1948

In November 1947 Frederick Tomlinson, news editor of the Observer, had suggested to Orwell that he might like a three-month assignment to cover the progress of what would prove to be a disastrous groundnut scheme in East Africa, and the South African elections. Orwell was tempted but by the end of the year he had become so ill that he had to turn down the offer. Instead he had to move to Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride, near Glasgow. He was there until almost the end of July when he was able to return to Barnhill. Through David Astor, streptomycin (then a new drug) was obtained from the USA but although it was beneficial at first, Orwell proved allergic to it. Nevertheless, by May his health was improving and he was getting a little stronger. He thought ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ was important enough to devote time and energy to making final revisions to it even though he knew the essay could not be published for many years for fear of libel actions. He also started the second draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four. He wrote several essays, including one on an author he greatly admired, George Gissing. It was intended for Politics and Letters but that failed before the essay could be published. It finally appeared in the London Magazine ten years after Orwell’s death.

Orwell’s thoughts were very much at Barnhill and with Richard. He was terrified that contact with his son could entail his passing on his TB. From the references in his letters it is clear that he closely followed Richard’s development. He also describes the Christmas they had had at Barnhill, glad to have got away before the day so that he was not ‘a death’s head’, and contrasts the inevitably hollow jollity of Christmas in hospital. He suffered the painful treatment he underwent, dreading it but never complaining: ‘we all noticed how much self-control he had’, as one of the surgeons put it.

Although very much the invalid, he was able to enjoy a final few months at Barnhill, but was too weak to make even slight exertions – apart, that is, from slogging away at Nineteen Eighty-Four. By early November he had finished the final draft and hoped that a typist could be induced to come to Barnhill to produce a fair copy of what the facsimile shows was a very much altered and overwritten text. But no one could be found to make the journey and Orwell suffered agonies typing the final copies (a very difficult task on a mechanical typewriter, with carbon copies to make and correct). Much of the time he typed in bed. By 4^th December the final copies were completed and he posted them to Leonard Moore, his literary agent, for Warburg and for consideration in the USA. He was by now very ill indeed, but not so ill that he could not take Roger Senhouse to task for his proposed blurb for the book: it was not, as Senhouse seemed to suggest, ‘a thriller mixed up with a love story’. The year ended with his arranging to go to a private sanatorium and, almost as significantly, giving up his lease on his flat in Canonbury Square, Islington.

From Orwell’s letter to his mother, 1 December 1912

To Gwen O’ Shaughnessy*

1 January 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Gwen,

I thought you’d like to hear how I was getting on. I believe Mr Dick* sent you a line about my case. As soon as he listened to me he said I had a fairly extensive cavity in the left lung, & also a small patch at the top of the other lung—this, I think, the old one I had before. The X-ray confirms this, he says. I have now been here nearly a fortnight, & the treatment they are giving me is to put the left lung out of action, apparently for about 6 months, which is supposed to give it a better chance to heal.1 They first crushed the phrenic nerve, which I gather is what makes the lung expand & contract, & then pumped air into the diaphragm, which I understand is to push the lung into a different position & get it away from some kind of movement which occurs automatically. I have to have ‘refills’ of air in the diaphragm every few days but I think later it gets down to once a week or less. For the rest, I am still really very ill & weak, & on getting here I found I had lost 1½ stone, but I have felt better since being here, don’t sweat at night like I used & have more appetite. They make me eat a tremendous lot. At present I am not allowed out of bed because apparently one has to get adjusted to having the extra air inside. It is a nice hospital & everyone is extremely kind to me. I have also got a room to myself, but I don’t know whether that will be permanent. I have of course done no work for 2–3 months, but I think I may be equal to some light work soon & I am arranging to do a little book-reviewing.

Richard was tremendously well when I came away. After I was certain what was wrong with me I tried to keep him out of my room, but of course couldn’t do so entirely. When Avril goes up to London in Jan. or Feb. to do some shopping I am going to take the opportunity of having Richard thoroughly examined to make sure he is O.K. We boiled his milk ever since you warned us, but of course one can forget sometimes. I am trying to buy a T B.-tested cow, & I think we are on the track of one now. With Bill Dunn in the house it is easier about animals, as he is going to pay part of his board by looking after our cows, which means that at need we can go away. I must say Richard doesn’t look very T.B, but I would like to be sure. I think they had quite a good Christmas at Barnhill. There were 4 of them including Richard, & there was a nice goose we bought off the Kopps. I was glad to get away before Xmas so as not to be a death’s head. I am afraid I didn’t write any Xmas letters or anything & it’s now a bit late even for New Year wishes. I hope by the summer I shall be well enough to go back to Barnhill for a bit & you & the kids will come again. Maybe there’ll be a pony to ride this time—we have got one at present but he is only borrowed. They had a New Year party for the patients here, all the beds dragged into one ward & there were singers & a conjuror. I hope you had a good Christmas. Love to the kids.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3324, pp. 247–8; handwritten]

1. In Remembering Orwell, pp. 197–8, Professor James Williamson, who was a junior doctor in the Thoracic Unit at Hairmyres Hospital when Orwell was a patient, describes Orwell’s condition and treatment:

It was a fairly trivial operation: you could do it in five minutes. You just pull the muscle aside, expose the nerve, and tweak it with a pair of forceps. The patient would get one sudden pain, and the diaphragm would jump, and that was the diaphragm paralysed for three to six months, until the nerve recovered again. Then we pumped air into his abdomen. The diaphragm was pushed up by this, and the lungs were collapsed. You put anything from four hundred to seven hundred cc of air in, under low pressure, with a special machine, through a needle which was a fairly elephantine-looking thing, a hollow needle about three inches long, actually. The first time you did it, you used a local anesthetic,° because you had to go very cautiously and advance it very slowly. But after that you just stuck it in, because patients agreed that if it was done expertly, one sharp jab was better than all this fiddling about with anesthetics and things.

I remember he used to dread each ‘refill’ and couldn’t relax at all when he was on the table. But he never complained. In fact we all noticed how much self-control he had. There was never a gasp, or any kind of noise from him when we did this.

I don’t think he would ever have been terribly infectious. The person who is highly infectious is the person who is coughing a lot, whose sputum has a lot of TB bacilli in it. He wasn’t coughing a lot, nor was his sputum, as I remember it, terribly strongly positive. But he would still be a potential danger to other people, particularly to young people like his son.

Most patients made much use of sputum mugs but Orwell’s tuberculosis was not of that kind, and Williamson did not recall his having a sputum mug on his bedside locker: ‘Mind you, I don’t think there was any room for anything on his bedside locker because there were always books everywhere.’

To Julian Symons*

2 January 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Julian,

Thanks ever so for sending the pen, which as you see I’m using. Of course it’ll do just as well as a Biro & I prefer the colour of the ink. My other was just on its last legs & you can’t use ink in bed.

I think I’m getting a bit better. I don’t feel quite so deathlike & am eating a lot more. They stuff food into me all the time here. I don’t know whether my weight is going up, because I’m kept strictly in bed at this stage of the treatment. They have put the affected lung out of action, which involves pumping air into one’s diaphragm. I have this done every few days. It’s a nice hospital & everyone is very kind to me. I was recommended to come here by my London chest specialist, & did so rather than go to London simply to avoid the long journey. It wasn’t much fun coming even here in that state, but I could do most of it by car. It’s funny you always think Scotland must be cold. The west part isn’t colder than England, & the islands I should think decidedly warmer on average, though probably the summer isn’t so hot. When I’m well enough to leave hospital I shall have to continue with this air-pumping business, so shall stay either in Glasgow or London for some months & just dodge up to Jura when I can. I have arranged things fairly well there. We, ie. my sister & I, have the house, & a young chap who lost a foot in the war & is taking up farming lives with us & farms the croft. Another friend of mine acts as a sort of sleeping partner,1 financing the croft & coming to help at the busy times. So I don’t have bad conscience about living in a farmhouse & keeping someone else off the land, & at the same time can go away whenever I want to as our animals will be looked after in our absence. I’m just going to embark on cows, just one or two, because I’m in terror of Richard getting this disease & the safest thing is to have a T.T cow. I’m also going to get him thoroughly examined when my sister goes up to London. Of course I kept him off me once I was certain what was wrong with me, but he has certainly been exposed to infection. He has got such a splendid physique & I don’t want him to wreck it.

About book reviewing. I had no thoughts of going back to the M[anchester] E[vening] News. I am merely arranging to do a review once a fortnight for the Observer, & I think I shall try & fix one once a fortnight for someone else, as I’m probably up to doing one article a week now. I think that shows I’m better, as I couldn’t have contemplated that a few weeks ago. I can’t do any serious work—I never can do in bed, even when I feel well. I can’t show you the part-finished novel. I never show them to anybody, because they are just a mess & don’t have much relationship to the final draft. I always say a book doesn’t exist until it is finished. I am glad you finished the life of your brother.2 It is such a ghastly effort ever to finish a book nowadays.

I agree with you about Tribune, though I think it’s probably Fyvel* rather than Kimche³ who is responsible for the over-emphasis on Zionism. They would have done better when Labour got in to label themselves frankly a government organ, a. because in all major matters they are in agreement with the government, b. because Labour has no weekly paper definitely faithful to it & is in fact on the defensive so far as the press goes. The evil genius of the paper has I think been Crossman,⁴ who influences it through Foot & Fyvel. Crossman & the rest of that gang thought they saw an opening for themselves in squealing about foreign policy, which in the circumstances was bound to go badly, & so Tribune has been in the position of coming down on the side of the government whenever there is a major issue, eg. conscription, & at the same time trying to look fearfully left by raising an outcry about Greece etc. I really think I prefer the Zilliacus lot, since after all they do have a policy, ie. to appease Russia. I started writing an open letter to Tribune about this, but was taken ill before I finished it.⁵ I particularly hate that trick of sucking up to the left cliques by perpetually attacking America while relying on America to feed & protect us. I even get letters from American university students asking why Tribune is always going for the USA & in such an ignorant way.

Well, this is quite a long letter. So my thanks again for sending the pen. I’ll send my old Biro sometime when I’ve got a bit of paper & perhaps you’d be kind enough to get it refilled. My best respects to your wife.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3325, pp. 249–51; handwritten]

1. Bill Dunn* and Sir Richard Rees*.

2. A. J. A. Symons: His Life and Speculations (1950).

3. Jon Kimche (1909–1994), author and journalist, was acting editor of Tribune, 1942– 46, editor, 1946–1948; and editor of the Jewish Observer, 1952–67. He and Orwell worked together at Booklovers’ Corner, 1934–35. He contributes several reminiscences to Remembering Orwell.

4. R. H. S. Crossman (1907–1974), scholar, journalist, and left-wing politician (Labour MP, 1945–55); assistant editor of the New Statesman, 1938–55. Strenuous efforts were made to stop the publication of his political diaries (4 vols., 1975–81).

5. Konni Zilliacus (1894–1967), left-wing Labour MP, 1945–50 and 1955–67. He was frequently at odds with the Labour Party because of his extreme pro-Soviet opinions and was expelled in 1949. (See Orwell’s ‘In Defence of Comrade Ziliacus’, XIX, 3254, pp. 179–84.)

To George Woodcock*

4 January 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear George,

I’d been meaning to write for some time to explain I wouldn’t be coming down to London after all. As I feared, I am seriously ill, T.B. in the left lung. I’ve only been in the hospital about a fortnight, but before that I was in bed at home for about 2 months. I’m likely to be here for some time, because the treatment, which involves putting the lung out of action, is a slow one, & in any case I’m so pulled down & weak that I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed for a couple of months or so. However, they seem confident they can patch me up all right, & I have felt a bit less like death since being here. It’s a nice hospital & everyone is very kind. With luck I may be out for the summer & then I think I’ll try & get a correspondent’s job somewhere warm next winter. I have [had] this disease before, but not so badly, & I’m pretty sure it was the cold of last winter that started me off.1

I hope the F.D.C.² is doing something about these constant demands to outlaw Mosley & Co. Tribune’s attitude I think has been shameful, & when the other week Zilliacus wrote in demanding what amounts to Fascist legislation & creation of 2nd-class citizens, nobody seems to have replied. The whole thing is simply a thinly-disguised desire to persecute someone who can’t hit back, as obviously the Mosley lot don’t matter a damn & can’t get a real mass following. I think it’s a case for a pamphlet, & I only wish I felt well enough to write one. The central thing one has [to] come to terms with is the argument, always advanced by those advocating repressive legislation, that ‘you cannot allow democracy to be used to overthrow democracy—you cannot allow freedom to those who merely use it in order to destroy freedom’. This of course is true, & both Fascists & Communists do aim at making use of democracy in order to destroy it. But if you carry this to its conclusion, there can be no case for allowing any political or intellectual freedom whatever. Evidently therefore it is a matter of distinguishing between a real & a merely theoretical threat to democracy, & no one should be persecuted for expressing his opinions, however anti-social, & no political organisation suppressed, unless it can be shown that there is a substantial threat to the stability of the state. That is the main point I should make any way. Of course there are many others.

