where there is no telephone and not much of a postal service.
A lot has happened to me since I saw you. I am very sorry to say I lost my wife a little over a year ago, very suddenly and unexpectedly although her health had been indifferent for some time. I have a little adopted son who is now nearly 2 and was about 10 months old when his mother, ie. my wife, died. He was 3 weeks old when we adopted him. He is a splendid child and fortunately very healthy, and is a great pleasure to me. I didn’t do much in the war because I was class IV, having a disease called bronchiectasis and also a lesion in one lung which was never diagnosed when I was a boy. But actually my health has been much better the last few years thanks to M and B.4 The only bit of war I saw apart from blitzes and the Home Guard was being a war correspondent for a little while in Germany about the time of the collapse, which was quite interesting. I was in the Spanish war for a bit and was wounded through the neck, which paralysed one vocal cord, but this doesn’t affect my voice. As you gathered I had a difficult time making a living out of writing at the start, though looking back now, and knowing what a racket literary journalism is, I see that I could have managed much better if I had known the ropes. At present the difficulty with all writers I know is that whereas it is quite easy to make a living by journalism or broadcasting, it is practically impossible to live by books. Before the war my wife and I used to live off my books, but then we lived in the country on £5 a week, which you could do then, and we didn’t have a child. The last few years life has been so ghastly expensive that I find the only way I can write books is to write long essays for the magazines and then reprint them. However all this hackwork I have done in the last few years has had the advantage that it gets me a new public, and when I do publish a book it sells a lot more than mine used to before the war.
You mentioned Freddie Ayer.5 I didn’t know you knew him. He is a great friend of mine. This new magazine, Polemic, has only made two appearances so far, but I have great hopes that it will develop into something good. Bertrand Russell is of course the chief star in the constellation. It was a bad job Bobby Longden6 getting killed. I believe Wellington became very enlightened while he was there. A boy whom you may know called Michael Meyer,7 who was in the RAF and is now I think back at Cambridge again, was at Wellington under Bobby and has a great regard for him.
I will certainly come and see you next time I am at Cambridge, but I don’t quite know when that will be. I thought of you last time I was there about 2 years ago when I was lecturing to the London School of Economics which was evacuated there. About my name. I have used the name Orwell as a pen-name for a dozen years or more, and most of the people I know call me George, but I have never actually changed my name and some people still call me Blair. It is getting to be such a nuisance that I keep meaning to change it by deed poll, but you have to go to a solicitor etc. which puts me off.
Yours
Eric Blair
P.S. You couldn’t be expected to read all the books your ex-pupils have produced, but I wonder whether you saw my last book but one, Animal Farm? If not I’d be happy to send you a copy. It is very short and might amuse you.
[XVIII, 2972, pp. 241–3; typewritten]
1. M. D. Hill was a master at Eton in Orwell’s time.
2. ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, Horizon, 1940, XII, pp. 57–79.
3. The Honorable George Lyttelton, a master at Eton who was also in correspondence with Orwell at this time. He was no longer at Eton and wrote to Orwell on 9 April 1946 to thank him for replying to an earlier letter and to invite him to write one of the biographies of great writers he was editing for Home & Van Thal. He said he suspected Orwell was ‘committed kneedeep’ but thought it worth asking. A year or two earlier, at £50 down and a royalty of 15% for 30,000 words, it might have been a chance to be seized. In a postscript he wrote, ‘I am very glad you put in a word for that foolish old Wodehouse. The discovery made by all our patriots that, because he made an ass of himself in the war, none of his books was really at all funny was very absurd—& very English.’
4. May & Baker, drug manufacturers. Orwell is probably referring to a treatment for pneumonia.
5. Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–1989; Kt., 1970), philosopher. His Language, Truth and Logic (1936) was a revolutionary work, the first extensive presentation of Logical Positivism in English. After Eton and Christ Church (1932–44) he served in the Welsh Guards and was an attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. From 1946 to 1978 he held professional appointments at UCL and Oxford; he was a fellow of Wolfson College, 1978–83.
6. Robert P. (‘Bobbie’) Longden, a contemporary of Orwell’s at Eton, had a brilliant academic career, became headmaster of Wellington, and was killed in 1940 by a German stray bomb that hit the school. Orwell’s comment about Wellington becoming ‘very enlightened while [Longden] was there’ may reflect on his memories of the short time he spent at the school before going to Eton: he ‘did not like Wellington at all. He found the militaristic spirit of this famous army school abhorrent’ (Crick, p. 96).
7. Michael Leverson Meyer (1921–2000), writer, critic, and distinguished translator and biographer of Ibsen and Strindberg. He had written what he described as a ‘timid letter’ to Orwell when Orwell was at the BBC and had a friendly response (13 April 1943) and they became friends. He had served in Bomber Command, 1942–45, and was Lecturer in English Literature, Uppsala University, Sweden, 1947–50.
To Anne Popham*
27 B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Andy,
I must have got your letter about the 7th, and I have thought over it a long time, as you can see by the date. I wonder if I committed a sort of crime in approaching you. In a way it’s scandalous that a person like me should make advances to a person like you, and yet I thought from your appearance that you were not only lonely and unhappy, but also a person who lived chiefly through the intellect and might become interested in a man who was much older and not much good physically. You asked me what attracted me to you in the first place. You are very beautiful, as no doubt you well know, but that wasn’t quite all. I do so want someone who will share what is left of my life, and my work. It isn’t so much a question of someone to sleep with, though of course I want that too, sometimes. You say you wouldn’t be likely to love me. I don’t see how you could be expected to. You are young and fresh and you have had someone you really loved and who would set up a standard I couldn’t compete with. If you still feel you can start again and you want a handsome young man who can give you a lot of children, then I am no good to you. What I am really asking you is whether you would like to be the widow of a literary man. If things remain more or less as they are there is a certain amount of fun in this, as you would probably get royalties coming in and you might find it interesting to edit unpublished stuff etc. Of course there is no knowing how long I shall live, but I am supposed to be a ‘bad life.’ I have a disease called bronchiectasis which is always liable to develop into pneumonia, and also an old ‘non-progressive’ tuberculous lesion in one lung, and several times in the past I have been supposed to be about to die, but I always lived on just to spite them, and I have actually been better in health since M and B. I am also sterile I think—at any rate I have never had a child, though I have never undergone the examination because it is so disgusting. On the other hand if you wanted children of your own by someone else it wouldn’t bother me, because I have very little physical jealousy. I don’t much care who sleeps with whom, it seems to me what matters is being faithful in an emotional and intellectual sense. I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and I also treated her very badly, and I think she treated me badly too at times, but it was a real marriage in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and she understood all about my work, etc. You are young and healthy, and you deserve somebody better than me: on the other hand if you don’t find such a person, and if you think of yourself as essentially a widow, then you might do worse—ie. supposing I am not actually disgusting to you. If I can live another ten years I think I have another three worth-while books in me, besides a lot of odds and ends, but I want peace and quiet and someone to be fond of me. There is also Richard. I don’t know what your feelings are about him. You might think all this over. I have spoken plainly to you because I feel you are an exceptional person. And I wish when you come back you would come and stay on Jura. I think I should have made the house fairly comfortable by then, and Richard and Susan, and perhaps other people, will be there as chaperons. I am not asking you to come and be my mistress, just to come and stay. I think you would like it. It is a beautiful place, quite empty and wild.
I don’t think there’s much news here. It’s been beautiful spring weather and the chestnut trees in the square are full out, ie. the leaves, such a vivid green as you don’t expect to see in London. I am alone because Susan and Richard have gone down into the country for the Easter weekend. I stayed behind because I want to polish off odds and ends of work and to pack the stuff before sending it to Jura. Last week I went down to the cottage in Hertfordshire to sort out the furniture and books there before Pickfords came for it. I had been putting it off because I hadn’t been down there since Eileen died and expected it to be horribly upsetting but actually it wasn’t so bad except when I kept coming on old letters. I am sending what furniture I have there, but have also had to buy innumerable things, almost like stocking up a ship. Pickfords are supposed to remove everything next week, about the 25th, and they think it will take at least 10 days to get there, after which it has to travel to the house by lorry, so it’s unlikely that I shall leave London before about May 10th, if then. Of course this move costs something fabulous1—on the other hand, once it’s accomplished and the house got into running order, there is a nice summer residence at almost no rent. I particularly want it for Richard, because he’s really getting too big to stay in a flat in the summer. It is a job now to keep him inside the garden, because he knows in principle how to open the gate and sometimes manages to do it. Next winter when we come back I shall send him to the nursery school. It’s funny he doesn’t seem to want to talk—he is so intelligent in every other way. He tries now to put on his own shoes and socks, and he knows how to drive in a nail, though he can’t actually do it without hammering his fingers. He is still terrified of the vacuum cleaner and we can’t use it while he is about.
You asked about a book of mine about France—I suppose Down and Out in Paris and London. I literally don’t possess a copy, even of the Penguin edition. I suppose it will be re-issued some time. I think the American edition of the essays has just come out, and my other American publisher cabled to say Animal Farm had been chosen by something called the Book of the Month Club. I think that must mean a sale of at least 20,0002 and that even after paying the taxes at both ends, and even if I’ve signed a disadvantageous contract, which I probably did, it should bring in enough to keep me in idleness for several months. The only thing is that they won’t publish it till the autumn and there’s many a slip etc.
I wonder if you have heard the cuckoo. I think I did dimly hear it when I was in Germany this time last year, between ‘Lili Marlene’3 and the roaring of trucks and tanks. The year before that I was so tied to London I never heard a cuckoo at all, the first year in my life that this had happened to me, ie. in London. I haven’t heard it this year yet because I was down in Wallington a few days too early, but I think I saw one sitting on a telegraph wire as I came back in the train. You often see them a few days before you hear them. After writing my article on toads for Tribune4 I went up to the little disused reservoir in the village where we used to catch newts, and there were the tadpoles forming as usual. It was rather sad. We used to have a small aquarium made of a 7 pound pickle jar each year and watch the newts grow from little black blobs in the spawn to full-grown creatures, and we also used to have snails and caddis flies.
I shall have to stop because I have to wash up the breakfast things and then go out to lunch. Take care of yourself. I hope you’re better. It’s beastly being ill in those circumstances, so lonely and comfortless. You didn’t say whether you want to be sent magazines or anything. And write as soon as you can. I hope you will come and stay on Jura. It would be wonderful walking over to the west side of the island which is quite uninhabited and where there are bays of green water so clear you can see about 20 feet down, with seals swimming about. Don’t think I’ll make love to you against your will. You know I am civilized.
With love
George
P.S. [handwritten] I’m taking you at your word & only putting 1½d on this, because it’s Good Friday & these are all the stamps I can find.5
[XVIII, 2978, pp. 248–51; typewritten
with handwritten postscript]
1. Orwell’s goods were valued at £250. The cost of transporting them (Pickfords, plus rail, plus ship as far as Craighouse, plus insurance) was £114 3s 8d. The goods had then to be conveyed from Craighouse to Barnhill.
2. The first printing for Book-of-the-Month Club was 430,000 copies and the second 110,000.
3. ‘Lili Marlene’ was a song popular with both German and Allied servicemen. It was played by chance by a German-operated station in Yugoslavia and heard, and enjoyed, by men of the British Eighth Army and Rommel’s troops in North Africa. It tells of a woman waiting for her soldier-lover, and it was used by the British for propaganda purposes. It was made the subject of a propaganda film (with the same title) directed by Humphrey Jennings (1944).
4. ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, 12 April 1946 (XVIII, 2970, pp. 238–41) – one of Orwell’s finest essays.
5. This was the correct amount for Forces’ mail. Post Offices closed on Good Friday.
To Stafford Cottman*
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Staff,
It was very nice to hear from you. I didn’t realise you were still in the RAF. Be sure and look me up if you’re in London when I’m here (if I am the above telephone number1 will always get me), but I’m shortly going away for 6 months. I’ve been doing too much hack journalism for several years past and have decided to drop it for a bit—for two months I mean to do nothing at all, then maybe I shall start another book, but any way, no journalism until next autumn. I have written three articles a week for two years, in addition to all the bilge I had to write for the BBC for two years before that. I have given up the cottage in Hertfordshire and taken another in the island of Jura in the Hebrides, and hope to go up there about May 10th if my furniture has arrived by that time. It’s in an extremely un-get-atable place, but it’s a nice house and I think I can make it quite comfortable with a little trouble, and then I shall have a nice place to retire to occasionally at almost no rent. My little boy whom I think you have never seen is now nearly 2 and extremely active, which is one of the reasons why I am anxious to get out of London for the summer. He was 10 months old when Eileen died. It was an awful shame—she had been so overworked for years and in wretched health, then things just seemed to be getting better and that happened. The only good thing was that I don’t think she expected anything to go wrong with the operation. She died as a result of the anaesthetic almost as soon as they gave it her. I was in France at the time, as neither of us had expected the operation to be very serious. The child I think was just too young to miss her, and he has done very well in health and everything else. I have a good housekeeper who looks after him and me.
The other day I ran into Paddy Donovan in the Edgware Road.2 He has a job cleaning windows and he said he would ring me up, but he hasn’t done so yet. He was wounded in Germany about the time of the crossing of the Rhine. Don’t forget to ring me up if you’re in town this coming autumn.
Yours
Eric Blair
[XVIII, 2984, pp. 257–8; typewritten]
1. Orwell’s telephone number has not been reprinted. It was CAN 3751.
2. John (Paddy) Donovan (1905– ), a labourer who had served in World War I and was one of Orwell’s colleagues in Spain. He, with Cottman and a number of others, had signed Orwell’s refutation of F. A. Frankford’s allegations in the Daily Worker against the ILP contingent (see Crick, pp. 346–47). Orwell was later to give him some work digging his Hertfordshire garden when Donovan was out of work (Crick, p. 354).
To Marjorie Dakin*
30 April 1946
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Marj,
I have only just heard from Avril about your illness. Naturally I only got a brief account from her, but she said it was pernicious anaemia. I do hope you are going on all right and are being properly treated. I am sending simultaneously with this a few books, some of which I hope you may not have read.1
I am just on the point of going away to Jura for 6 months. The furniture has gone, but it’s likely to take a long time getting there owing to the sea journey. I am letting this flat furnished, or rather am lending it to someone,2 as we’re not supposed to sublet. When the furniture arrives I shall go on ahead and get the house in order, and then bring Richard up later. Susan has to go into hospital for a treatment which will take about a month, and during that time I am going to park him in a nursery school. It seems rather ruthless, but I can’t look after him singlehanded for that length of time, and he is such a social child that he is bound to get on all right. We intend to stay on Jura till about October and I am dropping all casual journalism during that time, though I hope to get started on another book once I’ve got the house straight. The move is of course very expensive, but once it’s done we shall have a nice summer residence for almost no rent, and it will be a lovely place for children to stay.
Richard is extremely well and getting quite big. He weighs about 37 pounds and keeps growing out of his clothes. He will be 2 on the 14th of May. He doesn’t speak, but is very forward in other ways and very enterprising. He loves tools and already understands how to do such things as hammering in nails. He also goes downstairs on his own initiative and tries to put on his own shoes and socks. I shall be very glad to get him into the country for the summer because he’s getting too active for a flat. We have a garden here, but it’s not possible to leave him alone in it because he gets out into the street.
Don’t bother answering this. I am also writing to Humphrey. I am not certain what date I shall be leaving London (probably about May 10th), but my Jura address will be Barnhill, Isle of Jura, Argyllshire.
Love
Eric
[XVIII, 2987, pp. 262–3; typewritten]
1. Marjorie died on 3 May 1946. Orwell attended her funeral (see Diaries, p. 372). Writing later to her husband, Humphrey, he said, ‘One cannot really say anything about Marjorie’s death. I know what it is like and how it sinks in afterwards’ (XVIII, 2998, p. 309). Her children would later stay at Barnhill.
2. Mrs Miranda Wood (then Miranda Christen) had returned from the Far East early in 1946 after 3½ years in Japanese-occupied territory. She was technically a German national by marriage and was pursuing protracted divorce proceedings. She stayed in Orwell’s London flat during the summers of 1946 and 1947. She undertook typing for him including ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ and sections of Nineteen Eighty-Four. (For fuller details see the long note, XIX, p. 228 and her memoir, XX, 3735, pp. 300–306.)
