In 1954, the BBC decided to make a bold experiment and adapted Orwell’s novel 1984 for television. It was broadcast on 12 December in prime time – on a Sunday evening. The programme provoked a lot of publicity, most of it negative. There were rumours that London housewives, who had survived the German bombing of London without much fuss, had fallen unconscious during the programme. Five Conservative MPs protested in Parliament against the inappropriate content, which “appeals only to sadistic viewers”, but the viewing figures for the show still fell just short of those for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation the year before.
The writer George Orwell did not benefit much from all this drama, as he had been dead for four years and the book was published the year before his death, in 1949. It sold well at the beginning, but then sold only 150 copies a month, barely enough for the occasional reprint. But the screen version propelled 1984 to the top of the bestseller lists, and it remains there today.
Now people are starting to wonder who George Orwell really is. He was already quite a well-known writer, because his Animal Farm was published in 1945 and brought him some fame, but he was only one of the successful writers. In his will, which he wrote shortly before his death, Orwell firmly forbade the writing of his biography. In the following years, his widow Sonia, whom he married on his deathbed, slammed the door on anyone who knocked on her house door and asked for information.
But journalists have dug around and found a lot. Why did Orwell excel at grammar school but fail at an elite school in Eton, thus giving up privileges in life? Why, although highly critical of the British Empire, did he accept a five-year job in the most neglected and exploited part of the empire, Burma? Why, when he returned to England, did he visit the most notorious parts of London and Paris? Why did he fight on the side of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, what was it about his socialism, why did he draw up a list of people he thought were his friends and hand it over to the British Secret Service before he died? What was going on between the Orwells that his wife Sonia spent the night Orwell was dying in a London nightclub? They had been married barely a hundred days.
The widow Sonia kept her promise, but only until 1974, when the pressure from publishers was too great and Orwell’s first biography was published, but Sonia was not satisfied with it. In the weeks and months after its publication, she felt humiliated, fed up and soaked in alcohol, and quarrelsome, because she recognised herself in the novella 1984.
Burma, the world’s brothel
George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in June 1903 in Bengal, India, where his elderly father was a colonial official. Just a few months after his birth, the family returned to England, escaping the plague that was then ravaging the Indian subcontinent. His father returned and served in India until his retirement in 1912 at the age of 55. His mother, Ida, was a suffragette and had a special attitude to sexuality.
Orwell thus created a picture of the relationship between man and woman at a young age, later describing it as “a man chasing a woman, knocking her down and jumping on her, just as a cock does a hen”. When his father returned to England in 1912, Ida immediately arranged for separate bedrooms to avoid her husband’s officially sanctioned rape, as he demanded his “legal rights”. The Orwell family was considered “lower middle class” at the time, so they did not put much stock in tradition.
Despite this, Orwell, aged eight, managed to get into a preparatory school for entry to a prestigious school in Eton or Harrow. The Eton entrance examinations were not a major problem for him, as most of the candidates had to demonstrate their knowledge in Latin and Greek. Orwell was not a good student at Eton, however, and came 137th out of 168 entrants in the final examination. He left Eton without completing his final year. This closed his path to Oxford and Cambridge universities, as well as to the University of London. From then on, he had to fend for himself. And in England, that meant going to work in the colonies.
Traditionally, the colonies employed middle-class children as clerks, who were denied access to the highest positions in England because they were reserved for the elite. And it was in the colonies that Orwell’s place was from 1922 to 1927. The choice, of course, was not his. He was still three years short of coming of age, he had no means, so his father’s decision prevailed.
A nineteen-year-old untutored young man fell in love with Jacinta Buddicom, but the love ended with the young woman running away from the date with her clothes partially torn. Perhaps this unhappy love was the reason why Orwell did not regret going to Burma. He was lucky that Jacinta did not go to the police and report the assault, because he would probably have ended up in prison.
