Timewell Press £18.99 pp268
George Orwell is in a different category from other authors because he is admired as much for his life and character as for his books. To his devotees he is not just a writer but an example and an inspiration, St George of Old Labour, and they would find it difficult to have friendly relations, or even stay long in the same room, with someone who openly criticised their hero. By the same token, admiration for Orwell quickly forms a bond between perfect strangers, assuring them of each other’s inner decency, and it is to this fellowship of loyal Orwellians that Peter Davison’s new book owes its existence. In 1998, he published his 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell, a scholarly cornucopia, bulging with discoveries, that will enrich readers’ lives for generations to come. Since then many fellow enthusiasts have contacted him with suggestions, corrections and mislaid pieces of the jigsaw, and The Lost Orwell brings these together. It contains 80 new letters, two overlooked articles, and a scatter of previously unrecorded facts about Orwell and his associates, all held together by Davison’s fascinating commentary.
The prize item is a batch of six letters from Orwell’s first wife Eileen to her close friend Norah Myles, whom she had met at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where they both read English. Eileen has always been a rather shadowy figure. She and Orwell married in June 1936 and, though they longed for a family, the marriage was childless. She died in 1945, while undergoing surgery, three weeks after they had adopted a son, Richard. These letters show she was resilient and funny, and a match for her husband both in intellect and temperament. Their first home, a country cottage in Hertfordshire, was primitive enough to satisfy even Orwell’s appetite for discomfort — a corrugated iron roof, no electricity, cold water, an outside privy. Added to that, they were desperately poor, and he was working flat out to finish The Road to Wigan Pier before leaving to fight in the Spanish civil war.
The strain told. Eileen’s first letter, written in November 1936, reports that during the first few weeks of marriage “we quarrelled so continuously & really bitterly that I thought I’d save time & just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished”. She could not cook anything except boiled eggs, and “cried all the time from pure exhaustion”. However, the newlyweds took a united stand against the interfering attentions of Orwell’s aunt and Eileen’s mother, and it sealed the bond between them. “Now all our troubles are over,” she exulted, a little prematurely as it turned out. She joined her husband in Spain, where, on top of war’s normal dangers, she had to cope with the advances of Orwell’s commanding officer in the POUM militia, a shady Russian adventurer called George Kopp. Orwell found out about it when he opened one of Kopp’s letters by mistake, and his response was, Eileen tells Norah, “extraordinarily magnanimous”, whereas she felt dreadful: “I sometimes think no one ever had such a sense of guilt before.”
Orwell’s comrades in the militia declared that she “worshipped the ground he walked on”, but in these letters her love is tempered by a good deal of affectionate laughter. In Morocco where, for the sake of his bad chest, they spent the winter of 1938-9, they kept two goats (a favourite animal of Orwell’s), and Eileen describes him striving to milk them while their Arab servant held the head and hind leg. They also had a poodle puppy that they called Marx, to remind themselves they had never read Marx. When they did try reading some, they took such a strong dislike to the man that, Eileen reports, they could not look the dog in the face. Her trust in Orwell’s love was strong enough, it seems, to discount competition. Before he met her he had wooed Brenda Salkeld, the gym mistress at St Felix girls’ school in Southwold, where his parents lived, and he never quite shook off his desire for her. “Eileen said she wished I could sleep with you about twice a year, just to keep me happy,” he wrote to Brenda in 1940.
There are letters from Orwell to his French translator in which he explains the meaning of English obscenities, and a wonderfully asinine epistle from Lord David Cecil trying to prevent the publication of Orwell’s The English People on the grounds that it depicts English society, quite falsely, as snobbish and class-ridden. But the most contentious item is likely to be the newly discovered list of 38 crypto-communists and fellow travellers that Orwell drew up and gave his friend Celia Kirwan of the Information Research Department in 1949. The existence of this list has long been known, and some of the names were published in Davison’s Complete Works, to the accompaniment of squeals about Orwell’s “betrayal” of his liberal principles. But the Orwell who had seen his POUM comrades rounded up and put on trial by the communists in Spain, and had narrowly escaped arrest himself, was under no illusions about the deviousness of Soviet power, or the need for constant vigilance in countering it. One name on his list is Peter Smollett, a highly placed official in the Ministry of Information, who was almost certainly responsible for persuading Jonathan Cape not to publish Animal Farm, and who received an OBE for his “loyal” service to Britain. Orwell characterises him as “very slimy” and probably a Russian agent, and when the Complete Works appeared the Smollett family demanded an apology from Davison for circulating this monstrous libel. Later research revealed that Smollett had been working for the NKVD since 1933.
Of the two newly recovered articles, one is a haunting piece of reportage sent back from war-shattered Paris in February 1945, in which Orwell’s eye for seemingly insignificant things — a grocer’s shop-window, containing nothing but a list of the goods that are out of stock — combines with a more sinister moment. Revisiting the cheap hotel in the rue du Pot du Fer where he used to lodge in his down-and-out days, he finds it boarded-up and apparently empty. But as he comes away he sees, behind the broken window pane of his old room, two hungry-looking children peeping out “like wild animals”. The other article is an obituary for HG Wells, praising the “sheer literary brilliance” of his science-fiction stories — a reminder that Orwell’s terse, clear style and dystopian imagination were part of his debt to Wells.
For many, though, the most cherished things in this book will be those that show his care for ordinary people. Imperial Police officer Eric Blair is remembered by one old man in Burma as “the prophet”, and by another as “Uncle Eric”. Not long before his death, in hospital in Scotland, he wrote a long letter to a Mrs Jessica Marshall, whom he had never met, thanking her for a pot of jam, and chatting about books she had mentioned. It is hard to think of another author who would have bothered. Although Davison correctly describes his book as a supplement to the Complete Works, it is a little treasury that no Orwellian should be without.
NAMING NAMES
Orwell’s much-criticised list of communist sympathisers, written in May 1949 for the Information Research Department, included some familiar names, among them Alex Comfort, Katharine Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, JB Priestley and Michael Redgrave. Defending Orwell, Davison points out he “was simply helping select those who might be trusted to write on Britain’s behalf (to counter Soviet propaganda at the UN) and listing those who, in his opinion, were not to be trusted to do this”.
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