I’ve done no work whatever for 2–3 months. In this place I couldn’t do serious work even if I felt well, but I intend shortly to start doing an occasional book review, as I think I’m equal to that & I might as well earn some money. Richard was blooming when I came away, but I’m going to have him thoroughly examined, as he has of course been subjected to infection. All the best to Inge.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3329, pp. 254–5; handwritten]

1. When snow began to fall on 24 January 1947 it was the start of the bitterest cold experienced in the UK in the twentieth century. It led, for example, to electricity cuts for five hours a day, suspension of the Third Programme and TV, cuts in radio transmission and suspension of many journals coupled with paper rationing, and an increase in unemployment from 400,000 in mid January to 1,750,000. (See David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (2007; pb, 2008, pp. 189–200).

2. The Freedom Defence Committee, of which Orwell was vice-chairman; George Woodcock, secretary; and Herbert Read, chairman. The FDC’s Bulletins for Spring and Autumn 1948 (Nos. 6 and 7), though reporting efforts to help other unpopular causes—deserters, Polish ‘recalcitrants’ (its quotes), Dr Allan Nunn May, and Norman Baillie-Stewart (a British Fascist) – make no mention of ‘Mosley & Co’.

To Helmut Klöse

12 January 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Klöse,¹

I am ashamed I have not written earlier to thank you for those apples you sent, also for your long letter of advice about the tractors. But as I dare say you know I have been seriously ill for about 3 months. It is TB of the left lung. I was brought to this hospital some weeks ago, & I am glad to say I am feeling definitely better. Of course I’m frightfully weak & have lost a great deal of weight, but I don’t feel sick & giddy all the time as I did at first, & have got some appetite back. I imagine I shall be under treatment for a long time, as it is a slow cure which involves disabling the defective lung so as to let it heal without having to work. However they seem quite confident of being able to patch me up, & they say this disease is not so dangerous at my age as if I was younger. Of course I’ve done not a stroke of work for months past, but I am going to start doing a little book-reviewing soon.

In your letter you were inclined to think the BMB was the best light tractor. However, after getting all the specifications from a firm which deals in these tractors, I finally decided on the one you told me of first, the Iron Horse. From the photographs I thought it was a bit more solidly constructed than the other, which would be an advantage in a place like Jura, & also you can hitch horse-drawn implements on to it, which would be a great help because one could then use it for cutting the hay & even the oats. It also has a 5-cwt trailer which would be useful for potatoes, manure & so on. I am getting a circular saw, but I believe at present it’s almost impossible to get blades. I will take your advice & not try to run a dynamo off the tractor. Actually we find we can light the house quite satisfactorily with paraffin lamps. We use the Tilly incandescent lamps which are very powerful & don’t use much oil.

Karl2 & David Astor* came & visited me here yesterday, bringing loads of food with them. It was very kind of them to make the long uncomfortable journey. The weather has turned absolutely filthy, snow & fog alternating, making me quite glad to be in bed. There was marvellous weather in Jura all the time before I came away, brilliant sunshine on the snow & the sea as blue & smooth as the Mediterranean. The average winter temperature there is very mild & the grass seems to be quite nourishing up till about Christmas. The blackfaced sheep remain out all the winter without being fed, & the highland cattle can get through the winter without feeding, though of course it’s better to feed them.

My little boy, now 3½, is getting enormous. We are trying to get hold of an attested cow so as to make sure that he doesn’t get this disease of mine. I hope I shall see you again some time.

Yours

Geo. Orwell

[XIX, 3330, pp. 255–6; handwritten]

1. Helmut Klöse was described by Orwell as ‘the German anarchist who was on the same part of the front as me in Spain and was imprisoned for a long time by the Communists’. He would later visit Orwell in Cranham Sanatorium. Orwell usually omits the umlaut; it is added silently here.

2. Karl Schnetzler (see 1.3.39, n. 1 and 9.4.46 to Inez Holden, n. 2).

To Celia Kirwan*

20 January 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dearest Celia,

How delightful to get your nice long letter. I’ve been here about a month after being ill for about two months at home. I thought I’d told you what was wrong with me. It is TB, which of course was bound to get me sooner or later, in fact I’ve had it before, though not so badly. However I don’t think it is very serious, & I seem to be getting better slowly. I don’t feel so death like as I did a month ago, & I now eat quite a lot & have started to gain weight slowly, after losing nearly 2 stone. Today when I was X-rayed the doctor said he could see definite improvement. But I’m likely to be here a long time, as it’s a slow treatment, & I don’t think I shall even be fit to get out of bed for about 2 months. Richard is tremendously well & growing enormous. Of course I’m going to have him thoroughly examined when Avril takes him up to London shortly, but by the look of him I don’t think he’s caught this disease. I was very glad to be able to get away just before Christmas, so as not to be a death’s head. There were 4 of them at Barnhill & a nice fat goose & plenty to drink, so I expect they had quite a good Christmas. This is the second Christmas I’ve spent in hospital.1 It’s always rather harrowing, with the ‘parties’ they have—all the beds dragged into one ward, & then a concert & a Christmas tree. This is a very nice hospital & everyone is most kind to me, & I have a room to myself. I’m starting to attempt a very little work, ie. an occasional book review, after doing nothing for 3 months.

Yes, I remember the Deux Magots.² I think I saw James Joyce there in 1928, but I’ve never quite been able to swear to that because J. was not of very distinctive appearance. I also went there to meet Camus who was supposed to have lunch with me, but he was ill & didn’t come. I suppose Paris has cheered up a bit since I was there at the beginning of 1945. It was too gloomy for words then, & of course it was almost impossible to get anything to eat & drink, & everybody was so shabby & pale. But I can’t believe it is what it used to be. It’s lucky for you you’re too young to have seen it in the ’twenties, it always seemed a bit ghostlike after that, even before the war. I don’t know when I’ll see France again, as at present one can’t travel because of this currency business,³ but if one of my books did strike it lucky I’d get them to keep some of the francs in France so that I could go & spend them. If I’m cured & about by then as I assume I shall be, I am going to try & wangle a correspondent’s job this winter so as to winter in a warm place. The winter of 1946–7 in London was really a bit too thick, & I think it was probably what started me on this show. In Jura it’s a bit better, because it isn’t quite so cold & we get more coal, also more food, but it’s a bit awkward if one needs medical attention at a time when one can’t get to the mainland. Early last year my sister dislocated her arm & was nearly drowned going across to the doctor in a tiny motor boat. Inez [Holden]* exaggerated our later adventure a bit, but we did have a very nasty accident in the famous whirlpool of Corrievrechan^o (which comes into a film called I know where I’m going) & were lucky not to be drowned. The awful thing was having Richard with us, however he loved every moment of it except when we were in the water. I think Jura is doing him good except that he doesn’t see enough of other children & therefore is still very backward in talking. Otherwise he is most enterprising & full of energy, & is out working on the farm all day long. It’s nice to be able to let him roam about with no traffic to be afraid of. Write again if you get time. I love getting letters.

With much love

George

[XIX, 3332, pp. 257–8; handwritten]

1. The first time was when Orwell went into Uxbridge Cottage Hospital just before Christmas 1933 with pneumonia.

2. The Café aux Deux Magots, much frequented by writers, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

3. At the end of August 1947, because of the grave financial crisis, the Labour government reduced food rations, and banned pleasure motoring and holidays abroad. Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister, said, ‘I have no easy words for the nation. I cannot say when we shall emerge into easier times.’ On 29 September, the Midlands was deprived of power for one day a week to cut fuel costs. On 9 October 1947, to reduce foreign indebtedness, especially in dollars, the government cut the bacon ration to one ounce a week. The following month the potato ration was cut to 3 pounds a week.

To Eugene Reynal

28 January 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Mr. Reynal,¹

I must thank you very kindly for the food parcel which you so kindly sent me & which reached me here about a week ago. It was a very pleasant surprise. I was particularly thrilled to find in it a tin of olive oil, a thing we have not seen for years.

I expect Leonard Moore told you I was ill, as I asked him to let anyone in the USA with whom I had any connections know I should be out of action for some months. It is TB of the left lung. I have been ill for three months or more, but actually I think ever since that vile winter of 1946–47. I feel better & I think I have just about turned the corner, but the cure is a slow one at best. Of course I can’t do any serious work till I’m in good health, but I am beginning to do just a little journalism. After months of idleness, I’m afraid my handwriting is getting a bit funny, but that is because I have my right arm in plaster2 & haven’t got used to this yet.

Thank you so much again.

Yours sincerely,

George Orwell

[XIX, 3335, p. 260; handwritten copy]

1. Of Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, publishers of Dickens, Dali & Others (1946).

2. Why Orwell’s arm was in plaster is not known. He was confined to bed so could hardly have fallen. However, the phrenic nerve, crushed as part of the procedure described in his letter to his sister (see 1.1.48), affects the arms, and it might have been related to that.

To David Astor*

1 February 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear David,

Thanks so much for your letter. Before anything else I must tell you of something Dr Dick* has just said to me.

He says I am getting on quite well, but slowly, & it would speed recovery if one had some streptomycin (streptomycin).¹ This is only obtainable in the USA, & because of dollars the B.O.T.² (or whoever it is) won’t normally grant a licence. One can however buy it there if one has some dollars. He suggested that you with your American connections might arrange to buy it & I could pay you. He wants 70 grammes, & it costs about £1 a gramme. I would be awfully obliged if you could put this transaction through for me, as no doubt you can do it quicker than I could myself. There is no twist or illegality about this, Dr Dick says, & the stuff is not difficult to send. I suppose it will mean paying out about 300 dollars. If you want to be repaid in dollars, I think I have enough, as I had started building up a reserve of dollars in the US, otherwise I can pay you in sterling. I must in either case pay you, as it is a considerable sum & of course the hospital can’t pay it.

I received from McIntyre3 a parcel of butter & eggs, & he told me you had instructed him to send this weekly. It is awfully kind, but I am going to ask him not to send the eggs, as I can’t use them in those numbers & I expect the hens aren’t laying too well now. I know ours at Barnhill are still doing very badly. I feel we ought to pay for Bob if we have him 10 months of the year— however. He only gets hay in the winter—of course he’d get oats if he were doing harder work—but he was in excellent condition when I came away. Our new cow has just arrived & my sister can’t leave until it has calved. I’m afraid my writing is awful, but I have my arm in plaster. It’s much better that way, as it doesn’t hurt but it is awkward for certain purposes such as writing & eating. I also have to shave left-handed. Dr Dick says he will write to you. I suppose it will be best to have the drug sent to him. His correct designation is Mr Bruce Dick.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3337, pp. 262–3; handwritten]

1. Streptomycin was discovered in the United States in 1944 and was at this time being tested in Britain by the Medical Research Council.

2. Board of Trade, which controlled imports, and at this time refused to allow as many as it could, especially if payment was in dollars.

3. Presumably one of the Astor estate staff on Jura.

To Fredric Warburg*

4 February 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Fred,

Thanks so much for your letter.¹ As you inferred, my beginning to do articles in the Observer is a sign of partial revival, though even that is an effort, especially as I now have my right arm in plaster. I can’t attempt any serious work while I am like this (1½ stone under weight) but I like to do a little to keep my hand in & incidentally earn some money. I’ve been definitely ill since about October, & really, I think, since the beginning of 1947. I believe that frightful winter in London started it off. I didn’t really feel well all last year except during that hot period in the summer. Before taking to my bed I had finished the rough draft of my novel all save the last few hundred words, & if I had been well I might have finished it by about May. If I’m well & out of here by June, I might finish it by the end of the year—I don’t know. It is just a ghastly mess as it stands, but the idea is so good that I could not possibly abandon it. If anything should happen to me I’ve instructed Richard Rees, my literary executor, to destroy the Ms. without showing it to anybody, but it’s unlikely that anything like that would happen. This disease isn’t dangerous at my age, & they say the cure is going on quite well, though slowly. Part of the cure is to put the affected lung out of action for six months, which gives it a better chance to heal. We are now sending for some new American drug called streptomycin which they say will speed up the cure.

