THE VOYAGE ITSELF WAS a revelation. Blair passed long hours at the rail, watching the wake cast by the Herefordshire as it bore him toward the East. Even as the ship left England, Blair was beginning deliberately to postpone his plans for becoming a writer. One of the attractions of the Imperial Police was its promise of retirement with a pension at forty. Forty, thought Blair, was young enough to undertake a writing career; the pension would make his support easier until his works began to sell.
He could in a fit of self-pity or self-indulgence dream of deferring his literary ambitions, but he could not disengage the qualities a good writer most needs: attentiveness to language, awareness of detail, acuteness of observation. Blair stood by the rail of the ship and watched Britain recede, then turned his attention to his fellow passengers and the crew that served them. The crew was predominantly Indian, but the officers were British, and there were several Europeans among the crew. It was they who handled any mechanical emergency that might arise. Blair was fascinated by these men, awed by their array of skills. But his feeling was tempered when he spotted one of them, after the midday meal, smuggling leftover food from the galley back to his quarters, a guilty look on his face. Blair was never to forget that glimpse of a man he’d admired, a skilled man, reduced to becoming a petty thief in order to feed himself.
When the Herefordshire made landfall in Colombo, Sri Lanka (or Ceylon, as it was then known), Blair’s eyes were again opened. The ship became crowded with Sri Lankans who scurried up the gangplanks in search of work, most of which consisted of helping passengers with their luggage. The coolies, as they were called, were under the supervision of the local white police, Blair’s own colleagues, and Blair watched as the coolies were prodded to work harder and were brutally kicked when they became clumsy. Was this the sort of duty for which he was to be responsible? It did not escape his notice that the white passengers complimented the policemen for well-aimed, well-timed kicks.
By November Blair had landed in Rangoon, and his concern for coolies was replaced by the exotic distractions of the place. He was struck by the golden spires of Buddhist shrines, and by the contrast of the stacks and towers of the Rangoon oil refinery, which reached equally high but spat smoke rather than reflecting sunlight. Ancient, exotic, modern, Eastern, Western, Rangoon’s cultures mingled in a throbbing, noisy throng, almost overwhelming at first, with a fevered rhythm that took some getting used to. Blair, as was expected of him, introduced himself to the local colonial officials, and after a few days found himself growing more relaxed in India. Soon he caught the train that would carry him to Mandalay and the school at which he would be instructed in the art and science of becoming a colonial police officer. The train trip lasted sixteen hours, carrying Blair far north and into central Burma, to Mandalay on the Irrawaddy River.
Mandalay, celebrated in one of Kipling’s poems, dominated by a nearly one-mile-square fortified palace surrounded by a moat thick with hyacinths, struck Blair at first as a city as marvelously exotic as Rangoon. And there was no odorous refinery to foul the air in Mandalay. For all their exotic nature, however, neither city was ancient. Rangoon had been founded by King Alaungpaya in 1755, and Mandalay by King Mindon barely a century later in 1857. The streets of Rangoon had been planned by British engineers, and Mindon had copied that layout. Mandalay was to be the capital of Burma. It was built around the central palace and the Buddhist Shwe Nandaw Monastery, but in 1885 British troops captured the city, overthrew Mindon’s successor, and proclaimed Rangoon the country’s capital. Mandalay became an admittedly important colonial outpost, the palace transformed into a British fort, the city a central location from which control of the region could be exercised.
Imperial influence extended far beyond the layout of city streets. In fact, in 1922, even with the number of British troops declining, it extended beyond mere influence. It pervaded Burmese society, seeking to overwhelm any national identity and replace it with a more subservient colonial identity. The British Empire during the 1920s remained an empire, in which the crown’s absolute authority was enforced by troops if necessary, but more often by colonial police and administrative officials. During the 1920s, though, both Indian and Burmese independence movements were beginning to grow, India’s more rapidly and forcefully than that of Burma. Burma was viewed by the British as an Indian province, and those imperial concessions that were made to the independence movements favored India far more than they did Burma.
Provincial administration, especially in outlying and underdeveloped areas, fell largely to the provincial police that Eric Blair had joined. The policemen were often either Burmese or Indian—although there were more than a few Chinese among the ranks—and these were supervised by white officers. The challenges facing the provincial police grew apace with the spread of fervor for independence, and to meet these challenges a lengthy training period was required of new officers. For nine months Blair and his fellow new arrivals were billeted at the police mess in Mandalay as they undertook their course of study.
