IN AUGUST 1927, twenty-four-year-old Eric Blair stood on British soil for the first time in five years. In many ways he’d still been a schoolboy when he departed for exotic adventure in Burma, and he was in many ways a man now that he had returned. While overseas, he’d grown a mustache and become a nonstop cigarette smoker, a would-be writer, an adult responsible for his own actions and their consequences. That sense of responsibility, coupled with Blair’s belief, as yet unsupported, that he could best meet his responsibilities through the practice of literature, was what he most wanted to communicate to his parents. It would not be easy.
Blair joined his family immediately upon his return from Burma, and traveled with them for a family vacation in Cornwall. For his first few days home he kept quiet not only about his decision to leave the police, but also about the medical leave he’d been granted. The sea voyage had restored him to better health, and despite a brief relapse during which he lay in bed and was cared for by Ida Blair, Blair’s health remained generally good and continued to improve.
The same could not be said of his relationship with his parents. Once he was recovered, he steeled himself to reveal his decision. He would not be returning to Burma. More than that, he intended to become a writer, and had decided to seek no professional or salaried position. His frugality in Burma had left him with a few months’ pay, enough to get by on until his work was selling regularly.
Richard and Ida Blair had no idea what sort of response to make. They did reveal their displeasure and disappointment, but their son, though it was obvious he cared for their feelings, was not about to change his mind or revise his plans simply to suit them. He’d already drafted his letter of resignation, and mailed it to his superiors in London. Questions about duty, obligation, or, more pragmatically, subsistence, fell upon deaf ears. Blair had seen the empire at work, and learned that it was not his lot to play a part in it. He could make such a decision, he argued, because he had, at least, given the service a chance. He was not his father, who after all the years in the Opium Department had still felt strongly enough to volunteer for service during the war. That was admirable, certainly, but it was not for Eric Blair. He was going to write: it was as simple as that. And he made his points smoking, scattering ashes, tossing half-finished cigarettes on the floor, just as he threw his clothes onto chairs and left stacks of books piled precariously. He gave little evidence of caring for domestic order any more than he did for professional discipline.
The Blairs were baffled and convinced that their son’s ambitions would come to nothing. But they were also, despite the now-faded contempt Eric had expressed toward them while at Eton, intelligent and understanding people. They knew there was nothing they could do to change his mind. They made their disappointment clear, and in some ways it never dwindled. But Eric Blair was after all an adult. The path his life was to take was his to decide, so long as he understood that he would have to make his own way. He should not plan to learn to write while depending upon Richard and Ida Blair for support and sustenance. He would visit them occasionally, but they would never again be close. Blair was no longer a child.
Blair had anticipated that attitude, and knew that it was reasonable. He also knew how great a struggle lay ahead of him, how difficult it was to earn an entry into the world of literature, how much he had to learn, and how little he knew. There were sacrifices to be made, among them, at least temporarily, the respect of his parents. But he was willing to make that sacrifice and whatever others were required, in order to win the success that he felt awaited him. He would one day be able to show Jacintha Buddicom that “collected edition” of which they’d so often spoken as children.
His parents informed of his decision, the police notified of his intention to resign, Blair passed most of a month attempting to get his bearings. He’d chosen his course before he quite knew the best way of proceeding along it. He visited Prosper Buddicom, but Jacintha was away and he could not benefit from her counsel. He traveled back to Eton and spent a brief time with A. S. F. Gow, his first and favorite tutor. Gow gave what encouragement he felt he could, but had little to offer. Other than to recommend that a would-be writer actually spend time writing, and then submitting the completed work, there is very little good advice that can be given to a person possessed of literary ambition.
