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In this episode of the History Extra podcast...
James Osborne speaks with Robert Coles about that last chapter of the author's life, as he sought refuge on a remote Scottish island with the growing prospect of his own death looming over him.
Today, I'm joined by Robert Coles, who is the author of George Orwell Life and Legacy, which is a work that really grapples with how we should try to understand Orwell in his own terms.
We're going to focus on a part of Orwell's life that really stood out to me Rob, in your book, and that is the final phase of his life, from the publication of Animal Farm through to his death.
Firstly, can you take us through Orwell's personal and professional life up to the point where Animal Farm is published?
Orwell was never the great man in his own life.
He was never an Orwellian in his own world.
He was a jobbing journalist for most of his life, and only at the end did he become a national figure.
And then just before his death, Shockingly, a world figure.
So the book tries to take us through the phases of his life.
Born in India, a family of the Raj high in imperial noon, born in 1903, came back to Henley-on-Thames as a little baby brought up by his mother.
Father, stayed in India, went to prep school not unusual for his class at that time in Eastbourne, where he did really well and won a scholarship to Eton College which, as the whole world knows, is the most important and greatest school there's ever been in the history of the universe.
It says he was much happier at Eden because it gave him space to be who he wanted to be.
And I think he was a bit of a maverick bit cool actually for his time well known for his quips and jokes.
After Eton College, where he didn't do as well as he did at prep school, he didn't go to university, which was very surprising for a man of his ability and his class.
Although I must say, his class was not the class of most kids at Eton.
He only got there because he won the scholarship.
He didn't go to university.
He joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.
And he did five years there.
He says he hated it.
And I think he did.
Came back in 1927 to announce to his shocked parents that he was going to pack up the police, surrender the pension, not be on a good salary, which he was on.
800 pounds a year was a lot then for a young man, five times more than the able seaman who took him there.
And then shocked them even more by declaring his intention to be a writer.
From that point on, James, He is really committed only to his writing.
And the writing gets better and better, although it's good very quickly.
And by the time he becomes nationally and a little bit world famous with Animal Farm, which is about 20 years later.
The writing is superb.
And it is as a writer, not a prophet or a national treasure or a BBC statue.
It's as a writer that we should come to him.
And that takes us through from his early years to then his period as a journalist and finally to yes, the cusp of his career success.
And that success comes with Animal Farm, doesn't it?
But before we get to Animal Farm, I guess if we could take a look at his personal life at that moment in time.
He's also very, very unwell, isn't he?
Well, in 1945, he's had a good war in every respect other than His personal life.
His personal life during the war is hellish.
His father dies in 39.
His mother dies in 43, I think.
His wife dies on the operating table in 45.
His sister dies in 46.
And as you say, his personal, his own health gets worse and worse.
Eventually, it is confirmed that it's TB.
And he could have caught it in any number of places.
I mean, when he's trying to be a writer, he goes down and out.
He's sleeping rough in Paris and London and Middlesex and Kent.
He could have caught it there.
He could have caught it when he was fighting in Spain for the Republican cause, night after night in a trench.
He could have caught it when he went down the mine in Wigan.
I mean, anyway.
Finally, it is confirmed he has TB.
And by 45, he's not feeling great.
And as I say, his personal life is in a state.
And it's in this year, 45, that he writes his masterpiece, Animal Farm.
Yes.
So he's actually deeply unwell with tuberculosis for quite a long time, isn't he?
And it's this period of his life when he is working as a journalist throughout the Second World War.
Can you take us through that?
What's he writing about?
Yeah well, his first writing actually, James.
In the late 20s, early 30s he's first published in newspapers.
He's always got that journalist's eye, you know.
He doesn't want to write great tomes.
He doesn't want to write a PhD on poverty.
He wants to go and be poor.
It's like a zoom lens.
At the time it was called the new journalism, where you go right in and you report what you've seen.
This is what he does.
Does this in Paris, does this in and around London.
After that, he's more involved in the novels and the books.
But even then, the books are very journalistic.
His first book, Down and Out in London and Paris, is what it says it is.
And then of course he goes fighting in Spain, and the account of his life there six months in Spain in a trench is a journalist's account, not an academic's account.
