In this next writing on the Real George Orwell I cover the period before he goes to Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War as part of the Independent Labour Party Unit, abandoning his recently married wife until she is able to also journey to Spain, He begins to have his work published, lives with his parents and in London works as a teacher and in a bookshop and pursues women. I try and find out why he went to Spain, a country not previously visited and with whom he had no connections.
In 1931 Jonathan Cape and Faber and Faber rejected Blair’s Scullions Diary later to be known as Down and Out in Paris and London. It was a time when he also set out to experience what it was like to be in prison over Christmas got himself drunk and disorderly. The magistrates decided that a couple of days in police cells was sufficient. He does not appear to try again although he gives a fictional account of the experience in Keep the Aspidistra Flying which I purchased in 1963 when living and working in Oxford. My efforts to go to prison at the younger age of 20 were more successful
In 1960 I participated in a civil disobedience demonstration at a USA rocket base in Northamptonshire having posed with a grappling iron, I had no intention of using, at the suggestion of a freelance photographer employed by Peace News holding the instrument he provided and which I dropped before sitting down with over 70 others who were arrested outside the main gates.
About 70 refused bail including, the daughter of High Court Judge, and we were remanded from the Saturday afternoon until the Monday morning. The majority of the men were taken to Bedford Jail where everyone but me and another were accommodated in the Library and had a great time whereas I and the other young man, being under 21 were treated as young persons on remand and kept separately locked up for 24 hours apart for two periods of half an hour exercise. I hated this experience, albeit brief because on the Monday a leading lawyers successfully argued our case before the magistrates and we were discharged and if there were conditions these appear not to have been recorded.
I was soon sitting down again, this time at the suggestion of a Liberal Parliamentary Candidate outside South Africa House in protest against the Sharpville Shootings, fined £2 which was paid; and then in a country road in Essex, miles from anywhere, with no one else present apart from some thirty demonstrators, fifty or more police and a couple of dozen news people.
Technically the police blocked the roadway but the charge was obstruction of a police officer. Our objective had been to march to the gates of the Foulness Weapons of Mass Destruction Research Centre. In the court which was ready for us at Southend we were asked to pay a small fine or seven days and the majority refused. However my experience lasted four days at Brixton, sharing a cell with five other unconnected with the demonstration, because someone somewhere worked out that any funds in our possession less travel money should be deducted from the fine. Deciding that the authorities had not taken our protest seriously and by 15 votes to 13 we repeated the demonstration a week later and of the 15 participating, I cast my vote with heavy heart because I hated the prison experience as I anticipated with the Treasury solicitor prosecuting but of the 15, 13 accepted the one month for refusing to pay the £50 pound fine and six month concurrent as an alternative for refusing to give our word not to continue such action for a period of two years. The six months were spent in Brixton, Eastchurch, Brixton, Drake Hall and Stafford. All 13 completed the six months and two, Lady Jane Buxton and Margaret Turner wrote a good book about their experience and then with Lord Stonham (the former MP Victor Collins) they formed a group which they asked me to chair, resurrecting The Prison Reform Council which published 100 suggestions for Prison reform under the Title Inside Story, many of which the Government agreed should be implemented after a meeting with Lord Jellico Minister of State at the Home Office, a post Lord Stonham was himself able to fill and, and who arranged a debate on the subject in the House of Lords which I attended and where I met a Bishop whose daughter I was to meet again at criminology seminars at Nuffield College, Oxford.
It was the Home Office which found a place for me at Birmingham University and provided financial support as well as course fees. It was a Regional Inspector of the Home office who took me out to lunch one day and advised on my future conduct if I was to be successful in my application to become one of the New Directors of Social Services in 1971 and it was Sir Keith Joseph who approved my appointment as he only local authority chief officer to have gone to prison before their appointment. Two decades later I had a pass into the car park of the Home Office as a member of a national committee which they hosted
All very interesting this may be but what I hear someone ask has this to do with George Orwell and his autobiographical work about the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia? George was an insider of high rank who longed to become a proletariat insider but who spent most of life as an artistic outsider observing himself and others, then recording as fact or fiction and usually mixing up both and my impression is that only occasionally he felt part of and involved feeling fully alive, I was an outsider of lowly rank who became an insider of middling to upper rank and who returned to being an outsider but content with what I am doing and although back to being alone, not lonely. Within this frame worth there are similarities and connections as well as coincidences.