That was all that Eric Blair needed. By fall he had contacted a friend in London and through her had located and rented a small, sparsely furnished room in which to set up his typewriter and begin transforming himself from unemployed former colonial policeman into a self-supporting, consistently published writer. He planned to keep to himself. Blair did not have a great deal of interest in talking about the works he planned, despite the fact that most of his neighbors were writers and artists of various sorts and levels of success. Ruth Pitter, the friend who had found him the room, was herself a published poet, although she did not earn her livelihood from poetry. She was the one person to whom Blair was willing to show his work. He understood that he faced a long apprenticeship, and that idle conversation could too easily take the place of production of completed manuscripts. He plunged into his work, spending most of each day, as well as a good portion of his evening hours, at his typewriter. There was no going back now.
Nor was there, so far as his early pieces were concerned, much looking back, either. Despite the presence on his desk of a large stack of police stationery, purloined in Burma against lean days ahead, Blair seems to have avoided the attempt to deal with his colonial experiences in his early stories and poems. Few of those manuscripts survived, but most of his effort during his first season as a full-time writer was devoted to producing commercial stories, plays, and poems, pieces of work tailored to suit the literary marketplace as Blair viewed it. Burma would one day no doubt be transmuted into books, essays, poems, and short stories, but fall 1927 was too soon to attempt it. Burma and its people were too different, the Burmese experience too complex, his own attitudes toward empire still too chaotic and undefined to allow the production of the careful, good work he set as his goal. Burma also must have seemed less salable as source material for stories than did more literary themes.
As the fall turned into a cold winter and 1928 drew closer, Blair typed out his own versions of the sorts of stories he found most frequently in popular magazines. He wrote of young people, he wrote love stories, he wrote poetry, he endeavored to write a play about a struggling artist whose starving child needed an operation. The play was no more melodramatic and florid than the rest of his early works. Ruth Pitter listened attentively as Blair read some of his attempts to her, and she tactfully waited until the earnest young author had left the room before she burst out laughing. It was not just that he was unskilled; it was as though Blair’s brain generated plots, characters, and language that were deliberately overwrought. It struck some of those who were exposed to his apprentice work that he was worse than an amateur; he was a hopeless amateur who had no chance of ever becoming a published writer, much less an important one.
If Blair was aware of the others’ feelings, it did not deter him. Criticism and rejection could not stop him. He became increasingly withdrawn, the typewriter and blank pages the focal points of his existence. His situation must at times have seemed almost as melodramatic as those he devised for his poor characters. The room he rented was unheated, and as bitter winter settled in, Blair claimed to use a single candle as a means of warming his fingers until they were limber enough to let him work the keys of his typewriter. Blair could not be kept from the typewriter by the elements any more than he could by lack of talent, or parental displeasure, or a constant sense of failure. He swung between that sense of failure and a quiet optimism about his work. He kept on working, in either mood, dedicated to nothing less than mastering the English language. He had to learn how to create sentences, to write clearly, to overcome the handicaps of an overliterary, affected style. He gave the impression of being certain that by mastering language he would have the tool he needed to untangle the knot of emotion and half-formed opinion that kept his writing from being first rate. He knew he had things to say but did not quite know how to say them.
Those emotions and opinions increasingly gathered around the plight of the poor. Blair was not yet ready to undertake serious writing about the oppression he had witnessed, and participated in while stationed in Burma, but he grew more and more aware that there was oppression to be found outside his London room. As his resources dwindled, and his prospects for earning income by his typewriter grew no better, he became curious, and then fascinated with the lives of those who had no prospects at all. The Depression of the 1930s was already beginning to set in even in the late 1920s. Blair was increasingly drawn not only to thought about the poor, to contemplation of their situation and reflection about its nature, but also to physical proximity to poverty. He had to be there, in the poor quarters of London, he had to walk among the poor, and he felt with more and more certainty that he had to do even more than that. He had to walk as one of the poor, become one of them.
The early months of 1928 passed and Blair began to put aside his carefully, if poorly crafted commercial stories. He replaced them with fragments, bits of conversation overheard while stalking through poor sections of the city, sketches of the people he saw, and the incidents he witnessed. Blair returned to those places again and again, dressed as a tramp, drawn there by something he still could not articulate, could not make completely clear to himself, much less put down on paper. But the fascination became an obsession, and along with it was something like a conviction that he would find a source for great writing in the stricken lives and the deaths of the poor.
