ORWELL’S LEASED FARM WAS called Barnhill, and he made plans to visit it in May 1946. He was in the midst of a respite from work, having finally begun turning down journalistic assignments in an attempt to gather strength for the large novel that lay ahead. Orwell delayed his trip, sadly, to attend his sister Marjorie’s funeral: she died of kidney disease at age forty-eight. Another link with Eric Blair’s past was gone.
In late May he arrived at Barnhill alone, planning to ready it for summer occupancy by the entire family. Orwell responded favorably to the windswept rocks of Jura: it was a bleak place, but the temperature was far more kindly than that of many of the other Hebridean islands off the west coast of Scotland. Orwell planned to raise cattle, but Jura was not a suitable place; its soil was too acid to raise grain for stock that grazed on more than heather and grass. Barnhill itself was built of stone, and though not a large house had four bedrooms on its second floor. Orwell established a writing room for himself and worked to make the house comfortable. Avril joined him in late May, and by July Richard Blair and Susan Watson had made the journey from London to Jura. Susan did not stay long: the island’s isolation may have played a part, and with Avril present there was tension as to who actually managed Orwell’s home. Susan left before summer was out, after working for Orwell more than a year.
Throughout the summer Orwell gathered his strength but made no major effort on the new novel. He’d brought out another volume of critical essays, called just that, Critical Essays, early in 1946. On Jura he wrote more essays and reviews, but managed only a few thousand words of fiction. In Animal Farm he had taken a complex subject and treated it simply, which might be an apt definition of the fable form. Now, though, he wanted to create an entire, self-contained future world, not a prophecy, not a world of the future, but a future. It had to be believable and logical, for all of the exaggerations that would go into its making. Every element of the book and the world must work together to create a totally real portrait of a totalitarian world. He wanted on paper a reality the reader might feel as well as read. In October he, Avril, and Richard returned to London for the winter.
Orwell found living in a city as disagreeable as ever, and he was eager for winter to pass so that he could return to his island. His first season there had proved less productive than he had hoped, but it had also been a time of growing acquainted with his new home. On Jura he had been surrounded by openness, hills, and valleys; in London he was surrounded by squat drab buildings and advertising posters. He found the postwar world one of shortages more intense than those of the war years. The Labour Party had come into power at last, quite soon after the end of the war. But the revolution that Orwell had encouraged failed to follow suit. The Labour government in Orwell’s view merely reinforced all that was bad about Britain, while abandoning any visionary alterations in the nation’s or the government’s nature. They were simply capitalists, the same old order, traveling under a Labour banner. To all the other fears of totalitarianism was now added the fear of nuclear destruction. Everything seemed uncertain, everyone, despite victory, somehow unfulfilled.
Early in 1947 Orwell made a solitary trip to Jura where he began an orchard. By April he was back on Jura with Avril and Richard. His novel began to grow more rapidly, his stints at the typewriter grew longer and longer as he found his way through the story and his world. The previous winter had not been kind to his constitution, and it was nearly June before he was able to spend much time outdoors. Even as his health improved with the arrival of summer weather, Orwell stayed inside, working on the new book. He planned to complete the first draft by late summer or early faU, and limited the number of interruptions, journalistic or otherwise, that he allowed himself. He did take the time to write another long autobiographical essay, this one called “Such, Such Were the Joys,” which contained in horrifying detail and almost savage prose his recollections of St. Cyprian’s and the education it had afforded him.
Jura’s remoteness did not dissuade occasional visitors from London’s literary community. Perhaps more welcome were visitors from Orwell’s family. Eileen’s sister brought her own children for a long visit with Orwell. Marjorie’s daughters came to visit their uncle, and he took their arrival as an opportunity to break off work on the new book and plan an adventure. He took them in a small boat to a remote spot for camping, where they could pretend to survive by their wits as had the boys in The Coral Island. Such survival became real on the return trip, when their boat’s engine failed and they were stranded on a large rock until rescued by passing fishermen. Orwell enjoyed the experience tremendously. He became less willing even to consider returning to London; Jura was his home and he wanted to stay there year round.