The prison aspect I have explained because in Orwell’s case he was first motivated from a desire to experience directly as a participant, not as an observer reporting or as material for some literary work, a force which explains a much many of his actions of his actions.
In my case it was not an experience I wanted but felt it was important as part of a cause having understood the nature of a Satyagraha, only recently discovering that correspondence of mine was used in a book about Gandhi influence on the rise of protest in the West(Gandhi in the West, The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest by Sean Scalmer, Cambridge University press) see1 * and which I shall review in due course.
Like me Eric Blair was not a pacifist as we both accepted the use of force by governments in defence of their people. However as a young man he enjoyed shooting birds and animals, beat native prisoners when in Burma, shot an elephant, witnessed an official hanging (to be covered in a broadcast next Monday(Feb 18th 2013) and wanted to kill Fascists choosing to find a way to get to Spain do so. Ill health prevented fighting in the Second World War and failed in a plan to become a spy in France. I was medically unfit for national Service.
It is also evident from the writings read to date that he was against Imperialism as a result of his experience in Burma, and in Down and Out in Paris and London he liked he comradeship and sharing of the dispossessed and lowly paid hard working although he was also objective and realistic about the stealing and the hierarchies and snobbishness within the proletariat something he was to refer to again when first going to Barcelona in the heady days of POUM control (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxisto) pro worker but anti Stalin, He also was against injustice and after Spain he was a fervent anti Stalinist/Communist, becoming the darling of the embryonic CIA and denouncing everyone he knew who support the Soviets especially those at the BBC but I am way ahead of myself and for the moment I will leave the thought that I am not sure what he was for, except justice as fairness. He was not a member of any political party until coming back from Spain.
My belief is that politics was not his driving force but the need to experience things at first hand, to feel part of rather than the observer from the outside. While against conventional suburban life and conventional marriage and his anti hero in Keep the Aspidistra Flying says “But he had taken an oath against marriage long ago. Marriage was only a trap set for you by the money God. You grab the bait and snap goes the trap; and there you are, chained by the leg to some good job till they cart you to Kensal Green. And what a life “licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra?” There would be pram pushing and sneaky adulteries. But then he also realised that not being married had is downside.
I also believe that until he went to Spain Blair was still searching for a unique voice as a writer, despite several publications, and he also wanted a core sense of his identity. After Paris he returned to the bourgeois home of his parents writing and painting and going on expeditions into the world of poverty under the name Burton, a man who liked to possess and change his identities, Blair, Burton and Orwell? Suggesting someone not happy with what he was and had been!
Orwell provides a rational explanation, Burton was used to differentiate from his normal life on his tramping expeditions and the need to get into being a different character. He chose George Orwell, he says, because it sounded a rounded English name and he did not want his tramping activities to embarrass his family. In this afternoon‘s dramatization of his life after in England after Spain he tells an attractive woman from an Oxford College who has come to interview him that his name was also chosen to escape the enemies who threatened him, but if this was said it is not true for the literary name came with his first publication. One wonders what else he got up to during when under the name of Burton? The decision top use Orwell meant it was not until just before his death he was contacted by his first love and childhood friend who did not appreciate that her former suitor was the famous author of Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell. She was in a long term relationship with a peer at this time and had a child in an earlier relationship. I suspect had she known and made contact with Blair at this time any relationship then established between them would not have lasted unless she was prepared to tolerate his dalliances.
