Orwell's Nonfiction: Down and Out, Wigan Pier, Catalonia, Essays, Letters, More

[Extollager]

Tell here about your experiences of reading George Orwell's writing other than his half-dozen novels. He was a superb essayist -- almost everyone knows "Shooting an Elephant" and "Politics and the English Language" -- but there's a lot more to his nonfiction than these familiar items.

I'll lead off with a personal remark. In general, writing intended to be funny doesn't make me laugh or chuckle. Maybe I smile. But it's a rare book that can crack me up. Passages in Gogol's Dead Souls and Kinglsey Amis have done that. And Parisian passages in Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell shucked off the signs of his "privilege" and sought to see for himself what it was like to be poor in the major cities, and got himself a job as a dishwasher in a ritzy French hotel. His account of what went on behind the scenes, and his story of the miser and the cocaine scheme, are hilarious. I don't want to give too much away, and I should say I'm not sure how truthful he always is, but there's a gusto in his storytelling here that I don't think is often associated with Orwell's name.

 

[Toby Frost]

Where to start? With the possible exception of Willians and Searle's books about nigel molesworth, Orwell's writing was the first books for grown-ups that seemed to be addressed to someone like me. I remember reading E.M. Forster for exams, and finding it incredibly rarified and irrelevant: "proper books" only involved extremely wealthy people at home or very poor people abroad. And then here was this man talking about going down the pub and gardening and the importance of normal life: as Amis says in Lucky Jim, that nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

Orwell wasn't quite the man he wanted to be and didn't lead the life he celebrated (he was considerably weirder) but his understanding of power politics and his celebration of mild, everyday life are very important, I think. He made a sort of intellectual case for being reasonable, which is harder than it seems, and did a great deal to oppose the vicious and neurotic streak in intellectual thought at the time.

In answer to the inevitable question, I think he would have been totally disgusted by the 21st century, although some of his reasons would have been more justified than others!

 

[Extollager]

I'll throw out something more serious for this thread before long, but here's a little bit of literary history that might be new to some Chrons people.

Who was the woman...

--who was the first woman to win the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry?
--who was the woman C. S. Lewis said he would want to marry if he were the marrying kind?
--whose portrait was drawn by Mervyn Peake, author of the Gormenghast books?
--of whom the above things are true and also that Orwell tried to seduce her?

Answer: Ruth Pitter, 1897-1992.

 

[Extollager]

Would anyone like to read and discuss one of Orwell's longer and greatest essays here? As it is autobiographical, it might be a good one for early days of this thread.

I'm thinking of "'Such, Such Were the Joys,'" with its ironic title taken from Blake's Songs of Innocence. As the allusion to Nicholas Nickleby suggests, Orwell writes of his early schooldays with a Dickensian vigor and detail.

"Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into the routine of school life) I began wetting my bed....Whoever writes about his childhood must beware of exaggeration and self-pity. I do not claim that I was a martyr or that St Cyprian's was a sort of Dotheboys Hall. But I should be falsifying my own memories if I did not record that they are largely memories of disgust. The over crowded, underfed underwashed life that we led was disgusting, as I recall it. If I shut my eyes and say ‘school’, it is of course the physical surroundings that first come back to me: the flat playing field with its cricket pavilion and the little shed by the rifle range, the draughty dormitories, the dusty splintery passages, the square of asphalt in front of the gymnasium, the raw-looking pinewood chapel at the back. And at almost every point some filthy detail obtrudes itself. For example, there were the pewter bowls out of which we had our porridge. They had overhanging rims, and under the rimes there were accumulations of sour porridge, which could be flaked off in ling strips. The porridge itself, too, contained more lumps, hairs and unexplained black things than one would have thought possible, unless someone were putting them there on purpose. It was never safe to start on that porridge without investigating it first. And there was the slimy water of the plunge bath — it was twelve or fifteen feet long, the whole school was supposed to go into it every morning, and I doubt whether the water was changed at all frequently — and the always-damp towels with their cheesy smell: and, on occasional visits in the winter, the murky sea-water of the local Baths, which came straight in from the beach and on which I once saw floating a human turd. And the sweaty smell of the changing-room with its greasy basins, and, giving on this, the row of filthy, dilapidated lavatories, which had no fastenings of any kind on the doors, so that whenever you were sitting there someone was sure to come crashing in. It is not easy for me to think of my schooldays without seeming to breathe in a whiff of something cold and evil-smelling — a sort of compound of sweaty stockings, dirty towels, faecal smells blowing along corridors, forks with old food between the prongs, neck-of-mutton stew, and the banging doors of the lavatories and the echoing chamber-pots in the dormitories."