So he passed the not-too-difficult entrance exams for the Indian Imperial Police without any problems. Nobody minded too much that he had earlier put a dead rat in a birthday cake of a government official. The colonies needed fresh English power. So in October 1922, he travelled by ship via Suez and Ceylon to Burma. He spent three long years in Burma (1922-1925), serving as a police officer in various parts of the country, including very remote places. Only at the end did he serve near Rangoon.
In fact, his work was not purely police work, but mainly gathering information on the behaviour of the locals and informing the authorities about possible rebellions. “Big Brother is watching you” therefore has its roots in Burma. He was a capable spy in a police uniform and was therefore moved around to different places. When he was near the capital, Rangoon, he often went to bookshops and enjoyed European-style food.
But he was also a loner. He liked to be alone, read books and was reluctant to attend colonial parties. However, he learned the Burmese language so well that he was able to hold discussions with Buddhist monks. In Upper Burma, he contracted dengue fever in 1927 and had to go to England for several months of treatment, but he never returned to Burma. He resigned from the Imperial Police and decided to become a writer.
He described his experiences in Burma in his book Burmese Days. It was several years in the making and was not published in England until 1934. He started writing it in Paris between 1928 and 1929 and continued writing it in England during his summer holidays. “I can say that in some things it is biased and incomplete in detail, but for the most part I just reported what I saw.”
He later confided to an Indian friend that he had done “terrible things” in Burma. Everyone who read the book remembered two scenes. In the first, Ellis, a member of the Colonial Club, says: “Fighting with bamboo is the only thing that impresses the Burmese. Did you see them after we whipped them? When they are brought out of the dungeon on a bullock cart, they scream and the women stick squeezed bananas on their backs.”
Ellis is also involved in the second scene. He hits the boy with a stick across the eyes with all his might. “The boy has gone blind. He’s not going to cut anymore, you sneaky little baboon,” he wisecracks.
The Indian Imperial Police was largely unarmed. A baton was supposed to be sufficient for crowd control. In England, too, teachers enforced discipline mainly with the stick. In the years after Orwell’s death, rumours spread in pubs that he found it sexually arousing to be caned and flogged – an English habit.
Burmese Days was first published in America, a year before it was published in England, and the Americans assumed that the story smacked of sex. It was the male erection that sold it, not the dark analysis of the British Empire. For Orwell, sex was a painful biological problem whose solution he saw in the East, and Burma was considered by many to be the empire’s greatest brothel.
He confided to his friend that he had all the sex he couldn’t get in England, “from Jewish crocodile-faced cunts in Rangoon to assorted aromatic dolls in remote police stations”. He was also turned on by attractive boys. And he was convinced he was sterile: “I am sterile, I am sure of it, although I have never had myself examined because it is so disgusting.”
He spent years in the tropics in a job that fostered a sense of white supremacy over the natives. Thirty thousand whites and one million Indians constituted an oligarchy that ruled over 12 million Burmese. No wonder the Burmese hated the English and that if a white woman walked alone in the bazaar she could count on the locals spitting on her clothes. Even the better jobs that were available to the locals went only to Indians, and the Burmese hated them even more than they hated the English.
But Orwell also hated his own, the merchants and industrialists who plundered Burma’s natural resources. He was convinced that the foreigners would leave the desert behind them when the teak ran out, the last drop of oil was depleted and not a rupee of money could be extracted from the British-owned rice cartels.
While serving in Burma, he was sent for six months to Syriam, home to the empire’s largest oil refinery. All of India depended on this oil production. But six kilometres around the refinery, the land was completely poisoned. It was clear that there would never be any vegetation there again, and employees were dying of lung diseases. So important was the refinery that the Empire maintained a permanent garrison of British troops there.
Orwell, at this time of his life, was at once a snob and a revolutionary. He could hate imperialism, but he could also hate the natives (the evil, insolent little beasts) whom he tyrannised.