In 1932 Blair obtained a teaching job at a private preparatory school with one full time master and only twenty boys in Hayes, Middlesex, Greater London, When he returned to Southwold, the parental home at the end of the summer term he is reported to have pursued one Eleanor Jacques and later learn that he was also in correspondence with another young woman although she was already attached. I reflected on what I knew from what I had and have read about Blair in relation to his attitude towards women including his real relationships and discovered that Daphne Patai has published a full length analysis of some 335 pages on his masculine approach to life (The Orwell Mystique a study in the Male Ideology, (Massachusetts University Press at around £20) with first 120 pages available on line
In 1933 he moved to a school with 200 pupils and a full complement of staff. It is interesting that he was able to get such post given he not received teacher training or attended university. He bought a motorcycle and follow an excursion contracted pneumonia from which he nearly died returning to his family home once more to convalesce. He had become a seasoned smoker. With Eleanor Jacques married and out of the country it appears that he cast his mind to creating a Clergyman’s Daughter
He then moved to a job in a bookshop in Hampstead, over some eighteen months writing in the mornings, working in the afternoons and socializing in the evenings. It was a job arranged for him by his aunt with friends of hers and this period is said to be the basis for Keep The Aspidistra Flying which is a book I possess and quickly speed read yesterday with its opening chapter about being bored and unimpressed by the books and the majority of customers. He also wrote an essay Bookshop memories published in 1936 However the book is primarily about the male sex drive without commitment.
In the book prior to embarking on the life as a writer, book he had worked for an advertising firm as a copywriter and there meets Rosemary with who in begins an association and who is portrayed as a normal intelligent young woman, a virgin, seeking marriage before sex, concerned about the possibility of pregnancy outside of marriage, seeking a stable family life in suburbia, but also attracted to Blair. The book is a critique of suburban life rather than of capitalism and also how normal domesticity and being a wage slave can prevent artistic creativity. He loathes his work at the advertising company and leaves to becomes a writer with working in the bookshop brings him in contact with a wealthy and generous man who understands and supports the anti hero’s writing imperative.
When he meets Rosemary again he immediately presses her to sleep with him but she says she would if they were married and marriage is something out of reach on their state of finances, especially his. She offers to buy them a meal but makes an excuse because the male role is to pay and women do not, and when they go out for the day and to impress her he takes her for a meal in a hotel, and this consumes most of what he has, he has to borrow from her from the bus fare home, and this stops him having intercourse which she then agrees having earlier backed out with the fear of what would happen if she became pregnant, something which today’s generation do not need to have, but then we did not know of HIV and AIDS.
As I read on I realise this book is an extension of Down and Out in Paris and London, and what happens when the dispossessed come into money, they immediately spend it on food, drink, cigarettes and on a woman for sex. In this instance he takes Rosemary and the friend to the man’s favourite Italian restaurant which sounds possible Quo Vadis in Soho, a few doors away from the post war Sunset Strip and where he orders not one but two bottles of Asti Spumante rather than Champagne. I am with him on the Asti vis a vis the champagne, although also used to drink champagne occasionally.
As he gets drunk he wants her and gets her to leave quickly and when he attempts to take her in some back alley she slaps his face and goes off alone. He rejoins the man and they go to a pub where he starts to drink quarts in German style pots and then picks up two tarts, but when he gets one into a hotel room he cannot perform. He ends up drunk in the street and in the hands of the police he hits the sergeant but waking up he remembers nothing of what happened. Fortunately he is likely to be given a choice at court between a fine and imprisonment, avoiding the teetotal magistrates who would have sent him straight to prison for a month.
He loses his job when his court appearance is reported in the local paper and he dismays Rosemary by refusing to let her attempt to get his job back at the advertising firm. He moves to squalid bug fested rooms but where at least you can be yourself although he is horrified when the landlady produces a dying Aspidistra plant which he regards as the great symbol of suburban existence. He takes a job at another bookstore on reduces wages where he is put in charge of a new two penny dread full’s lending library where the books are mass produced at four a year per author designed to titillate the masses which television today fulfils and aspects of the internet. Rosemary and his friend attempt to persuade him against the move because they and he knows it will stifle his creative abilities and so it does. Eventually after her efforts have failed Rosemary more out of pity than desire offers herself to her and in a cold miserable room they have loveless and passionless sex which satisfies neither and disappoints both.