Richard is getting enormous & is very forward in everything except talking. I’m going to have him thoroughly examined when my sister goes up to town, but I really don’t think he’s T.B. to judge by the look of him. It’s sad that I can’t see him again till I’m non-infectious. Please remember me to Pamela and Roger.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3339, pp. 264–5; handwritten]

1. Warburg wrote to Orwell on 2 February 1948 saying that Orwell’s review of India Called Them by Lord Beveridge in the Observer (1 February, XIX, 3336, pp. 261–2), ‘gave me heart to write and enquire how you are getting on’. He said there was nothing they needed to consult about but he would be greatly cheered by ‘a line, however brief, as to how you are and how soon you hope to come out of that wretched hospital’.

To David Astor*

Monday [9 February 1948]

Dear David,

Just a hurried note to say thanks awfully your seeing about the streptomycin. Meanwhile you’ll have had a telegram¹ which crossed your letter & which I hope you didn’t bother to answer. Just having heard I got time to ring up last night, & as you were down in the country I then wired, as I did think it conceivable my original letter hadn’t gone off. We get them posted in a rather sketchy way here.

Of course I must pay you for the stuff. But I’ll try & think of something else you’d like, or your little girl.

I’ve just heard the Darrochs2 are ‘definitely leaving’ Kinuachdrach[d], but I still can’t find out what the row was about. It’s a sad business after D.D. has broken his back reclaiming the farm, & awkward for the Fletchers³ too. However, they’ll have to get another tenant if only to look after their cattle.

All well here. They pump me so full of air once a week that I feel like a balloon for two days afterwards.

Yours,

George

[XIX, 3342, pp. 265–6; handwritten]

1. Not traced.

2. Donald Darroch and his sister, Katie, had a croft a mile or so from Barnhill at Kinuachdrachd. Orwell went there every day for milk until he bought a cow. He and Donald, who worked on a profit-sharing basis with Orwell’s laird, Robin Fletcher, were very friendly. Donald and Katie are very frequently mentioned in Orwell’s diaries. In Remembering Orwell (pp. 174–5) Katie contributes a brief but telling memoir. She describes Orwell as ‘cheery and happy in his own way’ – and a great fan of her scones!

3. Robin Fletcher inherited the Ardlussa Estate some eight miles south of Barnhill. He had formerly been a housemaster at Eton. He and his wife, Margaret, set about restoring the estate and developing crofting. Margaret in Orwell Remembered (pp. 225–9) vividly describes Orwell: ‘how ill, how terribly ill, he looked – and drawn: a sad face he had … I think he very much missed his wife … He was devoted to Richard.’

To David Astor*

Saturday [14 February 1948]¹

Dear David,

Did you really not want the pens? They’re very useful, as my Biro was out of action & also lost, & my Rollball not functioning very well. This is yours I’m writing with.

The Van Gogh exhibition apparently begins on the 21st.

I’d certainly love to come down to your Abingdon place in the summer for a weekend, if I’m about by then. It would be lovely having the river at your door. Probably in June or July there’d be good fishing, dace & chub. The Thames fishing can be quite good. I caught some good fish at Eton, but hardly anybody outside College knew the place, as it was in the backwater joining on College field.

I still haven’t got to the bottom of the row at Kinuachdrach[d], but I gather it was between Bill & Donald. I assume Donald won’t leave immediately. The Fletchers are advertising for another tenant. They’ll have to have someone to look after their herd of Highlands.

By the way, I think you said poor old Niel° Darroch might want to sell his boat—do you remember whether it was petrol or paraffin?

Yours

George

[XIX, 3344, p. 267; handwritten]

1. Dated only ‘Sat.’ The Van Gogh Exhibition opened at the Tate Gallery, London, on 10 December 1947 and ran to 14 January 1948; it visited Birmingham, 24 January to 14 February 1948, and Glasgow—near where Orwell was in hospital—20 February to 14 March 1948. This letter is so fresh with hope that it must surely have been written before the course of streptomycin began: that, he would write to Middleton Murry on 20 February 1948, had ‘just started’. Saturday, 14 February, is, therefore, the most likely date for this letter. That must place the next letter, here dated 16.2.48, to that particular Monday.

To David Astor*

Monday [16 February 1948]

Dear David,

I’ve had 2 letters from you today. I’ll take the business one first. I’m perfectly willing to do the reviews for the U.S., in fact I’d like it, as they will probably want them rather longer than yours, & I prefer that. I presume that they will be for papers more or less on a level with the Observer & similar in tone. The only caveat is, that I might have a relapse or something, & any way I can only do about 2 hours work each day. They will be starting with the streptomycin soon, & though I don’t suppose so, it may have unpleasant effects, like M. & B.¹ But anyway, up to capacity I’ll certainly do the reviews.

As to the streptomycin. Thanks awfully for getting it on the wing so quickly.² I suppose it will get here in only a few days. If you really don’t want to be paid for it O. K., I won’t press it. But I really could easily have paid, not only in £s but even in dollars, because I remember now, I have at least 500 lying by in New York. I don’t need [to] tell you I am grateful. Let’s hope it does its stuff. I gather they aren’t very satisfied with my case at present. I haven’t gained weight for 2 weeks, & I have a feeling I am getting weaker, though mentally I am more alert. Dr Dick* seems anxious to start in with the strepto as early as possible.

I’m sorry A[rthur] K[oestler]* has blown up. He’s a bit temperamental. I thought his fi[rst] despatch from France was very good. The ‘London Letters’ he has been doing in P[artisan] R[eview] are shocking & I have been meaning to have a row with him about them—just one long squeal about basic petrol3 etc.

I’ll let you know how the strepto goes.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3349, p. 272; handwritten]

1. May and Baker, manufacturers of pharmaceuticals; their initials were a shorthand means of referring to sulphonamides.

2. David Astor wrote to Dr Dick* on 19 February 1948 thanking him for encouraging Orwell to get the streptomycin and offering to help in getting anything else that would aid Orwell’s recovery. He made it clear that he wished to pay for any drugs that would help and said he was ‘in communication with Blair on this’ and trying to convince him to accept help. He asked Dick not to discuss payment with Orwell, ‘as I think the only possibility of persuading him to be reasonable is that it should be a very private matter between him and me.’ He could make another visit to Hairmyres Hospital, he said, ‘this coming Sunday [22 February] or on Sunday, 7th March’, the latter being slightly more convenient. Was Orwell doing too much work, he asked; he could either increase or decrease it as would prove desirable.

3. ‘Basic’ petrol was the amount allowed before supplements for special purposes were added. Writing to Anthony Powell on 8 March (XIX, 3360, p. 283) Orwell said he was allowed six gallons of petrol a month and that his car did only ten miles to the gallon ‘on a highland road’.

To Ivor Brown*

20 February 1948

Hairmyres Hosp.

Dear Ivor Brown,

I’m sorry, but it was an awful book.¹ It had all the marks of an amateur’s writing, everything jammed in indiscriminately, a sort of matey facetious manner that failed to come off, & a most irritating trick of giving everything its Faeroese name, which meant one had to look up the glossary every few lines. Its only merit was that it was informative about a little-known subject, which I think I indicated. Linklater’s introduction didn’t impress me as sincere. I thought of saying that the book was stodgy, or heavy going, or words to that effect, but didn’t want to be unkind to an amateur.

I am not prepared to give praise on literary grounds to books of this type. One sinks one’s standards below zero by pretending that they exist in a literary sense at all. This kind of book (eg.° another you have sent me, about caves in France2) are simply bits of topography, or travel diary set down by people who have no idea how to select or to write, & they get boosted because of local patriotism. If one is to review them, I do not see what we can do except to give an exposition.³

Yours sincerely

George Orwell

[XX, 3351A, p. 564; handwritten]

1. On 18 February 1948, an unsigned letter from Ivor Brown of the Observer questioned Orwell about the review he had submitted of Kenneth Williamson’s The Atlantic Islands. He had noted that high claims had been made for the book and that Eric Linklater ‘puts it very high’. Orwell, he said, had taken no line at all about the book but merely reported what Williamson said. Readers, publishers and authors ‘like to see signs of enthusiasm and encouragement for good work, if it is good’. He himself had not read Williamson’s book. He asked Orwell if he could ‘give a bit more colour to your notice of it should you feel this is justified’. Eric Linklater (Robert Russell; 1899–1974), Scottish novelist (Juan in America, 1931), who wrote several war pamphlets (e.g., The Highland Division, 1942). Orwell’s review appeared on 29 February 1948 (XIX, 3356, pp. 277–8).

2. My Caves by Norbert Casteret reviewed 14 March 1948 (XIX, 3356, pp. 283–4).

3. Ivor Brown replied on 24 February saying he quite understood how Orwell felt.

To John Middleton Murry*

5 March 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Murry,

Thanks very much for the book,¹ which I read with interest. I agree with your general thesis, but I think that in assessing the world situation it is very rash to assume that the rest of the world would combine against Russia. We have a fearful handicap in the attitude towards us of the coloured races, & the under-privileged peoples generally (eg. in S. America), which we possibly don’t deserve any longer but which we have inherited from our imperial past. I also think it is rash to assume that most orientals, or indeed any except a few westernised ones, would prefer democracy to totalitarianism. It seems to me that the great difficulty of our position is that in the coming showdown we must have the peoples of Africa & the Middle East—if possible of Asia too, of course—on our side, & they will all look towards Russia unless there is a radical change of attitude, especially in the USA. I doubt whether we can put things right in Africa, at least in some parts of it, without quite definitely siding with the blacks against the whites. The latter will then look [to] the USA for support, & they will get it. It can easily turn out that we & America are alone, with all the coloured peoples siding with Russia. Perhaps even then we could win a war against Russia, but only by laying the world in ruins, especially this country.

I’m sorry to hear about your illness. My own seems to be getting better rapidly. They can’t say yet whether the streptomycin is doing its stuff, but I certainly have been a lot better the last week or so. I imagine however that I shall be in bed for another month or two, & under treatment at any rate until the summer. The lung has been collapsed, which is supposed to give it a better chance to heal, but of course it takes a long time, & meanwhile they have to keep on pumping air into one’s diaphragm. Fortunately this is a very nice hospital & very well run. Everyone is extraordinarily kind to me. It is sad I cannot see my little boy until I am non-infectious, however he will be able to come & visit me when I am allowed out of doors. He is getting on for 4 & growing enormously, though he is a bit backward about talking, because we live in such a solitary spot that he doesn’t see enough of other children. I have got our place in Jura running pretty well now. I myself couldn’t farm the land that went with the house, but a young chap who was wounded in the war lives with us & farms it. We are pretty well found there, & better off for fuel & food than one is in London. The winters also are not quite so cold, funnily enough. The chief difficulties are that in bad weather one is sometimes cut off from the mainland, & that one is chronically short of petrol. However one can use a horse if one is obliged to. Of course I have to go up to London occasionally, but the journey only takes 24 hours, less if one flies. I was half way through a novel when I took to my bed. It ought to have been finished by May—possibly I might finish it by the end of 1948 if I get out of here by the summer.

Please remember me to your wife.

Yours sincerely

Geo. Orwell

[XIX, 3358, pp. 279–80; handwritten]

1. The Free Society. In this Murry comes close to approving war against the Soviet Union, contrary to his long-held pacifist views and hence E.L. Allen’s Pacifism and the Free Society: A Reply to John Middleton Murry (1948).

To Dwight Macdonald*

7 March 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Dwight,

Thanks so much for sending me your book on Wallace, which I have read with the greatest interest. Have you done anything about finding an English publisher? In case you haven’t, I am writing to Victor Gollancz bringing the book to his attention.¹ If you’re not already in touch with some other publisher, I would write to Gollancz & send him a copy. In spite of the awful paper shortage etc., the book should find a publisher here, as people are naturally interested in Wallace, as the man who is likely to cause ‘our’ candidate to lose the election.² (It’s difficult to keep up with American politics here, but it does look as though Wallace is making great strides lately. I’m afraid he may get the whole anti-war vote, as Chamberlain did before the war.) And I think Gollancz is your man, as he is politically sympathetic & is able to bring a book out quickly, as Warburg, for instance, can’t. I suppose you know his address—17 Henrietta St. Covent Garden, London WC.2. The book might do with some minor modifications for the English public, but you could fix all that with G.