Late in October he completed the draft of his novel. He had quite a job of revision ahead of him, but he was not up to it. The long hours of concentration had crushed his strength as completely as any illness, and by December he found himself committed once more to a sanatorium. He greeted New Year 1948 from a bed at Hairmyres Hospital, near Glasgow, Scotland. He might have to leave Jura but he would stay as close as he could. Orwell felt confined, shut in. Little things became important: he went to some trouble to obtain a ballpoint pen, a new invention at the time. There was no question of his being allowed a typewriter in the sanatorium. He endured several painful treatments intended to help his poor lungs heal. For six months he was unable to see his son. He wrote occasional articles and made notes for the revision of his novel. He anticipated his own death. Orwell was not released from Hairmyres until July and then he immediately returned to Jura, marshaling his strength by spending only half of each day on his feet, but learning quickly that he could work at his novel while in bed. The condition of his lungs grew worse.
Both A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying had opened with the chiming of clocks, and the new novel, as yet untitled, did as well. But Orwell wanted to establish from the first sentence of this new book that the world of which he wrote was not his own.
“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen,” went the book’s first sentence. By the second paragraph Orwell had begun establishing the particulars of his strange new world. “The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up . . . . On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed down from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.”
Orwell had spoken many times of his desire to try his hand at a ghost story, and the new novel, though its only ghosts were the ghosts of a half-remembered, better past, proved the most horrifying of his career. He transmuted the jackbooted boot crushing the human face into the story of Winston Smith, employee of the Ministry of Truth. It was one of the huge buildings that dominated the novel’s London, and from which the nature of the world was defined for the people. It was a world of slogans such as FREEDOM IS SLAVERY and WAR IS PEACE. Government was managed by four Ministries, “the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs.” Britain was no longer called Britain, but Airstrip One, part of Oceania, one of the three great world powers.
Those powers waged constant war among each other, allegiances and alliances shifting with the winds of political expediency. Winston Smith and the other citizens of Oceania lived in a time of constant shortages, where there was little food, but plenty of telescreens to go around. The telescreens hung on the walls of the small filthy apartments, the medium through which Big Brother kept his citizens under observation. A new language, Newspeak, had been devised by the government; dissent, illegal anyway, was made impossible by the semantic rules of Newspeak. The government had created a language in which only encouragement for the government and its goals could be voiced. Thought police enforced those semantic rules, extending them from spoken and written language to thought itself. Winston Smith violates the law by keeping a diary and compounds his crime by falling in love. But the heart of Orwell’s story was that Big Brother was watching.
Throughout the summer of 1948 he worked at the novel. If he recalled Eileen’s teasing about the reception of Animal Farm, he may have considered the welcome his new novel was likely to earn. He did not want the book interpreted as a prediction, yet built into it were many elements satirizing his own experiences with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) during the war. The novel’s Ministry of Truth was located in a building clearly based upon the BBC’s Broadcasting House. But, as with his farmyard allegory, he was also seeking to create a universal story, and in Winston Smith’s desire for freedom of choice, freedom of expression, and freedom to love he touched universal concerns. Winston Smith’s conflict with Big Brother gave the book a strong story. The government’s manipulation of Smith’s deepest fears gave the book a horrific heart. An essay on Newspeak, ostensibly historical, showed how language could be manipulated; the essay appeared as the afterword to Orwell’s novel.
Orwell completed the final draft in late fall, but lacked the strength to take on the task of typing a clean manuscript. He tried to find a typist willing to come to Jura, but was finally forced to type it himself, ruining his precarious health with the effort. By January he was in the Cranham Sanatorium in England. But he had completed his novel and sent it to Seeker and Warburg with the title he had last selected: Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The book promised to be an even larger success than Animal Farm. American publishers were now eager for Orwell’s work, and the Book-of-the-Month Club offered £40,000 for the rights to the new novel, provided Orwell would make some alterations. He refused to change a word, and the Club took the book as it was. Orwell was not only famous, he was wealthy.