Then inevitably, because without the inevitable there would be now story, no book Rosemary is pregnant and lets him know and keeps saying she is not putting any pressures for him to decide what to do. The idea of an abortion horrifies him so they get married, in a small sad civil wedding after which they return by taxi paid by the friend to their knew small suburban home and for the anti hero to take the job at the advertising company where he does well and contemplates bringing up a child with wife staying home to look after on £4.10 a week compared to he £1.30 at the penny dreadfuls, He flushes away the manuscript of his unfinished monumental poetical work and stuns his wife by insisting they need an Aspidistra plant to show off to the neighbours at the front window. One of Gracie Fields popular songs was Biggest Aspidistra in the World.
There is a brief reference to socialism earlier in the book when a friend attempts to get him to read Marx but his central character is not really, but in his writing and in sex. I believe the book accurately depicts his mind set towards women and marriage at that time
Eric Blair had friends who were in the Independent Labour Party and they helped him to move accommodation to Parliament Hill. His landlady was studying for a master’s degree in psychology and held a party for some of her fellow student one of whom was Eileen O’Shaughnessy. There has been one film released in 1997 which I have not seen staring Helena Bonham Carter who does not immediately strike me as Rosemary and Richard E Grant, a possible anti hero.
Eileen was born in South Shields , attending the Sunderland Church High School from where she gained a place at St High’s Oxford University to read English and where one of her tutors was Tolkien, the author of the Hobbit and Lords of the Rings. She had a succession of diverse jobs at a girl Boarding School, as a reader for Dame Elizabeth Cadbury, as a secretary and also open and closed an office for secretarial and typing work in Victoria Street London. A road I know well from when I worked in the area for two years when I left school. She did some free lance journalism and help her brother proof reading his scientific papers and books.
Her father according to Wikipedia was a thoracic surgeon who she described as a natural fascist, a term which some on the left tend to apply to anyone right of centre, and therefore treated as an observation on him with caution. However in an article written in Guardian in 2005, Blair’s biographer D J Taylor he says her father worked for Customs and Excise and after sending him an email to clarify I read further that it was her brother the Thoracic surgeon.
That she was 29 an unmarried when she met Blair is interesting and that he proposed three weeks within meeting and she accepted on his second attempt and they were married at Wallington ( my Wallington), but another in Hertfordshire the following Summer where they had a small cottage. In the BBC programme drama called Loving yesterday afternoon the impression given is that Orwell pursued Eileen much as the anti hero pursued Rosemary although in this instance she responded more positively and although the Rosemary was education Eileen had been to Oxford and appears to have been a good intellectual match for Blair who appeared to long to find someone who was bright, sexually desirable and willing. That he has found a soul mate only adds to my query why did he go off to Spain.
After listening to the two hour long programmes on Orwell and the Civil War Homage to Catalonia I am still uncertain. However before then and before his marriage Victor Gollancz is reported to have suggested that Blair spend a short timer investigating social conditions in economically depressed England (Clancy Segal Weekend in Dinlock) some three decades later and no doubt someone else is doing the same now)
According to Wikipedia he stayed above a tripe shop in Wigan where in went into people homes, study health and social records at the library in February and then went to Sheffield and Barnsley, the latter I know well from have had child responsibilities for a year in the later , went down the Grimthorpe Colliery, listened to a Moseley Speech and to meetings of the Communist Party and also stayed with his sister in Headingley, which I know well from my visits to the cricket and from the year at Wakefield and Lofthouse down the road from Leeds and also visited the Bronte Parsonage at Haworth, something have done over a decade ago. The book was not published until the following year in 1937 but attracted the attention of Special branch who kept him under observation for 12 years until the publication of 1984. I must read the book and will therefore write separately postponing yet again the important experiences in Spain.
* 1. The non-violent protests of civil rights activists and anti-nuclear campaigners during the 1960s helped to redefine Western politics. But where did they come from? Sean Scalmer uncovers their history in an earlier generation's intense struggles to understand and emulate the activities of Mahatma Gandhi. He shows how Gandhi's non-violent protests were the subject of widespread discussion and debate in the USA and UK for several decades. Though at first misrepresented by Western newspapers, they were patiently described and clarified by a devoted group of cosmopolitan advocates. Small groups of Westerners experimented with Gandhi an techniques in virtual anonymity and then, on the cusp of the 1960s, brought these methods to a wider audience. The swelling protests of later years increasingly abandoned the spirit of non-violence, and the central significance of Gandhi and his supporters has therefore been forgotten. This book recovers this tradition, charts its transformation, and ponders its abiding significance.