To Michael Meyer*
23 May 1946
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Argyllshire
Dear Michael,
Thanks so much for your efforts. No, I haven’t a licence1 (there’s no policeman on this island!) so don’t worry about the black powder. I made some which is not as good as commercial stuff but will do. If you could get the percussion caps I’d be much obliged. Tell them the largest size they have, i.e. something about this size 
.
I’m just settling in here—up to my eyes getting the house straight, but it’s a lovely house. Richard isn’t coming till the end of June, because Susan has to have a minor operation & I couldn’t cope with him singlehanded, so I’ve had to board him out. However the reports are that he is getting on well. Only difficulties at present are (a) that I can’t yet get a jeep (hope to get one at the end of the month) & am having to make do with a motor bike which is hell on these roads, & (b) owing to the drought there’s no water for baths, though enough to drink. However one doesn’t get very dirty here. Come & stay sometime. It’s not such an impossible journey (about 48 hours from London) & there’s plenty of room in this house, though of course conditions are rough
All the best
George
[XVIII, 3002, p. 312; handwritten]
1. A licence was needed to carry a gun. Presumably Orwell was seeking ammunition for his gun.
To Rayner Heppenstall*
16 June 1946
Barnhill Isle of Jura Argyllshire
Dear Rayner,
Do come about July 14th if that date suits you.1 Try & let me have a week’s notice, so as to arrange about meeting you, as posts here are somewhat infrequent. There are boats to Jura on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. The itinerary is this (but better check it with the L.M.S.2 in case any time is altered):—
8 am leave Glasgow Central Station for Gourock (GOUROCK)
Join boat at Gourock
Arrive East Tarbert about 12 noon
Travel to West Tarbert by bus (runs in conjunction with boat)
Join boat at West Tarbert
Arrive Jura about 3 pm.3
You can book right [through] from Glasgow, or pay your fare on each boat. Fare Gourock–Jura is about £1. Bring any food you can manage, & bring a towel. You’ll need thick boots & a raincoat.
Looking forward to seeing you
Yours
Eric
[XVIII, 3015, p. 328; handwritten]
1. Heppenstall had written on 11 June 1946, saying he was pleased Orwell would do something for the BBC in the ‘Imaginary Conversations’ series in November or December. He expected to arrive in Jura about 14 July and (owing to the severe rationing) he would try to help with food: ‘The comparative roughness does not in the least appal me.’ He hoped Orwell’s health was improving and looked forward to seeing him ‘very beefy’.
2. Between 1923, when many individual railway companies were ‘grouped,’ and 31 December 1947, when the system was nationalised (as British Rail until its break up in the 1990s) there were four main companies, of which the London, Midland & Scottish was one.
3. Orwell’s instructions for getting to Barnhill vary from time to time but are hereafter omitted.
Avril Blair* to Humphrey Dakin*
1 July 1946
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Humph
Glad to hear you & the family are progressing satisfactorily. Congratulate Henry1 for me when next you write.
This is a lovely place. Why don’t you come up for a bit if you are feeling browned off. The only snag is—no beer, so bring your own if you want any.
This is a very nice farmhouse with five bedrooms & bathroom, two sittingrooms & huge kitchen larders dairies etc. The house faces south & we have a lovely view over the Sound of Jura with little islands dotted here & there. Eric has bought a little boat & we go fishing in the evening which is the time the fish rise. They are simply delicious fresh from the sea. In fact, on the whole we live on the fat of the land. Plenty of eggs & milk & ½ lb butter extra weekly on to our rations. Our landlord2 gave us a large hunk of venison a short while ago which was extremely good. Then there are local lobsters & crabs. Also the ubiquitous rabbit. Our nearest neighbours are a mile away. Then there is a strip of wild & remote country for eight miles to Ardlussa where our landlord the local estate owner & family live. This is a so called° village, but no shop. The only shop on the island is at Craighouse,3 the port where the ship calls three times a week. We go to fetch our letters from Ardlussa twice a week in a very delapidated° Ford Van that E has bought. The roads are appalling.
I am really enjoying it all imenseley,° including cooking on a range, with which I had a tremendous battle at first. But having removed two buckets of soot from the flues it now cooks & heats the water a treat. One couldn’t compare this place with Middlesmoor4 as it is quite different but next to it Middlesmoor seems like Blackpool. The country is lovely with rocky coastline & mountains all down the centre of the island. I am making a serious collection of pressed wild flowers. We have a friend of E’s one Paul Potts staying here. He takes all my shafts of scintillating wit quite seriously & suffers from fits of temperament but I think I am welding him into a more human shape.5
With love
Avril
[XVIII, 3025, p.337–8; handwritten]
1. Avril’s nephew, son of Humphrey and Marjorie Dakin.
2. Robin Fletcher, formerly an Eton housemaster; he inherited the Ardlussa Estate, which included Barnhill. He and his wife, later Margaret Nelson, set about restoring the estate and developing crofting. Mrs Nelson’s interview with Nigel Williams for the BBC programme Arena in 1984 is reproduced in Orwell Remembered, pp. 225–29.
3. Craighouse is about sixteen miles south of Ardlussa and about three miles from the southern tip of Jura. It was therefore about twenty-three miles south of Barnhill as the crow flies, but Margaret Nelson gives the distance as twenty-seven miles (Orwell Remembered, p. 226). Orwell relied on Craighouse for a shop, a doctor, and a telephone.
4. A remote village in Nidderdale, Yorkshire, some fourteen miles west of Ripon as the crow flies. The Dakins had a cottage there, described by Marjorie as ‘a magic cottage’ (see 3.10.38, n. 9).
5. Paul Potts (1911–90), Canadian poet whom Orwell befriended. His chapter, ‘Don Quixote on a Bicycle’ in his Dante Called you Beatrice (1960), partially reprinted in Orwell Remembered, pp. 248–60, describes Orwell affectionately. He recalls that ‘The happiest years of my life were those during which I was a friend of his’. Avril had been a metal-worker during the war which might explain her use of ‘welding’.
To Sally McEwan*
5 July 1946
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Sally,1
So looking forward to seeing you on the 22nd. But I’m very sorry to say you’ll have to walk the last 8 miles because we’ve no conveyance. However it isn’t such a terrible walk if you can make do with rucksack luggage—for instance a rucksack and a couple of haversacks. I can tote that much on the back of my motor bike (only conveyance I have), but not heavy suitcases. Send the food on well in advance so that it is sure to arrive before you. For instance if you sent it off about Monday 15th it would get here on the Friday previous to your arrival. I think I’ve given you all the directions for the journey. Don’t miss the train at Glasgow— it now leaves at 7.55, not 8. When you get to Jura, ask for the hired car at McKechnie’s shop if it doesn’t meet you on the quay. It will take you to Ardlussa where we will meet you. I may be able to arrange for it to take you another 3 miles to Lealt, but sometimes they won’t take their cars past Ardlussa. Yesterday I brought Richard and Susan back (I rang you up when in town but it was your day at the printers), and in that case managed to bribe the driver to go within 2 miles of Barnhill, but he was appalled by the road and I don’t think he’d do it again. I then carried Richard home from there and their luggage was brought on in the crofter’s cart. It’s really a quite pleasant walk if one takes it slowly. You don’t need a great deal in the way of clothes if you have a raincoat and some stout boots or shoes. I hope by that time we shall have a spare pair of gum boots for use in the boat. I don’t know what you’ll do on the train, but on the boats from Gourock and Tarbert it pays to travel 3rd class because there’s no difference in the accomodation° and the food is filthy any way.
With love
George
[XVIII, 3027, pp. 339–40; typewritten]
1. Sally McEwan came to Barnhill with her child. She and Avril were united in dislike of Paul Potts. He left suddenly in the night. At first it was thought it was either because he was told to do so by Avril or because he chanced to see something hurtful about him written by Sally McEwan in a letter (Crick, pp. 512–14). This account was corrected by Sally McEwan and Susan Watson, interviewed by Ian Angus in February 1984. Susan Watson confirmed that Sally McEwan had not left anything hurtful about Paul Potts where he might read it. The reason for Potts’s sudden departure was quite different: there was no newspaper left with which to get the fire started, so Susan Watson used what she took to be scrap paper; unfortunately, this turned out to be a draft of something Potts was writing.
To Sir Richard Rees*
5 July 1946
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Thanks for your letter of the 1st. I have sometimes thought over the point you raise. I don’t know if I would, as it were, get up to the point of having anything biographical written about me, but I suppose it could happen and it’s ghastly to think of some people doing it. All I can say is, use your discretion and if someone seems a B.F., don’t let him see any papers. I am going to include among my personal papers, in case of this happening, some short notes about the main events in my life, chiefly dates and places, because I notice that when people write about you, even people who know you well, they always get that kind of thing wrong. If I should peg out in the next few years, I don’t really think there’ll be a great deal for you to do except deal with publishers over reprints and decide whether or not to keep a few miscellaneous documents. I have named you as literary executor in my will, which has been properly drawn up by a lawyer, and Gwen O’Shaughnessy, who will be Richard’s guardian if anything happens to me, knows all about it. Richard, I hope and trust, is well provided for. I had managed to save a little over the last year or two, and having had this stroke of luck with the American Book of the Month people, I can leave that money untouched, as it is so to speak over and above my ordinary earnings.
I have been up here since the middle of May and am now well settled in. I haven’t done a stroke of work for two months, only gardening etc. My sister is here and does the cooking, and Susan and Richard came up a few days ago. I suppose I shall have to start work again soon, but I’m not going to do any journalism until October. This is a nice big farmhouse with a bathroom and we are making it quite comfortable. The only real snag here is transport— everything has to be brought over 8 miles of inconceivable road, and I’ve no transport except a motor bike. However it’s only necessary to do the journey once a week, to fetch bread and the rations. We’re well off for food. We get milk in any quantity and a fair amount of eggs and butter from a nearby crofter, our only neighbour within 6 miles, and we catch quantities of fish in the sea and also shoot rabbits. I’ve also got a few geese which we shall eat off by degrees. The house hadn’t been inhabited for 12 years and of course the garden has gone back to wilderness, but I am getting it under by little and little,1 and this autumn I shall put in fruit bushes etc. Getting the house running has cost a bit, but the rent is almost nothing and it’s nice to have a retreat like this to which one can disappear when one likes and not be followed by telephone calls etc. At present it’s about a 2-day journey from London, door to door, but one could do it in a few hours if one flew to the neighbouring island (Islay), which we shall be able to do another time because we shall leave clothes and so forth here. If you’d like to come and stay in for instance September we’d love to have you here. If so let me know and I’ll tell you about how to do the journey.* It isn’t really a very formidable one except that you have to walk the last 8 miles.
Yours
Eric
*P.S. You might find it rather paintable here.2 The colours on the sea are incredible but they change all the time. You could do some studies of real Highland cattle. They’re all over the place, just like in Landseer’s pictures!3
[XVIII, 3028, pp. 340–1; typed
with handwritten postscript]
1. ‘by little and little’ means gradually; ‘He that contemneth small things shall fall by little and little,’ Ecclesiasticus, xix, 1.
2. Rees was living in Edinburgh at the time and painting. He made several oil paintings at Barnhill including one of Orwell’s bedroom (now in the Orwell Archive, UCL).
3. Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) was best known for his pictures of dogs and deer; his ‘Monarch of the Glen’ (1851) was highly regarded in its time. Although his pictures have now become more popular, they were less appreciated when Orwell referred to them. He sculpted the lions at the foot of Nelson’s column (1867) in London. Orwell mentions them in Nineteen Eighty-Four, when Winston and Julia meet in Victory Square (p. 120).
To Yvonne Davet*
29 July 1946
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Chère Madame Davet,
I would, of course, be very pleased if Homage to Catalonia were accepted by M. Charlot.1 If it is, there are several mistakes (typographical errors etc.) which need correcting and which I’ll point out to you. I also think that it would be better to add an introduction by someone (a Spaniard, if possible) who has a good knowledge of Spain and Spanish politics. When the book is reprinted in England, I plan to take out one or perhaps two chapters and put them at the end of the book as an appendix. It specially concerns the chapter giving a detailed picture of the May fighting, with quotations from the newspapers etc. It has a historic value, but it would be tedious for a reader with no special interest in the Spanish Civil War, and it could go at the end without damaging the text.2 As for the title, it would probably be better to alter it. Even in English the title doesn’t mean much. But perhaps you have some thoughts on the subject. I think it’s impossible to choose a title in a foreign language.3
Unfortunately, I have no novel to give to M. Charlot. Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Coming Up For Air are all being translated,4 and there aren’t any more. That is, I did write two other novels, but I’m not very proud of them, and I made up my mind a long time ago to suppress them. As for the novel I’m beginning now, that will possibly be finished in 1947. I’ve only just started it. For nearly three months I’ve done nothing at all, that is, I’ve written nothing. After years of writing three articles a week, I was dreadfully tired, and I very much needed a long holiday. Here in Scotland we are living in a very primitive fashion, and we’re quite busy shooting rabbits, catching fish etc. to get enough to eat. I’ve just started writing a long article for Polemic,5 and after I’ve finished that, I hope to work on my novel for two months before I go back to London in October. In October I’ll start doing journalism again, but if I’ve written at least a few chapters of the novel I’ll probably be able to finish it sooner or later. The difficult thing is starting a new book when you’re busy for five or six days a week.
I’m staying here till the beginning of October, or perhaps a few weeks later. After that my address in London will be as usual. The address of my publishers (for Homage to Catalonia) is Messrs. Secker and Warburg Publishers 7 John Street London W.C.1.
Très amicalement
Geo. Orwell
P.S. I enclose a copy of my pamphlet James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, which first appeared as an article in Polemic with the title ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham.’ I suppose it is possible that one of the monthlies might think it worth translating.
[XVIII, 3036, pp. 360–3; typewritten]
1. Charlot saw the French translation of Homage to Catalonia through the press.
2. These and other changes listed by Orwell were made for the Collected Works edition, Vol. VI.
3. The French edition (1955) simply translated the title Homage to Catalonia into French. For the changes made for the French edition, and Orwell’s additional notes, see CW, VI, Textual Note.
4. The proposed translation of Coming Up for Air may be a reference to La fille de l’air.
5. ‘Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels’, Polemic, No. 5, September–October 1946 (see XVIII, 3089, pp. 417–32).
To Lydia Jackson*
7 August 1946
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Thanks for your letter. If you’d like to come up here, there would be room in the house in the second half of August, say any time between the 15th and September 1st. Somebody else is coming on the latter date, I think. [Details about travel: see 16.6.46]1 Try and give me several days° notice, won’t you, so that I can arrange about hiring the car. I think Susan’s little girl is coming up on Friday the 16th, in which case I shall go to Glasgow to meet her, but it’s not certain yet.
Thanks so much for sending on the boots. We need all the footwear we can get here because of course one is constantly getting wet, especially when we go fishing. Latterly the weather has been foul but whenever it’s decent we go out at night and catch a lot of fish which helps the larder.
As to the repairs.2 As I am supposed to be the tenant, it might be best if you sent Keep’s bill on to me and let me pay it, and I will then send the receipted bill to Dearman and see what I can get out of him. I don’t suppose we’ll get the whole amount, but anyway we can square up afterwards. I don’t suppose Keep will charge an enormous amount from what I know of him.
Love to Pat.
Yours
Eric
[XVIII, 3044, pp. 369–70; typewritten]
1. Orwell also asked Lydia to bring ‘some bread and/or flour’. The shortage of grain for bread grew worse during 1946 (partly because grain was needed for those near starvation in Continental Europe). The wheat content of bread was reduced in March 1946; in April the size of loaves was reduced from 2lbs to 1¾lbs – but the price was not reduced – and there was a 15% cut in grain for brewing beer; in June bread was rationed despite the fact that that had not proved necessary throughout the war. Near the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four (IX, p. 7) Winston Smith finds he has only ‘a hunk of dark-coloured bread’ to eat but that had to be saved for the next morning’s breakfast. The draft manuscript is even more specific for it is there described as ‘a single slab of bread three centimetres thick’ (Facsimile, p. 15).
