One of the great unwritten
laws of biography is that no sooner shall the biographer have
sent the manuscript off to the typesetter than a torrent of
fresh material can be guaranteed to descend on his or her unsuspecting
head. Orwell: The Life went to the printer at Christmas 2002.
Barely a fortnight had passed before the Buswell Memorial Library
at Wheaton College, Illinois, revealed, in response to a chance
inquiry, that it owned four letters from Orwell to Malcolm
Muggeridge.
These had somehow escaped his second
wife, Sonia Orwell's, grasp when, some time in the mid-1960s,
she retrieved from Muggeridge a heap of documents lent to
him for his own projected life but now required for the 1968
four-volume Collected Journalism, Essays and Letters.
In their slipstream new information
rose into view at alarmingly regular intervals: letters,
artefacts, hitherto undivulged recollections by those who
knew him, and, perhaps best of all, an incontrovertible sighting
on film. While none of them radically redefines our view
of Orwell, several corroborate important incidents in his
life or supply interesting sidelights on his activities or
opinions.
I managed to cram a synopsis of the
four letters to Muggeridge into the original edition's appendix.
Simultaneously, the Buswell Memorial Library's collection
yielded up another intriguing item: a letter from Orwell,
dated June 21 1945, to the editor of the Glasgow-based Million
magazine, complaining about an article entitled "George
Orwell and Our Time". Its author, JE Miller, had repeated
a claim first levelled by the British Communist party leader
Harry Pollitt in the Daily Worker in 1937, that in The Road
to Wigan Pier, Orwell asserts that the working class "smell".
Time had not softened Orwell's asperity. "I
not only did not say that the working classes 'smell', I
said almost the opposite of this. What I said, as anyone
who chooses to consult the books can see, is that 20 or 30
years ago, when I was a child, middle-class children were
taught to believe that the working class 'smell' and that
this was a psychological fact which had to be taken into
consideration."
There was a second complaint on a point
of detail: Miller had suggested that the essay "Shooting
an Elephant" was an extract from the novel Burmese Days.
As with Pollitt, eight years before, Orwell detected personal
animus: "I cannot think that Mr Miller is unaware of
these mis-statements as I pointed them out to him when the
draft was shown to me a year or two ago," he concluded.
A note in Orwell's hand states: "NB Miller denies having
received my letter."
Quite as fascinating is a letter sent
from Orwell's sickbed in Hairmyres Hospital near Glasgow
in May 1948 to a Mrs Marshall, a lady with whom he had begun
to correspond during the war. Mrs Marshall was clearly solicitous
of his welfare. At any rate, he begins by confessing that "It
has been on my conscience for a long time that you once sent
me a pot of jam for which I never thanked you."
The letter is chiefly interesting as
a statement of Orwell's literary opinions: his continuing
dislike of JB Priestley ("...he is awful, and it is
astonishing that he has actually had a sort of comeback in
reputation during the last year or two"), his admiration
for Osbert Sitwell and George Gissing ("one of the best
English novelists, though he has never had his due")
and his attempt, while bed-bound, to read Henry James ("I
can never really get to care for him").
However, there is one significant personal
detail in Orwell's explanation for his failure to acknowledge
the pot of jam: "I was rather distraught all through
the war years and left a lot of letters unanswered." In
the final paragraph Orwell notes that half-way through the
writing he had been out for his usual half-hour walk in the
grounds. "It leaves me very out of breath, in fact I
can't go more than a 100 yards without stopping for breath." The
doctors were intending to return his collapsed lung to its
original shape, so he supposed breathing would become easier. "This
is a nice hospital and everyone has been very good to me."
Several pieces of new information predictably
came to light in the course of making a South Bank Show about
Orwell in the early summer of 2003. In particular, more than
one of the interviewees previously consulted during the writing
of the book found that a television camera acted as a powerful
stimulant to memory.
The novelist Peter Vansittart, for
example, remembered being taken by his school history master,
John Hampden Jackson, to a conference held in the summer
of 1939 at Langham in Essex under the auspices of the pacifist
Adelphi community. Those present included Orwell, Rayner
Heppenstall, Richard Rees, Ethel Mannin and (possibly) John
Middleton Murry. "Orwell did not speak," Vansittart
recalled, "though I later overheard him talking in a
very inderminate way about the coming war." Another
interviewee, Mrs Dora Hammond, turned out to have been a
friend of Dorothy Rogers, the Southwold girl on whom Orwell
had his eye in early 1934, and confirmed both Orwell's pursuit
and the antagonism of her eventual husband, George Summers.