A journey into poverty and despair
But life in the tropics was irrevocably over. On his return to England, he stopped off in Marseilles, where something else had an indelible effect on him. People demonstrated en masse because in America the alleged anarchists Nicola Saccom and Bartilomeo Vanzetti had been sentenced to death for a terrorist bomb attack. It is undeniable that in Marseilles Orwell began to sympathise from time to time with anarchism, which wanted to wage an all-out internal war on the state and its institutions, seeing it as the only solution to all the world’s problems.
This sympathy with anarchism always came to him in moments of political despair, when he felt it was pointless to discuss anything other than the bomb. In these moments of despair – and there were many – he accepted Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchist nihilism as the only solution. This was best demonstrated in the Spanish Civil War, when he joined the Republicans, at a moment when it seemed pointless, and stepped under the red and black flag, fought and almost died fighting two totalitarianisms – fascist and Stalinist.
On his return to England, he slowly re-established contact with his former friends, and tried to renew his former friendship with Jacinta, but she coldly refused. He never found out that she had given birth to an illegitimate child while he was away, which was a great shame at the time. Finally, he wandered into London’s East End and had his first encounter with the real world of poverty. He began to explore a new world, so different from his own, and persisted in doing so for five long years.
His interest in poverty was almost obsessive. His years in Burma were socially very eventful for England. He missed the great general strike when England was very close to revolution, although its effects were still very much felt in England. Meanwhile, his contemporaries from Eton had become the rising stars of the new capitalism, and he remained a poor former colonial official. Those who saw him again at the time were shocked at how old he looked. When his retired father heard that he had laid aside the uniform he himself had served honourably for thirty years, he immediately disinherited him.
Orwell, meanwhile, was admiring Jack London, reading his books and visiting the slums of London. For the first time, he spent the night in a homeless shelter, dressed as a tramp. But he was also tempted by Paris, and early in 1928 he lived there with an aunt and wrote the first drafts of Burmese Days. In Paris, all his money was stolen and, to support himself, he spent some time washing dishes in a well-known hotel on the rue Rivoli.
After two years, he returned to England from Paris, took refuge in Southworld, where his parents had a house, and stayed there for five years. The townspeople, especially the men, considered him a sexual bully. Once he had to run for his life because he was chased on his motorbike by a jealous young man for getting too close to his fiancée.
He wrote little, so money was scarce, and he was forced to take a job as a teacher in a school. In August 1932, he started writing a book, which he later titled On the Edge and the Bottom in Paris and London. He wanted to publish it under a different name from the one he had been using, as he was still officially Eric Arthur Blair and all official documents were under that name. Of all the names that came to mind, he finally decided on George Orwell, and it was under that name that he was known to the whole world.
But if he wanted to write, he needed time, so he took a job in a second-hand bookshop. He worked in the afternoons, so he had time to write in the morning and socialise in the evening. He had the feeling that his writing career was going in circles. “Why don’t we just say, we don’t want your fucking texts. We only take texts from the guys we went to Cambridge with.”
Finally, in 1933, his first book, On the Edge and at the Bottom, was published, made possible by the socialist publisher Victor Gollancz. To Orwell’s delight, it was well received by readers. In it, he describes poverty in two cities as he experienced it himself, working in hotel kitchens, living in shabby rooms and wandering around like a klutz.
Orwell was at once attracted to poverty and ashamed of it. He felt cold when a wick fell from the ceiling into his milk in Paris. He slept in an English lodging house, woke up in the morning to find the stinking feet of a sailor in front of his nose, and was forced to sleep there again the next day. The smells were everywhere, masked only by the smell of tobacco. He described all this so vividly that the readers of his works thought they could smell it. “The lower classes stink”, he always said, angering socialists and other leftists.
In 1935, Burmese Days was published and Orwell was able to call himself a writer at the beginning of his literary career. Now publishers saw that he was a writer to be reckoned with and told him what kind of book they expected him to write. It was to be about a journey to those places in England hardest hit by the economic crisis; the northern areas of mines, obsolete factories and fields whose land was too poor to sustain a living.
