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George Orwell: lost letter revealed
A lost letter is part of a cache that reveals a little-known Orwell — as sweetheart and doting father
D.J. Taylor
Until fairly recently, a biographer asked to reckon up what is known of George Orwell’s emotional life would be left with an exceptionally narrow charge sheet. A teenage sweetheart, never re-encountered after he left England to join the Burma police in 1922. One or two mildly erotic twentysomething poems that suggest a passing acquaintance with Burmese prostitutes. Several early thirties “girlfriends”, addressed in the most conventional terms. A nine-year marriage to Eileen O’Shaugnessy (1905-45), a woman of whom, until five years ago, virtually nothing was known, and to whom he was apparently unfaithful. A deathbed union to the much younger Sonia Brownell (1918-80), whose motives the critics are still contesting 60 years on. Set against the concealments and evasions of Orwell’s private life, Philip Larkin’s romantic entanglements look like a Don Juan confessional.
The meagreness of Orwell’s emotional leavings is in sharp distinction to the immense volume of data that covers the rest of his career. For a man who lived a bare 46½ years (1903-50), much of it in painful obscurity, Orwell’s life is notoriously well documented. Peter Davison’s magisterial edition of his essays, letters and journalism runs to a dozen fat volumes. The reminiscences of his friends fill another two. At least five full-length life-and-times accounts, beginning with the late Sir Bernard Crick’s pioneering George Orwell: A Life (1980), still crowd library shelves.
All this adds up. The schoolboy career at Eton; the five wasted years as an Imperial servant; the long apprenticeship as a struggling writer; the transformation from Eric Blair, his baptismal name, into George Orwell; the self-discovering journeys to the blighted industrial North and the Spanish Civil War that produced The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938); the ideological separations that gave rise to his two masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): all these stretches of time can — up to a point — be taken apart, reconstituted and given forensic shape. But the Orwell who wandered through them is still an elusive figure — determined, in many of the relationships he contracted, to give away as little as possible.
So the signal merit of Orwell: A Life in Letters — put together by Peter Davison out of his 12 previous volumes, but also showcasing some fascinating new material, such as the letter below — is the light it sheds on Orwell’s inner life. In particular, it redefines his relationship with his adolescent sweetheart, Jacintha Buddicom, now revealed as a very serious business indeed.
The Buddicom children — Jacintha, her sister Guinever and brother Prosper — were friends of the Blairs, beginning around the start of the First World War. There were afternoons picking mushrooms near Henley, conversations about “Oxford and the wonderful time we would have when we got there” (Jacintha was at Oxford High School and Orwell at Eton, where, as a notorious slacker, he would have been unlikely to get into any university worth the name) and a rather solemn poem entitled The Pagan. It runs: “So here are you, and here am I, / Where we may thank our gods to be, / Above the earth, beneath the sky, / Naked souls, alive and free.” It ends with the thought of a “mysterious light” that ever in the recipient’s head would shine.
What were Orwell’s feelings towards Jacintha? Miss Buddicom, according to the details in her memoir Eric & Us (1974), was convinced that he had none. She herself insists: “I had no romantic emotion for him.”
There was another poem, written late in 1918, beginning: “Our minds are married, but we are too young / For wedlock by the custom of this age.” But the myth of high-minded platonic esteem was exploded by family papers brought to light after her death in 1993, which revealed that on one of their excursions in Rickmansworth, where both families rented a holiday home in 1921, “Eric” more or less attempted to rape her.
Even more revealing is a new letter Davison prints from 1972, in which Jacintha looks back on her life for the benefit of a distressed relative. Among other revelations,this notes that Orwell came back from Burma in 1927 with an engagement ring, but was refused a hearing. The explanation for this was essentially tragic: Jacintha had recently had an illegitimate child, given up for adoption after its father absconded. Jacintha and Eric never met again. Indeed, it was not until early 1949, only a year before Orwell’s death, that Jacintha was able to connect “George Orwell” to the boy that she had picked mushrooms with in the Oxfordshire hills 30 years before.
