Orwell and flawed characters.

 

Eric & Eileen Blair

We need George Orwell more today than ever. Orwell should be compulsory reading for all British school children. What would Orwell have made of Britain's surveillance state of CCTV, facial recognition technology, and mobile phones that track and profile you? For surveillance, Starmer's Britain is beginning to resemble something out of the Minority Report. 

What would George Orwell have made of a UK Labour Prime Minister, who wants us all to collude in a fiction, that 99.9% of women don't have a penis? What would Orwell have made of the 10,000 people arrested each year by the thought police in Britain, for comments they have made on social media? 

In his essay, 'Politics and the English Language' (1946), Orwell noted that political language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." 

I read his novel 'Down and Out in Paris and London' (1933) many years ago and it's a cracking little book. Had it not been for a woman called Mabel Fierz, who had literary connections, it's probable that book would have never have seen the light of day. The novel was rejected a number of times by publisher's and on one occasion, Orwell flung the manuscript at Mabel Fierz saying to her, "Burn it and keep the clips." It was eventually published by Leonard Moore who became his agent for life. 

Neither Orwell or his biographers ever paid much attention to the women in his life and this a theme that is taken up by the feminist writer Anna Funder, in her book 'Wifedom' about Orwell's wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Orwell was brought up by women and helped by women, but he rarely ever acknowledged this in print. He was eight years old before he ever really knew his father, Richard Blair. 

When Orwell spent 18-months in Paris, he often visited his mother's elder sister, Aunt Nellie, who helped him financially and connected him with agents and publishers. Aunt Nelly knew important writers like Chesterton, Barbusse, Nesbitt and H.G. Wells, but she isn't mentioned in his book Down and Out in Paris and London. Likewise, there's no mention of his wife Eileen in his book 'Homage to Catalonia' even though she was with him in Spain.

Anna Funder says in her book, "How is a women made to disappear"? She says that these links are not made by Orwell because it's impossible to attribute to women the environment of ideas and politics that made him. She says that the biographers are helped by Orwell erasing or obscuring the women in his life. Yet, his publisher, Frederic Warburg said of Orwell that "He was as secretive about his private life as any man I ever knew." Having read 'Wifedom', I thought that Anna Funder had set out to do a hatchet job on George Orwell. When she was doing research for her book, she travelled to Barcelona with Orwell's adopted son, Richard Blair, and his friend Quentin Kopp, the son of Orwell's commander in Spain, Georges Kopp. Quentin Kopp has said that Funder told her young daughter that she thought that Orwell was an "arsehole."

It seems to have become fashionable these days for feminist writers to destroy the reputations of male writers. They have done it with Charles Dickens and Arthur Koestler. 

Funder appears to be obsessed with Orwell's sex life and can't quite make her mind up whether he's a repressed homosexual or a priapic serial seducer of women. He might be both, but the American Charles Orr, who knew Eileen in Spain, said she "Just could not stop talking about Eric, her hero husband, whom she obviously loved and admired." Eileen did refer to her husband's "remarkable political simplicity." Orr thought that Orwell needed a socially extrovert wife as a window to the world. "Eileen helped this inarticulate man to communicate with others.” Charles Orr came to respect Orwell and described Eileen as beautiful, outgoing and gregarious. 

Eileen's friend Lydia Vitalevna Jiburtovich, considered Eileen to be "sophisticated, fastidious, highly intelligent and intellectual.” She thought that Eileen was a very good listener. "She doesn't suffer fools and doesn't spare anyone. Can give you a tongue lashing." Funder says that Orwell tried to force himself on Lydia at Wallington Cottage while Eileen was in London. 

Eileen Blair used to say "I don't care if I live or die." She died on 29 March 1945, in the operating theatre while undergoing an operation, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She was just 39 years of age. Later, George Orwell succumbed to TB.

George Orwell dealt with question of how good artistic work can come from flawed people. He thought Salvador Dali a "dirty little scoundrel" but also a great artist. He thought Dickens's mistreatment of his wife shouldn't affect how we read his work. We could say the same thing about Orwell, Caravaggio, Cellini, or Oscar Wilde. All four were flawed characters, like the rest of us.