Orwell sat on a bus and, with a pocket full of letters of recommendation from Communist friends, visited the mining areas of Lancashire, the textile mills of Yorkshire, the smelting plants of Sheffield and the docks of Liverpool during the two winter months of 1936. He spent the whole of February 1936 in Wigan, visiting many homes and seeing how the workers lived, taking notes and comparing wages, going down to the bottom of Brynhall Colliery. King Coal was the foundation on which the English Industrial Revolution was built, and in those days it was still holding the Empire upright.
What he saw shocked him. “Just because miners sweat themselves to exhaustion, the upper class can still be higher,” he wrote. On his first night, he slept in a worker’s flat that smelled like a ferret’s cage, with a bedpan full to the brim under the kitchen table. It was so cold in winter that the cookers were on day and night, and the mattresses on which the miners slept were always damp and damp. Water was supplied from a communal tap and the sanitary facilities were abysmal.
Of course, England didn’t need a writer to discover that the miners had pulled this one out of the crisis. All this was known, but it was deliberately forgotten by England’s more fortunate social classes because, in their view, it could not be changed. But the power with which Orwell described events went down many people’s noses. The middle class, Orwell’s class, knew nothing, or wanted to know nothing, about the fact that the occupation of an English miner was extremely dangerous and that there were so many accidents that they could be compared with the casualties in the First World War.
Orwell was clear about what was wrong with the English class system, and he expressed it clearly in the succinct words, “The underclass stinks. I don’t blame the working class because it stinks, but it really stinks.”
From all these impressions came the book The Road to Wigan, published in 1937. The publisher feared that some parts of the book might be offensive to the reader, so he wrote a kind of apology in the preface. Orwell just shrugged his shoulders at this.
A tribute to Catalonia
But by then Orwell was already in Spain. Before that, in June 1936, he got married. Shortly afterwards, the Spanish Civil War broke out and he decided to fight on the Republican side. Everyone, Orwell was convinced, had a Don Quixote in him. What did he think he could achieve in Spain? Why had a sickly, prematurely aged, middle-aged man with no military training gone into the hot Spanish cauldron? Other men of letters also took part in the war, but as a rule they were where the bullets were not, in the medical service and with the newspapers. The writer Henry Miller, whom Orwell adored and met in Paris while going to the Spanish front, called him an idiot. “What do you want, that’s the soldiers’ job,” he replied.
It is unclear with whom he sympathised in Spain, communists, syndicalists or anarchists, but at the end of 1936 he found himself in Barcelona. “I came here to fight the fascists”, he said. In general, he had a rather elaborate opinion of anarchism, writing: “According to anarchist theory, all government is bad and punishment does more harm than the crime itself, and people can only be trusted to act fairly if you leave them alone.”
Barcelona was the right place for him. “It was my first time in a city where the working class is in power. Almost all buildings of a reasonable size were seized by the workers and dressed in the red flags of the socialists and the communists, or in the red and black flags of the anarchists, hammer and sickle and the initials of the revolutionary parties were painted on the walls, churches were emptied and effigies burned, and proclamations of collectivisation hung on shops and cafés.”
For this reason, Orwell is still regarded by many as the representative of English socialist amateurism expressed in words. “Frankly, I don’t know what Marx’s theory of surplus-value is about, and I’m not interested.”
But he had to join one of the many parties fighting for the Republic. In January 1937 he was already on the relatively peaceful Aragon front, where he was surprised by the shortage of ammunition, food and fuel. He soon returned to Barcelona and found a situation which disappointed him. The clashes between the various parties, all fighting for the Republic and, of course, for power, had left the city with hundreds of dead, an atmosphere of fear, full dungeons, censorship of newspapers, food queues and mutual recriminations.
