During
our last Donostia Book Club meeting we talked about George Orwell's
“1984” and Orwell's biography. One of the first interesting
things is, that not many know George Orwell's real name. Yes, you got
it right George Orwell is a pen name!
He
was born as Eric
Arthur Blair on June, 25th,
1903 in Motihari, Bengal, in then British colony of India, where his
father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was working as an Opium Agent in the
Indian Civil Service. His paternal grandfather had served in the
Indian army and his maternal grandfather had been a teak merchant in
Burma. His mother, Ida
Mabel Blair (née Limouzin),
brought him to England at the age of one and Orwell was brought up
almost exclusively by her. He did not see his father again until
1907, when Richard visited England for three months before leaving
again until 1912. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie and a
younger sister named Avril. He would later jokingly describe his
family's background as "lower-upper-middle class." The
Thames Valley locales in which the family was settled provided the
background to his novel Coming
Up For Air (1939).
At
the beginning, Eric was a studious child. At the age of five, he was
sent to a small Anglican parish school in Henley, which his sister
had attended before him. He never wrote anything about that time, but
he must have caused a good impression as two years later he was
recommended to the headmaster of one of the most successful
preparatory schools in England at the time: St Cyprian's School, in
Eastbourne, Sussex. He attended St Cyprian's on a scholarship (his
parents struggled with money and to pay only half of the fees was a
huge relief for them). ‘No one can look back on his schooldays and
say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.’ he wrote later
in an essay ‘Such, Such Were The Joys’, but he mostly remembered
that school with resentment. Then, in May 1917, he moved to Eton
College where he won a King’s Scholarship. At Eton he started
having problems and was not a brilliant student that his previous
teachers had known. He left the school in December 1921 after only a
term in the sixth form. The following June he passed the entrance
examination of the Indian Imperial Police and was accepted into its
Burma division.
 |
| As a child, Orwell was shy and lacked self-confidence. He suffered from bronchitis all his life. He spent long hours reading and was especially interested in science fiction, ghost stories, William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) plays, and fiction by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Charles Dickens (1812–1870), and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). |
 |
| In 1922, Orwell joined the India Imperial Police Force and was posted to Burma. He served there for five years and thereafter resigned and returned to England in order to pursue his passion of writing. |
There
is not much we know about his stay in Burma. He based two of his
best-known essays on his experiences there, ‘A Hanging’ and
‘Shooting an Elephant’ and his first novel Burmese Days
(1934). It is widely believed his stay in Burma ruined his
health. He left it in June 1927 on a medical certificate. The
decision to resign from the Burma Police was taken after his return,
already in 1928.
For
the next five years his life was rather hectic, he tried a bit of
everything: living with his parents, teaching in provate schools,
living as a bum in Paris... That last experience he used as the
background to his first published work, Down and Out in Paris
and London (1933). He adopted his pen name in 1933, shortly
before its publication. To create the professional alias he combined
the name of the reigning monarch but also of the patron saint of
England with a local river (the River Orwell in Suffolk was one of
his favourite English sites).
Finally
Orwell decided to take a job as an assistant in a secondhand London
Hampstead bookshop. This was a productive period. Here he met and
married his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and wrote a third
novel, partly based on his book-trade experiences, Keep the
Aspidistra Flying (1936). The Orwells began their married
life in a tiny cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, where Orwell
worked up the material gathered on a recent tour of the industrial
north into The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Although
the book’s second half consists of a long, inflammatory polemic on
Socialism, Orwell’s political views were still not fully formed.
 |
| In the spring of 1936 Orwell moved to Wallington, Hertfordshire, and several months later married Eileen O'Shaughnessy, a teacher and journalist. |
The
defining political experience of his life, alternatively, was the six
months he spent in Spain, in 1937, as a Republican volunteer against
Franco. As a sympathiser of the Independent Labour Party (of which he
became a member in 1938), he joined the militia of its sister party
in Spain, the non-Stalinist far-left POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist
Unification), in which he fought as an infantryman. Orwell was shot
in the neck (near Huesca) on May 20, 1937, an experience he described
in his short essay "Wounded by a Fascist Sniper", as well
as in Homage to Catalonia. The bullet passed within a few millimetres
of his carotid artery. He and his wife Eileen left Spain after
narrowly missing being arrested as "Trotskyites" when the
communists moved to suppress the POUM in June 1937. Spain made Orwell
‘believe in Socialism for the first time’, as he put it, while
instilling an enduring hatred of totalitarian political systems.