For the new officers that curriculum included both the Burmese language and the Indian Hindustani language, which was also spoken in Burma. Officers were expected to become fluent in both languages, along with local dialects, and to understand more technical legal terms and conversation in both languages. They were responsible for courses in police methods and procedure, as well as local and British administrative law. In addition, they learned the various means and methods of controlling their subordinates.
On Wednesdays and Saturdays the probationary officers were expected to attend full-dress parades of those subordinates. More than one hundred of the Indian, Burmese, and Chinese cadets were attending the Police School in Mandalay during Blair’s term there, and the parades were an important part of each week. The probationary officers were required to wear their formal dress uniforms to the parades, looking like something out of Kipling: British officers in white with sabers, reviewing the natives. While it made a very dashing picture, Blair never quite managed to present the striking colonial officer image of his colleagues. He’d grown quite tall but also quite skinny, the chubbiness of his youth now long gone. Blair’s uniforms tended to hang loosely on him, no matter how tightly they were recut and tailored.
During his training period in Burma Blair lived in quarters his father would have well understood. The police mess was a comfortable large building whose ground floor served the while officers as their club. It was to the club that many officers retired for drinks, conversation, and cards at the end of the day, just as they had during Richard Blair’s years with the Opium Department. But if the details of club life—and clubmen, as they thought of themselves—had changed little since the reign of Queen Victoria, the cost of the club had gone up precipitously. Eric Blair, at least, could afford only occasional visits, having to spend most of his meager salary on the simple business of keeping alive.
His inability to join in the more social aspects of an officer’s life mattered little to Blair. His shyness, always pronounced, grew deeper during his days in Burma. He did not like meeting new people, he had no gift for small talk or idle chatter. He did not particularly enjoy the topics of conversation practiced in the club, either. His fellow officers seemed to spend all their time speaking of women, or of the inferiority of the dark-skinned peoples with whom they were surrounded, or of their experiences in combat during World War I. The older officers rarely overlooked the opportunity to make Blair and others his age feel inadequate for having been too young to take part in the war.
Blair preferred to spend his free time in his room, reading. He’d brought with him a number of books, novels, primarily, and other English-language publications were easily available. As the courses required of the probationary officers, particularly their language courses, were left to a certain degree to the individual student’s initiative and ability, Blair often was able to spend whole days in his room reading. He studied on his own and remained ahead of his classmates in most of the studies, his gift for languages enabling him to excel in his mastery of Burmese and Hindustani. Blair deliberately created the impression of wishing to be left alone, and his wishes were for the most part respected.
When he was not reading or studying, Blair prowled about Mandalay, learning as much as he could on his own of the nature of the country to which he’d requested assignment. Local history and culture were given short shrift at the Police School, being seen as unimportant to colonial administrators. Blair sought to remedy that lack on his own. After he’d been in Mandalay several weeks he managed to save enough money to buy a second-hand motorcycle. His classmates were amused by the picture of Blair on the bike. It fit him no better than did his uniforms, his knees coming, it seemed, all the way up to his oversized ears as he hunched over the handlebars.
The topic of women, so popular among the officers, was one that caused Blair some discomfort. He was not at ease around women, and with the exception of his poetic attempt at the courtship of Jacintha Buddicom, along with one or two other minor crushes, he had yet to experience a serious romantic attachment. He was too shy. Blair managed to overcome that shyness on occasion, however, and indulge in a bit of bragging about his amorous adventures among Mandalay’s bordellos, but whether or not his tales were based upon fact was unknown. He did seem to display less interest in female companionship than did other young men his age.
From time to time he was willing to engage in adventures of other sorts. While stationed in Mandalay he and a friend decided that their assignment would be incomplete without a tiger hunt, and they planned the undertaking with care. When they received some time off from their studies they traveled along muddy roads deep into the jungle to meet a guide they had hired. The guide then loaded them into a wooden cart drawn by a bull, and led them ever deeper into the jungle. He was leading them, they were assured, to a spot where they would encounter a fierce, trophy-sized tiger. They rode all night, the guide offered constant encouragement, but they saw no tigers. It was only as they made their way back to the police mess that Blair and his companion became convinced that the guide, perhaps resentful of British officers, had led them only to spots where no tiger was likely to be found.
Such companionship in adventure was uncommon for Blair, however, and he accomplished most of his explorations on his own. As the weeks of his training passed he retreated more and more into himself. He wrote few letters. At first, as though still convinced that a romance could be kindled, he wrote to Jacintha Buddicom, complaining of how awful he found everything, of how much he disliked the country. Jacintha was no more receptive to his complaints than she’d been to his plaintive declarations of romance. She responded with practical advice, telling Blair to grow accustomed to his surroundings or to abandon the service and return home. Eric wrote three letters to Jacintha, but either her responses were not what he wished to hear, or he lost interest in writing of complaints, for their correspondence dwindled and then ceased altogether.