He goes up to Wigan where he meets mining communities.
Again, he's a man on the prowl.
He's a journalist through and through.
And then the war comes and he tries to join up.
Nobody will have him.
He's not well enough.
So he joins the Home Guard with this kind of amateur voluntary force.
Millions of men and some women were in it.
And then he gets a job with the BBC in 41.
And he does two years with the BBC as a talks producer.
And although the BBC gets on his nerves.
And there's a lot of backbiting and complaints behind his back.
He's too big for his boots.
He offers people the fees are too high that he offers.
He gets fed up with all that.
But essentially, he respects the institution.
And he does great work with them.
I mean, he's years ahead of his time in these programs he's producing for the Indian service.
He does all sorts of things, from folk songs and sea shanties to a kind of open university about your personal health.
It's really good.
However, he gets fed up with them.
And in 43, he leaves the Beeb and he leaves the Home Guard and joins Tribune.
Now, I think Tribune's still going as a left-wing newspaper.
I used to buy it as a student and it was a much more influential newspaper in the 40s right up to the 60s than it is now.
And he joins them as a literary editor three days a week.
A little bit less than he was earning at the BBC, about £600 a year, which is pretty good actually.
Less than the solicitor, more than a teacher for three days a week.
And he really flourishes here as a journalistic writer.
He has his own column, which is called As I Please.
And he just writes what he fancies.
You know, he writes about anything he wants and his range is fantastic.
At the same time, he's churning out high quality essays for literary journals.
And it's as an essayist for me, James, that he is fantastic.
As an essayist, he's halfway between a novelist and a journalist.
And that's where he hits home.
I think something that really comes out in his essays, as it does throughout much of his other work, is that he's constantly observing, isn't he?
So he's going out and meeting people in a journalistic fashion and then he's absorbing that, reflecting on it and publishing writing that is reflecting on those experiences.
And that's something that comes through all of his work, isn't it, really?
Yes.
I mean as a novelist, insofar as he is a novelist he has this thing which the French called aperçu, meaning insight.
He sees a very small thing and it just opens up into a very big issue.
And that ability to have insight into things comes out of the novel writing, I think.
Out of the journalist in him, he has a point of view.
He has an essay.
He wants to tell you, he wants to make the world more intelligible and he wants to make the world better.
And I think we would agree most journalists worth their salt would want those two things.
So it's in his essays making the argument, seeing the insight in his essays, that I really think he comes alive.
And he comes alive right from the beginning.
His first essay is written in 31.
He's only 28 now.
And it's about the time he hanged a man in Burma.
I mean, honestly, what could be more stunning a subject than that?
I think, having looked at his career throughout most of his life, that's a good moment to take us to his first major success as a author, which is Animal Farm.
As I mentioned, this comes at a point of transition for him.
He is really finding success as a journalist, and then more broadly, the war is ending.
Can you take us through the writing and publication of Animal Farm?
Well, he's living in Hertfordshire with Eileen, his wife, in the late 30s.
And he claims that when he's walking down the lane one day, this is in Wallington, Near Letchworth.
And he sees a little boy with a big cart horse and the little boy is hitting it with a stick.
And he says it just occurred to him that if the cart horse for one moment realised the difference in power between him,
And the little boy, he would get rid of the little boy.
And the seed grows.
That's another aposi, you see, a little insight.
And it grows into Animal Farm.
Animal Farm is a fable about the Russian Revolution and what happens when the pigs or the animals anyway take over the farm.
What happens in Russia when the people take over the state?
And, of course, at first everything is exciting and thrilling and there's going to be justice at last.
But in the end, the pigs become tyrants too.
And this of course, you don't need to know about the Russian Revolution to read Animal Farm, but it helps if you do.
Because Napoleon, the big pig, is a complete swine, no pun intended.
And he's Stalin, really.
So this is Orwell's take on a form of socialism practiced in the Soviet Union that he first saw in Spain in the Spanish Civil War and has come by 1945 to feel free enough to criticize as he wishes.
And he does that in a fable about animals.
OK, so after years of working yes, as you said as a jobbing journalist, and years of writing essays and also writing intermittently publishing books that aren't so successful, Animal Farm is published and it garners huge national attention.
Does it make him famous?