2. The repairs are to The Stores, Wallington, not Barnhill. Mr Dearman was the landlord. (See Shelden, pp. 260–62.) Keep was, presumably, a local builder.
To Anne Popham*
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Andy,
You see this time it’s me who delays weeks or is it months before answering. You didn’t have to be so apologetic—I know only too well how difficult it is to answer a letter and how they rise up and smite one day after day.
I thought over your letter a lot, and I expect you’re right. You’re young and you’ll probably find someone who suits you. Any way° let’s say no more about it.1 I hope I shall see you when I am back in London (probably about October). I heard from Ruth2 about a week ago, as she kindly took in and is looking after some books which were being sent and which I didn’t want to follow me up here. We’re all flourishing here and Richard is beginning to talk a little though he’s still far more interested in doing things with his hands and is becoming very clever with tools. My sister is here and does the cooking, and Susan looks after Richard and looks after the house, while I do the gardening and carpentering. For two months I did no writing at all, then last month I did write an article,3 and I may begin a novel before returning to London but I’m not tying myself down. I had to have a good rest after years of hackwork, and it has done me a lot of good. So far I haven’t even had a cold while here, in spite of getting wet to the skin several times a week. We have to catch or shoot a lot of our food, but I like doing that and as a matter of fact we feed better than one can do in London now. This is a nice big house, and if I can get a long lease which would make it worth while to furnish it more completely and instal an electric light plant, one could make it really comfortable. In any case I’m going to plant fruit trees this autumn and hope I shall be here to get the benefit of them. It’s also a great treat to be in a place where Richard can run in and out of the house without being in any danger of getting run over. The only danger for him here is snakes, but I kill them whenever I see one anywhere near the house. This winter I shall send him to the nursery school if there is a vacancy.
Let me hear from you again if you can get round to writing.
Yours
George
[XVIII, 3045, pp. 370–1; typewritten]
1. For Anne Popham’s reminiscences of this exchange, see Remembering Orwell, pp. 166–67.
2. Ruth Beresford, who shared the flat in Canonbury Square with Anne Popham immediately below Orwell’s flat.
3. Possibly ‘Politics vs. Literature’, Polemic (XVIII, 3089, pp. 417–32.)
To Celia Kirwan*
17 August 1946
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dearest Celia,
How marvellous of you to get the brandy and send it off on your own initiative. I enclose cheque for £9–15–0. I hope you weren’t put to any other expense about it—if so please let me know.
I forgot to say, I think one or two of the titles (of pamphlets and so on) in the Swift essay1 are incorrect, as I was quoting them from memory, but so long as I see a galley proof it will be easy to put this right.
I am sorry you are pining away in London. It must be lousy being there at this time of year, especially if you have been having such marvellous weather as we have had here for the last week or two. I still haven’t done any work to speak of, there always seems to be so much to do of other kinds, and the journeys one makes are quite astonishing. Susan’s child came up here yesterday, and I was supposed to go to Glasgow to meet her. I set out the day before yesterday morning, but punctured my motor bike on the way and thus missed the boat. I then got a lift first in a lorry, then in a car, and crossed the ferry to the next island in hopes there would be a plane to Glasgow, however the plane was full up, so I took a bus on to Port Ellen, where there would be a boat on Friday morning. Port Ellen was full to the brim owing to a cattle show, all the hotels were full up, so I slept in a cell in the police station along with a lot of other people including a married couple with a perambulator. In the morning I got the boat, picked the child up and brought her back, then we hired a car for the first 20 miles and walked the last five home. This morning I got a lift in a motor boat to where my bike was, mended the puncture and rode home—all this in 3 days. I think we are going to get a motor boat, ie. a boat with an outboard engine, as it is the best way of travelling here when the weather is decent. At present we have only a little rowing boat which is good for fishing but which you can’t go far out to sea in. We go fishing nearly every night, as we are partly dependent on fish for food, and we have also got two lobster pots and catch a certain number of lobsters and crabs. I have now learned how to tie up a lobster’s claws, which you have to do if you are going to keep them alive, but it is very dangerous, especially when you have to do it in the dark. We also have to shoot rabbits when the larder gets low, and grow vegetables, though of course I haven’t been here long enough to get much return from the ground yet, as it was simply a jungle when I got here. With all this you can imagine that I don’t do much work—however I have actually begun my new book and hope to have done four or five chapters by the time I come back in October. I am glad Humphrey2 has been getting on with his—I wonder how The Heretics3 sold? I saw Norman Collins4 gave it rather a snooty review in the Observer.
Richard now wears real shorts, which another child had grown out of, and braces, and I have got him some real farm labourer’s boots. He has to wear boots here when he goes far from the house, because if he has shoes he is liable to take them off, and there are snakes here. I think you would like this place. Do come any time if you want to. But if you do, try and let me know in advance (it means writing about a week in advance, because we only get letters twice a week here), so that I can arrange about hiring a car. Also, don’t bring more luggage than, say, a rucksack and a haversack, but on the other hand do bring a little flour if you can. We are nearly always short of bread and flour here since the rationing. You don’t want many clothes so long as you have a raincoat and stout boots or shoes. Remember the boats sail on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and you have to leave Glasgow about 8 am. I expect to be here till about the 10th of October.
With love
George
PS. You might ask Freddie5 from me, now that he has a chair in Mental Philosophy, who has the chair in non-mental philosophy.
[XVIII, 3051, pp. 375–7; typewritten]
1. ‘Politics vs. Literature’, Polemic (for which Celia Kirwan worked as an editorial assistant).
2. Humphrey Slater,* then editor of Polemic.
3. Orwell had written a reader’s report for Fredric Warburg on Slater’s The Heretics. It was published in April 1946. The report does not appear to have survived.
4. For Norman Collins see 17.3.36, n. 4.
5. A. J. Ayer (1910–89), who had just been appointed Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London. (See also 13.4.46, n. 5.)
To George Woodcock*
2 September 1946
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear George,
Thanks ever so for the tea—it came just at the right moment because this week the whole of the nearest village is being brought here in lorries to get in the field of corn in front of our house, and of course tea will have to flow like water while the job is on.1 We have been helping the crofter who is our only neighbour with his hay and corn, at least when rain hasn’t made it impossible to work. Everything is done here in an incredibly primitive way. Even when the field is ploughed with a tractor the corn is still sown broadcast, then scythed and bound up into sheaves by hand. They seem to broadcast corn, ie. oats, all over Scotland, and I must say they seem to get it almost as even as can be done by a machine. Owing to the wet they don’t get the hay in till about the end of September or even later, sometimes as late as November, and they can’t leave it in the open but have to store it all in lofts. A lot of the corn doesn’t quite ripen and is fed to the cattle in sheaves like hay. The crofters have to work very hard, but in many ways they are better off and more independent than a town labourer, and they would be quite comfortable if they could get a bit of help in the way of machinery, electrical power and roads, and could get the landlords off their backs and get rid of the deer. These animals are so common on this particular island that they are an absolute curse. They eat up the pastures where there ought to be sheep, and they make fencing immensely more expensive than it need be. The crofters aren’t allowed to shoot them, and are constantly having to waste their time dragging carcases of deer down from the hill during the stalking season. Everything is sacrificed to the brutes because they are an easy source of meat and therefore profitable to the people who own them. I suppose sooner or later these islands will be taken in hand, and then they could either be turned into a first-rate area for dairy produce and meat, or else they would support a large population of small peasants living off cattle and fishing. In the 18th century the population here was 10,000—now less than 300.
My love to Inge. I hope to be back in London about October 13th.
Yours
George
[XVIII, 3058, p. 385; typewritten]
1. In his study of Orwell, The Crystal Spirit, Woodcock explains this gift of tea and comments on Orwell’s description of life on Jura: ‘Knowing Orwell’s passion for tea, my wife and I, coffee drinkers, would save up our rations and every now and again send him a packet of Typhoo Tips, which produced the dark, strong brew he liked. One of these packets … evoked a letter in which Orwell described existence on Jura; it reflected the intense interest he always took in the concrete aspects of life—particularly rural life—and also in its social overtones’ (p. 36). The tea ration had been increased in July 1945 from 2 ounces a week to 2½, but it was still a meagre amount, especially for someone who drank as much strong tea as Orwell did. Although Orwell was desperate for tea, his first thought on receiving this gift was that he could share it with the harvesters.
To Rayner Heppenstall*
19 September 1946
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Rayner,
The version of Boule de Suif I was projecting would be a featurisation of the story, with a narrator but no critical talk or biographical material, so I suppose it would be ‘drama.’ If you can interest the relevant person, you might say that the way I would want to do it would be the way in which we did various stories for the Eastern Service in 1943, and also that version of Little Red Riding Hood which you kindly placed for me. In my experience the BBC, although making a minimum of 6 copies of everything, can never find a back number of a script, but the stories I would like to draw attention to are Crainquebille (Anatole France,) The Fox (Silone,) and A Slip Under the Microscope (H.G. Wells.) We did all these in featurised form sticking to the text of the story as closely as possible and not mucking it up with meaningless patches of music, but dramatising all the dialogue and using a number of different voices. If anyone is interested enough to look up these scripts, you might tell him I had to write them in desperate haste, as I was overwhelmed with administrative work, and in each case could give only a day to the job. I could do it better if I were doing it for the Home Service and had a bit more time.1
As to Pontius Pilate, I am not pining to write a script about him, but I have always felt he has had a raw deal and thought one might make a good dialogue out of it somehow.2 Boule de Suif is a test of whether the C programme3 is really nothing barred. Incidentally I don’t believe it has ever been well translated into English (at least the only translation I have seen was damnable).
I expect to be back in London on October 13th. The weather here has been shocking for about a fortnight past and they are having a fearful job to get the harvest in. We stove in the bottom of our boat in the recent stormy weather. However we had had a good season’s fun out of it and a lot of fish and lobsters, and next year I shall get a bigger one with a motor on it, which will help solve our transport problem. Transport is really the only big problem here, and wouldn’t be a problem in normal times when one could lay in several months’ stores at one go. Even as it is we have done better in food and fuel than one can in London, but at the expense of a good deal of labour and some terrifying journeys. Hoping to see you in town. My love to Margaret.
Yours
Eric
[XVIII, 3074, pp. 400–1; typewritten]
1. On Rayner Heppenstall’s behalf, June Seligmann sent Orwell’s suggestion to Laurance Gilliam, Director of Features, on 24 September 1946 who passed it on to the Drama Department. His memorandum is annotated, ‘Sorry—no can do!’ and the answer is marked for Heppenstall’s attention. Except for Little Red Riding Hood, broadcast in BBC Children’s Hour, the scripts to which Orwell refers were written when he was broadcasting to India.
2. In a letter to Heppenstall on 5 September 1946 (XVIII, 3059, p. 386–7), Orwell had in mind an imaginary conversation between Pontius Pilate and Lenin – for ‘one could hardly make it J.C.’!
3. What was to become the Third Programme of the BBC, now Radio 3. Laurence Brander, the BBC’s Intelligence Officer for India when Orwell worked for the BBC, wrote in 1954 that Orwell ‘was the inspiration of that rudimentary Third Programme which was sent out to the Indian student’ (George Orwell, pp. 8–9).
To Humphrey Slater*
26 September 1946
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Humphrey,
Can you come to lunch at the flat on Sunday October 13th, and if possible bring one of our mutual friends with you? I am getting back to town that morning, but my sister is arriving with Richard a day or two earlier. I think there’ll be a goose for lunch, unless it somehow goes astray on the journey. We shall have one goose left when we leave, which we shall take with us or send on ahead, and if so we’ll need someone to help eat it.
I sent the documents to Cyril1 as requested in your wire, and hope he got them in time, but I couldn’t send them very promptly because of the difficulty of there only being two posts a week here and a telegram not moving any faster than a letter once it gets on to the island. I hope he makes good use of them. It is all pretty tough but only what you would expect. I thought the most interesting feature was what you too pointed out—the ambivalence all the way through, the writers constantly complaining that literature is dull and unimaginative and then wanting to cure this by clipping the artist’s wings a little shorter.
I haven’t really done any work this summer—actually I have at last started my novel about the future, but I’ve only done about 50 pages and God knows when it will be finished. However it’s something that it is started, which it wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t got away from regular journalism for a while. Soon I suppose I shall be back at it, but I am dropping some of it and am going to try and do mostly highly-paid stuff which I needn’t do so much of. I have arranged to do some book reviewing for the New Yorker which of course pays well. Please give everyone my love. Looking forward to seeing you. If you can’t come please reply to the flat, as it’s possible a letter might miss me here.
Yours
George
[XVIII, 3084, p. 408; typewritten]
1. Possibly Cyril Connolly in connection with the ‘Cost of Letters’, published in Horizon, September 1946 (XVIII, 3057, pp. 382–4).
To George Woodcock*
28 September 1946
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear George,
I was quite stunned on hearing from you about Colletts°1 taking over the S.B.C.2 How could it have happened? I thought they were doing quite well. And what happens about their publications, for instance the pamphlets they were issuing from time to time? There was one of mine they published a few months back,3 and I don’t even know how many copies it sold. It is simply calamitous if there isn’t one large leftwing bookshop not under C[ommunist] P[arty] control. However, I shouldn’t say it would be impossible to set up a successful rival, because any CP bookshop must be hampered as a shop by being unable to stock ‘the wrong’ kind of literature. We must talk it over when I get back. I have no idea what capital you need to set up a well-stocked bookshop, but I fancy it is several thousand pounds. It is not inconceivable that one might dig the money out of some well-intentioned person like Hulton,4 if he saw his way to not making a loss on it. The thing is to have a shop which apart from selling all the leftwing stuff is a good bookshop, has a lending library and is managed by someone who knows something about books. Having worked in a bookshop I have got ideas on the subject, which I’ll tell you about when I get back.
Of course it’s very flattering to have that article in Politics.5 I haven’t a copy of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I picked up a copy in a secondhand shop some months back, but I gave it away. There are two or three books which I am ashamed of and have not allowed to be reprinted or translated, and that is one of them. There is an even worse one called A Clergyman’s Daughter. This was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for money, ditto when I wrote Keep the A. At that time I simply hadn’t a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so.
I’m leaving here on the 9th and shall reach London on the 13th. I’ll ring you up then. Love to Inge. Richard is blooming.
Yours
George
[XVIII, 3087, pp. 410–11; typewritten]
1. Collet’s bookshop specialised in Communist publications. It was still active in the early nineties with an ‘International Bookshop’, a ‘Chinese Bookshop and Gallery’, and a Penguin Bookshop, but was no longer listed in the London telephone directory in 1995.
2. Socialist Book Centre.
3. James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution.
4. Edward Hulton (1906–1988; Kt., 1957), magazine publisher of liberal views, at the time proprietor of Picture Post.
5. ‘George Orwell, Nineteenth Century Liberal’, by George Woodcock, Politics, December 1946. The essay forms chapter 7 of Woodcock’s The Writer and Politics (1948).
To Dwight Macdonald*
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Dwight,
Thanks for your letter,1 which I got just before leaving Jura (I’m at the above again until about April of next year.) I’m awfully sorry about not sending you anything as promised, but part of the reason is that I have written almost nothing for 5 months. I went to Scotland largely with that end in view, because I was most desperately tired and felt that I had written myself out.
While there I did write one article2 and just started a new book (lord knows when it will be finished—perhaps by the end of 1947), but that was all. Now I’m starting up again, but I am going to do my best to keep out of ordinary daily and weekly journalism, except for Tribune. As to the New Republic, I gave them the reprint of that article because they cabled and asked for it. I would have gladly given it to you, but it didn’t occur to me as a thing that would particularly interest you. Shortly after that the New Republic wrote asking whether they could take their pick of any articles I write for Tribune, with which they have a reciprocal arrangement for the exchange of articles. I told them they could, but I expect they won’t often avail themselves of it, because when I start writing for Tribune again I shall probably take over the ‘As I Please’ column, which is mostly topical English stuff. I am well aware that the N.R. people are Stalino-Liberals, but so long as they have no control over what I write, as they wouldn’t under this arrangement, I rather like to have a foot in that camp. Their opposite numbers over here, the New Statesman, won’t touch me with a stick, in fact my last contact with them was their trying to blackmail me into withdrawing something I had written in Tribune by threats of a libel action.3 Meanwhile I think I am going to write rather more for American papers when I start writing at all. I am going, I think, to do occasional book reviews for the New Yorker, and some agents called Mcintosh and Otis are very anxious for me to send copies of all my articles, a number of which they say they could market in the U.S. I have already arranged with Polemic that when I send them anything I shall simultaneously send a copy to the USA. Of course the agents’ idea is to sell them to big-circulation magazines, but when there is anything that seems up your street I’ll see that it gets to you first.