That winter Blair walked London’s shabbiest streets, refusing to wear warm clothes because those he watched had none. His lungs began to act up and give him a chronic cough like that of the poverty-seized tubercular people he passed. But Blair began to come alive. To understand the poor he was going to have to live among them, not simply make forays from his artist’s quarters, to which he could return whenever he chose. He would have to change lodgings, moving from a clean, cold room to a foul and filthy one. It was a decision made easier by the fact that his savings had dwindled, but there was more to it than practical considerations. There was about him in 1928 something of the scientist going to work in the field while making observations. Blair now saw destitute Londoners differently from the way he’d viewed them in the past, but he remained an educated man who made his expeditions in disguise. There was something of the feeling he’d enjoyed when he missed the vacation train from school: he was living by his wits, as had the heroes of the books of R. M. Ballantyne and others.
There was also in Blair a growing political awareness; more and more of his thoughts took political turns as he learned more about the poor. He could feel an emotional thrill, and a political one, when a rough character, by middle-class standards, caught a glimpse of Eric Blair in theadbare clothes, perhaps hunched over a cheap meal, and called him “mate.” He was becoming a part of a community whose existence was as solid, and whose sense of itself as a community was as well defined as the Etonian old boy network. The distance from the officer’s club in Burma to being invited as a “mate” to have a mug of cheap beer was one that Blair hoped to cross. He welcomed the recognition of himself as one of the poor, but rarely responded to it conversationally. His words would give him away. An Etonian’s accent was not so easily shed as his clothes.
As the spring of 1928 neared, Blair planned his final move from artistic poverty to squalid poverty. He decided to move to Paris. He could live cheaply there, he spoke French, and there was, if he was interested, a large community of writers and artists residing in Paris. Blair thought that with what savings remained he could get a good amount of writing done, perhaps enough to break through into print. At the same time he could clarify his thoughts about poverty while finding a way of dealing with it in literary terms, and still manage to feed himself on a regular basis.
Upon arriving in Paris Blair stayed for a short while with his Aunt Nellie, one of Ida Limouzin’s sisters. She called herself Nellie Adam, using the last name of the man with whom she lived, although they were not married. Nellie Adam had a fond spot for her nephew Eric, and Eugene Adam, her lover, liked the young man as well. Eugene and Nellie were, in their own way, bohemians themselves. It was clear that he would be welcome to stay with them, though the apartment was not spacious. Blair appreciated their kindness and the confidence they seemed to have in his literary ambitions; they, alone among his relatives, found nothing strange in a talented young man wanting to become a writer. He moved shortly to a room of his own, however, determined that he would make his way independently. Blair found an affordable and marginally comfortable spot in a tenement building at 6 Rue du Pot de Fer, a street lined with nearly identical buildings.
His new room was little different from the one he’d left in London, and Blair was really no more or less poor at first than he’d been before. He was poor enough, though, surrounded by emigrés who had fled the Russian Revolution, by tradespeople, by students struggling for their education, by more than a few artists, and by many elderly people without funds. Rue du Pot de Fer was no artists’ quarter, fashionably bohemian, but a shabby street on which poor people lived. They lived close to the bone, eking out a living as best they could, counting every coin and all too frequently finding themselves short.
Blair launched himself into his work. It was as though he were laying seige to editors in their castles. He not only wrote daily, but some days he did little else. Blair had not come to Paris to sit in sidewalk cafes and become lost in empty artistic conversation. He was in Paris to work, and he stuck to his purpose. He sat and smoked and typed, producing thousands of words a day. Blair began a novel about a drunken officer in Burma and the pages piled up quickly. He wrote quite a few short stories that he thought of as commercial, hoping to breach editorial resistance with at least one of them. He thought they were coming closer to the mark. At least his prose was growing cleaner, his style perhaps benefiting from Samuel Butler’s warnings about literary adornment.