He did little writing of any sort while in Burma. Occasionally he would sit with pen and huddle over a piece of paper—often official stationery purloined for a literary purpose—and after much effort produce a poem. It was becoming clear to Blair, though, that his talents, whatever they were, were not wholly poetic. His Burmese poetry seemed little better than his schoolboy verse, and in all his years in Burma he wrote fewer than half-a-dozen poems. Was the dream of becoming a writer, delayed and deferred, in the process of being denied by Blair?
Certainly there were plenty of activities to keep him busy. In January 1924 he graduated from the Police School and received his first assignment. He remained a probationary officer, as regulations dictated, and would hold that position for another fifteen months. But his first posting, to Myaungmya in the south, where the Irrawaddy broadened as it made its way to the ocean, carried with it a great deal of responsibility. Under the supervision of an embittered, demanding superior officer, Blair was held accountable for a variety of tasks, including the direction of more than three dozen local policemen, and the accuracy and promptness with which all local records were kept. He was also responsible for the management and maintenance of the local version of the police school, as well as teaching native candidates who were studying to be police officers. His superior was frequently absent and Blair more than once found himself in absolute command of the Myaungmya police station with its attendant courts, school, and responsibilities.
The posting lasted barely a season. Blair was transferred to Twante in late spring, 1924. Twante was smaller than Myaungmya, and Blair carried even more authority in his new posting. In Twante he lived in a house that lacked all of the amenities to which Europeans were accustomed: there was no running water, toilets, or electricity. Blair was rarely at home, however, taking his motorcycle out for patrols through the area, checking on legal matters in villages even smaller than Twante, serving as a magistrate, and supervising the Burmese policemen. Although Twante was less than twenty miles by canal from Rangoon, Blair saw few other Europeans during his stay there. His superiors would occasionally visit, if only to insure that he was doing all right. Blair continued to keep his own counsel, seeking to be fair in the justice he delivered, while he learned the role of colonial police officer.
His performance was not distinguished, but neither was it incompetent. Blair set a steady course for himself, quiet, solitary, neither overeager nor lackadaisical. He was an ordinary, bookish sort of fellow who made few close friends and who earned some attention for his regular attendance at native churches—both Christian and Buddhist. As an assistant district superintendent, albeit probationary, he accepted his duties and spent most of his time carrying them out.
While those duties primarily involved the exercise of civil law and the supervision of police forces, there were occasional murders to which Blair was assigned as an investigator. This, at first, was more like the police work he recalled from the books he read as a boy. There was a sense of excitement that came with riding in a canoe paddled by Burmese, Blair in his uniform bringing authority and order, to small villages where a crime had been committed. He almost enjoyed it. It was almost possible, while seeking evidence or gathering testimony in a capital crime, to feel some of the romance he’d imagined he would find in Burma. And it was almost possible, once the investigation and trial ended, to watch the execution by hanging of the criminal and imagine that, in some way, justice had been done. But was justice served by a criminal’s death, by any death? Blair did not know.
Murder cases in the Twante area, however, were relatively rare, and their nature was usually that of a crime of quick flaring passion rather than careful calculation, as in detective stories. More common than murderers, and more problematical to deal with, were the gangs of thieves who roved through the area, attacking and robbing villages and travelers alike. Thievery was endemic in outlying regions, and some of the bands of thieves grew quite large and vicious, eluding the best efforts of Blair and his police force.
He came to enjoy working with the Burmese, but it was not a rapid process. The empire had been a fact for all of his life, and its nature—and the right of its existence—had been reinforced by his education both at St. Cyprian’s and Eton. The British had carried their culture and knowledge to this part of the world, and would make the Burmese accept it, by force when required. And, despite the decline in the number of troops stationed in Burma, force was still frequently required.
The British rarely identified Asians by any term other than a derogatory one. Discipline was accomplished by cursing them, and if this failed the British felt free to strike the Burmese. Eric Blair, still uncertain of himself, barely twenty-one years old, carried a cane on occasion. If he did not become a sadistic tormentor of the Burmese as did so many of the British, he could still grow sufficiently annoyed, often over very minor slights, to wield the cane, as Mr. Wilkes had done at St. Cyprian’s. He struck some harsh blows with it, he made some points with it, and never revealed whether he’d forgotten the effort of his Eton election to abolish violence.