Spain, he wrote, had 'turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I
stood. Every line I have written since 1936 has been written directly
or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.'
(an essay 'Why I Write').
 |
| In July 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out. Orwell arrived in Barcelona, Spain, at the end of autumn and joined the militia. Orwell was wounded in the middle of May 1937. During his recovery, the militia was declared illegal, and he fled into France in June. His experiences in Spain had made him into a revolutionary socialist, one who advocated change to a socialist form of society through rebellion of the people. (ORwell is the one with a puppy) |
Homage
to Catalonia, an account of his time in Spain, was published
in April 1938. He spent most of the next year recuperating, both in
England and Morocco, from a life-threatening lung haemorrhage. At
this stage Orwell was determined to oppose the looming international
conflict, only changing his mind on the announcement of the
Russo-German pact in August 1939. Initially Orwell had high hopes of
the war, which he believed would instil a sense of Socialist purpose:
this view was developed in the pamphlet essay The Lion and the
Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941). Rejected
for military service on health grounds, he became a talks producer in
the BBC’s Eastern Service, a job he came to dislike. The BBC’s
atmosphere, he complained, ‘is something between a girls’ school
and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or
slightly worse than useless’. He was well aware that he was shaping
propaganda, and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been
trodden on by a very dirty boot." Despite the good pay, he
resigned in 1943 and he secured a position of a literary editor of
the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune, to which he
also contributed a column under the heading ‘As I Please’.
Animal
Farm, his bitter satire of the Soviet experiment, was
written by the middle of 1944. Publishers’ timidity, and the covert
pressure exerted by a Russian spy working for the Ministry of
Information, delayed its appearance until August 1945. The royalties
from Animal Farm provided Orwell with a comfortable income for the
first time in his adult life but by this time Orwell’s personal
life was in ruins. Five months previously Eileen had died of heart
failure during a routine operation. The couple had previously adopted
a small boy, Richard Horatio Blair, whom Orwell, with the help of his
sister Avril, was determined to raise on his own. Richard Blair
remembers that his father "could not have done it without Avril.
She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts
of my father's time on Jura recognise how essential she was."
 |
| Son, Richard Blair |
Through
his friend David Astor, he had already begun to explore the
possibility of living on the remote Scottish island of Jura. Much of
the last half-decade of his life was spent in the Inner Hebrides
struggling against worsening health to complete his final novel,
Nineteen
Eighty-Four.
After finishing a final draft at the end of 1948 he suffered a
complete physical collapse and was taken away to a nursing home in
the Cotswolds suffering from advanced tuberculosis. The novel’s
enormous international success, on publication in June 1949, came too
late for its author.
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."
 |
| Barnhill |
By
mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the
grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter"
by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea
and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill,
night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November 1948 it was virtually
done.
By
now Orwell had left Jura and checked into a TB sanitorium high in the
Cotswolds. "I ought to have done this two months ago," he
told Astor, "but I wanted to get that bloody book finished."
Once again Astor stepped in to monitor his friend's treatment but
Orwell's specialist was privately pessimistic.
Nineteen
Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US)
and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by
Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice.
Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at
University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, an editorial
assistant on he literary magazine Horizon. with David Astor as best
man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new
year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive
haemorrhage in hospital and died alone.
The
news was broadcast on the BBC the next morning. Avril Blair and her
nephew, still up on Jura, heard the report on the little battery
radio in Barnhill. Richard Blair does not recall whether the day was
bright or cold but remembers the shock of the news: his father was
dead, aged 46. He died from tuberculosis which he had probably
contracted during the period described in Down and Out in Paris and
London. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of
his life. Having requested burial in accordance with the Anglican
rite, he was interred in All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay,
Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: “Here lies Eric Arthur Blair,
born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950.”
Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/orwell_george.shtmlhttp://www.orwell.ru/a_life/newsinger/english/e_oc
http://www.orwell.ru/a_life/newsinger/english/e_gosr
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell
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