As his skills as a writer improved, so did Blair’s approach to the marketing of his work. He was in no position to be snobbish, and avenues to print that he had previously avoided began to seem attractive. He read the lower-paying magazines even as he tried to sell to more lucrative markets. But the journalistic, political, and literary magazines, he noticed, appeared more frequently and were less opulently produced and easier to approach. He came across more than one piece that he was sure he could have done better. Fiction took time, even at his rapid pace, but journalistic pieces could be written quickly, speed offsetting low rates. Blair began to write nonfiction, literary and political journalism, articles, and essays. They came swiftly, if not easily. To increase his chances of publication—not to mention his chances of earning even a small amount—Blair submitted both to English and French publications. He worked on pieces about France, which he sent to Britain, and observations of British life, politics, and culture which he submitted to French periodicals. All of his work continued to come back.
It struck Blair that he might need professional assistance in placing his short stories, and he sent a package of the stories to an important London literary agent. This package, too, came back, but with a note full of good advice. The agent recommended that Blair try to relax a bit more while at the typewriter: there seemed to the agent to be too much writer and not enough story. Some of Blair’s stories were too overtly sexual, or contained language too strong for the intended market. The stories showed promise, and if Blair would overcome his stylistic pretensions, the agent implied, he might be able to produce salable works.
Relaxation on the page, though, required even more alertness and concentration than did pretension. Purple prose and flowery phrases crept in too easily. Blair worked at simplifying his sentences, finding his way toward putting reality on the page, not just his version of good writing.
It was not simply descriptions of life among the poor that drew him, but the political roots of poverty as well. Blair did not restrict himself to poverty as a political theme. Politics shot through all of life, from the poor to the military to industry and even to the magazines he was trying to crack. There were political essays and article ideas everywhere, and as the political and economic ferment of the late twenties grew more intense, political magazines and newspapers were abundant. In September 1928, one of these, Le Monde, published in Paris, accepted a piece signed by E. A. Blair.
It was a brief article about the ways in which literary censorship was practiced in Britain. “La Censure en Angleterre,” as the title read in French, appeared in the October 6, 1928 issue of Le Monde, seeming workmanlike and not out of place among the other columns of political and literary insight and rhetoric. Blair’s article was easily read, his points about British prudery well presented, his conclusions about censorship both sensible and sound. “La Censure en Angleterre” was nothing spectacular. It was not the sort of debut to distract readers from more prestigious authors and more in-depth articles in the same issue. Its author even had to share a by-line with his translator. But the piece was publishable and it was published.
As 1929 neared, Blair had several sales to his credit. His short stories continued to be returned, but by New Year he was finding occasional markets for his articles in France and also in Britain. He was beginning to bolster his opinions with advocacy, offering courses of action as well as pointing out problems. Blair wrote of Burma, of literature, of the publishing industry, weaving political comment into his observations. He had not found yet the proper way of writing about the poor, but he continued to work on pieces about life in the depths as he had seen it. He sent copies of two novels to the agent in London, and labored at a long piece about his experiences among the poor; that piece looked more and more as if it would become a book. Blair’s funds continued to diminish, and the journalism barely counted as income. A half-year after his first publication, he’d still earned less than £20 from full-time writing. Even poor Rue du Pot de Fer began to seem expensive to Blair. Occasionally he found employment as an English tutor, but that was irregular work and it paid little more than his articles.
By February 1929, the months of nonstop work combined with exposure to cold and poor nutrition to break Blair’s health. He collapsed with pneumonia and was taken to Hôpital Cochin, a hospital for the poor. Hôpital Cochin was a teaching as well as a charity hospital, and many of the doctors were barely more than youths. They watched as the stream of patients waited endlessly to endure meaningless questions, a tepid sponging, a cursory examination, and assignment of a bed in a ward. Blair was given a nightshirt and thin robe, but the hospital had no sandals large enough for his feet, and he walked barefoot through the bitter February night in search of his ward and his bed.