Yes, it makes him famous.
Before that, he's a kind of awkward figure on the London left.
He's sort of permanently irritated by the left.
But he nevertheless sees himself as a man of the left, of the left, but not on the left.
So Animal Farm comes along.
He's written nothing like this before.
I think Eileen, his wife, who comes from the same town as me, South Shields, and for that reason and many others, I really love her.
She had a big part to play, it would seem, in Animal Farm.
And I think you can see the humour of it.
There's a humour there that Orwell really doesn't get much into his writing.
But Animal Farm is full of it.
I think Eileen was involved in this humour, in this fable.
You can read it in a day as well.
You could be eight years old and read it and enjoy it.
You can be like me, 108, and read it and enjoy it.
If you've got any children, James, you should read it to them, see what happens.
I think that's part of the reason behind its success, isn't it?
It is both immensely accessible.
I think I probably did read it when I was in my very, very, very early kind of tween age years.
So immensely accessible. but also thought provoking for people of absolutely any age.
And I guess as well, it was incredibly of its time, wasn't it?
It was speaking to issues that were ongoing and that were very ripe is perhaps the word I'm looking for.
So that, I think. helps to explain why it achieved such prominence.
And it made him famous, as you say.
How does he find that fame?
What changes for him?
Do you think he'd ever really imagined what this kind of attention would be like?
Well, the first thing to say there is he didn't have to worry about his hospital bills anymore.
So what a relief that was.
And there's a tragedy here too, because Eileen dies in March 45 and the book comes out in August 45.
And one of the possible reasons she died is that she opted for the cheap operation rather than the expensive one.
She went cheap in Newcastle rather than expensive in Harley Street.
And they just didn't have the money.
Mind you, it's not to say they were poor.
They were just not willing or she was not willing to spend the money on herself.
So it's tragic, really.
Six months later, he's in the money.
And one of the reasons he's in the money is because the Americans love Animal Farm.
And it suits their new Cold War stance, which is deliberatively... against the Soviet Union.
I may say, of course, that Orwell didn't feel free to write Animal Farm till the war was nearly over, because up till that point the Soviet Union was our ally.
And it wasn't done.
You couldn't just go around laughing at Stalin.
It was thought.
And one of the reasons he couldn't get a publisher in London was that he wouldn't have a book that was mocking Stalin.
He got one in the end, but it took that publisher a year to publish it.
So here he is with fame and fortune.
How does he deal with it?
I mean, he doesn't go off and have a holiday in the south of France.
He just keeps working.
And in fact, he doesn't go to the south of France.
He doesn't drink loads of champagne.
He doesn't have fun.
He's not that kind of guy.
He goes to a Scottish island where he wants to write another great work.
And that Scottish island is something I really want to dwell on because it's such an interesting part of his life.
And it's such an interesting part of your book.
Something I want to just touch down on again is that the publication of Animal Farm.
Really, this was an incredibly transitional moment for George Orwell, wasn't it?
It meant fame.
It meant money.
It also came very soon after the death of his wife. and the end of the war.
So this was an incredible moment of transition for him personally, wasn't it?
And it was also art.
He said to a friend that this book has been praised to the skies.
But what really hurts me is nobody has said it's beautiful.
I think he was feeling a little bit sorry for himself at that point.
But it's true.
It is a work of art.
And in a sense, because it's that, it doesn't need explaining.
His friend Herbert Reid wrote to him and said, it's perfect.
It fits all around the head.
That's a beautiful description actually, of any work of art it fits all around the head.
Yes, he'd achieved what he'd always wanted to achieve a political work that was nevertheless a work of art.
You mentioned this scottish island that he leaves to.
I find this really interesting because George Orwell has a very loving but also very complex relationship with England as a country.
And yet, once he achieves this ambition that he's had for decades at this point, to write a successful political artful book, he leaves and goes to Scotland, this incredibly remote island called Jura.
Why there?
What did he want to achieve there?
Yeah well, he's a journalist who wants to be a writer and he's a writer who wants to be a journalist.
And he's always feeling weighed down, you know, by journalistic work.
So he's always saying oh, I just like to get out of all this and get away and write something wonderful.
But at the same time, he just loves being a journalist as well.