In 1931 Jonathan Cape and Faber and Faber rejected Blair’s Scullions Diary later to be known as Down and Out in Paris and London. It was a time when he also set out to experience what it was like to be in prison over Christmas got himself drunk and disorderly. The magistrates decided that a couple of days in police cells was sufficient. He does not appear to try again although he gives a fictional account of the experience in Keep the Aspidistra Flying which I purchased in 1963 when living and working in Oxford. My efforts to go to prison at the younger age of 20 were more successful
In 1960 I participated in a civil disobedience demonstration at a USA rocket base in Northamptonshire having posed with a grappling iron, I had no intention of using, at the suggestion of a freelance photographer employed by Peace News holding the instrument he provided and which I dropped before sitting down with over 70 others who were arrested outside the main gates.
About 70 refused bail including, the daughter of High Court Judge, and we were remanded from the Saturday afternoon until the Monday morning. The majority of the men were taken to Bedford Jail where everyone but me and another were accommodated in the Library and had a great time whereas I and the other young man, being under 21 were treated as young persons on remand and kept separately locked up for 24 hours apart for two periods of half an hour exercise. I hated this experience, albeit brief because on the Monday a leading lawyers successfully argued our case before the magistrates and we were discharged and if there were conditions these appear not to have been recorded.
I was soon sitting down again, this time at the suggestion of a Liberal Parliamentary Candidate outside South Africa House in protest against the Sharpville Shootings, fined £2 which was paid; and then in a country road in Essex, miles from anywhere, with no one else present apart from some thirty demonstrators, fifty or more police and a couple of dozen news people.
Technically the police blocked the roadway but the charge was obstruction of a police officer. Our objective had been to march to the gates of the Foulness Weapons of Mass Destruction Research Centre. In the court which was ready for us at Southend we were asked to pay a small fine or seven days and the majority refused. However my experience lasted four days at Brixton, sharing a cell with five other unconnected with the demonstration, because someone somewhere worked out that any funds in our possession less travel money should be deducted from the fine. Deciding that the authorities had not taken our protest seriously and by 15 votes to 13 we repeated the demonstration a week later and of the 15 participating, I cast my vote with heavy heart because I hated the prison experience as I anticipated with the Treasury solicitor prosecuting but of the 15, 13 accepted the one month for refusing to pay the £50 pound fine and six month concurrent as an alternative for refusing to give our word not to continue such action for a period of two years. The six months were spent in Brixton, Eastchurch, Brixton, Drake Hall and Stafford. All 13 completed the six months and two, Lady Jane Buxton and Margaret Turner wrote a good book about their experience and then with Lord Stonham (the former MP Victor Collins) they formed a group which they asked me to chair, resurrecting The Prison Reform Council which published 100 suggestions for Prison reform under the Title Inside Story, many of which the Government agreed should be implemented after a meeting with Lord Jellico Minister of State at the Home Office, a post Lord Stonham was himself able to fill and, and who arranged a debate on the subject in the House of Lords which I attended and where I met a Bishop whose daughter I was to meet again at criminology seminars at Nuffield College, Oxford.
It was the Home Office which found a place for me at Birmingham University and provided financial support as well as course fees. It was a Regional Inspector of the Home office who took me out to lunch one day and advised on my future conduct if I was to be successful in my application to become one of the New Directors of Social Services in 1971 and it was Sir Keith Joseph who approved my appointment as he only local authority chief officer to have gone to prison before their appointment. Two decades later I had a pass into the car park of the Home Office as a member of a national committee which they hosted
All very interesting this may be but what I hear someone ask has this to do with George Orwell and his autobiographical work about the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia? George was an insider of high rank who longed to become a proletariat insider but who spent most of life as an artistic outsider observing himself and others, then recording as fact or fiction and usually mixing up both and my impression is that only occasionally he felt part of and involved feeling fully alive, I was an outsider of lowly rank who became an insider of middling to upper rank and who returned to being an outsider but content with what I am doing and although back to being alone, not lonely. Within this frame worth there are similarities and connections as well as coincidences.