When he found the ward it seemed more a place of condemnation than of hope. The beds were crowded side by side and virtually end to end, close enough for your neighbor’s coughs to splash you. The screams of the cancer patient mingled with the coughs of the tubercular and the wailing of the amputee. The odors of disease, infection, and excrement overpowered any trace of medicinal odors, ultimately overwhelming the sense of smell itself. Working their way from bed to bed were a doctor and a student, drawing blood by creating a vacuum inside a small glass, then applying the heated glass to the patient in order to raise a blister. It was a medieval, agonizing practice, made worse when Blair witnessed the same glasses applied to him as had been used on the patient in the next bed. There was not even an attempt at sterilization, and the doctor and student seemed uninterested in anything Blair had to say. They seemed almost bored.
Cupping, as the procedure was called, had barely ended when Blair was seized by two nurses, who jerked him to a sitting position and applied a painful, burning poultice to his chest, strapping it behind his back so he could not remove it. Orderlies and attendants came to his bedside, an audience for his humiliation, their grinning faces and filthy clothes all Blair could see as the poultice was strapped in place. When the poultice was removed and Blair left to suffer alongside other sufferers, he had been in the hospital less than an hour.
He would stay for several weeks. Through his fever and pain he never forgot that he was a writer and never lost his powers of observation. He noticed everything. The scorn on the faces of the nurses as they told the patients to bathe themselves or remain dirty; the kindness of patients who bathed those not well enough to clean themselves. The decline of the minds of the dying until they lost control near the very end; the looks on their faces when they were dead; the hours the corpses lay in the ward until they were removed.
When Blair returned to Rue du Pot de Fer he was still weak, but he forced himself to write. He was not yet satisfied with his attempts at writing about oppression in Burma, but he knew now, more clearly than ever before, that there was oppression to be found outside his Paris room, and outside the similar room in London. Deathly ill, in stained robes identical to those still worn in death by nearby corpses, he’d been poor. Eric Blair, morally outraged, profoundly changed, and politically astute, realized that he had found in the lives and deaths of the poor not only a great theme, but also an important one.
Blair renewed his long stints at the typewriter, careful not to push too hard, building strength on the page while he marshaled his own physical strength. The markets were no more receptive to his work than they’d ever been. By summer his novels had been rejected and his short stories returned. He continued to circle around the narrative based on his experiences among the poor in Paris and as a tramp in London, seeking to find a proper form for it. Should it be a novel, an autobiography, or a journal? Blair searched through sentence after sentence for the right voice for this piece. He kept track of the pages as they piled up, and he measured his money against the calendar. As summer passed the calendar looked more and more ominous, a constant reminder of his state. He made it a practice to pay his rent a month in advance, enabling him to relax a bit. At least he had a place to stay for another month. But in late summer, with enough savings to see him through a few more weeks of writing, Blair’s room was robbed and his money stolen. He had neither the time nor the energy to bemoan his loss: he was too busy just trying to survive. All that remained was what he had in his pockets.
Blair brushed his clothes, made himself look presentable, and went out in search of work. He found nothing, got through each day on pennies, but even his pennies ran out. He found himself joining a line of other poor Parisians and emigrés offering their clothes to pawnbrokers for a few francs. That was temporary relief at best, and without his good clothes, Blair stood no chance at all of finding a good job. He became a plongeur, a dishwasher in a cheap restaurant, earning a small wage, fighting for scraps of food left on diners’ plates. He refused to see his aunt, lest she discover his situation and offer to help. He did not describe his circumstances in his infrequent letters home. He was poor.
Blair was also as observant as ever, perhaps more observant having passed through the period in the hospital. He’d seen how the poor lived, how they managed to exist through year after year of degradation, getting through each scrape somehow, until they, too, were staring corpses in a filthy hospital. He found allies: other artists, or would-be artists, exiled aristocrats who had a love of culture, communists who spurned society and spoke passionately of the revolution they planned, and how it would change the world. Blair listened intently, learning much. He discovered the radical zeal of the communists, but he also learned ways to smuggle luggage from a house where you could not pay the rent. He heard about the society of equals that was coming, and he was shown how to make a thin soup from a single potato. Some of his neighbors incited him to be more violent in his hatred of governments, to become more ardent in his condemnation of the world’s powers. Other neighbors helped him blacken his ankles so that the holes in his socks would not be noticed when he interviewed for a job as a dishwasher. Blair took it all in.