He returned to the front, but because he was too curious and kept looking around from the trenches, he was hit in the throat by a sniper’s bullet. He was no longer able to speak, blood poured out of his mouth in streams, he was loaded onto a stretcher and taken to hospital. The doctors declared him unfit for military service.
He was comforted by a visit from his wife Eileen in Barcelona, but it was only a calm before the storm. The Communist Party declared all those close to the POUM to be Trotskyists, and finally fascists. So Orwell and his wife had to sneak away, and only when their passports were in order did they return to France by train.
He went on to describe the events and his involvement in the Spanish War in his book Homage to Catalonia. It sold badly, as Orwell, on his return to England, came under attack from “comrade socialists” for his book The Road to Wigan and his words that “the underclass stinks”. Readers who wanted to read this book were reminded to be aware that “Mr Orwell is not one of them, but a representative of the middle class”.
Orwell was so affected by this that he became ill with pneumonia and had to undergo treatment. He was found to have the beginnings of tuberculosis and was advised to convalesce in a warm place. The French South was too expensive, so he opted for French Morocco (not Spanish Morocco, which was even cheaper, since the civil war had started there).
But Marrakech let him down. “Diseases of all kinds are crawling all over Marrakech, all kinds of scabies, tuberculosis and dysentery,” he wrote. He lost a lot of weight and was constantly coughing and bleeding at night. His only relief came from a trip to the Atlas Mountains, for only in such remote places was it possible to encounter anything resembling the true colonial era. Here Orwell pleaded with his wife to let him “choose a young Arab girl” and Eileen agreed.
Six months later, he and his wife returned from Morocco. The clouds of World War II were already on the horizon. Orwell saw the coming war as a struggle between British fascism and German fascism, but with Russian fascism in the background, just waiting to see which of the two would be able to jump in the back. In his mind, he was already convinced in advance that the war would not be a real catastrophe, but that it would only be catastrophic in its aftermath, which was not so far away, somewhere around 1984.
“Coloured shirts, barbed wire, rubber torches. Hidden prisons where the lights burn day and night and the guards watch you while you sleep. And processions and big posters with huge faces and millions of people who chant to the Leader so much that they go deaf thinking they love him madly, but all the time secretly hate him so much that it makes them want to puke. And all this will happen.”
During the first months of World War II, Orwell was officially unfit for military service, a fact that had been established by Spanish doctors several years earlier. He was physically weak and too old, and his political biography was full of black marks, as he was labelled a Trotskyist, which also made him ineligible for intelligence service. In short, he could not be trusted. “They don’t want me in the army, at least not for now, because of my lungs”, he naively believed.
His wife Eileen took a job in the censorship office of the Ministry of Information and, or so it seemed, avoided the black spots, although she was also in Spain for a while. Orwell was writing reviews of theatre, films and books for newspapers at this time, because it was necessary to survive, which was not easy in wartime. He was officially unfit for military service, although he considered himself fit to join the Voluntary Local Defence (LDV), which he already saw in his imagination as a revolutionary people’s militia.
The recognition that the Territorial Defence was recruiting guys like him was pleasing, as it reminded him of Barcelona, where they were also trained in guerrilla warfare, setting ambushes, handling explosives and fighting man-to-man.
But Churchill, who became Prime Minister in May 1940, clearly remembered well how the Irish had jumped on England’s back in 1916 and demanded independence. He would not suffer a possible internal enemy in England. He quickly neutralised the LVD and turned it into a toothless “Home Guard”. Orwell was disillusioned and so resigned from the LVD in 1943, officially because of ill health. He was also aware of the reality of the situation and therefore wrote in his inter-war diary:
“There is no better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our times than the fact that we are all now more or less pro-Stalinists. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side and the purges and the rest are suddenly forgotten.”