But in 1940, he's saying he's weighed down by work.
And he's dreaming always of my Hebridean island.
I mean, this is six years before he goes there.
He scouts around Jura in 44.
He knows about it through an old Etonian housemaster who has the lease.
So he scouts it in 44.
Eileen is writing to him in 45 saying, I think this is a good idea.
We can get out of London.
I'd so want to get out of London.
It'll be good for you.
It'd be great for me.
Then she dies.
And then the year after that, he keeps to her wish and arrives in Jura in May 46.
And he's there on and off James, according to his business responsibilities and his illness, until January 6th.
So it's a substantial number of years, isn't it?
It's three years on and off.
Off and on, yeah.
Yes, exactly.
Can you describe Jura?
I know you haven't been there personally, but can you describe for listeners what this island is like?
Well, I've been to the Isle of Lewis, which I thought was stunning.
Beautiful, beautiful place.
And my guess is Jura is similar.
They're both Hebridean.
I think probably Jura is a bit more isolated and smaller.
It just looks sort of soft and mossy and green in a silver sea.
It's really, really lovely.
Of course, living there is different, and they're cold and they haven't got enough petrol or fuel for the house.
And the garden is always in a kind of slipstream of the westerlies.
Life there is quite tough.
He's always asking people to come up.
Why don't you come up?
You only have to get two trains, a boat. a bus, a taxi.
And after that, you only have to walk the last eight miles and bring some food.
Actually, more people than you'd imagine do come up and stay.
But I think life's hard, but I think it's rewarding.
His younger sister, Avril, comes.
His best friend, Richard Rees, Old Etonian, editor of Adelphi, he comes and supervises things.
Avril meets a Scottish farmer, former soldier, and they team up.
So they bring energy and maturity to the enterprise.
Little Richard seems to be violently healthy as his father just slips away bit by bit.
But the main thing on Orwell's mind here. is the writing of this all-consuming masterpiece.
And when I say all-consuming, it is exactly that.
He starts writing it in April 47.
He breaks the back of it by November 47.
And then he's terribly ill, goes to a Scottish hospital near Glasgow for half of 47.
48 back to Jura, summer 48.
Finishes it by Christmas 48 leaves the island January 49 seriously, seriously ill.
He can hardly pick up a weed, as he puts it, without breaking into sweat.
It's really useful to have that chronology of his time on the island, interspersed with his trips to hospital and his ill health.
And all the while, he's writing 1984.
I do want to stick with Jorah for a moment there with his experience on the island.
In his essay Why I Write, he reflects on how he'd wanted to write naturalistic novels with detailed descriptions.
I was reminded of that by a passage in your book about him in which you talk about how much Orwell immersed himself in the natural world around him.
On Dura.
You say that He started afresh there.
You quote him as saying, I'm having a splendid time.
I have done no work, which is definitely a feeling that I can relate to.
You talk about all the things that made him happy planting vegetables, sawing logs, all this really physical embodied outdoor stuff.
And he's clearly loving that being surrounded by so much nature, but also it sounds like he's lonely.
Can you take us through that?
Can you take us through really his life on the island outside of his work?
So one thing we've not mentioned, and you're dead right to raise it.
All his life, really all his life, as a, As a tenant living in a fixed place mind, he's always on the move, but insofar as he ever gets near a garden, give Orwell a garden and he'll make it grow.
And of course, Jura is perfect for that.
And he spends a lot of time there.
He's a great man for lists.
And at one point in his notebook, he lists 29 jobs he's got to do in this garden.
And there's not a word of complaint about it.
So he can do all sorts of things and even can turn this love of the natural world into art.
He doesn't call it the natural world much.
Nature is not a word he uses much.
He calls it the surface of the earth and his love for it.
So he's doing that.
He's also upstairs with the paraffin heater going, typing away.
He's downstairs for lunch and then he's typing away or he's in the garden in the afternoon.
Then he has a kind of high tea.
He's very traditionalist.
He likes a big tea, which often is cooked by Avril, his sister.
And then he's upstairs again, paraffin heater on, chain smoking until the early hours.
So it's a mix, really, of garden, sofa, traditional things, and then tea. typing away.
When he finishes the first draft, he can't get anyone to come up and type it for him from London.