As summer faded, he made ready to return to Britain. Blair contained his pride and borrowed his homeward fare from his Aunt Nellie. He’d been through nearly three months as a kitchen worker, and he remained willing to make sacrifices for his craft, but he knew too well the dangers of the Paris winter. By Christmas 1929, he was in, Southwold with his family.
Richard Blair was nearly seventy-five by now, and Ida in her fifties. Blair was twenty-six, home again with his parents, and he could not escape seeing the disappointment, or at least confusion, in their eyes. What had he done? What could he point to as an accomplishment? His resignation from a respectable job in the police remained a thorn in the side of Richard Blair. Hadn’t he moved to Southwold because of its large population of retired people such as himself, who had spent all their working lives in India and other parts of the British Empire? A few articles in French newspapers and magazines, even fewer in English publications? Blair might show them with pride, but he still had earned less than £20 after nearly a year and a half as a full-time writer. His deep and genuine understanding of the poor made no impression on Richard and Ida Blair. They never made their disappointment blatant, and they offered no serious protest when Blair would don his ragged clothes and set out unexpectedly for a few days or weeks on the road as a tramp, living as an indigent. They listened to his boasts about the books he would write, but they saw no books.
The book, which Blair was calling A Scullion’s Diary, occupied him throughout the spring of 1930. He was having trouble with its presentation, rewriting passages again and again, trying the work as fiction, as diary, as straight autobiography or reportage, as a mixture of more than one form. He accepted a job as a tutor, and when summer arrived, hired out as a tutor and traveling companion on more than one vacation. He carried the book with him as he taught and looked after his charges, and made clear to their parents that he thought of himself as a writer, and more than that, a writer about the poor. He did not want any misconceptions. Both his young students and their parents found him charming and gentle, and wished him well with his work.
The work included an increasing number of book reviews. Reviews paid even less than essays and journalism, but he had no trouble placing them. Editors began sending books to him, a steady stream of review requests that carried him through a biography of Herman Melville, a critical life of Alexander Pope, even a novel by J. B. Priestley, who wrote precisely the sort of commercial fiction that Blair had for so long tried to write. His reviews were clear, readable, offered a good understanding of the books under consideration, and presented Blair’s opinions forcefully. Editors, pleased with the reviews, became more receptive to his articles. Blair began casting his tramping experiences in brief essays.
“The Spike” was one such essay, Blair’s account of a weekend spent among other tramps in a “spike,” a place where those with no money at all were given food and lodgings of a sort. Spikes possessed all the amenities of a prison, and they were run somewhat like prisons, with a major in charge, a search for contraband—either money, tobacco, or alcohol—and visitors sleeping behind bars. Blair wrote the piece as a reminiscence by an anonymous narrator, an observer as well as a participant. The first-person voice helped Blair achieve his narrative goals: the story was related, the details were clear and striking, but the storyteller was largely absent. The reader knows little more about the narrator at the end of the piece than is known at the beginning. It was an approach that served Blair well.
“As always happens in the spike, I had at last managed to fall comfortably asleep when it was time to get up. The Tramp Major came marching down the passage with his heavy tread, unlocking the doors and yelling to us to show a leg. Promptly the passage was full of squalid shirt-clad figures rushing for the bathroom, for there was only one tub full of water between us all in the morning, and it was first come first served. When I arrived twenty tramps had already washed their faces. I gave one glance at the black scum on top of the water, and decided to go dirty for the day.”