The prison aspect I have explained because in Orwell’s case he was first motivated from a desire to experience directly as a participant, not as an observer reporting or as material for some literary work, a force which explains a much many of his actions of his actions.
In my case it was not an experience I wanted but felt it was important as part of a cause having understood the nature of a Satyagraha, only recently discovering that correspondence of mine was used in a book about Gandhi influence on the rise of protest in the West(Gandhi in the West, The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest by Sean Scalmer, Cambridge University press) see1 * and which I shall review in due course.
Like me Eric Blair was not a pacifist as we both accepted the use of force by governments in defence of their people. However as a young man he enjoyed shooting birds and animals, beat native prisoners when in Burma, shot an elephant, witnessed an official hanging (to be covered in a broadcast next Monday(Feb 18th 2013) and wanted to kill Fascists choosing to find a way to get to Spain do so. Ill health prevented fighting in the Second World War and failed in a plan to become a spy in France. I was medically unfit for national Service.
It is also evident from the writings read to date that he was against Imperialism as a result of his experience in Burma, and in Down and Out in Paris and London he liked he comradeship and sharing of the dispossessed and lowly paid hard working although he was also objective and realistic about the stealing and the hierarchies and snobbishness within the proletariat something he was to refer to again when first going to Barcelona in the heady days of POUM control (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxisto) pro worker but anti Stalin, He also was against injustice and after Spain he was a fervent anti Stalinist/Communist, becoming the darling of the embryonic CIA and denouncing everyone he knew who support the Soviets especially those at the BBC but I am way ahead of myself and for the moment I will leave the thought that I am not sure what he was for, except justice as fairness. He was not a member of any political party until coming back from Spain.
My belief is that politics was not his driving force but the need to experience things at first hand, to feel part of rather than the observer from the outside. While against conventional suburban life and conventional marriage and his anti hero in Keep the Aspidistra Flying says “But he had taken an oath against marriage long ago. Marriage was only a trap set for you by the money God. You grab the bait and snap goes the trap; and there you are, chained by the leg to some good job till they cart you to Kensal Green. And what a life “licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra?” There would be pram pushing and sneaky adulteries. But then he also realised that not being married had is downside.
I also believe that until he went to Spain Blair was still searching for a unique voice as a writer, despite several publications, and he also wanted a core sense of his identity. After Paris he returned to the bourgeois home of his parents writing and painting and going on expeditions into the world of poverty under the name Burton, a man who liked to possess and change his identities, Blair, Burton and Orwell? Suggesting someone not happy with what he was and had been!
Orwell provides a rational explanation, Burton was used to differentiate from his normal life on his tramping expeditions and the need to get into being a different character. He chose George Orwell, he says, because it sounded a rounded English name and he did not want his tramping activities to embarrass his family. In this afternoon‘s dramatization of his life after in England after Spain he tells an attractive woman from an Oxford College who has come to interview him that his name was also chosen to escape the enemies who threatened him, but if this was said it is not true for the literary name came with his first publication. One wonders what else he got up to during when under the name of Burton? The decision top use Orwell meant it was not until just before his death he was contacted by his first love and childhood friend who did not appreciate that her former suitor was the famous author of Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell. She was in a long term relationship with a peer at this time and had a child in an earlier relationship. I suspect had she known and made contact with Blair at this time any relationship then established between them would not have lasted unless she was prepared to tolerate his dalliances.