There was a poignant exchange of letters — in which Orwell mildly rebukes her for “abandoning” him to Burma — and three phone calls. In the final conversation, according to Jacintha’s sister, Orwell declared that “he badly needed to discuss his little son, Richard”. But, for Jacintha, the real bombshell came four months later: reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, she was convinced that Julia, Winston Smith’s lover, frogmarched with him from their room by the Thought Police, was a portrait of herself. To the 70-year-old, looking back on her early romance, the evidence seemed cast-iron: “He describes her with thick dark hair, being very active, hating politics — and their meeting place was a dell full of bluebells.” Worse: “In the end he absolutely destroys me, like a man in hobnail boots stamping on a spider. It hurt my mother so much when she read that book that we always thought it brought on her final heart attack a few days later. Be glad that you have not been torn limb from limb in public.”
Real people very often imagine themselves to be the models for characters in fiction, and are very often wrong. Is Jacintha Nineteen Eighty-Four’s female lead? And does Orwell really “tear her limb from limb in public”? Probably not. For one thing, the manuscript of the novel was at the printer by the time Orwell received Jacintha’s letter of February 1949.
In any case, there is a much more plausible original for Winston’s lover: Hilary Spurling devotes a substantial chunk of The Girl from the Fiction Department (2002) to an attempt to prove that Julia “is” Sonia Brownell, whom Orwell married a few months after the novel was published. On the other hand, what we now know about Orwell’s feelings for Jacintha gives a bitter extra dimension to the letter he wrote to her on February 15 from his sickbed. Here he insists that he “can’t stop thinking about the young days with you & Guin & Prosper & things put aside for 20 and 30 years. I am so wanting to see you.”
Had they met before his death in January 1950 (she was a solitary, unrecognised presence at the funeral) they might have exchanged the confidences each burned to share — but exactly how this would have taken place is anyone’s guess. Orwell’s habitual wariness in the realm of the personal is one of his most marked characteristics: he is supposed to have apostrophised his first wife, shortly after her unexpected death, as “not a bad old stick”, while the symptoms of the TB that killed him rate a terse “pain in side very bad” in his diary.
At the same time, as some of the other new material in A Life in Letters demonstrates, he had a habit of briskly unburdening himself to strangers who had written to him out of the blue. In 2003, not long after finishing Orwell: The Life, I was sent a copy of a letter from a Mrs Jessica Marshall, with whom Orwell had apparently corresponded throughout the 1940s. They never met, and yet Orwell casually informs her — explaining his non-reply to a previous letter — that: “I was rather distraught all through the war and left a lot of letters unanswered.”
The same note — momentous revelations let out almost by accident — is struck in a previously unknown letter to Richard Usborne, written in 1947 during Orwell’s long stay on Jura. Usborne, the incoming editor of The Strand magazine, had asked for a contribution and details of his career. Rather than returning only a polite refusal, Orwell fills two-and-a-half typed pages with details about himself, including the development of his political opinions (“I was only intermittently interested in the subject until about 1935, although I think I can say I was always more or less ‘Left’”).
He then pronounces what would have been heresy to any card-carrying member of the late-1940s Bevanite-Foot Labour Left — “there is not much to choose between Communism and Fascism”. All this is rather extraordinary: a mini-biography, far more revealing than much of the information doled out to close friends, sent to someone he would never meet and whose offer of work he had briskly declined.
If A Life in Letters refines and expands on certain aspects of Orwell’s inner life, then it also offers an intriguing comment on the origins of his mature political views. The conventional take on Orwell’s commitment to democratic socialism is that it barely existed until the mid-1930s. The trip to the industrial North to gather the material included in The Road to Wigan Pier was undertaken by a journalist looking for a subject rather than an ideologue looking for confirmation of his beliefs: the descriptions of people he meets as being “very active in the Labour movement” are set down with a kind of anthropological relish. It was the experience of Spain in 1937, with its terror squads and its contempt for objective truth, this orthodoxy insists, that provided the crucible in which Orwell’s ideological sympathies were forged.