I suppose these letters aren’t now opened by snoopers, and I want to ask you to do me a favour which I believe involves illegality (on my part, not yours.) Do you think you could get me some shoes? Or is it the same about clothes in the US as well? Even if you have the clothes coupons, which I never have, you simply can’t get shoes in my size (twelves!) here. The last new pair I had were bought in 1941 and you can imagine what they are like now. I don’t care what they cost, but I like stout heavy walking shoes and I would like two pairs if it’s at all possible. I believe the American sizes are the same as the English.4 Could you let me know whether you think you can do this and what it will cost? I can get the money to you because I have or shall have some dollars in the USA. Even if you can manage to get them it will need strategy to send them because things like that get pinched in the docks. I’ll tell you about that later. I suppose this black-market business seems very sordid to you, but I have been almost ragged for years, and in the end it becomes irritating and even depressing, so I am doing my best to get hold of a few clothes by one route and another.
I was very flattered to learn that George Woodcock is writing an article on me for you. He wrote asking me for a copy of one of the books I have suppressed.5 He was also very indignant about something I said about anarchism in Polemic and is writing a reply.6 Polemic is making rather a speciality of ‘reply’ articles. I think it is now shaping better, and it is doing quite well from a circulation point of view. You’ll be glad to hear that Animal Farm has been or is being translated into 10 languages besides various clandestine translations or ones made abroad by refugees from the occupied countries. All the best.
Yours
Geo. Orwell
[XVIII, 3097, pp. 449–51; typewritten]
1. Dwight Macdonald wrote on 10 September 1946 with particular reference to Orwell’s article on James Burnham. He thought Orwell’s points were akin to those Macdonald had made in his review of Burnham in 1942 and that Burnham was no longer taken seriously in America. He asked Orwell why he didn’t write for Politics any more, and in particular why he had let The New Republic have ‘Politics and the English Language’. He proposed to reprint Orwell’s review of Koestler’s ‘The Yogi and the Commissar’, which had been published in C.W. Review, November 1945 (‘Catastrophic Gradualism’, XVII, 2778, pp. 342–7) in the September issue of Politics.
2. Presumably ‘Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels’ (XVIII, 3089, pp. 417–32).
3. It is possible that Orwell is referring to the response (especially Kingsley Martin’s) to ‘As I Please’, 40 (XVI, 2541, pp. 371-2), in which he discussed the Warsaw Uprising and the reaction to it of the press and intellectuals. Martin, editor of the New Statesman and Nation, protested that Orwell was not justified in including it among those which had ‘licked the boots of Moscow’.
4. They are not the same. English 12 is US 12½.
5. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Woodcock’s article was ‘George Orwell, Nineteenth Century Liberal’, Politics, December 1946.
6. See afterword to ‘Politics vs. Literature’, p. 431, for a summary of Woodcock’s article.
To Leonard Moore*
18 October 1946
27 B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Moore,
Many thanks for your letter of 17th October. I am glad to hear about the Norwegian serialisation of Animal Farm.1 You sent me recently some copies of the German edition, and it occurred to me that if the book sells well there may be some royalties over and above the amount Amstutz2 paid in advance. If so, is there any way by which I could leave some francs in Switzerland? Everyone who comes back from there tells me about how easy it is to buy clothes in Switzerland, and after years of rationing I am in such desperate straits for shirts, underclothes etc. that I should like to be able to buy a few odds and ends. Or is one obliged to bring all foreign exchange back to this country? This matter isn’t urgent, as even if extra royalties do accrue they won’t be due for some months. But I should be glad to know how the position stands. With regard to possible future earnings in the USA, Mr Harrison3 explained to me that by becoming a chartered company in the USA I could leave money there if I wished to, and so long as it was spent there and not here it would only be liable to American income tax. I told him I should like to do this, as if I ever go to the USA—I don’t want to do so now, but I might some time in 1948—it would be convenient to have some money there and I might as well avoid the higher tax.
He also said that he was going to Hollywood, and could he make any attempt on my behalf to negotiate film rights. I told him to get in touch with you, and I suppose he did this before leaving.
Yours sincerely
Eric Blair
[XVIII, 3099, pp. 452–3; typewritten]
1. In addition to a serialisation in Norwegian, a cheap edition was published in October 1946 as Diktatoren by Brann Forlag, Oslo. Only a small number of the 5–6,000 copies printed were sold, and when Brann Forlag was taken over, the new owners reduced the price (1948).
2. Verlag Amstutz, Herdeg & Co, Zurich, publishers of Farm der Tiere, October 1946.
3. Of Harrison, Son, Hill & Co., accountants. ‘No one is patriotic about taxes’ as Orwell remarked in his Wartime Diary on 9 August 1940. However, tax at the time he was earning anything like the just rewards for his labours amounted to 45% in the £ at the basic level and then rose to as much as 98% in the £.
To Leonard Moore*
23 October 1946
27 B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Moore,
Many thanks for your letter of the 22nd. It doesn’t matter sending those two copies of Polemic to America. I can get others. The great rarity is the first number, of which only a very few battered copies exist.
As you know Warburg wants some time to do a uniform edition of my books, and would like in any case to re-issue one of the old ones some time in 1947, as I am not likely to have a new book ready for publication before 1948. The question therefore arises about copyright. To date, the books worth reprinting are—
Homage to Catalonia Animal Farm
Critical Essays
Down & Out
Burmese Days
Coming Up for Air.1
The first three were originally published by Warburg himself, the other three by Gollancz. How does it stand about the re-issue of these three? Are the copyrights mine? My impression is that the copyrights reverted to me after two years, and I know that the copyright of the American edition of Burmese Days (actually the first edition of that book) is mine. The question arises first about Coming Up for Air, which has not been reprinted and which Warburg thinks it would be best to start with. Could you get in communication with him so that an agreement can be negotiated [?]
I think you were keeping for me some copies of the American edition of the Essays.2 If so I should be glad if you could send me them, as I have no copies of that book. Perhaps you could at the same time let me know the address of Harcourt Brace, to whom I want to write recommending a novel by a friend of mine which has been published here but not in the USA.
Yours sincerely
Eric Blair
[XVIII, 3100, pp. 453–4; typewritten]
1. Annotations made in Moore’s office show that a letter was sent to Gollancz about the last three books on 29 October 1946. In the left-hand margin has been written ‘R/R R/R their letter 21/4/43’ against Down & Out and Burmese Days; and ‘R.R. their 22/xi/41 letter’ against Coming Up for Air. ‘R/R’ is also written in the margin against the reference to the American edition of Burmese Days. R.R. stands for Rights Reverted.
2. In the left-hand margin has been written ‘3 copies’.
Dwight Macdonald wrote to Orwell on 2 December 1946. He was still anxious to have something from Orwell for Politics, the circulation of which was dropping enough (from 5,500 in spring 1946 to its present 5,000) to cause a financial crisis. He referred to George Woodcock’s article on Orwell in the latest number of Politics –‘neither flattering nor the reverse’, which was how he imagined Orwell would like his work considered.1 He had bought shoes for Orwell, at $8.95, which showed how the price had gone ‘way up of late’. He wanted to know how they should be packed and whether Orwell needed shirts or sweaters, for example, into which they could be bundled and labelled as ‘old clothes’ to avoid pilfering. If they fitted, he would get him another pair; he feared American and English size twelves were not the same.2 He also reported that anti-Stalinist intellectuals of his acquaintance claimed that the parable of Animal Farm meant that revolution always ended badly for the under-dog, ‘hence to hell with it and hail the status quo’. He himself read the book as applying solely to Russia and not making any larger statement about the philosophy of revolution. ‘I’ve been impressed with how many leftists I know make this criticism quite independently of each other—impressed because it didn’t occur to me when reading the book and still doesn’t seem correct to me. Which view would you say comes closer to your own intentions?’
To Dwight Macdonald*
27B Canonbury Square,
Islington N 1
Dear Dwight,
I can’t thank you enough about the shoes. I’ve written at once to my agent to see about getting the money to you. I suppose it would be better to see whether the first pair fits, though I think the American sizes are the same. Probably it would be all right if you did them up as old clothes as you said. But someone did tell me it was a good idea to send shoes in two separate parcels, then it’s not worth anyone’s while to pinch them, unless there happened to be a one-legged man on the dock.
Re. your query about Animal Farm. Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt.3) If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then, it would have been all right. If people think I am defending the status quo, that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism. In the case of Trotskyists, there is the added complication that they feel responsible for events in the USSR up to about 1926 and have to assume that a sudden degeneration took place about that date. Whereas I think the whole process was foreseeable—and was foreseen by a few people, eg. Bertrand Russell—from the very nature of the Bolshevik party. What I was trying to say was, ‘You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictat[or]ship.’4
I am at present struggling with a radio version of the book, which is a ghastly difficult job and will take a long time. But after that I shall get back to a long article I am doing for Polemic, and possibly it might interest you for Politics. Any way I’ll see that a copy gets to you first. It’s on Tolstoy’s essay on Shakespeare, which I expect you have read. I dare say you won’t approve of what I say. I don’t like Tolstoy, much as I used to like his novels. I believe George Woodcock is writing an attack on me for something I wrote in Polemic about Tolstoy, Swift and anarchism.5
I’m sorry about the circulation of Politics. You ought to be able to dispose of more copies over here, but I don’t know how one sets about the distribution. Did I previously send you lists of possible subscribers? One thing I found when trying to circularise the Partisan Review was that people don’t know whether there is a regular channel for paying for American magazines, so if you are canvassing people you ought to make this clear to them. Of course everyone has felt the draught a bit. Tribune’s circulation has dropped over the past year, and I must say that during the last six months it has deserved to. However they’ve now got more paper and Kimche is back as editor, so I expect it will improve. The trouble was that with Labour in office they couldn’t make up their minds whether to attack the government or not, especially as there are several Labour M.Ps on the board of directors. Also the paper had been given its main emphasis by Bevan who can now have nothing to do with it. By the way what you said about Tribune’s attitude to the squatters was not fair. Of course they didn’t want squatters shot, but one must realise that that kind of action simply interferes with re-housing. The later part of the squatting campaign, ie. siezure° of flats, was ‘got up’ by the Communists in order to make trouble and also in hopes of winning popularity for the coming municipal elections. They therefore led on a lot of unfortunate people, representing to them that they could get them houses, with the result that all these people lost their places in the housing queue. I imagine the heavy defeat the CP had in the municipal elections was partly a result of this.
I have stopped sending my things to the New Republic, because what I am now doing is mostly topical English stuff that wouldn’t interest them. I seldom see the N.R. and am not sure how far it is a fellow-traveller paper. From their frequently swapping articles with Tribune, and being anxious to have my stuff, I thought they couldn’t be very much, but I was rather taken aback when I heard Wallace had become editor in chief.6
Yours
George
[XVIII, 3128, pp. 506–8; typewritten]
1. Woodcock described Orwell’s reaction to this article in his study of Orwell, The Crystal Spirit (1967). He met Orwell in the Freedom Bookshop just as Orwell had bought this number of Politics. He felt apprehensive because on some points the essay was very critical. He had ‘got into trouble with London literary friends over much less critical comments on their work’. That evening, Orwell telephoned him; ‘he liked the essay and thought it was as good a first study as any writer could expect.’ He objected only to Woodcock’s accusation of political opportunism for arguing that conscription could not be avoided in wartime but thereafter must be ended because it infringed the liberties of the individual. ‘But even here his protest took a surprisingly mild form. “I have my reasons for arguing like that,” he said, but he never explained them’ (pp. 38–39).
2. English size 12 = American size 12½. The shoes did prove to be too small.
3. Kronstadt, a naval base guarding the approach to St Petersburg, a few miles from Finland, was established by Peter the Great in 1704. The turning point in Animal Farm is related to events that took place there early in 1921. Food shortages and a harsh regime prompted a series of strikes in Leningrad; in March the strikers were supported by sailors at the Kronstadt naval base. This was the first serious uprising not only by supporters of the Revolution against their government but by a city and by naval personnel particularly associated with ensuring the success of the 1917 Revolution. Trotsky and Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937) put down the rebellion, but the losses sustained by the rebels were not in vain. A New Economic Policy was enunciated shortly after which recognised the need for reforms. Tukhachevsky was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935, but two years later he was executed in one of Stalin’s purges. The fact that Macdonald missed the significance of the ‘turning-point’ in Animal Farm may be the reason why Orwell strengthened this moment in his adaptation for radio, the script of which he was to deliver in a week or so. He added this little exchange:
CLOVER: Do you think that it is quite fair to appropriate the apples?
MOLLY: What, keep all the apples for themselves?
MURIEL: Aren’t we to have any?
COW: I thought they were to be shared out equally. (VIII, p. 153)
Unfortunately, Rayner Heppenstall cut these from the script as broadcast.
4. When Yvonne Davet wrote to Orwell on 6 September 1946 (XVIII, 3063, pp. 390–1), she told him that the title initially chosen for the French translation of Animal Farm was to be URSA – Union des Républiques Socialistes Animales (= URSA, the Bear) but it was changed ‘to avoid offending the Stalinists too much, which I think is a pity’.
5. See 15.10.46, n. 6.
6. Henry Wallace (1888–1965), US Secretary of Agriculture, 1933–41; Vice-President, 1941–45. His very liberal views led to his replacement by Harry S. Truman as Vice-President, but he nevertheless served as Secretary of Commerce until, owing to his opposition to President Truman’s policy toward the Soviet Union, he was forced to resign. He was editor of New Republic, 1946–47. In 1948 he stood as presidential candidate for the Progressive Party advocating closer co-operation with the Soviet Union. He received more than one million votes but none in the Electoral College.
To Mamaine Koestler
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Mamaine,
I can’t thank you enough for the tea.1 We always seem to drink more than we can legally get, and are always slightly inclined to go round cadging it, but I don’t want to give you the impression that the shortage is calamitous.
As to books, I have only got a very little way with a novel which I hope to finish about the end of 1947, if too many things don’t intervene. I don’t really know how I stand about contracts with French publishers. Several books of mine are now being translated or have recently been translated, and I don’t know whether I have exclusive agreements with any of the publishers. In any case, I don’t like making arrangements before a book is written because I think it puts a hoodoo on it.
I have just read Thieves in the Night,2 which I could not get hold of before. I enjoyed reading it, but you know my views, or at any rate Arthur knows my views about this terrorism business. You might just tell Arthur from me that his ideas about the prevalence of circumcision are quite incorrect. So far from stamping anyone as Jewish, this practice used at any rate to be so common, especially among the richer classes, that a boy at a public school felt embarrassed at swimming pools and so forth if he was not circumcised. I believe it is getting less common now, but is also commoner among the working classes. I have a good mind to put a piece about this in my column some time.3
I am glad you liked the radio version of Animal Farm. Most people seemed to, and it got quite a good press. I had the feeling that they had spoilt it, but one nearly always does with anything one writes for the air.
Richard is very well, and is talking distinctly more.
With love,
George
[XIX, 3159, pp. 27–8; typewritten]
1. The Koestlers preferred coffee, hence their being able to spare some of their tea ration for him.
2. A novel, about the Zionist struggle to set up an independent Jewish state in Palestine, by Mamaine’s husband, Arthur Koestler, published in 1946.