There’s another instance of Wallace’s habit of issuing garbled versions of his speeches, which might be worth putting in. When he was over here, Wallace of course played down the Palestine issue, or at least didn’t make mischief about it. He was no sooner in France than he referred to the Jewish terrorists as a ‘maquis’ fighting against a British occupation. This appeared in French reports of his speech, but not in any English-language paper (except one, I think the Christian Science Monitor, which somehow got hold of it), presumably having been cut out from versions issued to them. The Manchester Guardian documented the facts at the time.

As you see I’m in hospital. [Reference to illness omitted.] I’m starting my uniform edition this year & shall start off by reprinting a novel which was published in 1939 & rather killed by the war. I believe Harcourt Brace are going to reprint my Burma novel. They were BFs not to do so immediately after having that bit of luck with Animal Farm.

What’s happened to Politics? I haven’t seen it for months. I told my agent in New York to take out a subscription for me, but she seemed rather reluctant to do so, evidently thinking I ought to get all the American papers free.

Isn’t it funny how surprised everyone seems over this Czechoslovakia business?3 Many people seem really angry with Russia, as though at some time there had been reason to expect different behaviour on the Russians’ part. Middleton Murry has just renounced his pacifism & written a book (practically) demanding a preventive war against the USSR! This after writing less than 10 years ago that ‘Russia is the only inherently peaceful country.’

Excuse bad handwriting

Yours

Geo. Orwell

[XIX, 3359, pp. 281–2; handwritten]

1. Letter not traced.

2. In the 1948 election Henry Wallace (see 5.12.46, n. 6) was a candidate of the left-wing Progressive Party, which received over one million popular votes. Thomas E. Dewey was expected to win the election (and a famous headline prematurely showed him as doing so), but Truman won with a two-million majority of the popular vote.

3. On 27 February 1948, Klement Gottwald (1896–1953), Communist Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, announced that the resignation of twelve centre and right-wing ministers had been accepted by President Edvard Beneš (although a week earlier Beneš had stated that there would be no Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia). Jan Masaryk (son of Czechoslovakia’s ‘founding father’) remained Foreign Minister, and attention (and hopes) were focused on him as the means whereby a total victory for the Communists might be averted. However, on 10 March 1948 he was found dead in the courtyard beneath his flat in Prague. The Communist line was that Masaryk had committed suicide in ‘a moment of nervous breakdown’. Those who opposed the Communist takeover, which had become complete, interpreted his death as murder.

To Leonard Moore*

19 March 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Moore,

Thank you for your letter. I didn’t object to the jacket, & it had ‘Uniform Edition’ on it, which I wanted to make sure of. But I did think the light green cover was unsuitable & asked Warburg whether he could manage to change the cloth for something darker.1 I favour dark blue, or any dark colour except red, which always seems to come off on one’s fingers. I thought the format was all right. Of course the price is fearful for a reprint, but I suppose subsequent volumes need not be so expensive.

I see that Burmese Days is supposed to come out in the same edition only a few months later. I believe the Penguin edition is still in print, as you sent me an account of sales recently. I suppose the Penguin people won’t print many more, otherwise it may damage the Warburg edition.

Warburg suggested that I should bring out another volume of essays in the fairly near future. I think it would be better not to do this for another 2–3 years, as people feel rather cheated if they buy a book & find it contains things which they have read in magazines only a year or so earlier.

Yours sincerely

Eric Blair

[XIX, 3362, pp. 285–6; handwritten]

1. Fredric Warburg had visited Orwell, probably on 10 March, bringing a specimen binding case (or cloth) for the Uniform Edition. Warburg took note of Orwell’s wish that a darker colour be selected. Orwell had some of his own books rebound in dark blue; these included a presentation copy of Animal Farm for his son, Richard. Warburg wrote to Orwell on 15 March, expressing ‘real pleasure’ at finding him ‘in better shape and better spirits than I had anticipated’. He realised that Orwell would require all his patience and control ‘to overcome the obstacles to a complete restoration of health’, but he did not doubt that Orwell could do that ‘since you still have many books you still wish to write’.

To Sally McEwan*

27 March 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Sally,

It seems literally years since I have heard from you, or of you? How are things going? I am going to send this to the Nature Clinic, hoping they’ll forward it if you aren’t still there. How is your young man? Are you married? And how is little Sally? Excuse this filthy pen. It is all I have, as my other one is being refilled.

I dare say you heard I am suffering from T.B. [Details of illness; progress of novel; Richard]

We have got more furniture at Barnhill now, & the place is running quite well. Transport is still the chief difficulty. We have got a car now, but the headache is tyres, apart from the everlasting petrol difficulty. However, we also have a horse which can be used in moments of emergency. A friend now lives with us & farms the croft, which is a good arrangement, because we don’t then feel guilty about occupying land & not using it, & also when we like we can go away, because there is someone to look after our animals. We have got a cow now, also of course hens, & am thinking of pigs. We’ve also got more of a garden now, & have made an end of all those awful rushes. I have planted a lot of fruit trees & bushes, but I am not sure yet whether trees will do much good in such a windy place.

Write some time & let me know how everything is going. The above address will find me for some time, I am afraid.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3373, pp. 305–6; handwritten]

To Mrs David Astor

5 April 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Mrs Astor,

I believe it was you who sent me a 7 lb. bag of sugar from Jamaica, also a tin of pears & some guava jelly. It was extremely kind of you to think of it. I was especially delighted to get the sugar, which my sister will use for making jam. I have been getting on pretty well, but just this last week have been feeling rather bad with a sore throat & various other minor ailments which are probably secondary effects of the streptomycin I am having. I think they are probably going to stop the injections for a few days & then go on again when these effects have worn off.1

I haven’t seen Richard, my little boy, since before Christmas, as I can’t see him while I am infectious. However I have had him photographed & can see that he is growing fast & is in good health. My sister says he is learning to talk better. I had been rather worried about that, though he is not backward in any other way.

Please forgive bad handwriting. My writing is bad enough at the best of times, but whatever is wrong with me has affected my fingernails & it is difficult to hold on to the pen. With many thanks again.

Yours sincerely

Geo. Orwell

[XIX, 3376, p.309; handwritten]

1. Professor James Williamson, who was a junior doctor at Hairmyres Hospital when Orwell was a patient, remembers the arrival of the streptomycin and its adverse effect on Orwell (Remembering Orwell, p. 200). In a note for Professor Crick, written many years later, Dr Williamson said that Orwell’s TB was ‘pretty “chronic”… It was not the type that would have largely cleared with effective drug treatment and he would always have been breathless and incapacitated’ (Crick, p. 602).

To David Astor*

[14 April 1948]

Dear David,

I thought you’d like to hear that Bobbie is making himself useful. Part of the field behind the house was too steep a slope for the small tractor, so they harnessed Bobbie into the harrow & he behaved ‘like a lamb,’ Bill says. So perhaps now they can use him in the trap, which is as well, as the car needs new wheels as well as tyres.

They’ve stopped the streptomycin for a few days & the unpleasant symptoms have practically disappeared. Shortly they will continue with the strepto, which has about 3 weeks to go. It’s evidently doing its stuff as my last 3 tests were ‘negative,’ ie no TB germs. Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all dead, but at any rate they must have taken a pretty good beating. I have felt better the last day or two & have nearly finished the article I promised for the Observer 1 The weather has at last improved, & I’m longing to go out, which I think they may soon let me do, in a chair, of course.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3379, p. 311; handwritten]

1. Probably his review of Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism (XIX, 3395, pp. 333–4).

To Julian Symons*

20 April 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Julian,

Thanks so much for sending the pen, & prospectively for some chocolate you mentioned. I am so glad to hear you are going to have a baby. They’re awful fun in spite of the nuisance, & as they develop one has one’s own childhood over again. I suppose one thing one has to guard against is imposing one’s own childhood on the child, but I do think it is relatively easy to give a child a decent time nowadays & allow it to escape the quite unnecessary torments that I for instance went through. I’m not sure either that one ought to trouble too much about bringing a child into a world of atomic bombs, because those born now will never have known anything except wars, rationing etc., & can probably be quite happy against that background if they’ve had a good psychological start.

I am a lot better, but I had a bad fortnight with the secondary effects of the streptomycin. I suppose with all these drugs it’s rather a case of sinking the ship to get rid of the rats. [Passage regarding progress of illness and Richard.]

It’s funny you should have mentioned Gissing. I am a great fan of his (though I’ve never read Born in Exile, which some say is his masterpiece, because I can’t get hold of a copy), & was just in the act of re-reading two reprints, which I promised to review for Politics & Letters. I think I shall do a long article on him, for them or someone else.¹ I think The Odd Women is one of the best novels in English. You asked about my uniform edition. They’re starting with a novel called Coming Up for Air, which was published in 1939 & rather killed by the war, & doing Burmese Days later in the year. I just° corrected the proofs of the latter, which I wrote more than 15 years ago & probably hadn’t looked at for 10 years. It was a queer experience— almost like reading a book by somebody else. I’m also going to try & get Harcourt Brace to reprint these two books in the USA but even if they do so they’ll probably only take ‘sheets’, which never does one much good. It’s funny what BFs American publishers are about re-prints. Harcourt Brace have been nagging me for 2 years for a manuscript, any kind of manuscript, & are now havering with the idea of doing a series of reprints, but when I urged them to reprint Burmese Days immediately after they had cleaned up on Animal Farm, they wouldn’t do so. Nor would the original publishers of B.D, though they too were trying to get something out of me. Apparently reprints in the USA are done mostly by special firms which only take them on if they are safe for an enormous sale.

Yes, I thought the last number of Politics quite good, but I must say that in spite of all their elegies I retain dark suspicions about Gandhi,2 based only on gossip, but such a lot of gossip that I think there must be something in it. Please remember me to your wife.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3386, pp. 321–3; handwritten]

1. The typescript of Orwell’s article on George Gissing only surfaced in the summer of 1959. It was published in the London Magazine, June 1960. (See XIX, 3406, pp. 346–52.)

2. Mahatma (Mohandas Karamchand) Gandhi (1869–1948), a major figure in the struggle for Indian independence and a continuing force in Indian life after his death. He was fatally shot on 30 January 1948 by a Hindu fanatic. See Orwell’s ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, Partisan Review, January 1949, (XX, 3516, pp. 5–12).

To Gleb Struve*

21 April 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Struve,

I’m awfully sorry to have to send this¹ back, after such a long delay, having finally failed to find a home for it. But as you see by the above, I am in hospital (tuberculosis), & at the time of receiving your letter I wasn’t able to do very much. I am better now, & hope to get out of here some time during the summer, but of course the treatment of this disease is always a slow job.

I have arranged to review We for the Times Lit. Supp., when the English translation comes out.² Did you tell me that Zamyatin’s widow is still alive & in Paris? If so, & she can be contacted, it might be worth doing so, as there may be others of his books which some English publisher might be induced to take, if We is a success. You told me that his satire on England, The Islanders, had never been translated, & perhaps it might be suitable.³

I hope you will forgive me for my failure to find an editor for Mandelstam’s sketches. There are so few magazines in England now. Polemic died of the usual disease, & the other possible one Politics & Letters, was no good.

You asked about my novel, Burmese Days. I think it is still in print as a Penguin, but there won’t be many copies left. It is being reprinted about the end of this year, as I am beginning a uniform edition, & that is second on the list. I may succeed in getting some of these books reprinted in the USA as well.

Yours sincerely

Geo. Orwell

P.S. This address will find me for some months, I’m afraid.

[XIX, 3387, pp. 323–4; handwritten]

1. Presumably the Mandelstam sketches mentioned later in the letter.

2. An English translation, by Gregory Zilboorg, was, in fact, published in New York by E. P. Dutton in 1924 and reprinted the following year. Although Orwell knew of the US edition, he had not seen it. The French translation, Nous autres, which Orwell reviewed in Tribune, 4 January 1946 (see XVIII, 2841, pp. 13–17), was published in Paris in 1929.

3. Yevgeny Zamyatin came to England in 1916 to supervise the building of Russian icebreakers in the northeast of England and Scotland. He wrote two amusing satires on English life, The Islanders, written in England in 1917, and The Fisher of Men, written in 1918 on his return to Russia. The first is set in Jesmond, near Newcastle upon Tyne and the second in Chiswick. A translation by Sophie Fuller and Julian Sacchi was published in 1984.