Times were changing in Burma, though, and on one occasion Blair used his cane to strike a Burmese student who had inadvertently jostled him. To his surprise, Blair found himself immediately surrounded by angry students. Their education might be a product of the British presence, but its results were prodding them to resist the right of the white man to inflict casual, painful blows. Burmese students understood that a day was coming when the British would no longer be granted the rights they had claimed for more than a century: the right to exploit the land until it was exhausted, the right to mine its resources and carry the profits home with them, the right to use, and often kill, the Burmese people by simple virtue of military and economic superiority and white skins. There were consequences to be paid for such actions.
Typically for Blair, the confrontation with the students avoided further violence, devolving into a shouted debate as both Blair and the students sought to make their points. The argument continued for some time, the students following Blair onto a train. Despite the heat of the moment, both Blair and the students seemed more interested ultimately in ideas than in physical confrontation. Blair was not certain he disagreed with the students.
By early 1925 Blair had been transferred to his third posting, this one at Syriam, even closer to Rangoon than was Twante. Syriam was a refinery town, its air acrid with smoke, its ground so fouled by industrial by-products that it was virtually unable to support vegetation. Syriam was a rough spot as well, with Burmese refinery workers who sometimes seemed to look upon their labor as an interlude between bouts of drinking and fighting. There was a murder virtually every day, but Blair’s primary responsibilities lay not in murder investigation, but in helping supervise security for the refinery and going on long patrols to outlying villages. There was no variety in the work, and few challenges; police work in Syriam soon came to strike Blair as being nearly as stultifying as the foul fumes that ruined the air.
He continued to devote his free time to reading, concentrating on novels. Despite his distance both geographically and professionally from the British literary scene, Blair attempted to keep up to date with the works of important contemporary writers. He would go on jags, reading one novel after another by D. H. Lawrence, for example, or passing hours with an acquaintance discussing the works of Aldous Huxley, an up-and-coming novelist. Blair recalled Huxley as a substitute French instructor at Eton, and was able to add his memories of Huxley’s personality to his discussions of Huxley’s work.
Another English writer Blair admired and turned to often was W. Somerset Maugham. Novels such as Of Human Bondage, and Maugham’s many short stories, struck Blair as models of clear, straightforward storytelling. He appreciated Maugham’s “plain” style. For its time, it was a relaxed and unmannered style of writing that erected few barriers of allusion or metaphor between writer and reader. Maugham had seen and written about the Far East, and Blair also found that agreeable.
In addition to his attempts at staying current with English literature, Blair was reading the works of an earlier generation. He particularly enjoyed Mark Twain, and could lose himself in the works of Tolstoy. Joseph Conrad’s novels and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe also caught Blair’s interest. He read avidly the works of Samuel Butler, the nineteenth-century English novelist and essayist. Butler had written Erewhon, a satirical novel of a world in which possession of machines was illegal. Blair appreciated Butler’s use of fantasy as a means of making intellectual points. He also studied Butler’s Notebooks, which were filled with practical comments about writing.
There were few people with whom Blair could discuss his literary interests, and no one to whom he divulged his literary ambitions. He would claim later that those ambitions had been put out of his mind when he put on the uniform of the provincial. police. Most of his fellow officers, especially the older ones, expressed attitudes verging on contempt toward novels, novelists, and intellectuals in general. They thought of themselves as hard practical men, tough men whose job it was to hold the empire together, or at least their own particular corner of it. If they had a favorite writer, it was Kipling, who had seen what they had seen, knew what they knew, and had written it down for the world. Even Blair admitted that part of his attraction to service in the police in Burma was derived from his reading of Kipling.
As his years in Burma passed, though, Blair’s affection for Kipling began to wane, as he saw what Kipling had seen, and came to know the modern version of the world Kipling had known. During his first two years in Burma, though, and through his first few postings, Blair was very much a part of that Kiplingesque world. For all that his uniforms did not fit him well, he wore them proudly, taking great pleasure in the way a uniform made a man feel. And despite his predilection for lingering in his room over a book, he could occasionally be found in the local club, smoking a cigarette and having a drink with his colleagues, discussing with them the day’s work.
His pleasure in that vision of himself began to fade as more time passed. The climate of Burma—and no doubt the cigarettes that he had taken to smoking constantly—did not agree with his lungs. He experienced occasional bouts with congestion and bronchial trouble. During the monsoon seasons his health would sink to its lowest point, and his early postings that carried him south into the Irrawaddy Delta also took him to the area of Burma where the monsoons were most severe.