3. There is no such discussion in the ‘As I Please’ columns.
To Rayner Heppenstall*
25 January 1947
27B Canonbury Square,
Islington N 1
Thanks for your letter. Re. Animal Farm.1 I had a number of people here to listen to it on the first day, and they all seemed to think it was good, and Porteous,2 who had not read the book, grasped what was happening after a few minutes. I also had one or two fan letters and the press notices were good except on my native ground, ie. Tribune. As to what I thought myself, it’s hard to get a detached view, because whenever I write anything for the air I have the impression it has been spoiled, owing to its inevitably coming out different to one’s conception of it. I must say I don’t agree about there being too much narrator. If anything I thought there should have been more explanation. People are always yearning to get rid of the narrator, but it seems to me that until certain problems have been overcome you only get rid of the narrator at the expense of having to play a lot of stupid tricks in order to let people know what is happening. The thing is to make the narrator a good turn in himself. But that means writing serious prose, which people don’t, and making the actors stick to it instead of gagging and trying to make everything homey and naturalistic.
I can’t write or promise to write anything more at present, I am too busy. I’ve still got ideas about fairy stories. I wish they would dig up and re-b’cast my adaptation of the Emperor’s New Clothes. It was done on the Eastern and African services, but in those days I wasn’t well-connected enough to crash the Home. I expect the discs would have been scraped,° however. I had them illicitly re-recorded at a commercial studio, but that lot of discs got lost. I’ve often pondered over ‘Cinderella’, which of course is the tops so far as fairy stories go but on the face of it is too visual to be suitable for the air. But don’t you think one could make the godmother turn her into a wonderful singer who could sing a higher note than anyone else, or something of that kind? The best way would be if she had a wonderful voice but could not sing in tune, like Trilby, and the godmother cured this. One could make it quite comic with the wicked sisters singing in screeching voices. It might be worth talking over some time. Give my love to Margaret.
Yours
Eric3
[XIX, 3163, pp. 32–3; typewritten]
1. Heppenstall had written on 24 January 1947 asking for Orwell’s conclusions about the broadcast of Animal Farm. He said that the opinion at the BBC, with which he agreed, was that ‘there were too many lengthy pieces of narration—that in fact the adaptation was not sufficiently ruthless and complete’. He asked also whether Orwell had further ideas for the Third Programme, for instance, ‘any Imaginary Conversation’ and whether he wanted more scripts of Animal Farm.
2. Hugh Gordon Porteous (1906–1993), literary and art critic and sinologist. In 1933 he remarked, ‘Verse will be worn longer this season and rather red,’ blaming Auden for being the reddening agent (Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, 1988, p. 27). He reviewed extensively, especially for T. S. Eliot in The Criterion in the thirties and The Listener in the sixties.
3. Heppenstall replied on 29 January 1947. He was anxious to convince Orwell ‘about this business of narration’. He did not agree that narration could be avoided only by resorting to ‘a lot of stupid tricks’. Narration involved ‘a very marked change of pace…straight reading and…dramatic presentation don’t mix’. He said he would never allow an actor to gag (ad lib). He thought the fairy stories should ‘follow Red Riding Hood to Children’s Hour’ unless Orwell had something more sophisticated in mind. His wife hoped Orwell would ‘presently come to supper’. He had seen Richard Rees for the first time since the outbreak of the war and remarked how greatly he had aged. The second page of this letter has not been traced.
To Leonard Moore*
21 February 1947
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
With reference to your two letters of the 18th and the 19th.
I don’t think the offer to dramatise Animal Farm sounds very promising, in fact I don’t see what we get out of it except that there would then be a dramatic version existing, which I suppose would make it slightly more likely to reach the stage. But we would also be tied down to that particular adaptor, at least for a year, and somebody else might make a more inviting offer in the mean time, though I am bound to say I do not think it is a suitable book to adapt for stage production. One doesn’t, of course, know what sort of version he and his collaborator would make, but from the fact of his referring to the book as ‘The’ Animal Farm I assume he has not read it very attentively. I don’t think I should close with him.1
I have meanwhile received a cable from some people in New York enquiring about film rights. I hope I shall have got you on the phone before this letter reaches you, but if not I will send the cable on with another letter.
As to Warburg. I want Warburg to become my regular publisher, because, although he may not sell the books so largely, I can trust him to publish whatever I write. At the same time we must settle this business about the uniform edition, as I don’t see much point in simply re-issuing, in different formats, various books which have already appeared and therefore can’t be expected to sell large numbers straight off. I had understood that what was intended was to produce all the books involved as paper became available in a uniform binding and at rather a low price—though I suppose not always the same price as some are much longer than others. But as to the variation in length, it is in most cases only between about 80,000 and about 50,000. The exception is Animal Farm (30,000), but I suppose he wouldn’t work round to this till last, and one might put something else with it to bring it up to the right length. As to your query about cheap editions, I am not quite sure what is involved there. Is it a question of whether Warburg has all rights for cheap editions as well? I imagine the only reprint firm likely to do any of my books is the Penguin Library, which has already done two. I presume Warburg wouldn’t object to a book being Penguinised, as I shouldn’t think this cuts across ordinary sales much.
Do you think you could get this fixed up with Warburg as soon as possible[?] Tell him that I am fully ready for him to be my regular publisher, but that I want the following conditions:
(i) That though he may, if he wishes, issue ordinary editions of any books, he will also undertake to do a uniform edition which will include the six books we have agreed on and any suitable future books.
(ii) That though I will give him first refusal of all full-length books, I can if I choose do odd jobs for other publishers, such as introductions, contributions to miscellanies, etc.
Even if we can’t draw up a full agreement immediately, I would like some settlement to be made as soon as possible about Coming Up for Air. Warburg proposed to do this as the first of the re-issues, and he says that if the matter can be settled quickly he might get it onto his March paper quota. I would like this to happen, because I shall not have anything ready to be published before 1948 and it would not be a bad idea to have something appearing this year. Also I think that book was rather sunk by appearing just before the outbreak of war, and it is now very completely out of print.2
Yours sincerely
Eric Blair
[XIX, 3173, pp. 47–9; typewritten]
1. Details of this proposal have not been traced. A dramatised version, with music and lyrics, directed by Peter Hall, was given with great success at the National Theatre on 25 April 1984. In 1985 it toured nine cities.
2. Moore wrote to Warburg on 27 February 1947 quoting much of this letter. Moore concludes with a reminder that Gollancz has an option on Orwell’s next two novels: ‘It may be, however, we can make some arrangement regarding this.’ This was eventually agreed.
To Dwight Macdonald*
26 February 1947
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Dwight,
Thanks awfully for sending the shoes which arrived today. I trust they have sent you the money for them—I wrote to my agent to remind him to do this and he said he had done so. I am sorry to say they were too small after all, however it doesn’t matter because I recently managed to get another pair owing to somebody who takes the same size ordering a pair about a year ago and not wanting them when done. I shall send this pair on to Germany where doubtless they will be appreciated.
I wanted to ask, when you print the excerpt from the Tolstoy article,1 if you’re paying for it, could you pay the money to my American agents, Mcintosh & Otis. I’m trying to let any money I earn in the USA pile up over there in case I ever make a visit there. I don’t know whether I shall do so, but even if I don’t, I’m not short of money at present and might as well let it lie there as pay British income tax on it.
It’s been a lousy winter here what with the fuel breakdown and this unheard-of weather. I suppose conditions here are now what would be normal postwar winter conditions in, say, Paris. Polemic were very pleased with the long note you gave them in Politics. I think the paper is now taking shape a bit, and it is doing fairly well from the point of view of circulation, though hampered by the usual organisational difficulties. I have now joined the editorial board, but I probably shan’t do much on it as I am going back to Scotland in April and shall go on with a novel which I am doing and hope to finish by the end of 1947. While in London I have been snowed up with hackwork as usual. This two-weeks’ closure of the weeklies2 has meant an awful lot of nuisance and incidentally lost Tribune a lot of money it can ill afford.
Yours
George
[XIX, 3175, pp.49–50; typewritten]
1. Macdonald did not print an excerpt from ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’.
2. Because of massive electricity power cuts.
To Fredric Warburg*
28 February 1947
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
I said I would write to you following on our telephone conversation. I wrote to Moore some days back, asking him to expedite the business of Coming Up for Air and if possible to get the whole contract settled. I told him that I wanted you to be my regular publisher and to have first refusal of all my books, but there were some conditions, none of which I imagine are of a kind you would object to. One was that you should publish a uniform edition. The second was that I should have the right to do odd jobs for other publishers such as, for instance, introductions or contributions to miscellaneous publications, and the other was that you would not object to certain classes of cheap editions being done elsewhere, for instance, Penguins. Some of my books have been done as Penguins, and I suppose this might arise again.
Moore has just written again raising the point about my previous contract with Gollancz. Gollancz is still supposed to have an option on two works of fiction, though in my opinion it should be only one as he refused Animal Farm and then claimed that it was not a work of fiction of standard length. Moore is anxious to get this settled. I must say I was inclined to leave it hanging, because actually I can think of ways to evade the contract with Gollancz. However, if it must be settled it would probably be better if I saw Gollancz personally.1 But meanwhile, need we let this hold up the republication of Coming Up for Air, the copyright of which is, I suppose, my own?2
Yours sincerely,
Geo. Orwell
[XIX, 3179, p. 53; typewritten]
1. This sentence had been annotated in the left-hand margin in Warburg’s office: ‘Go & see VG.’
2. The rights had reverted to Orwell on 22 November 1946 because the book had been allowed to go out of print for an agreed period of time.
On 7 March 1947, Ihor Szewczenko wrote to Orwell seeking a preface to Animal Farm. The Ukrainian translation had been given to the publisher in the early autumn of 1946. On 19 February 1947, the publisher requested a preface, regarding it as essential to the satisfactory reception of the book in Ukrainian. Szewczenko explained that delays had arisen because he had moved from Munich to Belgium (where the book was being printed), although he still worked in Germany, and because of difficulties in sending letters to Germany. Although the printer and publisher of Animal Farm had been licensed by the occupying powers, Szewczenko did not know whether a licence to publish Animal Farm had been applied for by them. If Orwell could not send a preface, he was asked to provide biographical notes.
Szewczenko then set out the political background of the publishers. They were, in the main, Soviet Ukrainians, many of them former members of the Bolshevik Party, but afterwards inmates of Siberian camps and who were ‘genuinely interested’ in the story. He reassured Orwell that ‘AF is not being published by Ukrainian Joneses’ – a reference to the farmer in Animal Farm.
To Ihor Szewczenko*
13 March 1947
27B Canonbury Square
Dear Mr Szewczenko,
Many thanks for your letter of the 7th, which I received today.
I am frightfully busy, but I will try to send you a short introduction to A. F. and to despatch it not more than a week from hence. I gather that you want it to contain some biographical material, and also, I suppose, an account of how the book came to be written. I assume that the book will be produced in a very simple style with no illustrations on the cover, but just in case it should be wanted I will send a photograph as well.
I was very interested to hear about the people responsible for translating A.F.,1 and encouraged to learn that that type of opposition exists in the USSR. I do hope it will not all end by the Displaced persons° being shipped back to the USSR or else mostly absorbed by Argentina. I think our desperate labour shortage may compel us to encourage a good many D.Ps to settle in this country, but at present the government is only talking of letting them in as servants etc., because there is still working-class resistance against letting in foreign workers, owing to fear of unemployment, and the Communists and ‘sympathisers’ are able to play on this.
I have noted your new address and presume you will be there till further notice. I shall be at the above address until April 10th, and after that at the Scottish address. I think you have this, but in case you have not I will give it you:
Barnhill Isle of Jura Argyllshire SCOTLAND.
Yours sincerely
Geo. Orwell
[XIX, 3187, 3188, pp. 72–4; typewritten]
1. This seems to be a slight misunderstanding. Szewczenko was undertaking the translation (it appeared under the pen-name Ivan Cherniatync’kyi).
To Victor Gollancz
14 March 1947
27B Canonbury Square,
Islington N 1
Dear Gollancz,
I believe Leonard Moore has already spoken to you about the contract which I still have with you and about my wish to be released from it. I believe that the contract that still subsists between us is the one made for Keep the Aspidistra Flying in 1937, which provided that I would give you the first refusal of my next three novels. Coming Up for Air worked off one of these, but you did not accept Animal Farm, which you saw and refused in 1944, as working off another. So that by the terms of the contract I still owe you the refusal of two other novels.
I know that I am asking you a very great favour in asking that you should cancel the contract, but various circumstances have changed in the ten years since it was made, and I believe that it might be to your advantage, as it certainly would be to mine, to bring it to an end. The position is that since then you have published three books of mine1 but you have also refused two others on political grounds,2 and there was also another which you did not refuse but which it seemed natural to take to another publisher.3 The crucial case was Animal Farm. At the time when this book was finished, it was very hard indeed to get it published, and I determined then that if possible I would take all my future output to the publishers who would produce it, because I knew that anyone who would risk this book would risk anything. Secker & Warburg were not only ready to publish Animal Farm but are willing, when paper becomes available, to do a uniform edition of such of my books as I think worth reprinting, including some which are at present very completely out of print. They are also anxious to reprint my novel Coming Up for Air in an ordinary edition this year, but, not unnaturally, they are only willing to do all this if they can have a comprehensive contract giving them control of anything I write.
From my own point of view it is clearly very unsatisfactory to have to take my novels to one publisher and at the same time to be obliged, at any rate in some cases, to take non-fiction books elsewhere. I recognise, of course, that your political position is not now exactly what it was when you refused Animal Farm, and in any case I respect your unwillingness to publish books which go directly counter to your political principles. But it seems to me that this difficulty is likely to arise again in some form or other, and that it would be better if you are willing to bring the whole thing to an end.
If you wish to see me personally about this, I am at your disposal. I shall be at this address until about April 10th.
Yours sincerely,
Geo. Orwell
[XIX, 3191, pp. 77–9; typewritten]
1. The contract was not actually made ‘for’ Keep the Aspidistra Flying (which had been published on 20 April 1936), but it referred to it. The first clause of the draft contract (all that survives) states ‘EB grants to G exclusive right to publish in English next 3 “new and original full-length novels” after Keep the A.’ This was signed on Orwell’s behalf – he was in Spain – by Eileen, who was empowered so to do. The three books published since then were The Road to Wigan Pier, Coming Up for Air, and Inside the Whale. Only the second is a novel, of course. Orwell could, perhaps, have mentioned that he had also collaborated with Gollancz on The Betrayal of the Left.
2. The two refused on political grounds were Homage to Catalonia and Animal Farm. Although there was no doubt that Animal Farm was refused on political grounds, Gollancz had a point that – whatever Orwell may have felt, it was hardly ‘a work of fiction of standard length’. The contract – if it repeated the wording of the draft – did specifically refer to ‘full-length novels’.
3. Presumably either The Lion and the Unicorn or Critical Essays, both published by Secker & Warburg.
It has long been accepted that, from his childhood, Orwell had shown an interest in science and had indicated he wanted one day to write a book like Wells’s A Modern Utopia (X, 29, p. 45). Sir Roger Mynors (see [?].8.20, n. 2) recalled how, when at Eton, he and Orwell had ‘developed a great passion for biology and got permission to do extra dissection in the biology lab’. One day Orwell, who had remarkable skill with a catapult, shot and killed a jackdaw high on the roof of the College chapel. They then took it to the biology laboratory and dissected it. ‘We made the great mistake of slitting the gall bladder and therefore flooding the place with, er … Well, it was an awful mess’ (Remembering Orwell, pp. 18–19).
Scholars have given much thought to when Orwell was prompted to set about writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. When The Lost Orwell was at proof stage, Ralph Desmarais, then undertaking doctoral research at Imperial College London, drew my attention to Orwell’s correspondence with Dr C. D. Darlington. This showed how important was Orwell’s attendance at a lecture given by John Baker at the PEN Conference, 22–26 August 1944 (see 19.3.47, n. 3 below for the lecture). It was already known that Orwell was interested in Lysenko* and his notes for The Last Man in Europe make an obscure reference to ‘The Swindle of Bakerism and Ingsoc’ (XV, 2377, p. 368). We know that Orwell told Warburg that he first thought of the novel in 1943 and Orwell himself wrote that it was the Teheran Conference (28 November 1943) which led him ‘to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into “Zones of influence”’ (XIX, 3513, p. 487). So, whereas Orwell first thought of the novel in late 1943, this exchange of correspondence suggests it was hearing Baker and his citation of Lysenko that prompted Orwell to begin serious work on Nineteen Eighty-Four later in 1944. Lysenko rejected traditional hybridisation theories. Stalin backed his approach to such a degree that opposition to him was outlawed in 1948. He claimed he could vastly improve Soviet crop yield, but after the total failure of his methods they were finally discredited in 1964.