But Davison prints a fascinating letter to Michael Sayers from December 1945, a few months after the triumphant publication of Animal Farm. Sayers — born in 1912 and the only survivor of Orwell’s Thirties circle — had shared a Kentish Town flat with him in 1935, the other tenant being the writer Rayner Heppenstall, who crawled home drunk one night and was famously attacked by Orwell with a shooting stick. Picking up the threads of friendship a decade later, and presumably answering some question of Sayers’, Orwell remarks that he doesn’t think “he could fairly be described as a Russophobe” but that the Soviet myth has done incalculable harm to the Left in Britain and elsewhere. Here Orwell represents himself as thinking this “as early as 1932 or thereabouts and always said so fairly freely”. He has no wish to interfere with the Soviet regime: “I merely don’t want its methods and habits of thought imitated here, and that involves fighting against the Russianisers in this country.”
Biography, Martin Amis once declared, is there for the curious, and curiosity gives out when boredom begins. Why should we be so excited by a few scraps of paper, hoarded over time, which may (or may not) explain why Orwell did (or didn’t) want to marry a girl he wrote sententious poems to 90 years ago? One answer, apart from their intrinsic interest, is the intimation of future promise, the existence of a whole heap of stuff out there just waiting to be found. For instance, the material stolen by Russian agents in 1937 from Orwell’s hotel in Barcelona that lies in the NKVD archive in Moscow; and 19 letters from the early 1930s to a girlfriend named Eleanor Jaques, to which scholars have yet to gain access.
Sixty years after his death Orwell remains arguably the most influential writer thrown up by the West in the 20th century; instantly recognisable, million-selling, his name invoked almost daily to explain the convolutions of a world whose fault lines he seems uncannily able to predict. Out across the horizon, his outlines endlessly respun out of these incremental fragments, the real Orwell — whoever he is — continues to take shape.
Orwell: A Life in Letters is published by Harvill-Secker at £20
George Orwell: lost letter revealed
A lost letter is part of a cache that reveals a little-known Orwell — as sweetheart and doting father
D.J. Taylor
Until fairly recently, a biographer asked to reckon up what is known of George Orwell’s emotional life would be left with an exceptionally narrow charge sheet. A teenage sweetheart, never re-encountered after he left England to join the Burma police in 1922. One or two mildly erotic twentysomething poems that suggest a passing acquaintance with Burmese prostitutes. Several early thirties “girlfriends”, addressed in the most conventional terms. A nine-year marriage to Eileen O’Shaugnessy (1905-45), a woman of whom, until five years ago, virtually nothing was known, and to whom he was apparently unfaithful. A deathbed union to the much younger Sonia Brownell (1918-80), whose motives the critics are still contesting 60 years on. Set against the concealments and evasions of Orwell’s private life, Philip Larkin’s romantic entanglements look like a Don Juan confessional.
The meagreness of Orwell’s emotional leavings is in sharp distinction to the immense volume of data that covers the rest of his career. For a man who lived a bare 46½ years (1903-50), much of it in painful obscurity, Orwell’s life is notoriously well documented. Peter Davison’s magisterial edition of his essays, letters and journalism runs to a dozen fat volumes. The reminiscences of his friends fill another two. At least five full-length life-and-times accounts, beginning with the late Sir Bernard Crick’s pioneering George Orwell: A Life (1980), still crowd library shelves.
All this adds up. The schoolboy career at Eton; the five wasted years as an Imperial servant; the long apprenticeship as a struggling writer; the transformation from Eric Blair, his baptismal name, into George Orwell; the self-discovering journeys to the blighted industrial North and the Spanish Civil War that produced The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938); the ideological separations that gave rise to his two masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): all these stretches of time can — up to a point — be taken apart, reconstituted and given forensic shape. But the Orwell who wandered through them is still an elusive figure — determined, in many of the relationships he contracted, to give away as little as possible.