To John Middleton Murry*

28 April 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Murry,

Thank you for your letter. I’m very sorry to hear the Adelphi is coming to an end.¹ At any rate it’s had a long run for its money, longer than most magazines. I could do you a review, but I’m not keen on doing the Joad book. I looked at it recently, & it didn’t seem to me to be about anything. How about the third volume of Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography,² which has come out recently & which I think is very good in a way? You wouldn’t need to send a copy, as I have one already. It would be better to do more than 1000 words if you have the space. I note that you want the copy by May 15, but perhaps you could let me know whether you think this a suitable book.

[Brief account of illness and Barnhill] I would like to see what is going on [at Barnhill], also to see my little boy, whom I haven’t seen since Christmas for fear of infection. I get photographs of him, & he is evidently growing enormous.

Yours

Geo. Orwell

[XIX, 3390, pp. 326–7; handwritten]

1. It survived until 1955.

2. Orwell reviewed Sitwell’s Great Morning in the July–September 1948 issue of The Adelphi (see XIX, 3418, pp. 395–8).

To Dwight Macdonald*

2 May 1948

Hairmyres Hosp

East Kilbride

Dear Dwight,

Thanks so much for your letter, and prospectively for sending the books.¹ Yes, I got Politics, as a matter of fact 2 copies, as you sent one to me direct here. It set me thinking again about Gandhi, whom I never met but whom I know a certain amount about. The funny thing is that though he was almost certainly used by the British for their own ends over a long period, I’m not certain that in the long run he failed. He was not able to stop the fight[ing] between Moslems and Hindus, but his major aim of getting the British out of India peacefully did finally come off. I personally would never have predicted this even five years ago, and I am not sure that a good deal of the credit should not go to Gandhi. Of course a Conservative government would never have got out without a fight, but the fact that a Labour government did so might indirectly be due to Gandhi’s influence. One might say that they only agreed to dominion status because they knew they couldn’t hold on to India much longer, but this doesn’t apply for instance to Burma, a country which was extremely profitable to us and easy enough to hold down. I think, pace tua, that Gandhi behaved abominably, or at any rate stupidly, in 1942 when he thought the Axis had won the war, but I think also that his prolonged effort to keep the Indian struggle on a decent plane may have gradually modified the British attitude.

Incidentally, this business of assassinating important individuals² is something one has to take account of. In the same number I see you note regretfully that Walter Reuther³ has a bodyguard, but I also see that he has just been seriously wounded—the second attempt, I believe. I notice also that you speak more or less approvingly of the Esprit4 crowd. I don’t know if you know that some at any rate of these people are fellow travellers of a peculiarly slimy religious brand, like Macmurray⁵ in England. Their line is that Communism and Christianity are compatible, and latterly that there is no choice except Communism or Fascism and one must therefore regretfully choose the former. But this is all right, because Communism will presently shed certain unfortunate characteristics such as bumping off its opponents, and if Socialists join up with the CP they can persuade it into better ways. It’s funny that when I met Mounier⁶ for only about 10 minutes in 1945 I thought to myself, that man’s a fellow traveller. I can smell them. I believe Sartre has been latterly taking the same line.

I’m sorry Gollancz fell through.⁷ I don’t know if it’s any use trying Warburg. He read the book and was impressed by it, but of course he is chronically short of paper and takes years to get a book out. The binding is the real trouble here. I must say I feel envious when I see American books now, their solidity and so on. The way British books are printed now makes one ashamed to be associated with them. I asked them to send you a copy of the first book in my uniform edition, coming out in a fortnight or so. I must say I wish I could have started this edition at a time when one could get hold of decent bindings. I feel that a uniform edition which in any case is a sign of approaching senility ought to be very chaste-looking in buckram covers. Have you got an agent over here, or an agent with connections here? It’s worth while I think.

Yes, I think Lanarkshire was where Owen⁸ flourished. It’s rather an unpleasant industrial county with a lot of coal mines, and its chief ornament is Glasgow. Out here it’s quite pleasant though. I am longing to go out of doors, having barely done so for six months. They now let me up an hour a day and I think they would let me out a little if it were warmer. It’s been a horrible spring, however not so bad as last year.

I’m in sympathy with the Europe-America leaflet you sent,⁹ but I don’t know if there’s anything I personally can do about it. Thanks for your query, but there is honestly not anything I want. We are well cared for here and people have been very kind about sending me food etc.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3392, pp. 328–90; typewritten]

1. Macdonald had written on 23 April 1948 and he sent a parcel of books by separate mail. He mentions two of these in his letter: Joseph Wood Krutch, Samuel Johnson (1944) and T. Polner, Tolstoy and His Wife, translated by N. Wreden (1945). These, he wrote, ‘are two of the best modern biographies I know’, especially the first. He asked Orwell if he shared his ‘private enthusiasm for Dr. Johnson’. Orwell did not respond to this in his reply. Krutch (1893–1970) was drama critic to The Nation, 1924–51.

2. Gandhi had been assassinated on 30 January 1948.

3. Walter Philip Reuther (1907–1970), President of the United Automobile Workers of America, 1946–70; President of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1952– 55. He was one of those instrumental in the merger of the CIO with the American Federation of Labor in 1955 and served as Vice-President of the AFL-CIO until, in disagreement with the President of the organisation, he took out the UAW. He had worked in a Soviet car factory for two years in the 1930s, but later was critical of the Soviets. He was killed when his plane crashed in fog.

4. Esprit was a periodical launched in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier (see n. 6) ‘to close the gap between communist and non-communist Frenchmen’. At the same time, Mounier inaugurated ‘the Personalist movement, a non-party philosophy between Marxism and Existentialism’ (J. F. Falvey, The Penguin Companion to Literature (1969), II, p. 553).

5. John Macmurray (1891–1976), Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University of London, 1929–44; Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, 1944–58. His many books include The Philosophy of Communism (1933) and Constructive Democracy (1943). In Orwell’s pamphlet collection is a copy of his Peace Aims Pamphlet, Foundations of Economic Reconstruction (1942).

6. Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950), writer, literary critic, intellectual leader in the French Resistance, was a Roman Catholic and Marxist sympathiser and the founder of the journal Esprit. He was influenced by Bergson and Péguy, and, with others, published La Pensée de Charles Péguy (1931), several books on Personalism, and some 170 articles. He advocated economic revolution, a new socialist system, respect for the individual, and an active Roman Catholic Church in order to implement ethical values appropriate to the age. He particularly addressed the needs of apathetic and disorientated post-war youth (J. F. Falvey, see n. 4).

7. Orwell had suggested to Gollancz that he publish Macdonald’s Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth. Macdonald told Orwell that, though Gollancz was at first enthusiastic, he had written later saying he could not get the book out in time. Despite good reviews the book had sold only 3,500 copies in two months in the USA. However, Macdonald was having ‘a lot of fun’ speaking at colleges exposing Wallace’s ‘lies and demagogy, and the almost 100% Commie entourage which writes his speeches’.

8. The text of Macdonald’s letter that has survived is a carbon copy. It contains no reference to Owen, so that may well have been in a postscript added only to the top copy. Robert Owen (1771–1858), born and died in Wales, a successful Lancashire cotton manufacturer, established the model industrial town of New Lanark in Scotland, with good living conditions for the employees complete with nonprofitmaking shops.

9. A leaflet issued in connection with a proposed series of meetings – the first had by then been held – ‘on the Russian culture purge. Speakers: Nicolas Nabokov, Meyer Schapiro, Lionel Trilling, and myself. It was a success—about 400 people, $300 profit, and solid speeches.’

To Julian Symons*

10 May 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Julian,

Thanks ever so much to yourself and your wife for the chocolate and the tea and rice, which got here last week. I’d been meaning to write. You see I’ve organised a typewriter at last. It’s a bit awkward to use in bed, but it saves hideous misprints in reviews etc. caused by my handwriting. As you say, the ball-bearing pen is the last stage in the decay of handwriting, but I’ve given mine up years ago. At one time I used to spend hours with script pens and squared paper, trying to re-teach myself to write, but it was no use after being taught copperplate and on top of that encouraged to write a ‘scholarly’ hand. The writing of children nowadays is even worse than ours used to be, because they will teach them this disconnected script which is very slow to write. Evidently the first thing is to get a good simple cursive script, but on top of that you have to teach hand control, in fact learning to write involves learning to draw. Evidently it can be done, as in countries like China and Japan anyone who can write at all writes more or less gracefully.

I am glad E[yre] and S[pottiswoode] are pleased with the biography, but don’t let them get away with The Quest for AJA Symons as a title. It is true that if a book is going to sell no title can kill it, but I am sure that is a bad one. Of course I can’t make suggestions without seeing the book, but if they insist on having the name, something like A.J.A. Symons: a Memoir is always inoffensive.1

Coming Up for Air isn’t much, but I thought it worth reprinting because it was rather killed by the outbreak of war and then blitzed out of existence, so thoroughly that in order to get a copy from which to reset it we had to steal one from a public library.² Of course you are perfectly right about my own character constantly intruding on that of the narrator. I am not a real novelist anyway, and that particular vice is inherent in writing a novel in the first person, which one should never do. One difficulty I have never solved is that one has masses of experience which one passionately wants to write about, eg. the part about fishing in that book, and no way of using them up except by disguising them as a novel. Of course the book was bound to suggest Wells watered down. I have a great admiration for Wells, ie. as a writer, and he was a very early influence on me. I think I was ten or eleven when Cyril Connolly* and I got hold of a copy of Wells’s The Country of the Blind (short stories) and were so fascinated by it that we kept stealing it from one another. I can still remember at 4 o’clock on a midsummer morning, with the school fast asleep and the sun slanting through the window, creeping down a passage to Connolly’s dormitory where I knew the book would be beside his bed. We also got into severe trouble (and I think a caning—I forget) for having a copy of Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street.3

They now tell me that I shall have to stay here till about August. [State of health; worries about Richard] I don’t know who put that par in the Standard⁴—someone who knew me, though there were the usual mistakes. I don’t think they ought to have given my real name.

Please remember me to your wife.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3397, pp. 335–7; typewritten]

1. Julian Symons’s biography of his brother was called A. J. A. Symons: His Life and Speculations (1950).

2. Whether or not the copy was ‘permanently stolen’ is not known.

3. Cyril Connolly recalls the incident less painfully. He and Orwell alternately won a prize given by Mrs Wilkes, the headmaster’s wife, for the best list of books borrowed from the school library. However, ‘we were both caught at last with two volumes of Sinister Street and our favour sank to zero’ (Enemies of Promise, 1948, chapter 19).

4. On 5 May 1948, in the ‘Londoner’s Diary’, a gossip column in the Evening Standard, there was a paragraph about Orwell which referred to Eileen’s death.

To Leonard Moore*

12 May 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Moore,

On going through my books I see that I wrote an introduction for a book of collected pamphlets for Allan Wingate more than a year ago. I don’t know why the book hasn’t come out,¹ but I think it is time they paid me for the introduction. If I remember rightly, I was promised £50 and was paid £10 in advance: or it may have been that I was promised £40—anyway, I think £40 is the sum involved. Perhaps you could communicate with them about it.

I am a lot better and the infection has evidently been quelled, but the doctors think I should remain here till about August. However, I feel so much better that I think I can get back to a little serious work and am starting on the second draft of my novel. I don’t know how far I shall [get] as it is awkward working in bed, but if I can get well started before leaving hospital I should get the book done before the end of the year.

Yours sincerely

Eric Blair

[XIX, 3398, p. 336; typewritten]

1. British Pamphleteers, edited with Reginald Reynolds. Volume 1 was published 15 November 1948. The second volume, in which Orwell was not involved, appeared in 1951.

To Mrs Jessica Marshall*

19 May 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Mrs Marshall,

Many thanks for your letter. It has been on my conscience for a long time that you once sent me a pot of jam for which I never thanked you. I was rather distraught all through the war years and left a lot of letters unanswered. My wife I am sorry to say died three years ago, leaving me with a little adopted son who was not then a year old. He has just had his fourth birthday and is now of enormous size and full of vigour and mischief, though I haven’t seen him since Christmas because of the danger of infection. Of course all these events have put back my work a great deal, and, as you say, I have not published a full-length book since before the war. I was about half way through a novel when I was taken ill, and if I had not been ill I should have finished it by the spring. As it is I hope to finish it before the end of the year, which I suppose means it would not come out before the autumn of 1949. It takes about a year to get a book through the press now.¹

I have been here since before Christmas, but I was ill at home for some months before that. However I am now much better, thanks largely to the streptomycin, and hope to get out of hospital some time during the summer. They have evidently succeeded in killing the infection, but of course it takes a long time for the damaged lung to heal up. I imagine that I shall have to take things very easily for about a year, so far as physical effort goes. But I am now able to do a little work, though I find it very tiresome to write in bed. When I get out I may have to attend for out-patient treatment, in which case I shall have to make my headquarters in Edinburgh, otherwise I can go back to Jura where we have been installed for the last two years. It is a completely wild place and a bit un-getatable, but it is quite easy to live there if you have a cow and hens, and you are better off for food and fuel than in England. Also, contrary to what people think, that side of Scotland is not at all cold. It is damp, but the winter is mild and you get beautiful weather in the summer. The only thing that worries me is that my little boy only sees other children about once a week, except when people are staying with us, and I think this has made him a bit backward in his talking. However I shall have to arrange for him to go to school in about a year’s time, and Jura will be a good place for him to spend his holidays. He is tremendously healthy and didn’t seem much affected even when he had measles and whooping cough. I am terrified of his getting this disease that I have, but actually I don’t think he is the type that would get it, and we now have tuberculin-tested cows, so the likeliest source of infection is shut off. I think it is good for him to grow up among farm animals and boats, in a place where there are no ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’ boards.