So he does it himself.
Some of his biographers think this might have been the last straw, really.
And certainly by the time he finishes it in November 48th, He's in a terrible state, really very, very ill indeed.
And it's then that he leaves Jura in the January to go to a sanatorium useful to remind us precisely exactly how ill he was while he was on Jura and while he was writing 1984 there.
And it seems like perhaps what sustained him was the satisfaction that he clearly gets from the natural simplicity around him the physical work, the going, crabbing and chopping wood.
Even though it's physically exerting, it feels like this is also what's keeping him going.
And that's really interesting to me.
Yes, yes.
He loves fishing.
He's always been a keen fisherman.
He has a gun under his arm some of the time.
He takes rabbits out.
Yeah, he's a countryman in that sense.
I suppose his His class were tweeds and barber jackets and guns.
So, yeah, I think you're dead right, James.
I think I don't know about you, but if ever I'm writing, one of the best parts of writing is not writing and getting away from it and then coming back and writing again.
It's strange how little time you need an hour in the garden and you feel a new person.
And that's how he's living.
You're dead right also to say he's lonely.
Eileen, his wife of nine years, is not there.
And strangely and sadly, I suppose from the word go he's finding he's looking for another wife, or at least a partner, or at least a nanny for Richard who's a toddler.
And finally, he finds a second wife, and to everyone's amazement, he marries her.
But this is not on Jura.
Sonia Brownell, his second wife, won't come to Jura.
She's not that kind of girl.
She doesn't come to Jura, but she does attend to him once he's in the sanatorium in Gloucestershire.
And it's she and his publisher Wahlberg, Fred Wahlberg, who get him out of the sanatorium and into University College Hospital just off the Euston Road in the summer of 49.
And actually, they marry there.
Orwell in bed, in his new smoking jacket, and the amount he smoked, he needed one.
And Sonia and his best man, David Astor, round the bed.
And that's a marriage that only sadly lasts three months, three and a half months, because he dies in the January of 1950.
Something I see within your book is that this is the final phase of his personal life, his marriage to Sonia.
Really,
That is the last defining moment of his internal life and his relationships.
Something else I learned from your book is that 1984 had been gestating for quite a long time and that he'd been sitting on notes for it and making notes on ideas for it for years, and that it was under a different name.
Can you take us through those early stages of 1984 and then how it became as we know it?
Its first title is Last Man in Europe.
He's also an avid reader.
And there's a lot of books coming out in the 30s 20s, 30s and 40s which are dystopian novels about similar themes.
You know, a great world ruler who wants absolute and total power and to enslave everyone else.
So, although he is looking at the world around him, he's also reading a lot and noting a lot from these other works.
And the first notes for 1984, although it's called Last Man in Europe, are in 1943, which is, you know, four years before he starts writing it in earnest.
So it's on his mind.
It's bubbling away.
And my book takes you through all the influences on it, ranging from Zamyatin's Russian novel We Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Right through to books in the 40s like CS.
Lewis, not an author Orwell loved, but he wrote a book called This Hideous Strength, which is about the destruction of the natural world by a dictator figure.
H.G.
Wells, of course, is writing dystopian stuff.
There's all kinds of this.
And he's, he's fusing that into American gangster fiction, would you believe, which he's reviewing and reading, where gangsters, for him, have no moral compass.
They have no taboos.
They just do what they want.
And some of the more disgusting scenes in.
1984.
Some of the pornography and sadism comes from these gangster novels.
Dime fiction, they were called.
So he brings it all together.
He finally brings it all together, writing through 47 and 48.
Something that I noted when you were speaking earlier is how much his writing is informed by his own experiences.
So you mentioned his trip to Wigan influencing The Road to Wigan Pier and obviously, his time in Burma influencing his book Burmese Days.
So he's observing the outside world and he's reflecting on his own internal experiences.
And this is kind of being cycled through like one of those bingo machines that jumbles all the balls around.
And he's plucking out this book at the end of it, which is this cocktail of observations on the outside world, internal reflections of his own experiences.
How much do you see that in 1984?
Do you see elements of it as autobiography?
Yeah, I do, because Winston is not very well.
And in the final phase, of He's reduced to a skeleton.