Animal Farm
In August 1941, he managed to get a regular job with the BBC’s Eastern Department. He supervised the cultural broadcasts aimed at India, which the BBC used to counter Nazi propaganda that sought to encourage Indians to revolt against colonial rule. But after two years he had had enough of the clerical routine and bureaucracy and, realising that few Indians were tuning in to his broadcasts, resigned in the first half of 1943. He was now able to devote himself fully to writing Animal Farm.
He finished it in April 1944, but nobody wanted to print it because the publishers considered it an attack on the Soviet regime, which at that time was a decisive ally of the Western powers in the fight against Germany. Even the publisher who was prepared to print it changed his mind when he was visited by P. Smollett, an official in the Ministry of Information, who later turned out to be a Moscow agent.
Orwell’s family life was also not the best. Eileen had constant gynaecological problems, the causes of which she kept from her husband. They had to accept that they would not have children and each reacted to the news in their own way. Eileen became a chain smoker and he flew after other women. This was not unusual in those days, because in wartime moral prejudices fell away because of the mentality that you could be dead the next day. Nevertheless, they decided to adopt, and after a long process, in the summer of 1944 they got a one-month-old boy, Richard.
The war was not yet over when, in February 1945, Orwell received an invitation to become a war correspondent for the Observer, and so he set off for the already liberated Paris and later Cologne. How Eileen died while he was on the Continent has never been fully explained, but it is known that she did not tell Orwell that she was going on a completely routine operation. During it, while she was still under anaesthetic, her heart failed. In a few months she would have been 40 years old. It was later rumoured that she was allergic to the anaesthetic, but no one has officially confirmed this.
Orwell was suddenly a widower and a single parent. He was in Germany at the time, but he was physically unable to be on the front line. He mourned for Eileen, and even the Allies’ triumphal march through Germany brought him no consolation. The ruined cities he saw and the terrified defeated population convinced him that civilisation was over. Eileen had left him everything she had, but his possessions, including his house, meant little to him. His greatest regret was that he no longer had anyone to transcribe his notes.
He had only the satisfaction of knowing that Animal Farm was reprinted in August 1945, and a year later in America. He was a socialist and an opponent of dictatorship. He had fought on the side of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, had seen the left-wing republicans routed by the Communists loyal to Moscow, and had at least a rough idea of what was going on in the Soviet Union. But the idea of writing Animal Farm came to him when he saw a boy forcing a packhorse to work with a whip. “I was struck by the realisation that man could not influence the animals if they were aware of their power, and so he exploits them in the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”
The story is animal simple, and even people who are not much into politics can understand it. Every animal has its hidden namesake in a human person. On a manor animal farm, after an inspiring speech by the old boar Major (Lenin), the animals drive out the farmer Jonas (Tsar Nicholas II), who is only exploiting them. They name the farm Animal Farm, choose an anthem, a flag and the Seven Commandments, the basic idea of which is brotherhood among all animals.
Pigs run the farm as the most intelligent animals. The pigs Napoleon (Stalin) and Fatty (Trotsky) are in charge of the revolution on the farm. Napoleon, with the help of nine dogs, manages to push Debelinko out of the game and accuses him of sabotaging the construction of a mill which is never finished. Napoleon becomes a tyrant and starts to change the Seven Commandments. Now the pigs have the most rights, but the other animals have to work hard.
The owner of the neighbouring farm, Mr. Frederick (Hitler) makes a temporary alliance with Napoleon, but is tricked into invading Animal Farm. This slowly blurs the line between humans and pigs, who have since started wearing tailcoats and walking on two legs like humans.
It is interesting to see what the Seven Commandments, which are a kind of animal constitution, are all about. Anything that walks on two legs is an enemy, and anything that walks on four legs or has wings is a friend. No animal should wear clothes, sleep in a bed, drink alcohol or kill other animals. All animals are equal. It was this last fundamental commandment that the pigs changed, and it was that while all animals are equal, some animals are more equal.