I agree with you about Priestley – he is awful, and it is astonishing that he has actually had a sort of come-back in reputation during the last year or two. What you say of Wells is of course true, but that has never stopped me enjoying at any rate his early work. I have just read the third volume of Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography, in fact I reviewed it for the last number of the Adelphi, which is now packing up after 25 years of moribund existence. Evidently there will be more volumes, as this one only goes up to 1914. I am a great admirer of his novel Before the Bombardment, and the only time I met him I liked him very much. I have also been re-reading some books of George Gissing, on whom I am going to write a long essay for a magazine. I always say he is one of the best English novelists, though he has never had his due, and they always seem to reprint the wrong books. His two best ones, New Grub Street and The Odd Women, can’t now be got, even secondhand. I also re-read recently George Moore’s Esther Waters, which is a marvellous straightforward story in spite of being very clumsily written. While in bed I have been making one of my periodical attacks2 on Henry James, but I never can really get to care for him.

Half way through writing this letter I have been out for my usual half-hour walk in the grounds. It leaves me very out of breath, in fact I can’t go more than about 100 yards without stopping for a rest. However, they are now going to let the lung which they have collapsed return to its normal shape, so I suppose breathing will become easier. This is a nice hospital and everyone has been very good to me. Thanks so much for writing.

Yours sincerely

Geo. Orwell

[LO, pp. 113–5; XIX, 3401A, p. 339; typewritten]

1. Orwell was contrasting pre-war practice. Thus, he posted the ms of The Road to Wigan Pier to his agent on 15 December 1936. On the 19^th he saw Victor Gollancz and it was decided to illustrate the book. It was published twelve weeks later on 8 March 1937 with 32 pages of plates.

2. attacks = attempts to read

To George Woodcock*

24 May 1948

Dear George,

I received another letter from Charles Davey, drawing my attention to the fact that E. M. Forster has resigned from the NCCL. I then sat down, or sat up rather, with the idea of writing that article on the F.D.C., but on second thoughts I really don’t think I can do it. To begin with I have two long articles on hand and I can’t do much yet, but what is more to the point, I don’t know enough factually about the F.D.C. for the purpose. Do you think you could do the article? I think you said Davey had written to you. Perhaps you could ring him up. I don’t know if you know him—he is a very nice chap. I don’t know exactly what they want, but I assume they would want an account of the Committee and its activities, in general terms, with some remarks on the threat to individual liberty contained in the modern centralised state. I don’t like shoving this off on to you, on the other hand if they are willing for you to write the article they’ll pay you quite well for it.

I hadn’t yet thanked you for the copy of the book of essays. Of course I was delighted to see the one on myself appearing in book form. I liked the one on Bates whose book I read years ago.¹ All nineteenth-century books about S. America have a wonderful Arcadian atmosphere, though I think I was always more attracted by the pampas than by the forest. I suppose you’ve read The Purple Land. And the one on hymns, which I’d always been meaning to write something about myself. I think you’re wrong in saying that people respond to a hymn like ‘Abide with me’ (by the way shouldn’t it be ‘the darkness deepens,’ not ‘gathers’)² chiefly because of wars, unemployment etc. There is a great deal of inherent sadness and loneliness in human life that would be the same whatever the external circumstances. You don’t mention two of the best hymns, ‘praise° to the holiest’ and ‘Jerusalem my happy home’—this one, I think, however, must be a great deal earlier than the other groups you were studying. In Ancient and Modern3 if I remember rightly it’s heavily expurgated to get the Catholic imagery out. [Paragraph on health, Richard.]

Please give all the best to Inge. I’ve gone and lost your new address, but I will think of someone to send this care of. I will write to Charles Davey about the article.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3403, pp. 341–3; typewritten]

1. Henry Walter Bates (1825-92), visited South America in 1848. He wrote The Naturalist on the River Amazons ^o (1863).

2. Orwell is correct.

3. The first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern was published in 1861. Ironically in the light of his comments about Roman Catholicism ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’ was by Cardinal John Henry Newman.

To Celia Kirwan*

27 May 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dearest Celia,

Thanks ever so much for your letter. I must say, anything to do with unesco sounds pretty discouraging. Any way, I should knock all the money you can out of them, as I don’t suppose they’ll last much longer. [Paragraph on health; Richard, now aged four.]

How I wish I were with you in Paris, now that spring is there. Do you ever go to the Jardin des Plantes? I used to love it, though there was really nothing of interest except the rats, which at one time overran it & were so tame that they would almost eat out of your hand. In the end they got to be such a nuisance that they introduced cats & more or less wiped them out. The plane trees are so beautiful in Paris, because the bark isn’t blackened by smoke the way it is in London. I suppose the food & so on is still pretty grisly, but that will improve if the Marshall plan¹ gets working. I see you have to put a 10 franc² stamp on your letter, which gives one an idea of what meals must cost now.

I can’t help feeling that it’s a bit treacherous on Arthur’s part if he does settle down in the USA.3 He was talking about doing it before. I suppose he is furious about what is happening in Palestine, though what else was to be expected I don’t know. His lecture tour seems to have been quite a success. I wonder if he has got back yet, & what he will do about his place in Wales. It seems a pity to start sending roots down somewhere & then tear them up again, & I can imagine Mamaine not liking it.

[His book put back ‘frightfully’] – now it can’t be finished before the end of the year, which means not coming out till the end of 1949. However it’s something to be capable of working again. Last year before they brought me here I really felt as though I were finished. Thank Heaven Richard looks as if he is going to have good health. We have got 2 tested cows now, so at any rate he won’t get this disease through milk, which is the usual way with children. Take care of yourself & write to me again some time.

With love

George

[XIX, 3405, pp. 344–5; handwritten]

1. The Marshall Plan, properly the European Recovery Program, was the outcome of the Paris Economic Conference, July 1947, to aid post-war recovery in a number of European countries. It was financed by the United States ($17 billion in grants and loans over four years) and was named after US Secretary of State George C. Marshall (1880–1959), whose advocacy of such aid was instrumental in bringing the scheme to fruition. In 1953 General Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his work in this field.

2. Ten francs was about one old penny in mid-1948.

3. Arthur Koestler, who had been living with his wife, Mamaine, in Wales, decided he would like to move to the United States, and they lived there for a short time.

To Anthony Powell*

25 June 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Tony,

I received a letter from your friend Cecil Roberts¹ asking me if he could have my flat. I had to write and tell him it was impossible. I am awfully sorry about this, but they have already been riding me like the nightmare for lending it to Mrs Christen, and threatening to let the Borough take it away from me. I don’t want this to happen because I must have a pied à terre in London, and also I have a little furniture still there and a lot of papers which it’s awkward to store elsewhere. Even if I gave up the flat they won’t let you transfer the lease and of course they have their own candidates ready many deep, with bribes in their hands.2

If you happen to see Graham Greene, could you break the news to him that I have written a very bad review of his novel³ for the New Yorker. I couldn’t do otherwise—I thought the book awful, though of course don’t put it as crudely as that. I am going to review Kingsmill’s book⁴ for the Obs. as soon as possible, but I still have another book to get out of the way first.⁵ I seem to be getting quite back into the journalistic mill, however I do tinker a little at my novel and no doubt shall get it done by the end of the year.

I am a lot better and now get up for three hours a day. I have been playing a lot of croquet, which seems quite a tough game when you’ve been on your back for 6 months. In the ward below me the editor of the Hotspur⁶ is a patient. He tells me their circulation is 300,000. He says they don’t pay very good rates per thou, but they can give people regular work and also give them the plots so that they only have to do the actual writing. In this way a man can turn out 40,000 words a week. They had one man who used to do 70,000, but his stuff was ‘rather stereotyped.’ I hope to get out in August, but the date isn’t fixed because it depends on when my lung resumes its normal shape after the collapse therapy has worn off. Richard is coming to see me early in July. He couldn’t before because of infection. I suppose I shall hardly know him after six months.

It’s my birthday to day—45, isn’t it awful. I’ve also got some more false teeth, and, since being here, a lot more grey in my hair. Please remember me to Violet.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3416, pp. 393–4; typewritten]

1. Cecil A. (“Bobby”) Roberts, sometime manager of Sadler’s Wells Theatre, had recently been demobilised from the Royal Air Force.

2. Accommodation was hard to find in the years immediately after the war. Most leases included a clause forbidding the lessee to sub-let or ‘part with possession’ in whole or in part, whether or not money changed hands, for example as a ‘premium’.

3. The Heart of the Matter, see 17 July 1948 (XIX, 3424, pp. 404–7).

4. The Dawn’s Delay; see 18 July 1948 (XIX, 3425, pp. 407–8).

5. Probably Mr. Attlee: An Interim Biography; see 4 July 1948 (XIX, 3419, pp. 398–9).

6. A weekly paper for boys published from 1933 to 1959. In a letter to Ian Angus, 17.9.96, Professor Williamson said this man shared a room with Orwell for a while and that Professor Dick was interested to see how they got on. ‘In the event they got on well together (as I think almost anyone would have …).’

To Julian Symons*

10 July 1948

Hairmyres Hospital

East Kilbride

Dear Julian,

I must thank you for a very kind review in the M[anchester] E[vening] News1 which I have just had a cutting of. I hope your wife is well and that everything is going all right. I thought you would like to hear that I am leaving here on the 25th. They seem to think I am pretty well all right now, though I shall have to take things very quietly for a long time, perhaps a year or so. I am only to get up for six hours a day, but I don’t know that it makes much difference as I have got quite used to working in bed. My sister brought Richard over to see me this week, the first time I had seen him since Christmas. He is tremendously well and almost frighteningly energetic. His talking still seems backward, but in other ways I should say he was forward. Farm life seems to suit him, though I am pretty sure he is one for machines rather than animals. [References to Hotspur and Gissing] I also wasn’t so up in the air as most people about Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, though of course it was amusing. Unlike a lot of people I thought Brideshead Revisited was very good, in spite of hideous faults on the surface. I have been trying to read a book of extracts from Leon Bloy,°² whose novels I have never succeeded in getting hold of. He irritates me rather, and Peguy,°³ whom I also tried recently, made me feel unwell. I think it’s about time to do a new counterattack against these Catholic writers. I also recently read Farrell’s Studs Lonigan⁴ for the first time, and was very disappointed by it. I don’t know that I’ve read much else.

The weather here was filthy all June but now it’s turned at last and they are getting the hay in with great speed. I am longing to go fishing, but I suppose I shan’t be able to this year, not because fishing in itself is much of an exertion, but because you always have to walk five or ten miles and end up by getting soaked to the skin. Please remember me to your wife. After the 25th my address will be as before, ie. Barnhill, Isle of Jura, Argyllshire.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3420, pp. 400–1; handwritten]

1. Symons had reviewed the reprint of Coming Up for Air in the Manchester Evening News, 19 May 1948.

2. Leon Marie Bloy (1846–1917), French novelist whose work attacks the bourgeois conformism of his time. He expected the collapse of that society and became increasingly influenced by Roman Catholic mysticism, expressed particularly in his Journal, 1892–1917.

3. Republican and socialist, he founded Cahiers de la Quinzaine (1900–14). This set out ‘To tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, to tell flat truth flatly, dull truth dully, sad truth sadly’—that was its doctrine and method, and, above all, its action (Péguy, quoted by Daniel Halevy, Peguy and ‘Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine’, 1946, 52). In the course of his editing, his Roman Catholicism and his patriotism were intensified. A favourite story of Orwell’s, which he dramatised for the BBC, was Anatole France’s L’Affaire Crainquebille (11 August 1943, XV, 2230, pp. 186-97), first published by Péguy in Les Cahiers.