“The Spike” was accepted by New Adelphi, a literary and critical magazine Blair had mocked as pretentious while in Paris and even Burma, but whose quality, he thought, was improving. The Adelphi, as it was called, also printed several of his reviews. “The Spike,” though, was Blair’s first major piece to win acceptance, and he was satisfied with it. He liked the anonymous narrator, and would use the approach again, although he included a scene in “The Spike” that somewhat modified his purposes. Near the piece’s conclusion, the narrator is recognized as a “gentleman,” although the recognition occupies only a few lines. But his prose had relaxed, and now he worked still harder at perfecting his style and approach.
A Scullion’s Diary, Blair’s long account of dishwashing in Paris, was completed in its first form by fall 1930. He typed a clean copy, but the manuscript was less than 40,000 words, barely a hundred pages. It was returned as too short by the publisher to whom Blair submitted it, and Blair undertook a revision. He searched his memory for incidents that could be included in the text, and expanded them in his imagination. The lines between fiction and autobiography grew more blurred with each draft of each page. As Blair began to write sections based upon his experiences as a tramp in Britain, 1931 unfolded around him, but he concentrated only upon his work. There was no doubt in his mind that he had the makings of a book, however much he might on occasion doubt his own ability to write that book.
While most of his concentration was focused upon his revision of A Scullion’s Diary, Blair also turned back to Burma for material. His book would show life among the poor and oppressed from the inside, as it really was. He also forced himself to try to recreate what it had been like to be one of the oppressors, whether knowingly or not. Blair recalled the heat of Burma, the fury of the monsoons, the looks on the people’s faces, his various postings. In Paris he had witnessed a man’s death as a result of disease. In Burma, in uniform, Blair had witnessed more than one hanging. He distilled those experiences and applied himself and his new narrative approach to capturing a Burmese execution on paper.
His pared-down style proved as effective against a Burmese backdrop as a British or a French one. On the page he created time and he created place. Blair called up conversations overheard, or that he had imagined he overheard. He made a picture for himself, and for his readers, of the prisoner and the executioners. And as the piece, which he called “A Hanging,” took shape, Eric Blair began to play detail against detail, keeping the reader aware that a man’s life is about to be ended at imperial whim, but showing the reader more trivial and poignant detail as well.
“It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped lightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
“It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.”
“A Hanging” appeared in the August 1931 issue of the Adelphi, signed Eric A. Blair. Its author was in Kent picking hops. He was earning only a few coins a week, and by the middle of September he had returned to London. This time he did not wait for memory to alter his perceptions, and perhaps deepen them. He immediately began a long journal called “Hop-Picking.” His typewriter rattled through the end of September and on into October, as he produced dozens of pages of detail and description. The piece did not find a market.
As a means of making money he offered his services to publishers as a translator, even suggesting French novels that he thought worthy of English editions. Blair received no assignments as translator, although he had a brief correspondence with the poet T. S. Eliot, who was one of the directors of Faber and Faber, one of the most prestigious British publishers.
Blair himself was working at very little other than his writing. He took on occasional jobs as a laborer, working in fish markets, but nothing more substantial. Earnings from his typewriter remained miniscule. From time to time his parents, despite their disapproval of Blair’s actions, gave him a pound or two, and he went to other relatives for long visits. His brother-in-law, Marjorie’s husband, had taught Blair to fish when the two were growing up, but now he saw Blair as a vagrant, an idler, a man too lazy or unambitious to accept his normal responsibilities.
As Christmas 1931 approached, Blair, in a mood of resentment and self-pity, decided to pass the Christmas holiday behind bars. He set about getting himself arrested as a drunk, got drunk and was picked up, but was released all too soon the same afternoon. He had no better luck in other locations, either as a drunk or as a beggar, both of which postures were illegal. He could not get himself arrested.
The new year began and Blair at last decided to seek employment. There seemed at the time little more he could learn about the poor, or observe among them, and his life of subsistence required more energy than would an undemanding job. His narrative account of life among poor Parisians and of London from the viewpoint of an articulate tramp was making the rounds of publishers. Blair called the book Days in London and Paris, but expanded, better written, more incisive and readable, it had no better luck than as A Scullion’s Diary. T. S. Eliot rejected the book for Faber and Faber late in February 1932. Less than two months later, Eric Blair was a teacher at The Hawthorns, a school for boys.