But was Orwell thinking only of Stalinist Russia in Animal Farm, or was he perhaps describing the state of human society everywhere and at all times? The socialists immediately started shouting and screaming and protesting against his description of the working class as lesser animals. They were angry that Orwell was doing a disservice to the “stinking Tories” as intelligent pigs.
In Orwell’s animal kingdom, there is no equality and no possibility for the lower working class to rise to the upper classes. Horses will always work without brains, chickens will always run in circles and chirp, and sheep will always read posters and not understand them. Only pigs have the intellect and the ability to effect change. But what kind of change and to what end?
In the summer of 1944, Orwell first gave the manuscript to his left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, who was still such a Stalinist that he returned it to him. Other publishers were also indecisive, as the war was not yet over and “Daddy Joe” – Stalin – was still popular among the people. Five American publishers also refused to publish the book.
The Animal Farm had to wait for the end of the Hot War and the beginning of the Cold War. It appeared in bookshops in August 1945, when everyone was celebrating the end of World War II. It was well received that year. The money began to flow in and Orwell, who had been poor and frugal all his life, could not believe that he had finally made it. He immediately enrolled his adopted child Richard at Eton. If he was already on a sinking ship, he thought it right that he should sink in first class.
But Animal Farm was not just a fairy tale. It was a great Cold War asset and a major weapon of the Conservative Tory Party. It was something Orwell had not planned. J. Edgar Hoover, the chief propagandist of the Cold War, loved it. In the following years, the book was successfully distributed through secret channels throughout Eastern Europe.
1984
“There is a lot of rain,” Orwell wrote in his diary. In the last years of his life, he often signed himself “Orwell Farmer”. A friend of his had some land on the Hebridean island of Jura and suggested he move there for a while. “You’ll be able to fish there,” he advised him. So a half-abandoned and dilapidated house – it was called Barnhill – at the end of the island became his new home. He rented it because, for the first time in his life, he had enough money to do so.
It was a risky decision, as he was seriously ill and the winter of 1946-1947 was one of the coldest of the century. Orwell was convinced that atomic war was imminent, so the remote island of Jura was the perfect refuge from the fallout, even for his adopted child Richard. But this was no sanatorium for a person with a collapsing tuberculous lung. There was no electricity, no running water, and the first shop, telephone and doctor were almost 30 kilometres away.
Although the Hebrides were warmer than London because of the Gulf Stream, summers were wet and cold. He had a nearby farmer to help with the heavier work around the house, and a maid to look after little Richard. The tragedy of Orwell’s life was that when he came to fame and success, he was a dying man. He was too ill to leave the house and had enough money to spend.
Any other writer would have stayed in London and enjoyed the fame, but Orwell was fed up with it all. He wanted to plant a vegetable garden on Jura, keep chickens, walk, fish and do nothing but think for a while. Strangely enough, he also wanted to get married before he died.
He finally accepted that he was a severe TB patient, but refused to give up smoking. His lungs needed dry, warm air and his body needed rest. He still spoke to his young son only at a distance for fear of infecting him. His friends broke the rules and pressured the Minister of Health, and in 1948 managed to secretly procure the American ‘miracle drug’ streptomycin. He took it stoically, even though he was not sure it would do anything for him.
The widowed Orwell felt lonely and was ready to marry any suitable woman. But who would want to live in a humble cottage with a dirt and muddy road that ran for more than ten kilometres? Orwell did not even have a car, just an unreliable motorbike that he rode around the muddy roads.
His health deteriorated and he had to go to a Scottish sanatorium. But streptomycin seemed to help and he was soon able to return to Barnhill. He found it difficult to walk and spent most of his time in bed, writing on a typewriter, smoking and coughing and spitting blood into a handkerchief. The house was full of cigarette smoke and the writer’s moans. He had no secretary to type out what he had written, because none of them wanted to go to a remote island far from civilisation.