4. James Thomas Farrell (1904–1979), prolific and successful US novelist and a forthright social and literary critic (for example, The League of Frightened Philistines, 1945).

Fredric Warburg* to Orwell

19 and 22 July 1948

On 19 July 1948, Warburg wrote to Orwell saying he had heard that Orwell was looking very much better and he mentioned Orwell’s interest in getting more of Gissing’s novels back into print. The main burden of the letter concerned Nineteen Eighty-Four:

I was of course specially pleased to know that you have done quite a substantial amount of revision on the new novel. From our point of view, and I should say also from your point of view, a revision of this is far and away the most important single undertaking to which you could apply yourself when the vitality is there. It should not be put aside for reviews or miscellaneous work, however tempting, and will I am certain sooner rather than later bring in more money than you could expect from any other activity. If you do succeed in finishing the revision by the end of the year this would be pretty satisfactory, and we should publish in the autumn of 1949, but it really is rather important from the point of view of your literary career to get it done by the end of the year, and indeed earlier if at all possible.

On 22 July, he told Orwell of the great interest aroused in Japan by Animal Farm. The Americans had submitted 50–75 titles of Western books to Japanese publishers and invited them to bid for them. Animal Farm received the most bids; forty-eight Japanese publishers were anxious to publish it. It was ‘finally knocked down to an Osaka firm who are paying 20 cents or 20 yens° per copy, I am not sure which’. It would not make Orwell wealthy and the yen could be spent only in Japan: ‘Perhaps a trip one Spring in cherry time might be practicable for you, if and when the world clears up a bit.’

[XIX, 3426, pp. 408–9]

Avril Blair* to Michael Kennard1

29 July 1948

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

…² Eric returned yesterday & looks much better. He has got to take it very easy but is interested in how things are going & has been going round the estate today; practically everything is new or different since he was last at home. Richard Rees is also here for a day or two & we all (not E) bravely went down & had a bathe this afternoon. The water was icy despite the fact that we are in the midst of a terrific heat wave…

We have just been erecting a large tent in the garden for the overflow of visitors who start arriving tomorrow…

So glad you enjoyed your holiday. Do come up again if you ever have any more time off.

Yours

Avril

[XIX, 3429, pp. 410–11; handwritten]

1. Michael Kennard (= Koessler) a Jewish refugee who came to England in 1938; the Warburgs looked after him. He visited Jura two or three times and visited Orwell in hospital. Orwell left him his fishing rods. Kennard designed several dust-jackets for Secker & Warburg including those for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (see also XIX, p. 304–5).

2. The ellipses in this passage indicate the editor’s cuts and are not original to Avril’s letter.

To David Astor*

9 October 1948

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

Dear David,

Thanks so much for your letter. A little before getting it I had written to Mr Rose,1 sending him a short review of one book and making suggestions for some others. I think I had put on the list of books I should like to have one called Boys will be Boys² (about thrillers etc.), of which the publishers have now sent me a copy: so even if he would like to have me review it, there is no need to send it to me.

You were right about my being not very well. I am a bit better now but felt very poorly for about a fortnight. It started funnily enough with my going back to Hairmyres to be examined, which they had told me to do in September. Mr Dick seemed to be quite pleased with the results of his examination, but the journey upset me. Any kind of journey seems to do this. He told me to go on as at present, ie. spending half the day in bed, which I quite gladly do as I simply can’t manage any kind of exertion. To walk a mile or pick up anything in the least heavy, or above all to get cold, promptly upsets me. Even if I go out in the evening to fetch the cows in it gives me a temperature. On the other hand so long as I live a senile sort of life I feel all right, and I seem to be able to work much as usual. I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it’s awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book, which is supposed to be done by early December, and will be if I don’t get ill again. It would have been done by the spring if it had not been for this illness.

Richard is tremendously well and is out of doors in all weathers. I am sorry to say he took to smoking recently, but he made himself horribly sick and that has put him off it. He also swears. I don’t stop him of course, but I am trying to improve my own language a bit. The weather has been absolutely filthy, except for three or four days just recently. Bill Dunn managed to get all his hay and corn in early, but a lot must have been spoiled elsewhere. The farm is building up. He has now got about 50 sheep and about 10 head of cattle, some of which are my property. We have also got a pig which will go to be baconed shortly. I had never kept one before and shan’t be sorry to see the last of this one. They are most annoying destructive animals, and hard to keep out of anywhere because they are so strong and cunning. We have built up a bit of a garden here now. Of course a lot of it has gone back owing to my not being able to do anything, but I hope to get an Irish labourer3 to do some digging this winter and even this year we had quite a few flowers and lashings of strawberries. Richard seems interested in farm and garden operations, and he helps me in the garden and is sometimes quite useful. I would like him to be a farmer when he grows up, in fact I shouldn’t wonder if anyone who survives will have to be that, but of course I’m not going to force him.

I don’t know when I’m coming up to London. First I must finish this book, and I’m not keen on London just before Xmas. I had thought of coming in January, but I must wait till I feel up to travelling. I’m a bit out of touch with the news, partly because the battery of my wireless is getting weak, but everything looks pretty black. I don’t personally believe an all-out shooting war could happen now, only perhaps ‘incidents’ such as used to occur all the time between Russia and Japan, but I suppose the atomic war is now a certainty within not very many years. This book I am writing is about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn’t conclusive. I think you were right after all about de Gaulle being a serious figure. I suppose at need we shall have to back the swine up rather than have a Communist France, but I must say I think this backing-up of Franco, which now appears to be the policy is a mistake. In France there doesn’t seem to be an alternative between de Gaulle and the Communists, because apart from the CP there has never been a mass working-class movement and everyone appears to be either pro-CP or bien pensant. But I shouldn’t have said from what little knowledge I have that things were the same in Spain. No doubt it is the American Catholics who saved Franco from being turfed out in 1945. I am still worried about our policies in Africa and South Asia. Is Crankshaw⁴ still going to Africa for you, I wonder? It’s all most depressing. I keep thinking, shall I get such and such a book done before the rockets begin to fly and we go back to clay tablets.

There is an eagle flying over the field in front. They always come here in windy weather.

Yours

George

P.S. [handwritten] Do you happen to know anyone who restores pictures. A picture of mine has been damaged (a slit in the canvas) & though it isn’t worth anything I should like to have it repaired.

[XIX, 3467, pp. 450–2; typed with handwritten postscript]

1. Jim Rose, a member of the literary editor’s staff of the Observer.

2. Boys Will be Boys: The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, et al., by E. S. Turner (1948; revised, 1957). Orwell did not review it.

3. Francis (Francey) Boyle, a road-worker (see Crick, p. 525).

4. Edward Crankshaw (1909–1984), novelist and critic, member of diplomatic staff on the Observer from 1947; British Military Mission to Moscow, 1941–43. In David Astor and ‘The Observer’, Richard Cockett states: ‘Orwell was instrumental in making David aware of the post-war problem of decolonization in Africa. The Observer was thus the first, and for a long time the only, British paper to focus on the problems of decolonization in Africa and in particular the plight of Africans on their own continent’ (p. 126).

To Fredric Warburg*

22 October 1948

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

Dear Fred,

You will have had my wire by now, and if anything crossed your mind I dare say I shall have had a return wire from you by the time this goes off. I shall finish the book, D.V.1, early in November, and I am rather flinching from the job of typing it, because it is a very awkward thing to do in bed, where I still have to spend half the time. Also there will have to be carbon copies, a thing which always fidgets me, and the book is fearfully long, I should think well over 100,000 words, possibly 125,000. I can’t send it away because it is an unbelievably bad MS and no one could make head or tail of it without explanation. On the other hand a skilled typist under my eye could do it easily enough. If you can think of anybody who would be willing to come, I will send money for the journey and full instructions. I think we could make her quite comfortable. There is always plenty to eat and I will see that she has a comfortable warm place to work in.

I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied. I first thought of it in 1943. I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB. I haven’t definitely fixed on the title but I am hesitating between Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Last Man in Europe.

I have just had Sartre’s book on antisemitism, which you published, to review. I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good boot.²

Please give everyone my love.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3477, pp. 456–7; typewritten]

1. D.V.: Deo volente = God willing.

2. Portrait of the Anti-Semite, Observer, 7 November 1948, XIX, 3485, pp. 464–5.

To Julian Symons*

29 October 1948

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

Dear Julian,

I can’t thank you enough for the tea, which I do hope you could spare. My sister, who keeps house for me, was enchanted to see it and asked me to say she will pack up a little butter for you next churning day. I am so glad to hear that all is well with your wife and daughter and that you enjoy having a baby. They’re really great fun, so much so that I find myself wishing at each stage that they could stay like that. I suppose you are on the steady grind of 5 bottles and 15 nappies a day. It’s funny that they are so insatiably greedy when they are small babies and then between about 2 and 6 it is such a fight to get them to eat, except between meals. I wonder which milk you are using. We brought up Richard on Ostermilk, which seemed to be better than National Dried.¹ His cousin was brought up on Cow and Gate and became grossly fat on it. You’ve got a big battle ahead when it comes to weaning time.

I was very well for some time after leaving hospital but have been very poorly again for the last month. [Effect of visit to Hairmyres Hospital.] Even to walk half a mile is upsetting. I was going to come down to London in January, but I am consulting with my doctor and if he thinks it best I shall go into a private sanatorium, if I can find one, for the worst of the winter, ie. Jan–Feb. I could go abroad perhaps, but the journey might be the death of me, so perhaps a sanatorium would be best. I think I am going to give up my London flat, as I never use it at present and it costs me about £100 a year and a lot of nuisance. Of course I shall have to get another London place later. I shall finish my book, D.V., in a week or ten days, but I am rather flinching from typing it, which is a tiring job and in any case can’t be done in bed where I have to be half the day. [Attempting to get a typist to come to Jura.]

I am rather surprised to hear of John Davenport associating himself with a CP or near-CP paper.² He used not to be that way inclined, that I knew of. Politics & Letters I am sorry to say has disappeared and is supposed to be reappearing next year as a monthly, rather to my annoyance as they had an article of mine. It is nonsense what Fyvel said about Eliot being antisemitic. Of course you can find what would now be called antisemitic remarks in his early work, but who didn’t say such things at that time? One has to draw a distinction between what was said before and what after 1934. Of course all these nationalistic prejudices are ridiculous, but disliking Jews isn’t intrinsically worse than disliking Negroes or Americans or any other block of people. In the early twenties, Eliot’s antisemitic remarks were about on a par with the automatic sneer one casts at Anglo-Indian colonels in boarding houses. On the other hand if they had been written after the persecutions began they would have meant something quite different. Look for instance at the Anglophobia in the USA, which is shared even by people like Edmund Wilson. It doesn’t matter, because we are not being persecuted. But if 6 million Englishmen had recently been killed in gas vans, I imagine I should feel insecure if I even saw a joke in a French comic paper about Englishwomen’s teeth sticking out. Some people go round smelling after antisemitism all the time. I have no doubt Fyvel* thinks I am antisemitic.3 More rubbish is written about this subject than any other I can think of. I have just had Sartre’s book on the subject for review, and I doubt whether it would be possible to pack more nonsense into so short a space. I have maintained from the start that Sartre is a bag of wind, though possibly when it comes to Existentialism, which I don’t profess to understand, it may not be so.

Richard is blooming. [His progress; winters milder in Jura than England.] For the first time in my life I have tried the experiment of keeping a pig. They really are disgusting brutes and we are all longing for the day when he goes to the butcher, but I am glad to see they do well here. He has grown to a stupendous size purely on milk and potatoes, without our buying any food for him from outside. In another year or so I shall have to be thinking about Richard’s schooling, but I am not making any plans because one can’t see far ahead now. I am not going to let him go to a boarding school before he is ten, and I would like him to start off at the elementary school. If one could find a good one. It’s a difficult question. Obviously it is democratic for everyone to go to the same schools, or at least start off there but when you see what the elementary schools are like, and the results, you feel that any child that has the chance should be rescued from them. It is quite easy, for instance, to leave those schools at 14 without having learned to read. I heard on the wireless lately that 10 per cent of army recruits, aged 19, have to be taught to read after they join the army. I remember in 1936 meeting John Strachey⁴ in the street—then a CP member or at least on the staff of the [Daily] Worker—and him telling me he had just had a son and was putting him down for Eton. I said ‘How can you do that?’ and he said that given our existing society it was the best education. Actually I doubt whether it is the best, but in principle I don’t feel sure that he was wrong. However I am taking no decisions about Richard one way or the other. Of course we may all have been blown to hell before it becomes urgent, but personally I don’t expect a major shooting war for 5 or 10 years. After the Russians have fully recovered and have atomic bombs,5 I suppose it isn’t avoidable. And even if it is avoided, there are a lot of other unpleasantnesses blowing up.

