There has got to be by now a subgenre of literary journalism classifiable as "Orwell pornography" and devoted to every inch of his domestic existence. How many times the collected word count of Shakespeare have gone to deciphering whether the Bard wrote his own stuff, sat for some enigmatic portrait, or loved whichever sex? But his life was so long ago that the mystery entices precisely because we'll never quite know the truth (save for the fact that he did indeed write his own stuff, thank you very much, Justice Stevens).
In Orwell's case, however, the clock need only be rewound sixty years, and thanks to correspondence, memoirs and living eyewitness accounts, we have been able to cobble together an adequate picture of what it was like to be the moral genius of the twentieth century. Orwell's maxim was that good prose is clear as a window-pane, a corollary of which is that in order to write anything readable one must efface one's personality. But it doesn't seem as if he had any self-effacement to do, or not much anyway. So much of Orwell's life was dedicated to drudgery and the anxiety about further drudgery--as was so much of his work. (See the essays "Why I Write," "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," and even "A Nice Cup of Tea," which catechized an English ritual in terms that only a cognitive behavioral psychologist should ever appreciate.)
Robert McCrumb recounts the long, sad process of Orwell's composition of his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which took place on the Scottish island of Jura, in a house belonging to his editor at the Observer, David Astor. It was here that Orwell succumbed to tuberculosis after a constitution-weakening boating mishap with his young son Richard in frigid temperature:
A few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: "I still feel deadly sick," and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, "like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing." In 1947 there was no cure for TB - doctors prescribed fresh air and a regular diet - but there was a new, experimental drug on the market, streptomycin. Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US.
Richard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works."
As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. "It really is rather important," wrote Warburg to his star author, "from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible."
Just when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in "early December", and coping with "filthy weather" on autumnal Jura. Early in October he confided to Astor: "I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive."
"A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection," wrote Nabokov, satirizing Marx and the "law" of historical inevitability. Sometimes toothaches and drizzles prove useful. I now find it impossible to imagine that what Orwell put poor Winston Smith through in Room 101 and the unrecorded dungeons of Oceania was not in some way extrapolated from his own physical ruin. "Cadaverous" is how McCrumb describes the writer even in modest health, who, despite a preoccupation with the Last Man of Europe (an early possible title for Nineteen Eighty-Four), dreamt up the quintessential nightmare of a world gone mad looking and feeling like one of Eliot's hollow men.
add a comment