While he was in the sanatorium, he wrote, wrote and wrote, and when he was finally in his house in December 1948, he had already written the manuscript for 1984, the book that brought him worldwide fame. But what did he write, and about what? Long before he sat down to write, he had been thinking about what he was going to write. The book We (1924), by the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, in which the people of a country live under strict laws and are constantly controlled, never left his mind. He was equally influenced by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).
But his condition deteriorated rapidly again on the damp island, and in January 1949 he was transferred to a sanatorium in Cranham, where he was very weak.
His last weeks were a race to the grave. Friends who visited him were shocked to see him and to see his treatment fail. Streptomycin helped only occasionally. By mid-1949, he had recovered sufficiently to begin courting Sonia Brownell and, shortly before he was taken to hospital in London, he became engaged to her. He met her while he was still working for a literary magazine in London. Sonja then took care of his business and visited him diligently in hospital, while his friends shook their heads.
His book 1984 was published in June 1949. 25,000 copies were printed in London and soon afterwards it was published in America. On 13 October, Orwell married Sonia in hospital. During the ceremony, he was lying in bed. He had, of course, to cancel his planned wedding trip to the Swiss mountains.
Then it started to fade quickly. He made his will three days before his death, leaving all his property to Sonia, leaving only a not very generous insurance policy to his son. On the morning of 21 January 1950, an artery burst in his lung and he died. He was only 46 years old.
He wanted to be buried according to the ritual of the Anglican Church and did not want to be cremated. His tombstone simply says: “Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born 25 June 1903, died 21 January 1950.” Nowhere is his pen name, George Orwell, mentioned.
His widow Sonja survived him by many years. Some said she married him for money. But whatever the case, she died absolutely poor in 1980 and her funeral had to be paid for by her friends.
“It was a clear, cold April day and the time was 13:00.” This sentence begins the action in Orwell’s novella 1984. Even today, seventy years after the book’s publication, these words do not announce anything that could not be read in many other books by different authors. It was just an ordinary day when nothing special was supposed to happen. But the sobering effect comes after just a few sentences with the words:
“On every floor, opposite the lift shaft, a poster with a giant face stared down from the wall. It was one of those images that are made so that your eyes follow you as you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, read the caption underneath.”
We now know that something unusual is about to happen. In a few pages, we can read the three party slogans in big letters: “WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS POWER.” And to this day, the English Teachers’ Union recommends 1984 to schoolchildren as a kind of compulsory reading, just as the New Testament was compulsory reading a hundred years ago.
The story told in the novella 1984 is still fresh and contemporary today, and the expression BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU has become part of everyday conversation. Just as “Orwellianism” is a universal shorthand for all that is repressive and totalitarian, the story of Winston Smith, the sleuth of his time, resonates in the ears of readers whose fear for the future is even greater now than it was in the 1940s.
The idea for the novella 1984, which initially had the working title The Last Man in Europe, had been brewing in Orwell for many years, in fact since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, and came to maturity at the time of the Teheran Allied Conference in 1944. It convinced Orwell that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt had consciously decided to divide the world. It is not known what Churchill thought of the book, but it is known that he read it twice. After all, the main character of the novella was also called Winston.
“My book is a utopia in the form of a novel,” wrote Orwell. He was convinced that this utopia was an expression of the distortions that can be introduced by centralist governance, such as that which has already emerged in the form of fascism and communism. The aim of such totalitarianism is the total domination of society and the complete mental unity of its citizens. The story is both simple and frightening, and is set in 1984 in Oceania, one of the most repressive countries in the world, ruled by a one-party system that demands total obedience from its citizens to its leader, Big Brother.
Winston Smith is a junior Party official living in London, a city still recovering from the atomic war. His task is to rewrite history to suit the Party’s instructions. He meets the free-spirited Julia and the two of them get in touch with dissidents, unaware that there are traitors among them and that the police are already watching them. He is tortured and brainwashed, and in the end betrays his love, Julia, during the torture. He is then released, reunites with Julia, but has no more feelings for her, because now he loves only Big Brother and the client.