So the signal merit of Orwell: A Life in Letters — put together by Peter Davison out of his 12 previous volumes, but also showcasing some fascinating new material, such as the letter below — is the light it sheds on Orwell’s inner life. In particular, it redefines his relationship with his adolescent sweetheart, Jacintha Buddicom, now revealed as a very serious business indeed.
The Buddicom children — Jacintha, her sister Guinever and brother Prosper — were friends of the Blairs, beginning around the start of the First World War. There were afternoons picking mushrooms near Henley, conversations about “Oxford and the wonderful time we would have when we got there” (Jacintha was at Oxford High School and Orwell at Eton, where, as a notorious slacker, he would have been unlikely to get into any university worth the name) and a rather solemn poem entitled The Pagan. It runs: “So here are you, and here am I, / Where we may thank our gods to be, / Above the earth, beneath the sky, / Naked souls, alive and free.” It ends with the thought of a “mysterious light” that ever in the recipient’s head would shine.
What were Orwell’s feelings towards Jacintha? Miss Buddicom, according to the details in her memoir Eric & Us (1974), was convinced that he had none. She herself insists: “I had no romantic emotion for him.”
There was another poem, written late in 1918, beginning: “Our minds are married, but we are too young / For wedlock by the custom of this age.” But the myth of high-minded platonic esteem was exploded by family papers brought to light after her death in 1993, which revealed that on one of their excursions in Rickmansworth, where both families rented a holiday home in 1921, “Eric” more or less attempted to rape her.
Even more revealing is a new letter Davison prints from 1972, in which Jacintha looks back on her life for the benefit of a distressed relative. Among other revelations,this notes that Orwell came back from Burma in 1927 with an engagement ring, but was refused a hearing. The explanation for this was essentially tragic: Jacintha had recently had an illegitimate child, given up for adoption after its father absconded. Jacintha and Eric never met again. Indeed, it was not until early 1949, only a year before Orwell’s death, that Jacintha was able to connect “George Orwell” to the boy that she had picked mushrooms with in the Oxfordshire hills 30 years before.
There was a poignant exchange of letters — in which Orwell mildly rebukes her for “abandoning” him to Burma — and three phone calls. In the final conversation, according to Jacintha’s sister, Orwell declared that “he badly needed to discuss his little son, Richard”. But, for Jacintha, the real bombshell came four months later: reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, she was convinced that Julia, Winston Smith’s lover, frogmarched with him from their room by the Thought Police, was a portrait of herself. To the 70-year-old, looking back on her early romance, the evidence seemed cast-iron: “He describes her with thick dark hair, being very active, hating politics — and their meeting place was a dell full of bluebells.” Worse: “In the end he absolutely destroys me, like a man in hobnail boots stamping on a spider. It hurt my mother so much when she read that book that we always thought it brought on her final heart attack a few days later. Be glad that you have not been torn limb from limb in public.”
Real people very often imagine themselves to be the models for characters in fiction, and are very often wrong. Is Jacintha Nineteen Eighty-Four’s female lead? And does Orwell really “tear her limb from limb in public”? Probably not. For one thing, the manuscript of the novel was at the printer by the time Orwell received Jacintha’s letter of February 1949.
In any case, there is a much more plausible original for Winston’s lover: Hilary Spurling devotes a substantial chunk of The Girl from the Fiction Department (2002) to an attempt to prove that Julia “is” Sonia Brownell, whom Orwell married a few months after the novel was published. On the other hand, what we now know about Orwell’s feelings for Jacintha gives a bitter extra dimension to the letter he wrote to her on February 15 from his sickbed. Here he insists that he “can’t stop thinking about the young days with you & Guin & Prosper & things put aside for 20 and 30 years. I am so wanting to see you.”
Had they met before his death in January 1950 (she was a solitary, unrecognised presence at the funeral) they might have exchanged the confidences each burned to share — but exactly how this would have taken place is anyone’s guess. Orwell’s habitual wariness in the realm of the personal is one of his most marked characteristics: he is supposed to have apostrophised his first wife, shortly after her unexpected death, as “not a bad old stick”, while the symptoms of the TB that killed him rate a terse “pain in side very bad” in his diary.