Nor did he have a great deal of luck with his superior officers. While he was taken with the idea of colonial service, and pleased with the feel of his uniform with its straps and buckles, Eric Blair was by no means a conventional young colonial officer. He was too open, too receptive, and as the years passed it became obvious that he was too empathetic toward the Burmese over whom he was supposed to exercise authority. Blair had servants, as did all the other officers, but when those officers would visit Blair’s quarters they would often find him living in a tumbledown hut, with a variety of animals that he’d adopted running loose through his bedroom. Servants, the others pointed out, were supposed to deal with messes like that. But, Blair responded, the mess was the way he enjoyed living. The officer’s mold that he had tried to fit was beginning to crack.
By the end of the summer of 1925, Blair had been transferred out of the Delta and back into jungle country, to Insein, ten miles to the north of Rangoon. It was at his new posting that Blair began to entertain his first serious doubts about the service in which he had enlisted. His growing dissatisfaction could be traced partly to the passage of time: nothing about Burma was new to him any longer, he had seen it all and the days and chores became repetitive and depressing. Blair was too imaginative: Insein was the site of a major Burmese prison, with thousands of Burmese incarcerated there, many of them awaiting execution. Their captive presence was a constant reminder to officers such as Blair of the authority they held over other’s lives. Blair’s superior in Insein made his own contributions to the young officer’s disappointment with the service. The superior officer possessed a reputation for tormenting his juniors that was by every evidence well earned. To be trapped in a dull job, in proximity to thousands of men waiting to die, and hounded by a superior without sympathy or concern, was more than Blair could stand. He began to speak of leaving the police.
His stay in Insein lasted an endless six months, each day weighing more heavily upon Blair than the previous one. By April 1926, when he was transferred to Moulmein, his decision to leave Burma was virtually complete. Certainly his early determination to become a model police officer was gone. Even the distractions of being posted in a large city, the home of his maternal grandmother, could not spark in him a renewal of interest. He told his grandmother, in fact, that he was giving thought to the best way of leaving the service. He found her unsympathetic. The Limouzin family had settled in Burma generations before and bore the obligations of colonials as comfortably as anyone. On a more pragmatic level, Mrs. Limouzin was curious as to what her grandson would do after leaving the service. He had no answer.
It became more and more clear to him, though, that departure from Burma and abandonment of his police career were inevitable. He was not meant for this way of life. His argument with the students over his right to strike them made a good example of what was wrong. Blair, the white man, the British officer, was granted by virtue of the circumstances of his birth the right to strike blows against other human beings. Yet when the argument continued on board the train, those supposedly lesser humans rode with him in the same car, their first-class tickets as good as his own. Their eyes, for that matter, were as alive with the student’s love of learning as, at one time, his had been. What right did he have to strike them?
He grew more aware of the hatred that lay beneath the surface servility of the Burmese. And why should they not hate the British, the Europeans, and the Americans who destroyed their land and their hopes? The question of authority began to obsess him. Blair, as a young officer, was occasionally presented with tasks that were intended to reinforce that authority. But whether he was called upon to help in a criminal investigation, witness a hanging, or shoot an elephant that had gone mad, Blair no longer saw the respect for uniform and empire in Burmese eyes that he’d seen upon first arriving in Burma. Now he saw more deeply and could see or sense the laughter, contemptuous and disrespectful, that lurked behind those eyes. It would erupt one day, he began to realize, and the eruption would most likely be violent, perhaps terribly so. The empire had outlived its usefulness, or at least Eric Blair felt he had outlived his own usefulness to the empire.
Eric Blair received what would be his final posting during the Christmas holidays in 1926. He was transferred to Katha, far to the north of Mandalay, in a more temperate region of Burma. The change in climate helped his health little. His cough was chronic now, and he suspected more than once that he had tuberculosis. As the early months of 1927 passed he began to think of his health as a legitimate excuse for leaving the service. Late in 1927 he would complete his first five years of Burmese duty, and would be eligible for a long leave of absence. Perhaps during the leave he could renew his discipline if not his dedication, and return to Burma refreshed.
That brief hope faded quickly. By June he knew that he could no longer function as a police officer. He put in for a medical leave, not Wishing to resign while still in Burma. He could not wait even four months for his regular leave to come up. In July he was granted a medical leave that was to last nearly half a year.
Blair did not hesitate. He packed his bags, said what few farewells he felt obliged to say, and boarded ship for his return voyage to Britain. Despite his request for a temporary medical leave, he knew that he would not be returning to Burma. He passed his time on board the ship reading, smoking, and thinking about his future. That future, he came to realize with increasing clarity, was one in which he would make of himself a writer. But how to write? And what to write about? As at so many other points in his life, Eric Blair was uncertain.