Until six months ago, no moving picture
of Orwell was thought to exist. Another advantage of the
Orwell South Bank Show was that it allowed a fragment of
cine-film shot in Southwold in the early 1930s and spotted
by me in an old University of East Anglia film archive tape
to be blown up to near life-size proportions. This revealed
a figure whose upper half looked very like contemporary photographs
of Orwell. However, this tentative identification was rendered
irrelevant by the discovery, five weeks after the programme
had been broadcast, by one of the researchers, Phil Windeatt,
of a Pathé newsreel shot immediately before the 1921
Eton Wall Game, in which the Collegers' team is shown moving
in line across a playing field. The tall figure, third from
the left, exactly matches a photograph of Orwell held in
the Orwell Archive at University College, London.
Meanwhile, excitement over Orwell's "list" of
supposed communist fellow-travellers reached fever pitch
with the discovery, among the papers of the late Celia Goodman
(formerly Kirwan), of a copy of the original document submitted
by Orwell to the International Research Department in 1948.
Its public unveiling, in these pages by Timothy Garton Ash,
increased my respect for Goodman, who, while ever hospitable
to Orwell biographers, had clearly decided that the release
of this definitive version (obtained by her from the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office some time in the mid-1990s) could
happily wait until after her death. Of the additions to the
list, one was found still to be alive - an academic-cum-founding
member of the Social Democratic party, now living in innocuous
retirement on the south coast.
And then there is the question of Orwell's
things, the tiny collection of artefacts he left behind.
As the proud possessor of "Orwell's stapler", presented
to me by a friend who bought it at a Tribune fund-raiser,
I was mortified in the spring of 2003 to read a Spectator
diary column by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's then
press secretary, in which he claimed to have acquired the
self-same item in similar circumstances.
I was yet more mortified later in the
year to read an account of a second, or rather third, left-wing
fire-sale, presided over by the rail union's Bob Crow, at
which the star exhibit would be... you guessed it. One can
only suppose that Tribune has a cupboard full of the things,
ripe to be pulled out whenever the creditors are massing.
Solace was provided by the gift, courtesy
of an old friend of Sonia's, of an elaborately patterned,
mulberry-coloured tie, unworn but given by her to Orwell
shortly before he died, and a pair of silver gravy boats,
represented as the final remnant of the Blair silver but
dated by a silversmith to 1935, which suggests they came
to Orwell and his first wife Eileen as a wedding present.
There will undoubtedly be more where
all this came from: more letters (copies of several recent
additions, among them one sent in 1937 to the Soviet journal
International Literature and an exchange with a former Catalan
comrade from 1949) are in the hands of Professor Peter Davison
and will be included in future supplements to The Complete
Works, more memories and possibly even more pieces of silverware.
Only last month, for instance, in Southwold I came across
an old gentleman who claimed that in 1932, from a vantage
point in the heather of the town's common, he watched Orwell
and his friend Dennis Collings bury a time capsule. The contents
are said to include a Great War-era tin helmet.
As for perhaps the largest hoard of
known but undiscovered Orwell material, during the summer
I received several tantalising emails from a researcher at
work in the Moscow KGB archives. Somewhere in those trackless
caverns - for purposes of comparison the files held in the
former East German Stasi archive, if laid out end to end,
would form a line 180 kilometres long - lie the diaries and
letters taken from Orwell in Barcelona in 1937. Indeed, I
know of a man who saw them and passed them over, not realising
their significance. At some point this cache will be found,
by which time who knows what other treasure will have arrived
to join it, and yet another biography, or biographies, will
have to be written.
Biographers, sad to relate, very often
fall catastrophically out of love with their subjects. As
someone whose feeling for Orwell was only heightened by the
four years spent professionally in his company, I am already
looking forward to reading them.
·: Adapted from the afterword
to the revised, paperback edition of Orwell: The Life, published
by Vintage on March 4 at £8.99
Related articles:
20.01.2004: DJ
Taylor's books for Orwell-lovers
|
