GEORGE ORWELL Literary Lives General Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English Lancaster University This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the most admired and influential English-language authors. Volumes follow the outline of writers' working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing. A list of the published titles in this series follows overleaf. Published titles include Cedric C. Brown Michael O'Neill JOHN MILTON PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Peter Davison Leonee Ormond GEORGE ORWELL ALFRED TENNYSON Richard Dutton George Parfitt WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE JOHN DONNE Jan Fergus Gerald Roberts JANE AUSTEN GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS James Gibson Felicity Rosslyn THOMAS HARDY ALEXANDER POPE Kenneth Graham Tony Sharpe HENRY JAMES T. S. ELIOT Paul Hammond Grahame Smith JOHN DRYDEN CHARLES DICKENS W. David Kay Gary Waller BEN JONSON EDMUND SPENSER Mary Lago Cedric Watts E. M. FORSTER JOSEPH CONRAD Alasdair D. F. Macrae John Williams W. B. YEATS WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Joseph McMinn Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham JONATHAN SWIFT CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE Kerry McSweeney John Worthen GEORGE ELIOT (MARIAN EVANS) D. H. LAWRENCE John Mepham VIRGINIA WOOLF George Orwell A Literary Life Peter Davison © Peter Davison 1996 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996 978-0-333-54157-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with * the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, london WI P OlP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by PAlGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PAlGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press llC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). Outside North America ISBN 978-0-333-54158-6 ISBN 978-0-230-37140-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230371408 In North America ISBN 978-0-312-12820-3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 Dedicated to my wife, Sheila, with love and gratitude, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of our first meeting, 30 May 1945 This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction ix Chronology xv 1 Getting Started The Family 1 The Buddicoms 8 St Cyprian's and Eton 12 2 Foreign Fields Burma Days 15 Days in London and Paris 24 Down and Out: Financial Returns 30 3 The Profession of Author Blair and Orwell 38 Burmese Days 45 The Rejected 'Pot-boilers' 54 4 The Turning-Point: Wigan and Spain The Road to Wigan Pier 67 Homage to Catalonia 79 5 Orwell as Reviewer and Essayist 88 6 Events Leading Up to the War and the BBC Years 111 7 The Last Five Years War Correspondent 121 Animal Farm 123 Nineteen Eighty-Four 129 8 Conclusion 140 Bibliography 164 Index 168 vii This page intentionally left blank Introduction Jacintha Buddicom first saw Eric Blair when he was 11: he was standing on his head, the better to be noticed, he said.1 If studies and biographical accounts are anything to go by, for a man who wished no biography to be written about him, he has been well and variously remembered. In addition to two excellent biographies, Bernard Crick's George Orwell: A Life (1980, 1982, and 1992) and Michael Shelden's Orwell: The Authorised Biography (1991), and ear­ lier, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, The Unknown Orwell and Orwell: The Transformation (1972 and 1979), on my shelves alone are studies by Keith Aldritt, John Atkins, Laurence Brander, Jacintha Buddicom, Tosco Fyvel, Bernard Gensane, J. R. Hammond, Rayner Heppenstall, Christopher Hollis, Tom Hopkinson, Lynette Hunter, Robert A. Lee, Peter Lewis, Jeffrey Meyers, Daphne Patai, Alok Rai, Sir Richard Rees, Patrick Reilly, John Rodden, David Smith and Michael Mosher, Alan Sandison, Ian Slater, William Steinhoff, Edward M. Thomas, John Thompson, W. J. West, Raymond Williams, Ian Willison (his UCL Librarianship Diploma Thesis (1953) is in­ valuable), George Woodcock, David Wykes, and Alex Zwerdling, plus essay-collections and memoirs edited by Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick, Miriam Gross, Irving Howe, Christopher Norris, Peter Stansky, Stephen Wadhams, Courtney T. Wemyss and Alexej Ugrinsky. There are books I do not have and there are countless essays (notably those by Maung Htin Aung, Elisaveta Fen, Robert Pearce, and Nicolas Walter). One might conclude that standing on one's head does get one noticed. More to the point, it is obvious that Orwell has been and continues to be an abiding source of interest, to friends, enemies and objective scholars. At the same time doubt must arise as to whether there is very much more to be said. This study is chiefly concerned with what influenced Orwell - people, reading, circumstance - and his relationship with publish­ ers and editors. It is drawn from experience of editing The Complete Works of George Orwell. The first nine volumes of this edition give corrected texts of nine of Orwell's books. In their hardback editions, published by Secker & Warburg, 1986-87, textual notes and colla­ tions record what happened in print to what Orwell wrote; how, for example, A Clergyman's Daughter was savagely cut and Keep the ix x Introduction Aspidistra Flying modified because (with some justification) the publisher, Victor Gollancz, feared legal action of a kind that would, today, be impossible. Orwell later rejected these two novels as pot­ boilers. But also, in part I believe, because of the way in which, to use his word, they had been' garbled' by his publisher. The first volume of this edition, Down and Out in Paris and London, has a long introduction explaining the genesis of the editions, touching on 'what Orwell really wrote'. Volume Five, The Road to Wigan Pier, repro­ duces the 32 pages of plates which appeared in the first editions in England and the USA but never thereafter until 1986, and Victor Gollancz's anxious Foreword addressed to members of the Left Book Club in 1937. The eighth volume, Animal Farm, has Orwell's pro­ posed Preface to his Fairy Story, his Preface to the Ukrainian edi­ tion, and Orwell's own adaptation of Animal Farm for radio. The Penguin editions of these texts, 1989-90, have shorter notes on the textual problems (and some have introductions by distinguished writers); the Penguin Road to Wigan Pier reproduces the plates for the first time in a paperback edition, and its Animal Farm includes Orwell's two Prefaces. (Penguin's one-volume Complete Novels of George Orwell, published in 1993, evidently due to an unfortunate overSight, reprinted the garbled instead of the corrected texts; the editor, on Orwell's behalf, had better try standing on his head.) In addition, in 1984, a Facsimile edition of all that remains of Orwell's draft for Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. Editing of everything else of Orwell's that has been traced - essays, letters, broadcasts, diaries, reviews of books, plays and films - was completed in February 1993 for publication in eleven 600- page volumes. In January 1994, when a little over 40 per cent of the text had been set and proofread, the publishers, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 'withdrew from the contract' (without telling the editor). In September 1994, Secker & Warburg agreed to take over publica­ tion and it is hoped that the eleven volumes will appear in Septem­ ber 1996. These volumes are very fully annotated. The close examination of every word Orwell wrote, every event and person he referred to, has thrown up new insights into George Orwell, especially through his relationships with his publishers and those with whom he worked. For example, from the minutiae recorded in these volumes it is possible to work out what Orwell earned in the crucial years between his leaving the Indian Police and the publi­ cation of Animal Farm; to doubt the myth that he was paid an advance of £500 for writing Down and Out in Paris and London at a time when Introduction xi a miner was lucky to earn between £2 and £3 a week;2 from the seemingly unprofitable BBC years, how he set up what we would now call an 'Open University' for students in India, and encour­ aged creative writing and practical drama in the sub-continent; the true significance of censorship of his work as a writer and as a broadcaster; the importance of the pamphlets he collected in shap­ ing his political ideas; and, from what could be a much longer list, how his and Arthur Koestler's efforts to reveal the slaughter of Polish prisoners by the Soviets failed to find a publisher. Perhaps no item in the Complete Works is more significant than the analysis of the deposition laid before the Tribunal at Valencia in 1937 charg­ ing Orwell and his wife with Espionage and High Treason, a docu­ ment which, though he never knew it existed, explains vividly how he came to write Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.