Please remember me to your wife and give my best regards to your daughter.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3481, pp. 460–2; typewritten]

1. National Dried was a milk powder, akin to proprietary brands such as Ostermilk, made available by the government through Baby Clinics to mothers of young babies.

2. John Davenport (1906–1966), critic and man of letters, a friend of many writers and painters. The paper was probably Our Time, to which he was a contributor. In the autumn of 1948 it was edited by Frank Jellinek and in 1949 by Randall Swingler.

3. Tosco Fyvel*, a long-standing friend of Orwell’s, comments on Orwell’s remark that he, Fyvel, doubtless thought him anti-Semitic in George Orwell: A Personal Memoir, pp. 178–82: ‘I would never have said that,’ though he reported that Malcolm Muggeridge thought Orwell ‘at heart strongly anti-Semitic’. Fyvel went on, ‘Put baldly like that, I would not agree…. It was unthinkable that he should ever have been openly anti-Semitic. But his ideological views concerning the assimilation into British culture of a strong Jewish ethnic minority were a different matter.’

4. John Strachey (1901–1963), politician and political theorist; Labour MP, 1929–31, 1945–63. In 1946 he became a prominent member of the Labour government.

5. Soviet Russia tested its first atomic bomb in September 1949.

To David Astor*

19 November 1948

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

Dear David,

Thanks so much for your letter. If you’d really like to give Richard something for Christmas, I wonder whether one can still get Meccano sets? I should think he is about ripe for one of the lower grades. Of course he’ll lose all the bolts, but still that is the kind of thing he likes. He is tremendously active about the farm and household, has to take part in all operations such as chopping firewood, filling lamps etc., and even insists on pouring out my ration of gin for me every evening. He goes fishing with the others and caught several fish the other day. I am so glad your little girl is going on well. I suppose at 20 months she will be talking a bit, as well as walking. Julian Symons, whom I think you met at lunch once, has just got a baby and seems very absorbed in it. Margie Fletcher is over on the mainland having her fourth.

It’s very kind of Charoux1 to help about restoring the picture. When I can get round to doing so I’ll make a crate and send it to him direct. I never can remember his address but I expect I have a letter of his somewhere. It’s only a very small picture, about 20" by 16", so it won’t be difficult to pack. In sending it here those bloody fools Pickfords succeeded in making a slit in the canvas and also chipping it in two places, but I don’t imagine it would be difficult to mend. It’s of no value, but it has sentimental associations and I think is quite a good painting. There was also that picture which you gave me and which got blitzed.² I was going to have that restored, but it’s a more extensive job as it got scratched all over. It was thrown right across the room by the blast.

I am on the grisly job of typing out my book which I have at last finished after messing about with it ever since the summer of 1947. I tried to get a stenog. to come here and do it for me, but it’s awkward to get anyone for such a short period so I am doing it myself. I feel somewhat better now, but I was in absolutely lousy health for about a month and I have decided if I can arrange it to go into a private sanatorium for Jan–Feb, which is the worst of the winter. Dr. Dick thinks it would be a good idea. I seem to be all right so long as I stay in bed till lunch time and then spend the rest of the day on a sofa, but if I walk even a few hundred yards or pull up a few weeds in the garden I promptly get a temperature. Otherwise everything is going well here and the farm has had quite a good first year in spite of the vile weather. There is now a bull, which is very good and quiet and I trust will remain so, as I can’t run very fast these days. Bobbie, your pony, is still at Tarbert, and I am not sure whether McIntyre° wants us to winter him or not. I had a talk with your brother about it when I met him at the sports about August, but subsequently there was some mixup and nobody from here has been down as far as Tarbert for some months. Anyway, if they would like us to winter Bobbie, we are pleased to do so, as he is useful to us in several ways and also makes a companion for the other horse. I do not know whether I shall be in London at any time in the near future—I suppose some time next year, but I must try and get my health right.

I am so glad the Obs. is taking up Africa so to speak. Also that O’Donovan³ is going on reporting Asia for you. He is really a great acquisition. Your friend de Gaulle seems to be bent on making mischief all round. However it rather looks now as if there won’t be war for some years.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3490, pp. 468–9; typewritten]

1. A picture-framer and restorer; his address is given in Orwell’s address book as 65 Holland Park Road, [London] W.14.

2. A flying bomb fell close by the Orwells’ flat in Mortimer Crescent on 28 June 1944.

3. Patrick O’Donovan, who had joined the Observer in 1946 and worked with distinction as a roving correspondent abroad. (See his A Journalist’s Odyssey, 1985.)

To Gleb Struve*

22 November 1948

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

Dear Struve,

Thanks so much for your letter of November 6th (only just got here.) I have written to Warburg, explaining the circumstances about We, and suggesting that if interested he should write either to you or to the people handling Westhouse’s affairs. Of course if Warburg isn’t interested there are plenty of others.

Yes, of course it’s all right about the Russian translation of Animal Farm.¹ Naturally I don’t want any money from D.Ps, but if they ever do produce it in book form I should like a copy or two of that. Did I tell you it was done into Ukrainian by the D.Ps in the American Zone about a year ago? I understand that the American authorities seized about half the copies printed and handed them over to the Soviet repatriation people, but that about 3000 copies got distributed.

I’ll look out for your Turgenev translation in Politics.² [Is typing his book.]

Yours sincerely

Geo. Orwell

[XIX, 3496, pp. 472–3; typewritten]

1. The Russian translation of Animal Farm, Skotskii Khutor, was made by M. Kriger and Gleb Struve; it appeared in Possev, a weekly social and political review, Nos. 7–25, 1949, which published it as a book in 1950. Possev means the sowing of seed and outlasted the Soviet Union.

2. Politics ceased publication before the translation could be published.

To Leonard Moore*

30 November 1948

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

Dear Moore,

I am afraid there has been a mix-up about this typing business and that you and perhaps the typing agencies you applied [to] have been put to unnecessary trouble. What happened was this. I wrote first to Warburg, asking him to engage a typist in London, but he and Senhouse apparently decided that it would be easier to arrange it in Edinburgh, because of the journey, although, of course, the tiresome part of the journey is not between London and Scotland but between Jura and the mainland. I waited for a bit, and then Roger Senhouse said he was putting his niece in Edinburgh on to the job of finding a typist. Meanwhile in case nothing materialised I had started doing it myself. Then apparently Warburg rang you up and I got two letters from you, suggesting the names of two people in London, but I couldn’t close with this in case Senhouse’s niece suddenly produced somebody. I have never heard from her, and now I hear from Senhouse that in fact she couldn’t get anybody. Meanwhile I have almost finished the typing and shall send it off probably on the 7th December, so you should get it in about a week. I do hope the two women whose names you suggested have not been inconvenienced or put off other engagements or anything like that. It really wasn’t worth all this fuss. It’s merely that as it tires me to sit upright for any length of time I can’t type very neatly and can’t do many pages a day.

These copies I am sending you are only carbons, and not first-class typing. If you think bad typing might prejudice the MS. with the American publishers, it would be worth having it redone by a commercial agency. But if you do decide on that, can you see that they don’t make mistakes. I know what these agencies are like. As the thing is typed already, and I don’t think I have left any errors in it, it should be easy enough, but it is wonderful what mistakes a professional typist will make, and in this book there is the difficulty that it contains a lot of neologisms.

Yours sincerely

Eric Blair

[XIX, 3501, p. 477; typewritten]

To David Astor*

21 December 1948

Barnhill

[Isle of Jura]

Dear David,

I am really very unwell indeed, & have been since about September, & I am arranging to go into a private sanatorium early in January & stay there at least 2 months. I was going to go to a place called Kingussie, reccommended° by Dr. Dick, but they were full up & I have made arrangements to go to a place in Glostershire.° I suppose there might be some slip-up, but if not my address as from 7th Jan. will be The Cotswold Sanatorium, cranham, glos.

I tell you this chiefly because I feel I simply must stop working, or rather trying to work, for at least a month or two. I would have gone to a sanatorium two months ago if I hadn’t wanted to finish that bloody book off, which thank God I have done. I had been messing about with it for 18 months thanks to this bloody disease. I have polished off all the reviews I promised for the Observer except two [details and apologies to Mr Rose]. I’m afraid I[vor] B[rown] will mark this as another black mark against me, but I just must have a good rest for a month or two. I just must try & stay alive for a while because apart from other considerations I have a good idea for a novel.1

Everything is flourishing here except me. [Life at Barnhill; has a stationary engine for Richard’s Meccano.] We sent our pig to be slaughtered a week or two ago. He was only nine months old & weighed 2 cwt. after removal of the head & trotters.

I hope your little girl is well. Margie Fletcher’s new baby had something wrong intestinally, but it seems to be better now. It’s another boy.

Yours

George

[XIX, 3510, pp. 485–6; handwritten]

1. Perhaps ‘A Smoking-Room Story’ (see XX, 3723–4, pp. 193–200).

To Fredric Warburg*

21 December 1948

Barnhill

[Isle of Jura]

Dear Fred,

Thanks for two letters. [Is really very unwell indeed & arranging to go into The Cotswold Sanatorium.] But better consider Barnhill my address till I confirm the other. I ought to have done this 2 months ago but I wanted to get that bloody book finished.

About photos. I have none here, but I’m pretty certain I had a number at my flat, which my sister has just been closing up & dismantling. The photos will have been in a file which will be coming up here, but I suppose not for ages, as anything sent by rail takes months. I’ll send you any photos I can when they arrive, but meanwhile could you try first Moore, who I think has one or two, & then Vernon & Marie-Louise Richards1 who took a lot 3 years ago. [How to find them.] At need we could bring a photographer to the sanatorium, but I am really a deathshead at present, & I imagine shall be in bed for a month or so.

I’m glad you liked the book. It isn’t a book I would gamble on for a big sale, but I suppose one could be sure of 10,000 any way. It’s still beautiful weather here, but I never stir out of doors & seldom off the sofa. Richard is offensively well, & everything else flourishing except me. I am trying to finish off my scraps of book-reviewing etc. & must then just strike work for a month or so. I can’t go on as at present. I have a stunning idea for a very short novel which has been in my head for years, but I can’t start anything until I am free from high temperatures etc.

Love to all.

George

[XIX, 3511, pp. 486–7; handwritten]

1. Vernon Richards* (1915–2001) and Marie-Louise Richards (1918–49) were very active in the Anarchist movement. They both took photographs of Orwell at his request for use in newspapers and magazines and, in 1946, photographed him with his adopted son, Richard. (See George Orwell at Home (and Among the Anarchists): Essays and Photographs, Freedom Press, 1998.)

To Roger Senhouse*

26 December 1948

Barnhill Isle of Jura Argyll

Dear Roger,

Thanks so much for your letter. As to the blurb. I really don’t think the approach in the draft you sent me is the right one. It makes the book sound as though it were a thriller mixed up with a love story, & I didn’t intend it to be primarily that. What it is really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into ‘Zones of influence’ (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Teheran Conference), & in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism. It has always seemed to me that people have not faced up to these & that, eg., the persecution of scientists in Russia1 is simply part of a logical process which should have been foreseeable 10–20 years ago. When you get to the proof stage, how would it be to get some eminent person who might be interested, eg. Bertrand Russell² or Lancelot Hogben,³ to give his opinions about the book, & (if he consented) use a piece of that as the blurb? There are a number of people one might choose from.

I am going into a sanatorium as from 6th Jan., & unless there is some last-minute slip-up my address will be, The Cotswold Sanatorium, Cranham, Glos.

Love to all

George

[XIX, 3513, pp. 487–8; handwritten]

1. See 19.3.47.

2. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970; 3rd Earl Russell), philosopher, mathematician, lecturer, and writer. Among the many causes for which he fought perhaps the most important was that for nuclear disarmament. (See his ‘George Orwell’, World Review, new series 16, June 1950.)

3. Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975), scientist and author, first achieved distinction as a geneticist and endocrinologist but later became known to a very wide public for a series of books that introduced science and language to the general reader, especially Mathematics for the Million (1936), and Science for the Citizen (1938).