To Dr C. D. Darlington*
19 March 1947
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Dr Darlington,
Very many thanks for the cutting of your article from Discovery,1 which I read with great interest. I dare say someone had told you that I was interested in this story of Lysenko*, though I rather think we did meet once when I was at the B.B.C.2
I first heard about it in the speech given by John Baker at the PEN Conference in 1944, and afterwards read it at greater length in Baker’s book Science and the Planned State.3 I formed the opinion then that the story as told by Baker was true, and am very glad to get this confirmation. I would like to make use of the information supplied by you in my column some time, but I am no scientist and I hardly care to write about what is first and foremost a scientific matter. However, this persecution of scientists and falsification of results seems to me to follow naturally from the persecution of writers and historians, and I have written a number of times that British scientists ought not to remain so undisturbed when they see mere literary men sent to concentration camps.
I shall try to get hold of your obituary article on Vavilov in Nature.4 I saw it stated in an American paper recently that he was definitely known to be dead.
Yours sincerely,
Geo. Orwell
[LO, pp. 128–31; XIX, 3192A, p. 79; typewritten]
1. C.D. Darlington, ‘A Revolution in Russian Science’, Discovery, vol 8, February 1947, pp. 33–43.
2. Orwell had asked Darlington to broadcast to India for university students on ‘The Future of Science’, 7 July 1942 (XIII, 1170, p. 321); on ‘India and the Steel Age’, 10 July 1942 (XIII, 1220, p. 361); and on ‘Plant or Animal Breeding’, 22 July 1943 (XV, 2088, p. 101).
3. In the lecture at the PEN Conference that Orwell heard Baker give, Baker reiterated his objection to scientific planning, specifying Trofim Denisovich Lysenko* as a case in point: ‘A good example is provided by the appointment of one Lysenko to be an Academician in the U.S.S.R. and Director of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Science’. After describing Lysenko’s rejection of Western genetics and his insistence that Soviet researchers adopt his own beliefs, Baker concluded: ‘The case of Lysenko provides a vivid illustration of the degradation of science under a total-itarian regime’ (John R. Baker, ‘Science, Culture and Freedom’, in Herman Ould, ed., Freedom of Expression: A Symposium (1945), pp. 118–19 which Orwell reviewed, 12 October 1945, XVII, 2764, pp. 308–10). See also third paragraph from the end of ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (XVII, 2792, p. 379) for Orwell on the uncritical attitude of some scientists to the Soviet persecution of creative writers.
4. C.D. Darlington and SC Harland, ‘Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, 1885–1942’, Nature, 156 (1945), p. 621.
To Brenda Salkeld*
20 March 1947
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dearest Brenda,
I tried to phone you last night but couldn’t get any sense out of the phone.
In case this reaches you in time on Friday morning. I’m afraid Friday is hopeless for me. I’m going out to lunch, and, little as I want to, I believe I have got to go out to dinner as well. I shall be at home during the morning up to about 12.30, and during the afternoon. So ring if you get the chance.
I have now literally no fuel whatever. However it isn’t quite so stinkingly cold, in fact we’ve distinctly seen the sun on more than one occasion, and I heard some birds trying to sing the other morning. I’ve been frantically busy but have now cleared off the more urgent stuff. I’ve only one more job to do and hope to get that out of the way before we leave for Barnhill, as I do so want not to have to take any bits and pieces of work with me. We have arranged to leave on April 10th, and if I can fix the tickets are going to fly from Glasgow to Islay, which ought to cut out about 6 hours of that dismal journey. Richard has had a nasty feverish cold and he had a temperature two days, but I think he’s all right now. Do make sure to see me before we go, and try and fix up about coming to stay at Barnhill. I think after this stinking winter the weather ought to be better this year.
Take care of yourself and try and give me a ring tomorrow. Perhaps you could look in for a cup of tea, say about 3 or 4 in the afternoon?
Much love
Eric
[XIX, 3195, pp. 80–1; typewritten]
Arthur Koestler*
21 March 1947
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Arthur,
Thanks for your letter. Ref. the Freedom Defence Committee. It is a very small organisation which does the best it can with inadequate funds. The sum they were appealing for on this occasion was £250, and they got somewhat more than that. Naturally they want an assured income to pay for premises and staff, and regular legal assistance. What they actually have at present is some small premises and one secretary, and the (I imagine) rather precarious aid of one lawyer who does not demand much in the way of fees. Of course one can do very little on such a tiny establishment, but they can hardly make it larger unless people do give them money. I think up to date they have done a certain amount of good. They have certainly taken up quite a few cases and bombarded secretaries of state etc. with letters, which is usually about all one can do. The point is that the N.C.C.L.1 became a Stalinist organisation, and since then there has been no organisation aiming chiefly at the defence of civil liberties. Even a tiny nucleus like this is better than nothing, and if it became better known it could get more money, and so become larger. I think sooner or later there may be a row about the larger aims of the Committee, because at present the moving spirits in it are anarchists and there is a tendency to use it for anarchist propaganda. However, that might correct itself if the organisation became larger, because most of the new supporters would presumably be people of ordinary liberal views. I certainly think the Committee is worth £5 a year. If 9 other people have guaranteed the same sum, £50 a year assured is quite a consideration. It would cover stationary°, for example.
I am going back to Jura in April and hope then to get back to the novel I started last year. While in London I’ve been swamped with footling jobs as usual. The weather and the fuel shortage have been unbearable. For about a month one did nothing except try to keep warm. Richard is well and is talking rather more—in all other ways he seems fairly forward. Please give my love to Mamaine.
Yours
George
[XIX, 3196A, p. 84; typewritten]
1. National Council for Civil Liberties.
To Victor Gollancz*
25 March 1947
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Gollancz,
I must thank you for your kind and considerate letter, and I have thought it over with some care. I nevertheless still think, if you are willing to agree, that it would be better to terminate our contract. It is not that anything in the book I am now writing is likely to lead to trouble, but I have to think of the over-all position. Neither Warburg nor anyone else can regard me as a good proposition unless he can have an option on my whole output, which is never very large in any case. It is obviously better if I can be with one publisher altogether, and, as I don’t suppose I shall cease writing about politics from time to time, I am afraid of further differences arising, as in the past. You know what the difficulty is, ie., Russia. For quite 15 years I have regarded that regime with plain horror, and though, of course, I would change my opinion if I saw reason, I don’t think my feelings are likely to change so long as the Communist party remains in power. I know that your position in recent years has been not very far from mine, but I don’t know what it would be if, for instance, there is another seeming raprochement° between Russia and the West, which is a possible development in the next few years. Or again in an actual war situation. I don’t, God knows, want a war to break out, but if one were compelled to choose between Russia and America—and I suppose that is the choice one might have to make—I would always choose America. I know Warburg and his opinions well enough to know that he is very unlikely ever to refuse anything of mine on political grounds. As you say, no publisher can sign blind an undertaking to print anything a writer produces, but I think Warbug is less likely to jib than most.
I know that I am asking a great deal of you, since after all we have a contract which I signed freely and by which I am still bound. If you decide that the contract must stand, of course I shall not violate it. But so far as my own feelings go I would rather terminate it. Please forgive me for what must seem like ungraciousness, and for causing you all this trouble.
Yours sincerely
Geo. Orwell
[XIX, 3200, pp. 90–1; typewritten]
To Victor Gollancz*
9 April 1947
27B Canonbury Square
Islington N 1
Dear Gollancz,
I should have written several days earlier, but I have been ill in bed. Very many thanks for your generous action.1
Yours sincerely,
George Orwell
[XIX, 3211, p. 122; typewritten copy]
1. Gollancz’s generous action was to relinquish his right to publish Orwell’s next two novels – in effect, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
To Sonia Brownell*
Barnhill,
Isle of Jura
Dearest Sonia,
I am handwriting this because my typewriter is downstairs. We arrived O.K. & without incident yesterday. Richard was as good as gold & rather enjoyed having a sleeper to himself after he had got over the first strangeness, & as soon as we got into the plane at Glasgow he went to sleep, probably because of the noise. I hadn’t been by plane before & I think it’s really better. It costs £2 or £3 more, but it saves about 5 hours & the boredom of going on boats, & even if one was sick its° only three quarters of an hour whereas if one goes by sea one is sick for five or six hours, ie. if it is bad weather. Everything up here is just as backward as in England, hardly a bud showing & I saw quite a lot of snow yesterday. However it’s beautiful spring weather now & the plants I put in at the new year seem to be mostly alive. There are daffodils all over the place, the only flower out. I’m still wrestling with more or less virgin meadow, but I think by next year I’ll have quite a nice garden here. Of course we’ve had a nightmare all today getting things straight, with Richard only too ready to help, but it’s more or less right now & the house is beginning to look quite civilized. It will be some weeks before we’ve got the transport problem fully solved, but otherwise we are fairly well appointed. I’m going to send for some hens as soon as we have put the hen house up, & this year I have been also able to arrange for alcohol so that we have just a little, a sort of rum ration, each day. Last year we had to be practically T.T. I think in a week everything will be straight & the essential work in the garden done, & then I can get down to some work.
I wrote to Genetta1 asking her to come whenever she liked & giving instructions about the journey. So long as she’s bringing the child, not just sending it, it should be simple enough. I want to give you the complete details about the journey, which isn’t so formidable as it looks on paper. The facts are these:
There are boats to Jura on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. You have to catch the boat train at Glasgow at 8 am, which means that it’s safer to sleep the preceding night at Glasgow, because the all-night trains have a nasty way of coming in an hour or two hours late, & then one misses the boat train. [Directions for travel, for similar details about travel see 16.6.46] If you want to go by plane, the planes run daily (except Sundays I think), & they nearly always take off unless it’s very misty. The itinerary then is:
10.30 arrive at Scottish Airways office at St Enoch Station, Glasgow (the air office is in the railway station).
11.15 leave by plane for ISLAY. (Pronounced EYELY).
12 noon arrive Islay.
Hire a car (or take a bus) to the ferry that leads to Jura.
About 1 pm cross ferry.
Hired car to LEALT.
It’s important to let us know in advance when you are coming, because of the hired car. There are only 2 posts a week here, & only 2 occasions on which I can send down to Craighouse to order the car. If you come by boat, you could probably get a car all right by asking on the quay, but if you come by air there wouldn’t be a car at the ferry (which is several miles from Craighouse) unless ordered beforehand. Therefore if you proposed coming on, say, June 15th, it would be as well to write about June 5th because, according to the day of the week, it may be 4 or 5 days before your letter reaches me, & another 3 or 4 days before I can send a message. It’s no use wiring because the telegrams come by the postman.
You want a raincoat & if possible stout boots or shoes—gum boots if you have them. We may have some spare gum boots, I’m not sure—we are fairly well off for spare oilskins & things like that. It would help if you brought that week’s rations, because they’re not quick at getting any newcomer’s rations here, & a little flour & tea.
I am afraid I am making this all sound very intimidating, but really it’s easy enough & the house is quite comfortable. The room you would have is rather small, but it looks out on the sea. I do so want to have you here. By that time I hope we’ll have got hold of an engine for the boat, & if we get decent weather we can go round to the completely uninhabited bays on the west side of the island, where there is beautiful white sand & clear water with seals swimming about in it. At one of them there is a cave where we can take shelter when it rains, & at another there is a shepherd’s hut which is disused but quite livable where one could even picnic for a day or two. Anyway do come, & come whenever you like for as long as you like, only try to let me know beforehand. And meanwhile take care of yourself & be happy.
I’ve just remembered I never paid you for that brandy you got for me, so enclose £3. I think it was about that wasn’t it? The brandy was very nice & was much appreciated on the journey up because they can’t get alcohol here at all easily. The next island, Islay, distills whisky but it all goes to America. I gave the lorry driver a large wallop, more than a double, & it disappeared so promptly that it seemed to hit the bottom of his belly with a click.
With much love
George
[XIX, 3212, pp. 122–4; handwritten]
1. Janetta Woolley (now Parladé) was a friend of those who ran Horizon and Polemic. She may have met Orwell through her former husband, Humphrey Slater* but it seems more likely it was through Cyril Connolly*. At this time she had changed her name by deed-poll to Sinclair-Loutit, whilst living with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit: their daughter, Nicolette, then nearly four years old, is the child mentioned in this letter. Sonia Brownell had suggested to Orwell that Nicolette would be a suitable same-age companion for young Richard, hence Orwell’s invitation, but in the event Janetta and Nicolette did not go to Jura. Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit also knew Orwell, having been in the Spanish civil war as a doctor in the International Brigade and had first met him in Spain.
The following letter is in reply to one from Dwight Macdonald of 9 April 1947. Macdonald said that since his last letter to Orwell he had decided to devote the May–June issue of Politics to the USSR and the issue after that to France. There would therefore be no room for even an abridged version of Orwell’s ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’ until September–October at the earliest. He would hold on to the article but would give it to someone else if Orwell wished. It was never published in Politics. He asked Orwell for help in compiling a reading list of 50–60 books and articles ‘which might be called the basic ones for the layman if he wants to understand Russia today’. Had Orwell any ‘pet discoveries’? What ten books would he recommend to a friend ignorant of Russia but seeking enlightenment? He also wanted another 50–60 titles of more specialised books on the best in Soviet art, movies, literature. He said he had no friendly contacts with the higher editors of The New Republic. His friends were being ‘weeded out at a great rate’, and he guessed that Orwell’s column ‘As I Please’ would not be published now that ‘the mag has become well-vulgarized by the Wallace crowd’. He suggested Orwell ask his agents to approach The Nation. Macdonald had airmailed his profile of Henry Wallace, because, since Wallace was now in England, Orwell might care to tell his readers about it. He confirmed that he had received payment for the shoes he had obtained for Orwell (the shoes which, unfortunately, proved too small).
To Dwight Macdonald*
15 April 1947
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Dwight,
Many thanks for your very interesting and informative article on Wallace1, which reached me yesterday—unfortunately a few days after I’d left London for the summer. I’ve sent it on to Tribune, as I should think they could well use parts of it, at least as background material. I left London the day before W[allace] had his big public meeting at the Albert Hall, but I heard him say a few words of welcome on arrival and got the impression that he meant to be very conciliatory and not make the sort of remarks about ‘British imperialism’ which he has been making in the USA. His visit here has been timed to do the maximum of mischief, and I was somewhat surprised by the respectful welcome given to him by nearly everyone, incidentally including Tribune, which has given him some raps over the knuckles in the past.
It doesn’t matter about the Tolstoy article. If you feel you do want to use a piece of it sooner or later, hang on to it until then. Otherwise, could you be kind enough to send it on to my agents, Mcintosh & Otis, explaining the circumstances. It’s possible they might be able to do something with it, though as they failed with another Polemic article (one on Swift), perhaps this one is no good for the American market either.
