Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘What are you working on?’ she asks. It’s a new, adult question for her.

This is a tremendous biography, and I’m very grateful to S for flagging it up to me. Eileen O’Shaughnessy married Eric Blair, known to history as George Orwell, in 1936; she was 31 and he was about to turn 33. She devoted herself to supporting his writing, though they were both very ill; he had tuberculosis, which would kill him in 1950; she suffered persistent uterine bleeding, and died during an operation for a hysterectomy in 1945, aged 39.

Funder goes through the few surviving records of Eileen herself, which include six letters to her best friend, three to Orwell (including the unfinished one that she left on her bedside table before she died) and a few others. Out of this she spins a dense narrative, most of it sticking clearly to the facts, some fictionalised thought processes of what was going through Eileen’s head, and the occasional flashforward to the present day and the writer’s own family life. As far as I can tell, the fiction is clearly demarcated, which I appreciate – I’ve tried a couple of historical works recently where the line between fact and fiction is irritatingly fudged.

Funder comes to Eileen’s story as a fan of Orwell’s writing, but she shows how you can usefully explore the flaws in the work you love and in creators too. The most significant part of the book is her reconstruction of what was going on in Barcelona. Eileen peeps out of the corners of the writing of Homage to Catalonia; in fact she was the central organiser of the office of John McNair, the Independent Labour Party leader, and at great risk to herself managed Orwell’s escape after he was wounded and the POUM, who he was fighting for, were proscribed.

One vivid example of how she was erased from the story (which she herself typed up for publication) is the vignette of Orwell’s encounter with some stray soldiers: “I remember a couple of men from the International Column sitting in my room at the hotel when I came in tired, hungry, and dirty after a night on guard.” He does not mention the other person in the hotel room, or why she had had to let the soldiers in.

Eileen’s direct influence on Orwell’s work is debatable, because she herself controlled all the surviving records, so we can only surmise. It’s clear that he was utterly dependent on her support. For much of their marriage she was the one with the steady income, and for all of their relationship she organised their household affairs, while he got on with writing that was rarely and barely paid. He was serially unfaithful to her, starting on their honeymoon, and emotionally very neglectful.

When Eileen died in March 1945, Orwell was in Europe on assignment as a war correspondent, and it seems very cruel to me that he was not there for her operation – even if it was not expected to be fatal (though as Funder points out, the warning signs were there), it was none the less a serious procedure. He professed to be devastated, but proposed marriage to several other women before ending up with their friend Sonia Brownell three months before his death.

A fascinating, sad and thought-provoking book, and my renewed thanks to S for flagging it up to me. You can get Wifedom here.

Second paragraph of third essay (“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”):

Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dali’s life, from his earliest years onward. Which of them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do.

I picked this up while at Novacon (in the wonderful Scrivener’s bookshop) and then left it behind in a taxi when I had almost finished it. Luckily the internet is to the rescue, and it wasn’t difficult to fill in the gaps online. I give links below to the online Orwell archive, though I am not sure of the extent to which it has been authorised by the Orwell estate.

It is stunning to be reminded just how good a writer Orwell was. He applies his ethical and moral standards to all sides, and eloquently deconstructs the hypocrisy of the Left as well as the evil of the Right. There are ten essays here and each of them deserves a short note of its own.

“Decline of the English Murder“, the title piece, from 1946, is about the media coverage of real-life murder cases, the public reaction to them, and the extent to which the war had brutalised public discourse.

I had read “A Hanging” previously.

A detailed account of an execution in a jail in Burma, effectively and efficiently conveying the horror and pointlessness of the situation.

A very vivid, short piece.

“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” is an excoriating review of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, pointing out Dalí’s many moral failings as described by the artist himself. The takeaway line is,

One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.

“How the Poor Die” is about Orwell’s experiences in a city hospital in Paris, and the uncaring and unsympathetic approach of the staff. He doesn’t blame France as such, but the nineteenth-century traditions of healthcare.

“Rudyard Kipling” examines Kipling’s creative genius and defends him against T.S. Eliot’s charge of Fascism, while deeply regretting his imperialist apologetics.

For my own part I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him. The one thing that was never possible, if one had read him at all, was to forget him.

“Raffles and Miss Blandish” contrasts the gentleman thief Raffles in the stories published between 1898 and 1909 by E.W. Horning, with James Hadley Chase’s novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish. I must say I was astonished to learn that James Hadley Chase’s literary career had begun so early – his last book was published in 1984. I have not read any of his books, and after reading Orwell’s blistering review of his first one, I don’t feel I need to.

“Charles Dickens“, at 62 pages, is the longest piece in the book, taking up almost a third of its length. Orwell clearly loved Dickens’ writing but was also alert to its flaws: “his greatest success is The Pickwick Papers, which is not a story at all, merely a series of sketches; there is little attempt at development — the characters simply go on and on, behaving like idiots, in a kind of eternity.” He criticises Dickens for his portrayal of working-class and poor characters, and for his conservative attitude to social change, but still finds much to praise.

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

“The Art of Donald McGill” looks at the genre of bawdy seaside postcards and finds a lot to like about them. Orwell was a moralist, but he had a sense of humour.

In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill’s could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers’ windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.

I got the most value out of “Notes on Nationalism“.

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

He applies the same critical apparatus to English and Celtic nationalism as to German and Japanese, and lumps in both Stalinism and Trotskyism as well. I found it a very thought-provoking commentary on bigotry and prejudice, and the mind-set that leads to them.

Finally, “Why I Write” was again a piece that I had read before. It was good to read it after nine other essays, pulling the whole thing together,

An interesting bit of self-reflection, available here, in which Orwell starts by describing his own artistic growth, and then the impact of politics on his thoughts and words. But he finished with a description which I recognise from some writers who I have known:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

This collection was put together by Penguin in 1965, though the title has also been used for other Penguin collections with different content. You can get this one here.