He looks in the mirror.
He can't believe it's him.
And I think Orwell was looking in the mirror at that time and thought the same.
He couldn't believe it was him.
He was getting some treatment in hospital in Hermes, the hospital near Glasgow, which was pretty, pretty brutal stuff.
When you read what was happening to him, it was like being beaten up by an expert, I think.
And then his very good friend, David Astor, for whom he wrote at the Observer.
Got him some new American drugs called streptomycin and Asta paid for them.
And Orwell's old friend from Tribune, Anoran Bevan, who was minister of health.
He got them imported on special license for Orwell.
And this streptomycin really did not do Orwell any good.
It reduced him to a complete wreck.
So the wreck that is Winston is the wreck that Orwell is seeing in the mirror, in Jura and in hospital.
And of course, the real hero of 1984 is not Winston, but Julia.
And he's been thinking about this for a while.
He's been attacking intellectuals for years.
And of course, the thing about 1984 is Ingsoc The party is the party of intellectuals.
It's intellectuals who are wrecking the country.
And the great thing about Julia?
In one sense she's Orwell's perfect woman beautiful, but she hates intellectuals.
They bore her stiff.
So, yeah, Winston is Orwell and Julia is Orwell's favorite kind of gal, you might say.
And for me, the true hero, whether it's Sonia, whether it's Eileen, whether it's any number of modern, independent minded women he knew, I don't know.
But she's in it just as much as Winston is.
So, as the manuscript is nearing completion, as he's nearly done with 1984, Orwell's tuberculosis, as you've said, is dramatically worsening.
Yeah.
How aware do you think he was that he was pouring the last reserves of his energy into the book?
And do you think he was more scared by the prospect of the book being unfinished than he was of dying in order to see it finished?
That's the hardest question I've ever been asked.
He must have been appalled. at the prospect of oblivion.
And he must have been more appalled at hurrying it on as he sat in that paraffin filled heated room smoking himself to death, writing and typing and amending and annotating.
He must have.
But then when the book was done, I don't think he was a pessimist by nature.
I think he was optimistic and hopeful.
And Sonia, of course, is a sign of that hope.
She gets a doctor in, a top man for TB, actually the guy who treated D.H.
Lawrence for the same problem.
And Morland the doctor says well, the best you can hope for George, is the life quote of a good chronic.
And that meant, I suppose, a wheelchair, somewhere soft like Brighton in the corner of his hotel bedroom.
He has a fishing rod and Sonia's talking about taking him to Switzerland where he can fish and sit in the sun and cough into a spittoon.
So I think there's a bit of hope there.
He might have made it through the 50s, or I think maybe they hoped he would.
Certainly his publisher wanted it.
Certainly his new wife wanted it.
Certainly he wanted it.
Certainly Richard wanted it.
So he might have stuck it on.
In fact, he barely makes it to 1950.
He dies very soon after the conclusion of his work on 1984.
My final question is if he could have seen the influence of 1984, this revolution, Amazing work of fiction that he has literally poured the last reserves of his life into, on this remote Scottish island.
If he could have seen its influence and if he could have seen how immersed it has become in modern culture, what would he have thought about that?
And what would he have thought about how we interpret 1984 today?
Yeah well, he would have lived, let's say, to see the Cold War, and he would have lived to see NATO creating a barrier against the thing he feared most, which was a kind of left or right fascism.
He would have been in favor of that.
On the other hand, he would have seen McCarthyism.
And I think, although he was not averse himself to ratting on fellow travelers as he called them who he did not like and did not trust,
I think he would have been a bit nervous about what he saw there.
And then if he made it that long.
American involvements in Vietnam, I think would have horrified him and he would have been back to his Burmese days with that.
So, yeah, he would have stayed on the left but of the right, if you see what I mean.
And I think he would have got increasingly more pro-Western up until Vietnam, when colonialism would have come back to hit him and he would have had to reconsider where he was.
But he wasn't a thing forever, James.
He was like you and me.
He would have responded to things as they came along, one after the other.
That was Robert Cole speaking to James Osborne.
Robert is Emeritus Professor of History at De Montfort University.
His latest book, George Orwell Life and Legacy, explores the entirety of the author's life and is out now.