As to books on the USSR. It’s very hard to think of a good list, and looking back, it seems to me that whatever I have learned, or rather guessed, about that country has come from reading between the lines of newspaper reports. I tried to think of ‘pro’ books, but couldn’t think of any good ones except very early ones such as Ten Days that Shook the World2 (which I haven’t read through but have read in, of course.) The Webbs’ Soviet Communism,3 which I have not read, no doubt contains a lot of facts, but Michael Polanyi’s little essay4 on it certainly convicted the W.s of misrepresentation on some points. A nephew of Beatrice Webb5 whom I know told me she admitted privately that there were things about the USSR that it was better not to put on paper. For the period round about the Revolution, Krupskaya’s Memories of Lenin has some interesting facts. So does Angelica Balabanov’s My Life as a Rebel.6 The later editions of Krupskaya’s book have been tampered with a little, at any rate in England. Of the same period, Bertrand Russell’s Theory and Practice of Bolshevism (a very rare book which he will not bother to reprint) is interesting because he not only met all the tops but was able to foretell in general terms a good deal that happened later. Rosenberg’s History of Bolshevism is said to be good and unprejudiced, but I haven’t read it and his book on the German Republic seemed to me rather dry and cagey. A book that taught me more than any other about the general course of the Revolution was Franz Borkenau’s The Communist International. This of course is only partly concerned with the USSR itself, and it is perhaps too much written round a thesis, but it is stuffed with facts which I believe have not been successfully disputed. As for books of ‘revelations,’ I must say I was doubtful of the authenticity of Valtin’s book, but I thought Krivitsky’s book7 genuine although written in a cheap sensational style. In one place where it crossed with my own experiences it seemed to me substantially true. Kravchenko’s book8 is not out in England yet. For the concentration camps, Anton Ciliga’s The Russian Enigma9 is good, and more recently The Dark Side of the Moon10 (now I think published in the USA) which is compiled from the experiences of many exiled Poles. A little book by a Polish woman, Liberation, Russian Style,11 which appeared during the war and fell flat, overlaps with The Dark Side and is more detailed. I think the most important of very recent books is the Blue Book on the Canadian spy trials,12 which is fascinating psychologically. As for literature, Gleb Struve’s Twenty-five Years of Soviet Russian Literature is an invaluable handbook and I am told very accurate. Mirsky’s Russian Literature 1881–1927 (I think that is the title) takes in the earlier part of post-revolutionary literature. There is also Max Eastman’s Artists in Uniform. You’ve probably read everything I have mentioned except perhaps the Blue Book. If you haven’t read the latter, don’t miss it—it’s a real thriller.
I am up here for 6 months. Last year I was just taking a holiday after six years of non-stop journalism, but this year I am going to get on with a novel. I shan’t finish it in six months but I ought to break its back and might finish it at the end of the year. It is very hard to get back to quiet continuous work after living in a lunatic asylum for years. Not that conditions are now any better than during the war—worse in many ways. This last winter has been quite unendurable, and even now the weather is appalling, but one is a little better off up here where it is a bit easier to get food and fuel than in London.
Yours
George
[XIX, 3215, pp. 126–9; typewritten]
1. For Henry Wallace see 5.12.46 n. 6.
2. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). Reed (1887–1920) was involved in setting up the Communist Party in the United States. He died of typhus and was buried in the Kremlin wall.
3. Sidney James Webb (1859–1947) and Beatrice Webb (1858–1943), Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (2 vols, London, 1935; New York, 1936). Republished in London in 1937, but without the question mark, and in 1941 with a new introduction by Beatrice Webb.
4. Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), The Contempt of Freedom: The Russian Experiment and After (1940). Includes his ‘Soviet Economics – Fact and Theory’ (1935), ‘Truth and Propaganda’ (1936), ‘Collectivist Planning’ (1940).
5. Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–90), author and journalist. In 1930, after three years as a lecturer at the Egyptian University, Cairo, he joined the Manchester Guardian and was its Moscow correspondent, 1932–3 (see his Winter in Moscow, 1934). He then worked on the Calcutta Statesman and, from 1935–6, on the Evening Standard. He served throught the war (Major, Intelligence Corps) and afterwards was Daily Telegraph Washington correspondent, 1946–7, and its deputy editor 1950–2. From 1952–7 he edited Punch. His The Thirties (1940) is a useful account of that decade. Sonia Orwell asked him to write Orwell’s biography; he agreed but never produced anything. The section of this letter from ‘A nephew’ to ‘on paper’ was marked in the margin, in Orwell’s hand, ‘Off the record.’
6. Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869–1939), wife of Lenin and active in his revolutionary programme. Her Memories of Lenin is quoted more than once by Orwell. Angelica Balabanov (1878–1965), associate editor with Mussolini of Avanti, worked with Lenin and Trotsky during the Russian Revolution and was the first secretary of the Third International. Her memoir was published in 1937.
7. Jan Valtin (pseudonym of Richard Krebs, 1904–1951), Out of the Night (New York, 1940; London and Toronto, 1941). He later became a war correspondent with the American forces in the Pacific. Walter G. Krivitsky (d. 1941), In Stalin’s Secret Service (New York, 1939; I Was Stalin’s Agent, London, 1963). He was head of the western division of the NKVD, but defected.
8. Victor Kravchenko (1905–1966), I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (New York, 1946; London, 1947). During the Spanish civil war, Kravchenko served as an aide to General Dimitri Pavlov (shot on Stalin’s orders, 1941). (See Thomas, p. 588, n. 1.)
9. Anton Ciliga (1898–1991), a founder of the Yugoslav Communist Party. His The Russian Enigma was published in English in 1940 (in French, Paris, 1938). It is concerned chiefly with Russian economic policy, 1928–1932, and with its prisons. His The Kronstadt Revolt (Paris 1938; London, 1942) was described by Orwell as an ‘Anarchist pamphlet largely an attack on Trotsky’.
10. Anonymous, The Dark Side of the Moon (London, 1946; New York, 1947), deals with Soviet-Polish relations. It has a preface by T. S. Eliot, a director of the book’s English publishers, Faber & Faber.
11. Ada Halpern, Liberation—Russian Style (1945); it is listed by Whitaker as August 1945 and so published not during the war but just as it was ending.
12. In the left-hand margin, against one or both of Liberation—Russian Style and the Canadian Government Blue Book, is a marker arrow, presumably added by Macdonald. The Blue Book referred to reported on a Canadian Royal Commission which investigated Soviet espionage in Canada, 1946 and 1947. This found that a spy ring had been built up by the Soviet Military Attaché, Colonel Zabotin. Amongst those sentenced to terms of imprisonment was Fred Rose, the only Canadian Communist MP.
To Fredric Warburg*
31 May 1947
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Many thanks for your letter. I have made a fairly good start on the book and I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time, because I have really been in most wretched health this year ever since about January (my chest as usual) and can’t quite shake it off. However I keep pegging away, and I hope that when I leave here in October I shall either have finished the rough draft or at any rate broken its back. Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess having very little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job. So if I do finish the rough draft by October I might get the book done fairly early in 1948, barring illnesses. I don’t like talking about books before they are written, but I will tell you now that this is a novel about the future— that is, it is in a sense a fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel. That is what makes it a difficult job—of course as a book of anticipations it would be comparatively simple to write.
I am sending you separately a long autobiographical sketch1 which I originally undertook as a sort of pendant to Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, he having asked me to write a reminiscence of the preparatory school we were at together. I haven’t actually sent it to Connolly or Horizon, because apart from being too long for a periodical I think it is really too libellous to print, and I am not disposed to change it, except perhaps the names. But I think it should be printed sooner or later when the people most concerned are dead, and maybe sooner or later I might do a book of collected sketches. I must apologise for the typescript. It is not only the carbon copy, but is very bad commercial typing which I have had to correct considerably—however, I think I have got most of the actual errors out.
Richard is very well in spite of various calamities. First he fell down and cut his forehead and had to have two stitches put in, and after that he had measles. He is talking a good deal more now (he was three a week or two ago.) The weather has cheered up after being absolutely stinking, and the garden we are creating out of virgin jungle is getting quite nice. Please remember me to Pamela and Roger.2
Yours
George
[XIX, 3232, pp. 149–50; typewritten]
1. In the margin there is a handwritten annotation (in Warburg’s hand?): ‘Such, Such were the Joys’. For the development of this essay and for the nature of the ‘commercial typing’, see headnote to the essay, XIX, 3408, pp. 353–6. Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise was published in 1938. Warburg wrote to Orwell on 6 June saying, ‘I have read the autobiographical sketch about your prep. school and passed it to Roger.’
2. Fredric Warburg’s second wife, formerly Pamela de Bayou (they married in 1933); and Roger Senhouse.
To Leonard Moore*
14 July 1947
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Moore,
I wonder if you could get in touch with the ‘Britain in Pictures’ people and find out what they are doing about a booklet, The British People, which I wrote for them 3 or 4 years ago. The history of it was this.1
In 1943 W. J. Turner,2 who was editing the series, told me that they had had books on British scenery, British railways, etc., but none on the British people, and that they would like me to do one. I was not very keen on the idea, but as it was to be a short book (15,000) and Turner promised me I should have a free hand, I agreed. Before going to work I submitted a detailed synopsis, which was approved. I then wrote the book, and it was no sooner sent in than the reader for Collins’s, who were publishing the series, raised a long series of objections which amounted, in effect, to a demand that I should turn the book into a much cruder kind of propaganda. I pointed out that I had closely followed the agreed synopsis, and said I was not going to change anything. Turner backed me up, and the matter seemed to be settled. About a year later, nothing having happened, I met Turner in the street and told him I thought I ought to have some money for the book, on which I had been promised an advance of £50. He said he could get me £25, and did so. About this time he told me it had been decided to get someone else to do a companion volume to mine, on the same subject, so as to give as it were two sides to the picture. They first got Edmund Blunden,3 who made such a mess of it that his copy was unprintable, so there was another delay. They afterwards got someone else, I forget whom, to do the companion volume. Turner and his assistant, Miss Shannon, several times told me that the objections to my book had been over-ruled and that it would appear in due course. About a year ago I was sent the proofs and corrected them. I was told then, or shortly afterwards, that they were choosing the illustrations, and if I remember rightly Miss Shannon told me what the illustrations would be. During last winter Turner died suddenly, and Miss Shannon wrote to say that this would impose another short delay, but that the book would appear shortly. Since then nothing has happened. I think it must be more than 4 years since I submitted the manuscript.
I haven’t the faintest interest in the book nor any desire that it should appear in print. It was simply a wartime book, part of a series designed to ‘sell’ Britain in the USA. At the same time I obviously ought to have some more money out of them, at least the other half of the £50 advance. £50 was incidentally rather a small advance, since these books, when once on the market, usually sold largely. Unfortunately I have not my copy of the contract, as this was one of the documents that were destroyed when my flat was bombed in 1944.4 However, I suppose that wouldn’t matter, and I am sure Miss Shannon, if she is still helping to run the series, would be cooperative.
Yours sincerely
Eric Blair
[XIX, 3248, pp. 172–3; typewritten]
1. Though he did not realise it when he wrote to Moore, The English People was about to be published, in August 1947 (XIX, 3253, p. 179). Collins had not bothered to inform the author.
2. W. J. Turner (1889–1946), poet, novelist, and music critic who did a variety of publishing and journalistic work, including acting as general editor of the Britain in Pictures series for Collins.
3. Edmund Charles Blunden (1896–1974), poet, critic, and teacher.
4. Orwell and his wife were bombed out on 14 July 1944.
To Lydia Jackson*
28 July 1947
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Lydia,
I have just received notice to quit the Wallington Cottage.1 It was bound to happen sooner or later, and of course as it is only a weekly tenancy they can do it on very short notice. However the date given on the notice is August 4th, so that in theory your furniture ought to be removed by that date. I wrote off at once to the Solicitors explaining that you could hardly be expected to get out at such short notice, as you must find somewhere to put your furniture. If you want to write to them direct they are Balderston Warren & Co, Solicitors, Baldock, Herts. I have no doubt you could get more time, but of course if ordered to get out we have to do so, especially as I, the theoretical tenant, am not using the cottage at all, and you are only using it for week ends. I believe actually on a weekly tenancy they are supposed to give six week° notice. I am very sorry this should have happened.
If you’d like to come and stay any time, please do,2 I shall be here till October, and there are always beds here. Just give me good notice, so that I can arrange about meeting you. The weather has been filthy but has lately turned nice again. Love to Pat.
Yours,
George
[XIX, 3250, p. 177; typewritten copy]
1. The Stores, Wallington; Orwell moved there on 2 April 1936, and it was his home until May 1940. He seems to have used it rarely thereafter (most often for a few days in 1940 and 1941, and perhaps a Bank Holiday weekend in 1942).
2. Lydia Jackson visited Barnhill 26 March to 2 April 1948. She might have retyped the final version of ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ while she was there.
To Leonard Moore*
28 July 1947
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Moore,
Herewith the proofs.1 It seems quite a good translation, so far as I am able to judge. I have made a few corrections, but mostly of punctuation etc.
Many thanks for your offices in connection with the ‘Britain in Pictures’ book.
I am getting on fairly well with the novel, and expect to finish the rough draft by October. I dare say it will need another six months° work on it after that, but I can’t say yet when it is likely to be finished because I am not sure of my movements. I have to come back to London in October and shall probably stay at any rate a month, but we are thinking of spending most of the winter up here because I think it is not quite so cold here and fuel is a bit easier to get. If I do stay here I shall no doubt get on with the rewriting of the novel faster than if I am in London and involved in journalism. At any rate I have some hopes of finishing it fairly early next year.
Yours sincerely
Eric Blair
[XIX, 3251, pp. 177–8; typewritten]
1. Presumably proofs of the French translation of Animal Farm, published in October 1947.
To George Woodcock*
9 August 1947
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear George,
I at last get round to answering your letter of 25th July. I am, as you say in principle prepared to do an article in the series you mention, but ‘in principle’ is about right, because I am busy and don’t want to undertake any more work in the near future. I am struggling with this novel which I hope to finish early in 1948. I don’t even expect to finish the rough draft before about October, then I must come to London for about a month to see to various things and do one or two articles I have promised, then I shall get down to the rewriting of the book which will probably take me 4 or 5 months. It always takes me a hell of a time to write a book even if I am doing nothing else, and I can’t help doing an occasional article, usually for some American magazine, because one must earn some money occasionally.
I think probably I shall come back in November and we shall spend the winter here. I can work here with fewer interruptions, and I think we shall be less cold here. The climate, although wet, is not quite so cold as England, and it is much easier to get fuel. We are saving our coal as much as possible and hope to start the winter with a reserve of 3 tons, and you can get oil by the 40 gallon drum here, whereas last winter in London you had to go down on your knees to get a gallon once a fortnight. There are also wood and peat, which are a fag to collect but help out the coal. Part of the winter may be pretty bleak and one is sometimes cut off from the mainland for a week or two, but it doesn’t matter so long as you have flour in hand to make scones. Latterly the weather has been quite incredible, and I am afraid we shall be paying for it soon. Last week we went round in the boat and spent a couple of days on the completely uninhabited Atlantic side of the island in an empty shepherd’s hut—no beds, but otherwise quite comfortable. There are beautiful white beaches round that side, and if you do about an hour’s climb into the hills you come to lochs which are full of trout but never fished because too ungetatable. This last week of course we’ve all been breaking our backs helping to get the hay in, including Richard, who likes to roll about in the hay stark naked. If you want to come here any time, of course do, only just give me a week’s notice because of meeting. After September the weather gets pretty wild, though I know there are very warm days even in mid winter.
I got two copies of the FDC1 bulletin. I am not too happy about following up the Nunn May case, ie, building him up as a well-meaning man who has been victimised. I think the Home Secretary can make hay of this claim if he wants to. I signed the first petition, not without misgivings, simply because I thought 10 years too stiff a sentence (assuming that any prison sentence is ever justified.) If I had had to argue the case, I should have pointed out that if he had communicated the information to the USA he would probably have got off with 2 years at most. But the fact is that he was an ordinary spy—I don’t mean that he was doing it for money—and went out to Canada as part of a spy ring. I suppose you read the Blue Book2 on the subject. It also seems to me a weak argument to say that he felt information was being withheld from an ally, because in his position he must have known that the Russians never communicated military information to anybody. However, in so far as the object is simply to get him out of jail somewhat earlier, I am not against it.
Yours
George
[XIX, 3256, pp. 188–9; typewritten]
1. This was Freedom Defence Committee Bulletin, 5, July–August 1947. This issue outlines action taken to have Nunn May’s sentence reduced, achieving, if possible, ‘early release’. Dr Allan Nunn May (1911–2003) was found guilty of spying on behalf of the Soviets. Conor Cruise O’Brien defended him in the Daily Telegraph, 10 February 2003, as someone who thought it was his ‘moral duty’ to help the Soviet Union. He told O’Brien that on his release his communist colleagues cut him dead because he had pleaded guilty. He should, he said, ‘have pleaded not guilty, thereby enabling the Soviet Union to accuse the British Government of having framed’ him – it was, said Nunn May, ‘an instructive experience’.