The Hawthorns was no St. Cyprian’s. For all of that school’s faults, its students were young people of promise. The Hawthorns prepared its graduates for lives as clerks. The material to be covered was dreary and repetitive, but Blair settled into the job with some enthusiasm. He hated the idea of having to work rather than write, but he enjoyed working with children and was generous with the time he spent with his students.
Time not engaged by the students was passed in his room, typing. It was different to be in a dry and almost warm room, with a full stomach from a meal taken in a dining room with colleagues: a far step from his life in the streets. But Blair was aware that The Hawthorns was a stopping place at which he could catch his breath, regain his strength and financial reserves, even get some writing done. He was not tempted to relax his literary ambitions. Too many schools like The Hawthorns held too many teachers who had intended to become writers or poets or composers. It was a banal and empty sort of existence, its result being teaching of even lower quality than he recalled from St. Cyprian’s. Blair also found himself using his cane more than once, striking a student as Mr. Wilkes had struck him. As though in contrition, he became more enthusiastic than other teachers, devising contests and awarding prizes to students who excelled.
As Blair struggled to come to terms with his first steady employment in years, his agent continued to show Days in London and Paris to publishers, discussing its excellence with editors. While Blair taught, wrote reviews, fished, and gardened, Days in London and Paris made its way to Victor Gollancz, an important and aggressive publisher with a reputation for iconoclasm as well as an enthusiasm for books that served left-wing political causes. In April the book was recommended by one of Gollancz’s readers, and in June 1932 Blair was notified that Victor Gollancz was eager to publish the book.
There was a good amount of editorial work to be done. Blair wrote honestly, but many of the scenes and much of the conversation and dialogue in Days in London and Paris proved too strong for publication in 1932. Gollancz and Blair met soon after the book was accepted, and discussed the necessary editing in detail. Gollancz also requested a new, more dramatic title for the book. Blair considered calling it The Lady Poverty, or Lady Poverty. He was also searching for a new by-line. The book, it was agreed, would be published as a novel.
Less than a month after Gollancz agreed to publish Days in London and Paris, Blair wrote to his agent that he wished the book to be published under a pseudonym. He felt himself to be in a good position to make such a request: any name would sell books as well as the unknown Eric Blair. He continued to write literary and journalistic pieces over his own name, but he would not sign that name to his book. It contained many episodes, even edited, that would shock readers of its time, and Blair had no wish to embarrass his parents. He was not certain whether a pen name would be permanent, or used only on this one book.
With a journalistic reminiscence done, Blair was hard at work on a full-fledged novel. He set the book in Burma, and though the interest expressed by publishers pleased him, he could not promise when it would be completed. He continued to teach, and he wrote in the evenings, producing essays, book reviews, and articles, saving hard work on the novel for holidays when he could get at it for uninterrupted stretches.
This way of life continued throughout the fall of 1932. Blair dealt with the myriad details that accompany publication: editing, but also checking for libel, clarifying points, and proofreading. He suggested The Confessions of a Dishwasher as a title, but remained unsatisfied. The whole book dissatisfied him, he made clear to friends. He thought of it as an apprentice piece written so long ago that he barely recalled it. He was more interested in his novel, and while he would be pleased to have the book out, he was just as pleased to have kept his own name clear from it. Among the names to which he gave consideration were the ordinary Kenneth Miles and the unusual H. Lewis Allways. He preferred a more ordinary name, a simple and strong name, but one that attracted no attention to himself.
Eric Blair had spent the previous Christmas seeking to be arrested. As Christmas 1932 arrived, he received the first copies of his first book. The title finally settled upon seemed strong and accurate. The book was called Down and Out in Paris and London. The by-line it carried was a name as plain and simple as his own, a good name for a writer. The book was signed by George Orwell.