The entire essay seems to be available here, but with some misprints (caveat lector):

George Orwell: Such, Such Were The Joys

The essay is available on pp. 330-369 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 4: In Front of Your Nose.

 

[Toby Frost]

Random thoughts:

1) Orwell is obsessed with smells, usually bad ones. 1984 and The Road to Wigan Pier are fully of nasty odours. A surprising number of things stink. He is also very good at (unpleasant) detail. There is a real sense of someone rather refined forced to live in squalid conditions and hating it. I don't know if he was especially clean (was anyone then?), but it seems to have been a real preoccupation.

2) The genius of "Such, Such Were the Joys", I think, is his understanding of the way in which things that are completely unimportant to an adult can be the end of the world to a child. I remember this sense very clearly: the feeling that not only was forgetting your homework incredibly important, but that nobody other than a teacher or a child would understand it (and I had a much nicer childhood than him!). I think he calls it a nightmare world, where all the sense of logic and proportion is gone. If you are not winning in such a world, and you can't escape it, it is a nightmare (and not unlike 1984, where you really can't win, and they are out to get you from the start).

3) There's a point in it where Orwell gets very close to summing up his whole world view: where the rules no longer favour the weak, the weak have a right to make new rules. But if you wanted to get a coherent philosophy out of Orwell's works, apart from "Be decent and accept no nonsense from people who aren't", you would have to glean it bit by bit, and it would probably contradict itself.

4) Cyril Connolly went to the same school, and said it wasn't half as bad as Orwell made out. But does this matter? Is Orwell to be criticised, given that his memory would inevitably be faded and his views skewed?

And also: Despite seeming to loathe everyone in it, Orwell was surprisingly well-connected to the literary world. He was one step connected to a lot of people, not least because either his second wife knew them or he tried to get them to sleep with him (unsuccessfully).

 

[Extollager]

I'm finishing George Orwell: A Life in Letters today. What comes through, right enough, is largely his life at the time. I get the sense that his thoughts about his reading largely went into his essays. Anyway, I was arrested just now by a 20 April 1948 letter in which the hospitalized Orwell mentions that he'd have liked to read a book by George Gissing said to be his masterpiece, Born in Exile, but he's never been able to, can't get hold of a copy.

And I can start reading it right now for free:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4526/pg4526.txt

If I want a paper copy, I can get one for under $8 postpaid at abebooks.com. Sellers at the same site offer first editions if I can afford that.

Wow. Must be we're living in the Golden Age of book availability.

 

[Bick]

... Born in Exile, but he's never been able to, can't get hold of a copy.

If I want a paper copy, I can get one for under $8 postpaid at abebooks.com. Sellers at the same site offer first editions if I can afford that.

Wow. Must be we're living in the Golden Age of book availability.

Indeed! There's a certain amount of irony in that perhaps, as actual book reading is dropping off, and all the bookstores are closing. I'd only heard of Gissing's New Grub Street, incidentally. I've not read that either though, perhaps put off by Paul Theroux finding it rather turgid and uninteresting when he started to read it on the Patagonian Express, on his way to meet Borges.

 

[Bick]

... Orwell gets very close to summing up his whole world view: where the rules no longer favour the weak, the weak have a right to make new rules. But if you wanted to get a coherent philosophy out of Orwell's works, apart from "Be decent and accept no nonsense from people who aren't", you would have to glean it bit by bit, and it would probably contradict itself.

Yes - too smart and well read to uphold a philosophy that applies universally in all situations? Life is too uneven and contradictory for sensible, humanitarian, world views to be anything but the same, I suspect.