In 1932 Blair obtained a teaching job at a private preparatory school with one full time master and only twenty boys in Hayes, Middlesex, Greater London, When he returned to Southwold, the parental home at the end of the summer term he is reported to have pursued one Eleanor Jacques and later learn that he was also in correspondence with another young woman although she was already attached. I reflected on what I knew from what I had and have read about Blair in relation to his attitude towards women including his real relationships and discovered that Daphne Patai has published a full length analysis of some 335 pages on his masculine approach to life (The Orwell Mystique a study in the Male Ideology, (Massachusetts University Press at around £20) with first 120 pages available on line
In 1933 he moved to a school with 200 pupils and a full complement of staff. It is interesting that he was able to get such post given he not received teacher training or attended university. He bought a motorcycle and follow an excursion contracted pneumonia from which he nearly died returning to his family home once more to convalesce. He had become a seasoned smoker. With Eleanor Jacques married and out of the country it appears that he cast his mind to creating a Clergyman’s Daughter
He then moved to a job in a bookshop in Hampstead, over some eighteen months writing in the mornings, working in the afternoons and socializing in the evenings. It was a job arranged for him by his aunt with friends of hers and this period is said to be the basis for Keep The Aspidistra Flying which is a book I possess and quickly speed read yesterday with its opening chapter about being bored and unimpressed by the books and the majority of customers. He also wrote an essay Bookshop memories published in 1936 However the book is primarily about the male sex drive without commitment.
In the book prior to embarking on the life as a writer, book he had worked for an advertising firm as a copywriter and there meets Rosemary with who in begins an association and who is portrayed as a normal intelligent young woman, a virgin, seeking marriage before sex, concerned about the possibility of pregnancy outside of marriage, seeking a stable family life in suburbia, but also attracted to Blair. The book is a critique of suburban life rather than of capitalism and also how normal domesticity and being a wage slave can prevent artistic creativity. He loathes his work at the advertising company and leaves to becomes a writer with working in the bookshop brings him in contact with a wealthy and generous man who understands and supports the anti hero’s writing imperative.
When he meets Rosemary again he immediately presses her to sleep with him but she says she would if they were married and marriage is something out of reach on their state of finances, especially his. She offers to buy them a meal but makes an excuse because the male role is to pay and women do not, and when they go out for the day and to impress her he takes her for a meal in a hotel, and this consumes most of what he has, he has to borrow from her from the bus fare home, and this stops him having intercourse which she then agrees having earlier backed out with the fear of what would happen if she became pregnant, something which today’s generation do not need to have, but then we did not know of HIV and AIDS.
As I read on I realise this book is an extension of Down and Out in Paris and London, and what happens when the dispossessed come into money, they immediately spend it on food, drink, cigarettes and on a woman for sex. In this instance he takes Rosemary and the friend to the man’s favourite Italian restaurant which sounds possible Quo Vadis in Soho, a few doors away from the post war Sunset Strip and where he orders not one but two bottles of Asti Spumante rather than Champagne. I am with him on the Asti vis a vis the champagne, although also used to drink champagne occasionally.
As he gets drunk he wants her and gets her to leave quickly and when he attempts to take her in some back alley she slaps his face and goes off alone. He rejoins the man and they go to a pub where he starts to drink quarts in German style pots and then picks up two tarts, but when he gets one into a hotel room he cannot perform. He ends up drunk in the street and in the hands of the police he hits the sergeant but waking up he remembers nothing of what happened. Fortunately he is likely to be given a choice at court between a fine and imprisonment, avoiding the teetotal magistrates who would have sent him straight to prison for a month.
He loses his job when his court appearance is reported in the local paper and he dismays Rosemary by refusing to let her attempt to get his job back at the advertising firm. He moves to squalid bug fested rooms but where at least you can be yourself although he is horrified when the landlady produces a dying Aspidistra plant which he regards as the great symbol of suburban existence. He takes a job at another bookstore on reduces wages where he is put in charge of a new two penny dread full’s lending library where the books are mass produced at four a year per author designed to titillate the masses which television today fulfils and aspects of the internet. Rosemary and his friend attempt to persuade him against the move because they and he knows it will stifle his creative abilities and so it does. Eventually after her efforts have failed Rosemary more out of pity than desire offers herself to her and in a cold miserable room they have loveless and passionless sex which satisfies neither and disappoints both.
Then inevitably, because without the inevitable there would be now story, no book Rosemary is pregnant and lets him know and keeps saying she is not putting any pressures for him to decide what to do. The idea of an abortion horrifies him so they get married, in a small sad civil wedding after which they return by taxi paid by the friend to their knew small suburban home and for the anti hero to take the job at the advertising company where he does well and contemplates bringing up a child with wife staying home to look after on £4.10 a week compared to he £1.30 at the penny dreadfuls, He flushes away the manuscript of his unfinished monumental poetical work and stuns his wife by insisting they need an Aspidistra plant to show off to the neighbours at the front window. One of Gracie Fields popular songs was Biggest Aspidistra in the World.