Cranham, the sanatorium to which he was confined, gave some evidence of his improved finances. He was given a small chalet of his own, well-heated and comfortable, surrounded by other chalets. Cranham lay high above sea level, and was a favored sanatorium of the upper classes. Orwell found himself surrounded by the types of people he disliked. It was easy for him to ignore them, though, for he spent most of his time in his quarters, and the physicians informed him that he might be confined to a bed for the rest of his life. He spoke of a new novel, and even wrote some reviews, but they took their toll. Whatever the results of his recuperation, his prolific days had ended with his collapse.
Orwell did receive a good amount of mail and was able, by violating doctors’ orders, to answer much of it. A good deal of the correspondence contained wishes of improved health, and some of the letters touched Orwell deeply. One was from Jacintha Buddicom, his childhood friend and the first girl he had courted. She had read Orwell’s work, but without any idea that he was Eric Blair until happening across a literary comment to that effect. She was a poet herself, and had evidently not married. Orwell wasted no time in his response, recounting his experiences since they’d last seen each other and writing a second letter with the Hail and Fare Well salutation they had used as children. His letter was handwritten because he was too weak to repair a minor problem with his typewriter. His loneliness showed through his words as he told his old friend of his child, and asked if she liked children. He invited Jacintha to visit him upon the return to London that he hoped would come soon.
Jacintha never visited, but Sonia Brownell did. She was a young woman, an editor, and Orwell had known her since shortly after Eileen’s death. Their relationship had not been romantic, although Orwell proposed marriage to her. By the summer of 1949, as Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, he was working up his courage to propose again. He wanted to leave someone in charge of his estate and his son, should he die. The success of Nineteen Eighty-Four—its British first edition alone, which sold out quickly, was more than 25,000 copies—would make that estate sizable. Animal Farm was appearing throughout the world. The critics misunderstood Orwell, as always. Many of them saw the new novel as a renunciation of socialism. But once again many critics declared that Orwell was the equal of Swift. And a few wise reviewers, as always, saw that Orwell was not writing solely of temporal policies or politics, despite his transposition of the present year’s numerals into his title. This time Orwell was too ill to respond other than perfunctorily to his critics. He made clear in a public statement that his book was no narrow satire of British socialism, but something larger; the statement, though, was issued in a paragraph rather than an essay. Orwell sank back into his bed.
On October 13, 1949, Orwell and Sonia Brownell were married. Orwell had been transferred to University College Hospital in London a month earlier. At forty-six he was fifteen years older than his new wife, and was unable to join the small wedding party at lunch after the ceremony. Everyone autographed the menu for the missing groom. A few days later he made a new will that provided for Richard and left the bulk of his estate to Sonia, putting her in charge of its management. His doctors recommended that he be moved to a sanatorium in Switzerland where the chill high air would be good for his lungs. Orwell tried to conserve his energy for the trip; he worried that he would be unable to get a proper cup of tea there. A. S. F. Cow, his old Eton tutor, came to visit, but gruffly announced that he was in the hospital to see someone else. Orwell shared a last afternoon with his son, and charged Avril, now married, with Richard’s upbringing.
The New Year passed and Orwell made himself ready for the move to Switzerland. His optimism would not leave him, and he ordered a fishing rod packed with his belongings. After a few months in Switzerland he would be strong enough to fish a bit, and a few months after that he would be able to write once more. He wanted to be settled in before the end of the month.
Instead, on January 21, 1950, during the night, Orwell’s lungs gave out in a final hemorrhage and he died quietly. The BBC paid tribute to him worldwide, and he was buried shortly afterward under a simple marker that read Eric Arthur Blair.