 

[Extollager]

I discovered as I finished the Orwell Letters book that his old flame Jacintha Buddicom (sounds like a P. G. Wodehouse flapper) said that a letter he wrote -- which has not survived -- wrote of (her words) "her faith in some sort of after-life. Not necessarily, or even probably, a conventional Heaven-or-Hell, but the firm belief that 'nothing ever dies', and that we must go on somewhere" (p. 473). But there's no suggestion that Orwell was thinking about such matters in the letters that are printed in the book.

Jacintha and Orwell got in touch after a hiatus of quite a few years. She hadn't known that the Eric Blair she remembered was "George Orwell" till late in Orwell's life.

Just thought Orwell readers might be interested.

 

[Extollager]

SORRY — I mistyped. It was Orwell who wrote of “his faith,” etc. Jacintha wrote that that was what he said.

She wrote a book about him many years after his death, which I haven’t read.

The Orwell letters book becomes rather poignant as we see him writing about hopes to live for a few more years, but we know he’s not going to. He’d put down roots on Jura and would have loved to be there with his adopted little boy. Instead he had to make the boy stay away from getting too close when visiting him in hospital, for fear Richard would catch his TB. He had ideas for one or two more novels.

 

[Bick]

He’d put down roots on Jura and would have loved to be there with his adopted little boy. Instead he had to make the boy stay away from getting too close when visiting him in hospital, for fear Richard would catch his TB.

How grim and tragic!

 

[Toby Frost]

Yes, it was pretty bleak, IIRC. From what I've read, I suspect that Orwell was at most agnostic, certainly not any form of orthodox Christian, although he was steeped in Christian - probably Anglican - tradition: a liking for old churches, an ability to reference the Bible in detail, and so on. There's a line in "Such Were The Joys" about being unable to love and fear anyone at once, including God. A relation of mine once said to me "I just don't really need religion", and I suspect Orwell might have been like that.

That said, there's a sense of mysticism in his writing, especially regarding families, friendship and nature, a sort of wholesome continuity that I find very persuasive but impossible to quite express. He seems to have rejected most supernatural things: there's an odd bit in one of the essays about fascists being into tarot-reading or something like that. Sheldon's biography mentions him making notes of "death dreams" which seem to suggest going into some kind of afterlife, but whether he took that seriously, I don't know.

I think Jacintha Buddicom went on to be a poet, if I remember rightly.

 

[Extollager]

How grim and tragic!

Yes. It really comes through the letters, how important it was to Orwell to see the little boy (if only in photos) growing vigorously. He loved Richard for the boy's own sake, I don't doubt, but I think also it meant a lot for his inner balance to have the thriving of the lad to offset his own debility. (Orwell needed the new streptomycin treatment to fight his infection, but the drug made feel ill. At first he had to get it from America because it wasn't available in Britain.)

The book on p. 449 mentions Lettice Cooper's reminiscence that he was "'was terrified to let Richard come near him and he would hold out his hand and push him away -- and George would do it abruptly because he was always abrupt in his manner and movements. And he wouldn't let the child sit on his knee or anything."

 

[Extollager]

Yes, it was pretty bleak, IIRC. From what I've read, I suspect that Orwell was at most agnostic, certainly not any form of orthodox Christian, although he was steeped in Christian - probably Anglican - tradition: a liking for old churches, an ability to reference the Bible in detail, and so on. There's a line in "Such Were The Joys" about being unable to love and fear anyone at once, including God. A relation of mine once said to me "I just don't really need religion", and I suspect Orwell might have been like that.

That said, there's a sense of mysticism in his writing, especially regarding families, friendship and nature, a sort of wholesome continuity that I find very persuasive but impossible to quite express. He seems to have rejected most supernatural things: there's an odd bit in one of the essays about fascists being into tarot-reading or something like that. Sheldon's biography mentions him making notes of "death dreams" which seem to suggest going into some kind of afterlife, but whether he took that seriously, I don't know.

I think Jacintha Buddicom went on to be a poet, if I remember rightly.

Have you read this book review by Orwell?

George Orwell: Notes on the Way

Notes on the Way, the essay of George Orwell. First published: March 30 and April 6, 1940 by/in Time and Tide, GB, London

www.orwell.ru