At the same time, as some of the other new material in A Life in Letters demonstrates, he had a habit of briskly unburdening himself to strangers who had written to him out of the blue. In 2003, not long after finishing Orwell: The Life, I was sent a copy of a letter from a Mrs Jessica Marshall, with whom Orwell had apparently corresponded throughout the 1940s. They never met, and yet Orwell casually informs her — explaining his non-reply to a previous letter — that: “I was rather distraught all through the war and left a lot of letters unanswered.”
The same note — momentous revelations let out almost by accident — is struck in a previously unknown letter to Richard Usborne, written in 1947 during Orwell’s long stay on Jura. Usborne, the incoming editor of The Strand magazine, had asked for a contribution and details of his career. Rather than returning only a polite refusal, Orwell fills two-and-a-half typed pages with details about himself, including the development of his political opinions (“I was only intermittently interested in the subject until about 1935, although I think I can say I was always more or less ‘Left’”).
He then pronounces what would have been heresy to any card-carrying member of the late-1940s Bevanite-Foot Labour Left — “there is not much to choose between Communism and Fascism”. All this is rather extraordinary: a mini-biography, far more revealing than much of the information doled out to close friends, sent to someone he would never meet and whose offer of work he had briskly declined.
If A Life in Letters refines and expands on certain aspects of Orwell’s inner life, then it also offers an intriguing comment on the origins of his mature political views. The conventional take on Orwell’s commitment to democratic socialism is that it barely existed until the mid-1930s. The trip to the industrial North to gather the material included in The Road to Wigan Pier was undertaken by a journalist looking for a subject rather than an ideologue looking for confirmation of his beliefs: the descriptions of people he meets as being “very active in the Labour movement” are set down with a kind of anthropological relish. It was the experience of Spain in 1937, with its terror squads and its contempt for objective truth, this orthodoxy insists, that provided the crucible in which Orwell’s ideological sympathies were forged.
But Davison prints a fascinating letter to Michael Sayers from December 1945, a few months after the triumphant publication of Animal Farm. Sayers — born in 1912 and the only survivor of Orwell’s Thirties circle — had shared a Kentish Town flat with him in 1935, the other tenant being the writer Rayner Heppenstall, who crawled home drunk one night and was famously attacked by Orwell with a shooting stick. Picking up the threads of friendship a decade later, and presumably answering some question of Sayers’, Orwell remarks that he doesn’t think “he could fairly be described as a Russophobe” but that the Soviet myth has done incalculable harm to the Left in Britain and elsewhere. Here Orwell represents himself as thinking this “as early as 1932 or thereabouts and always said so fairly freely”. He has no wish to interfere with the Soviet regime: “I merely don’t want its methods and habits of thought imitated here, and that involves fighting against the Russianisers in this country.”
Biography, Martin Amis once declared, is there for the curious, and curiosity gives out when boredom begins. Why should we be so excited by a few scraps of paper, hoarded over time, which may (or may not) explain why Orwell did (or didn’t) want to marry a girl he wrote sententious poems to 90 years ago? One answer, apart from their intrinsic interest, is the intimation of future promise, the existence of a whole heap of stuff out there just waiting to be found. For instance, the material stolen by Russian agents in 1937 from Orwell’s hotel in Barcelona that lies in the NKVD archive in Moscow; and 19 letters from the early 1930s to a girlfriend named Eleanor Jaques, to which scholars have yet to gain access.
Sixty years after his death Orwell remains arguably the most influential writer thrown up by the West in the 20th century; instantly recognisable, million-selling, his name invoked almost daily to explain the convolutions of a world whose fault lines he seems uncannily able to predict. Out across the horizon, his outlines endlessly respun out of these incremental fragments, the real Orwell — whoever he is — continues to take shape.
Orwell: A Life in Letters is published by Harvill-Secker at £20
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