by Peter Davison
The Guardian, 27 June 1998
On March 29, 1945, Eileen Blair wrote to her husband, George Orwell, as she waited for an operation. 'Dearest, I'm just going to have an operation, already enema'd, injected (with morphine in the right arm which is a nuisance), cleaned & packed up like a precious image in cottonwool & bandages. When it's over I'll add a note to this & it can go off quickly. Judging by my fellow patients it will be a short note. They've all had their operations. Annoying - I shall never have a chance to feel superior.' The style is typical of Eileen's irrepressible lightness of touch. Only in Spain did this desert her. There, Orwell's friend and literary executive, Sir Richard Rees, reported seeing her seemingly absent-minded, preoccupied, and dazed; she was, he realised, suffering 'under a political terror'.
That 'short note' after her operation never came. Eileen suffered a heart attack and died under the anaesthetic. She was 39.
Orwell was reporting from France and Germany for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News at the time. He had been rushed to hospital in Cologne with a chest infection when Eileen went in for her operation in Newcastle, but he heard the news of her death on his return to his base at the Hotel Scribe in Paris. He dashed home to make arrangements to look after their son, Richard, and to bury Eileen in Jesmond Cemetery.
Orwell's immediate response in letters to his friends seems almost curt. 'Eileen is dead,' he told Anthony Powell. The same short sentence broke the news to Lydia Jackson (who translated Chekhov plays for Penguin Books). Soon after he returned to the continent to work in the hope that a few weeks of bumping about in Jeeps would help him feel better.
It would be wrong to conclude that Orwell was not deeply upset by Eileen's death. His response was in line with his upbringing: his stiff upper lip the product of Eton, and the Indian Civil Service. Her loss evidently came home to him more fully a few months later. Although his letter has not survived, a response from E M Forster does. Forster told him that things did get worse afterwards ' for a bit'. Almost a year later, Orwell said he put off going to his cottage in Hertfordshire 'because last time I was there it was with Eileen and it upsets me to go there.' After Eileen's death Orwell proposed to several women, all young, all attractive. Susan Watson, who acted as Orwell's housekeeper and looked after Richard, has related how 'he just started proposing to girls without any real confidence of being accepted. He proposed to them because he felt desperately lonely and disoriented. . . I think he would have loved a wife.' One such was Celia Kirwan, now Celia Goodman, who has been much in the news because she worked at an anti-communist propaganda unit attached to the Foreign Office and it was to her that Orwell handed his list of 35 'crypto-communists' and fellow travellers.
Another was Anne Popham, who had a flat in the same Canonbury block as Orwell. On April 18, 1946, after she had gently declined his offer of marriage, he wrote her a letter, describing himself as a 'bad life' (risk) because he suffered from respiratory problems. 'I am also sterile I think - at any rate I have never had a child, though I have never undergone the examination because it is so disgusting. . . if you wanted children by someone else it wouldn't bother me, because I have very little physical jealousy. I don't much care who sleeps with whom, it seems to me what matters is being faithful in an emotional and intellectual sense.
I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and I also treated her very badly, and I think she treated me badly, too, but it was a real marriage in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and she understood all about my work.' Guesses can be made about whom Orwell was unfaithful with - perhaps a secretary at the BBC - but there is no hard evidence. Certainly he attempted to have an affair with Lydia Jackson; his pleas to her on his return from Marrakesh in 1938 are printed in his Complete Works, to be published next month. Eileen might have had an affair with Orwell's commander in Spain, George Kopp, though it may well be his interest in her was stronger than hers in him.
Orwell has been criticised for 'toxic scorn' towards women and working-class socialists. Beatrix Campbell maintains that his choice of miners for study 'is significant. As the misogynist he is, it is not surprising that he has chosen the most masculinised profession'. But miners in the thirties and forties were invested with mythic status because of their industrial battles.
Campbell is right insofar as working women are scarcely represented in The Road To Wigan Pier; however, its most memorable image is that of an exhausted woman trying to clear a blocked drain. Who can forget it? We know from Orwell's Wigan Diary that he worked on the image with skill to bring home to readers, especially those in the south, the horror of what he was depicting.
Women appeared rarely in studies of working class life at that time. Orwell was ahead of his time when it came to looking after his little boy and such mundane tasks as washing up. There is an eye-opening moment in the Wigan Diary: 'We had an argument one evening in the Searles' house because I helped Mrs S. with the washing up. Both of the men disapproved of this, of course, Mrs S seemed doubtful. She said that in the north, working class men never offered any courtesies to women (women were allowed to do all the housework unaided, even when the man is unemployed) and she took this state of things for granted, but did not see why it should be changed. . . I think it is instinctively felt by both sexes that the man would lose his manhood if, merely because he was out of work, he became a 'Mary Ann.' ' This hardly makes a New Man of Orwell, but, just as he was ahead of his time in his devotion to working on his piece of land, so he was in such domestic matters. Susan Watson said: 'Richard was a lovely baby, George was very tender with him.' She also said: 'George was a father figure. He treated me as a guardian would a ward. I think in a Dickensian way George was fond of me.' Orwell had many women correspondents. He wrote before and after the war to Yvonne Davet, who translated Homage To Catalonia, though they never met. Other women wrote to him out of the blue and they received long letters of patient explanation.
In September 1949, only three months before he died, when he was lying ill with TB in University College, he became engaged to Sonia Brownell. They had both been born in India. Orwell had known her since the forties but they grew intimate only after Eileen died. They were married in the hospital on October 13, David Astor, editor of the Observer and close friend, having obtained a special licence.
The marriage with Sonia has invited unkind speculation, but a letter that only came to light recently puts it in new perspective. Arthur Koestler, another close friend, wrote to Orwell on September 24 expressing his joy at the marriage. Sonia was the most intelligent girl he had met in England, Koestler wrote, and if a fairy had granted him three wishes the first would have been that she and Orwell should marry.
A clue to Orwell's view of women is provided by his relationship with his mother, a lively and independently-minded woman who was quick to be rid of the company of her children. There is a strange passage in Orwell's Last Literary Notebook (c. 1949) written in a curiously detached tone. It does not say these were his memories, but surely they are: 'The conversations he overheard as a small boy, between his mother, his aunt, his elder sister and their feminist friends. . . he derived a firm impression that women did not like men. . .
Somehow, by the mere tone of these conversations, the hatefulness - above all the physical unattractiveness - of men in women's eyes seemed to be established.' It is plain that Eileen offered Orwell all that he had missed or misunderstood in his childhood, as well as understanding him and his work. When he was recovering from his throat wound, shot by a sniper, he wrote: 'You really are a wonderful wife. ' It is well known that Eileen was a formative influence on Animal Farm, as Orwell readily recognised. From November 1943 to February 1944, he read to her in bed each night what he had written that day. Eileen's last letters make her concerns for his work very plain: 'I think it's quite essential that you should write some books again. I thought Tribune better than the BBC and I still do. Indeed I should think a municipal dustman's work more dignified and better for your future as a writer. But you ought to stop the editing. . .
'I would infinitely rather live in the country on 200 pounds (a year) than in London on any money at all. I don't think you understand what a nightmare the London life is to me. . . Every meal makes me feel sick because food has been handled by 20 dirty hands and I can't bear to eat anything that hasn't been boiled to clean it. I can't breathe the air and I can't read poetry.' Eileen was not to live in London. There was to be no more poetry for her.