2. Issued by the Canadian government (see Orwell’s letter to Dwight Macdonald, 15.4.47, n. 12).
To Brenda Salkeld*
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dearest Brenda,
At last I get round to answering your letter. We have had unheard-of weather here for the last six weeks, one blazing day after another, and in fact at present we’re suffering from a severe drought, which is not a usual complaint in these parts. There has been no water in the taps for nearly a fortnight, and everyone has had to stagger to and fro with buckets from a well about 200 yards away. However there have been plenty of people to do it as the house was very full with people staying. We made several expeditions round to Glengarrisdale and slept a couple of nights in the shepherd’s cottage—no beds, only blankets and piles of bracken, but otherwise quite comfortable. Unfortunately on the last expedition we had a bad boat accident on the way back and 4 of us including Richard were nearly drowned. We got into the [Corryvreckan] whirlpool, owing to trying to go through the gulf at the wrong state of the tide, and the outboard motor was sucked off the boat. We managed to get out of it with the oars and then got to one of the little islands, just rocks covered with sea birds, which are dotted about there. The sea was pretty bad and the boat turned over as we were getting ashore, so that we lost everything we had including the oars and including 12 blankets. We might normally have expected to be there till next day, but luckily a boat came past some hours later and took us off. Luckily, also, it was a hot day and we managed to get a fire going and dry our clothes. Richard loved every moment of it except when he went into the water. The boat which picked us up put us off at the bay we used to call the W bay,1 and then we had to walk home over the hill, barefooted because most of our boots had gone with the other wreckage.2 Our boat luckily wasn’t damaged apart from the loss of the engine, but I’m trying to get hold of a bigger one as these trips are really a bit too unsafe in a little rowing boat. I went fishing in the lochs near Glengarrisdale both times (I’ve got to continue in pen because the wire of the typewriter has slipped) & caught quite a lot of trout. Several of these lochs are full of trout but never fished because however you approach them it’s a day’s expedition to get there.
We’re going to spend the winter up here, but I shall be in London roughly for November—I haven’t fixed a date because it partly depends on when I finish the rough draft of my novel. I’ll let you know later just when I am coming up.3
Eric
[XIX, 3262, pp. 195–6; typed and hadwritten]
1. Presumably the adjacent bays of Glentrosdale and Gleann nam Muc at the northwestern tip of Jura which, on a map, with a headland separating the bays, looks like the letter W. Eilean Mór lies opposite the centre point of the ‘W’.
2. This would involve a walk of at least three miles over rough country.
3. Orwell was to lecture at the Working Men’s College, Crowndale Road, London, NW1, on 12 November 1947. However, he was too ill to leave Jura and so could not give his lecture.
To Arthur Koestler*
20 September 1947
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Arthur,
I think a Ukrainian refugee named Ihor Sevcenko° may have written to you—he told me that he had written and that you had not yet answered.
What he wanted to know was whether they could translate some of your stuff into Ukrainian, without payment of course, for distribution among the Ukrainian D.Ps, who now seem to have printing outfits of their own going in the American Zone and in Belgium. I told him I thought you would be delighted to have your stuff disseminated among Soviet citizens and would not press for payment, which in any case these people could not make. They made a Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm which appeared recently, reasonably well printed and got up, and, so far as I could judge by my correspondence with Sevcenko°, well translated. I have just heard from them that the American authorities in Munich have siezed° 1500 copies of it and handed them over to the Soviet repatriation people, but it appears about 2000 copies got distributed among the D.Ps first. If you decide to let them have some of your stuff, I think it is well to treat it as a matter of confidence and not tell too many people this end, as the whole thing is more or less illicit. Sevcenko °asked me simultaneously whether he thought Laski1 would agree to let them have some of his stuff (they are apparently trying to get hold of representative samples of Western thought.) I told him to have nothing to do with Laski and by no means let a person of that type know that illicit printing in Soviet languages is going on in the allied zones, but I told him you were a person to be trusted. I am sure we ought to help these people all we can, and I have been saying ever since 1945 that the DPs were a godsent opportunity for breaking down the wall between Russia and the west. If our government won’t see this, one must do what one can privately.
[Final paragraph omitted: will visit London but stay at Barnhill for winter.]
Yours
George
[XIX, 3275, pp. 206–7; typewritten]
1. Harold J. Laski (1893–1950), political theorist, Marxist, author, and journalist, was connected with the London School of Economics from 1920 and Professor of Political Science in the University of London from 1926, member of the Fabian Executive, 1922 and 1936, member of the Executive Committee of the Labour Party, 1936–49. Although critical of Laski, Orwell had appealed for support for him after Laski lost an action for libel; see ‘As I Please’, 67, 27 December 1946, (XVIII, 3140, p. 523).
To David Astor*
29 September 1947
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear David,
I wonder how things are going with you and the family. I am going to be in London for November to see to some odds and ends of business, but after that we intend spending the winter here. I think it will be easier to keep warm here, as we are better off for coal etc., also I am struggling with this novel and can work more quietly here. I hope to finish it some time in the spring. I have got on fairly well but not so fast as I could have wished because I have been in wretched health a lot of the year, starting with last winter. We have got the house a lot more in order and some more garden broken in, and I am going to send up some more furniture this winter. I think the Barnhill croft is going to be farmed after all, which eases my conscience about living here. A chap I don’t think you have met named Bill Dunn,1 who lost a foot in the war, has been living with the Darrochs all the summer as a pupil, and in the spring he is going to take over the Barnhill croft and live with us. Apart from the land getting cultivated again, it is very convenient for us because we can then share implements such as a small tractor which it [is] not worth getting for the garden alone, and also have various animals which I have hitherto hesitated to get for fear a moment should come when nobody was here. We have had a marvellous summer here, in fact there was a severe drought and no bath water for ten days. Four of us including Richard were nearly drowned in Corrievrechan,° an event which got into the newspapers even as far away as Glasgow. Richard is getting enormous and unbelievably destructive, and is now talking a good deal more. I expect your baby will have grown out of recognition by this time. I don’t know if you’re going to be up here any time in the winter but if so do look in here. There’s always a bed and food of sorts, and the road is I think slightly better as it’s being drained in places. Your friend Donovan came over riding on Bob and bearing incredible quantities of food, evidently sure he would find us starving. Actually we do very well for food here except bread, because we buy huge hunks of venison off the Fletchers whenever they break up a deer, also lobsters, and we have a few hens and can get plenty of milk.
Please remember me to your wife.
Yours
George
P.S. Do you want Bob wintered again by any chance? I got hay for him last year and he seemed to me in pretty good condition when I took him back, though I’m no judge. Till the day I took him back I had never mounted him, because the Darrochs had built up a picture of him as a sort of raging unicorn, and I was in such poor health I felt I was getting past that sort of thing. Actually he was as good as gold even when ridden bareback.
[XIX, 3277, p. 209–10; typewritten]
1. Bill Dunn (1921–92), had been an officer in the army but after the loss of a leg had been invalided out. He came to Jura in 1947 and later entered into a partnership with Sir Richard Rees to farm Barnhill. He married Avril, Orwell’s sister, in 1951. See Orwell Remembered, pp. 231–5, and Remembering Orwell, pp. 182–5. Richard Blair has contributed a very interesting memoir about Avril and Bill Dunn to the Eric & Us website (www.finlay-publisher.com).
To Roger Senhouse*
22 October 1947
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Roger,
I’m returning the proofs of Coming Up for Air.
There are not many corrections. In just one or two cases I’ve altered something that had been correctly transcribed, including one or two misprints that existed in the original text. I note that on p. 46 the compositor has twice altered ‘Boars’ to ‘Boers,’ evidently taking it for a misprint. ‘Boars’ was intentional, however (a lot of people used to pronounce it like that.)
What about dates? On the title page it says ‘1947,’ but it isn’t going to be published in 1947. And should there not somewhere be a mention of the fact that the book was first published in 1939?
Did you know by the way that this book hasn’t got a semicolon in it? I had decided about that time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.1
I’m coming up to London on November 7th and shall be there for about a month. I have various time-wasting things to do, lectures and so on. I hope before I arrive to have finished the rough draft of my novel, which I’m on the last lap of now. But its° a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be rewritten entirely besides the usual touching up. I don’t know how long that will take—I hope only 4 or 5 months but it might well be longer. I’ve been in such wretched health all this year that I never seem to have much spare energy. I wonder if Fred will be back by November.2 I hope to see you both then.
Yours
George
[XIX, 3290, pp. 216–17; typewritten]
1. See Textual Note to Coming Up for Air, VII, pp. 249–50. Despite Orwell’s clearly expressed wishes, the proofs and Uniform Edition include three semi-colons. Whether Orwell missed these (and they do make for easier reading than do the commas he wished to have used) or whether his instructions were ignored is not known.
2. Warburg had gone on his first of a dozen visits to the United States. Orwell had written to him on 1 September 1947 asking him, if he had time, to buy him a pair of shoes.
To Anthony Powell*
29 November 1947
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Tony,
Thanks so much for your letter. I’m still on my back, but I think really getting better after many relapses. I’d probably be all right by this time if I could have got to my usual chest specialist, but I dare not make the journey to the mainland while I have a temperature. It’s really a foul journey in winter even if one flies part of the way. However I’ve arranged for a man to come from Glasgow & give me the once-over, & then maybe I’ll get up to London later, or perhaps only as far as Glasgow. I think I’ll have to go into hospital for a bit, because apart from treatment there’s the X-raying etc., & after that I might have a stab at going abroad for a couple of months if I can get a newspaper assignment to somewhere warm. Of course I’ve done no work for weeks—have only done the rough draft of my novel, which I always consider as the halfway mark. I was supposed to finish it by May—now, God knows when. I’m glad the Aubrey book1 is coming along at last. I think in these days besides putting the date of publication in books one also ought to put the date of writing. In the spring I’m reprinting a novel which came out in 1939 & was rather killed by the war, so that makes up a little for being late with my new one.
Apparently Mrs Christen has just sailed. What I partly wrote about was this: have you got, or do you know anyone who has got, a saddle for sale? Good condition doesn’t matter very much so long as it has a sound girth & stirrups. It’s for a horse only about 14 h[ands] but on the stout side, so very likely a saddle belonging to a big horse would do. It’s the sort of thing someone might have kicking round, & you can’t buy them for love or money. The farm pony we have here is ridden for certain errands to save petrol, & it’s so tiring riding bareback. I am ready to pay a reasonable price.
Richard is offensively well & full of violence. He went through whooping cough without noticing that he had it. My love to everyone. I hope to see you all some day.
Yours
George
[XIX, 3308, pp. 227–8; handwritten]
1. Powell published John Aubrey and His Friends in 1948, and Brief Lives and Other Selected Writings of John Aubrey in 1949.
To Leonard Moore*
7 December 1947
Barnhill
Isle of Jura
Dear Moore,
Thanks for your letter of the 1st. I have of course no objection to the arrangement with the F[oreign] O[ffice] about A.F.1 I had already written to the U.S. Information Service to tell them they could broadcast it free of charge.
I have seen a chest specialist, &, as I feared, I am seriously ill. As soon as there is a bed vacant, I think in about 10 days, I shall have to go into a sanatorium—for how long I don’t know of course, but I gather probably something like 4 months. It’s T.B., as I suspected. They think they can cure it all right, but I am bound to be hors de combat for a good while. Could you inform all the publishers etc. concerned. Could you also thank very kindly Harcourt Brace for getting & sending me a pair of shoes (just arrived) & find out from Fred Warburg who paid for them, ie. whom I should repay. I believe Warburg paid.
Yours sincerely
Eric Blair
P.S. I’ll send you the address of the hospital as soon as I’m there, but any way this address will find me.
[XIX, 3313, pp. 233–4; handwritten]
1. Probably for the Persian-language version, Enqelāb Hayvānāt, arranged by the Central Office of Information and translated by Ali Javāherkālām, 1947.
To Frederick Tomlinson, The Observer
23 December 1947
Ward 3
Hairmyres Hospital
East Kilbride
Nr. Glasgow
[Tel:] East Kilbride 325
Dear Tomlinson,
I’m afraid it’s all off about Africa so far as I’m concerned, much as I’d like to have done the trip. As you see I’m in hospital & I think likely to remain here 3–4 months. After being really very ill for about 2 months I got a chest specialist to come from the mainland, & sure enough it was T.B. as I feared. I’ve had it before, but not so badly. This time it’s what they call ‘extensive’ but they seem confident they can patch me up in a few months. For some time I’ve been far too ill even to attempt any work, but I’m beginning to feel somewhat better, & I was wondering whether the Obs. would like to start letting me have some books to review again. I suppose this isn’t your department, but perhaps you could be kind enough to shove the suggestion along to Ivor Brown.*1
I haven’t heard from David [Astor]* so don’t know if he’s back yet. Please give all the best to everybody from me.
Yours
Geo. Orwell
[XIX, 3315, p. 235; handwritten]
1. Ivor Brown wrote to Orwell on 27 December saying how sorry he was to hear that Orwell was ill and offering to find some of the ‘pitifully small’ space available for him to contribute book reviews. He also suggested some might be short leader-page articles appropriate to the subject matter. Orwell thanked him, saying he would prefer sociological books or literary criticism; he was happy to write short leader-page articles (XIX, 3321, p. 239).
To David Astor*
31 December 1947
Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride
Dear David,
I have to continue this1 in pencil as my Biro pen is giving out. I was so glad to get your letter and know you were back. I’d love it if you did come and see me some time—don’t put yourself out of course, but if you had to visit these parts anyway. I came by car, so I’m not certain how far out of Glasgow this is, but I think about 20 minutes drive. They don’t seem to be very lavish with visiting hours. The official hours are: Sundays, Weds. & Sats., 2.30 to 3.30 pm, Tuesdays 6–7 pm.
As to what you say about Richard, he’s in Jura with my sister at present, but later in the year I might be very glad to take advantage of your offer and dump him on you for a few weeks. The thing is that I don’t know about my movements. The treatment they are giving me is one that must take a long time, and even if I get well enough to get out of bed and even leave the hospital, I imagine I should have to stay for some months in London or Glasgow or somewhere and go once a week for a ‘refill’, which means having air pumped into one’s diaphragm. My sister is going up to London for a short while in January or Feb. to do shopping etc., and she will leave R. with friends in Edinburgh. I am going to have him X-rayed then, though I must say of his appearance he doesn’t look very T.B. I kept him away from me as best we could after I knew what was wrong with me, and we are getting a T.T.2 cow so as to make sure of his milk. We boil all his milk, but of course one can forget sometimes. Although he is still backward about talking, he is getting very big and rowdy, and loves working round the farm. I think he much prefers machinery to animals. One has to keep him off anything that can be taken to pieces. He even succeeded in uncoupling the trailer from the Fletchers’ tractor. This is the first Christmas that he has more or less understood what it is all about, so I was very glad to get away just beforehand and not be a skeleton at the Christmas dinner. There were 4 of them there so I dare say they had quite a good time.
I’m writing to I[vor] B[rown] suggesting that I should do an article once a fortnight, as I did before. I think I’ll try and fix another article with somebody else, as I think I’m probably up to doing one a week now, and I might as well earn some money while I’m on my back. Of course I’ve done no work at all for 2–3 months, and indeed haven’t been out of bed during that time. I’ve lost a stone and a half of weight, and still feel deadly sick and so forth all the time, but I think I’ve been better the last week or two. The treatment they are giving me is to put the affected lung out of action, which is supposed to give it a better chance to heal. I suppose this takes a long time, but they say it generally works. It is a nice hospital and everyone is extraordinarily kind to me.
Hoping to see you some time.
Yours,
George
P.S. You don’t want to sell Bob, I suppose? You know we have been wintering him again. He seems very good and tractable, and McIntyre seemed glad to get rid of him for the winter, as he said they had ‘plenty to winter already’. Bill Dunn rides him when he goes to round up the sheep, but we did plan also to use him in the trap when the car goes to be overhauled, also for dragging wood etc.
[XIX, 3320, pp. 238–9; handwritten]
1. Nothing has been omitted.
2. Tuberculin-tested