There is a brief reference to socialism earlier in the book when a friend attempts to get him to read Marx but his central character is not really, but in his writing and in sex. I believe the book accurately depicts his mind set towards women and marriage at that time
Eric Blair had friends who were in the Independent Labour Party and they helped him to move accommodation to Parliament Hill. His landlady was studying for a master’s degree in psychology and held a party for some of her fellow student one of whom was Eileen O’Shaughnessy. There has been one film released in 1997 which I have not seen staring Helena Bonham Carter who does not immediately strike me as Rosemary and Richard E Grant, a possible anti hero.
Eileen was born in South Shields , attending the Sunderland Church High School from where she gained a place at St High’s Oxford University to read English and where one of her tutors was Tolkien, the author of the Hobbit and Lords of the Rings. She had a succession of diverse jobs at a girl Boarding School, as a reader for Dame Elizabeth Cadbury, as a secretary and also open and closed an office for secretarial and typing work in Victoria Street London. A road I know well from when I worked in the area for two years when I left school. She did some free lance journalism and help her brother proof reading his scientific papers and books.
Her father according to Wikipedia was a thoracic surgeon who she described as a natural fascist, a term which some on the left tend to apply to anyone right of centre, and therefore treated as an observation on him with caution. However in an article written in Guardian in 2005, Blair’s biographer D J Taylor he says her father worked for Customs and Excise and after sending him an email to clarify I read further that it was her brother the Thoracic surgeon.
That she was 29 an unmarried when she met Blair is interesting and that he proposed three weeks within meeting and she accepted on his second attempt and they were married at Wallington ( my Wallington), but another in Hertfordshire the following Summer where they had a small cottage. In the BBC programme drama called Loving yesterday afternoon the impression given is that Orwell pursued Eileen much as the anti hero pursued Rosemary although in this instance she responded more positively and although the Rosemary was education Eileen had been to Oxford and appears to have been a good intellectual match for Blair who appeared to long to find someone who was bright, sexually desirable and willing. That he has found a soul mate only adds to my query why did he go off to Spain.
After listening to the two hour long programmes on Orwell and the Civil War Homage to Catalonia I am still uncertain. However before then and before his marriage Victor Gollancz is reported to have suggested that Blair spend a short timer investigating social conditions in economically depressed England (Clancy Segal Weekend in Dinlock) some three decades later and no doubt someone else is doing the same now)
According to Wikipedia he stayed above a tripe shop in Wigan where in went into people homes, study health and social records at the library in February and then went to Sheffield and Barnsley, the latter I know well from have had child responsibilities for a year in the later , went down the Grimthorpe Colliery, listened to a Moseley Speech and to meetings of the Communist Party and also stayed with his sister in Headingley, which I know well from my visits to the cricket and from the year at Wakefield and Lofthouse down the road from Leeds and also visited the Bronte Parsonage at Haworth, something have done over a decade ago. The book was not published until the following year in 1937 but attracted the attention of Special branch who kept him under observation for 12 years until the publication of 1984. I must read the book and will therefore write separately postponing yet again the important experiences in Spain.
* 1. The non-violent protests of civil rights activists and anti-nuclear campaigners during the 1960s helped to redefine Western politics. But where did they come from? Sean Scalmer uncovers their history in an earlier generation's intense struggles to understand and emulate the activities of Mahatma Gandhi. He shows how Gandhi's non-violent protests were the subject of widespread discussion and debate in the USA and UK for several decades. Though at first misrepresented by Western newspapers, they were patiently described and clarified by a devoted group of cosmopolitan advocates. Small groups of Westerners experimented with Gandhi an techniques in virtual anonymity and then, on the cusp of the 1960s, brought these methods to a wider audience. The swelling protests of later years increasingly abandoned the spirit of non-violence, and the central significance of Gandhi and his supporters has therefore been forgotten. This book recovers this tradition, charts its transformation, and ponders its abiding significance.
No comments:
Post a Comment