Out From the Shadows

I confess that in the first instance I was slightly daunted by the idea of tackling Sylvia Topp’s long-awaited biography of Eileen. Having read all the Orwell biographies, and picked over various collections of letters, including the Complete Works over the past twenty-or-so years, I was more than a little perplexed about what Eileen might offer that we didn’t already know. The result quite astounded me – for not only do we gain a much richer understanding of the positive impact that Eileen had on Orwell’s writing, we also get a unique perspective of Orwell through the eyes of his wife and her friends that makes us think a little more about, or even to reassess the man that we thought we knew.

I often detect from certain biographies that the process of researching the subject matter can have a habit of stretching across a significant number of years. Not long after Sylvia joined the Orwell Society in 2012 it became known among members that she had begun work on a biography of Eileen – a revelation that I remember aroused much enthusiasm among the committee – including our Patron Richard Blair (Orwell and Eileen’s adopted son) who regarded it as something long overdue. As editor of the Society Journal I was fortunate enough to be allowed to publish a chapter from the work in progress in 2016 under the title Orwell in Love. The publication finally in March of this year of the completed work rests as an indication of the depth of research undertaken by Sylvia in her determination to complete the project with no stone left unturned!

Right from the early chapters we get an indication of how deep the author was prepared to dig with very concise details of the family background, followed by a couple of chapters that deal with Eileen’s education, including numerous school and university reports. These reports represent a far more important component to the story than previous reviewers would have us believe in that they illuminate some favourable attributes in Eileen Blair that her future husband would come to value – in particular her good sense of prose-style. Having failed to attain the first at Oxford that she so coveted, Eileen worked as a teacher, a shorthand typist and reader to an almost blind, ageing wealthy widow, before enrolling for a Psychology MA at University College in 1934 run by the influential educational psychologist Sir Cyril Burt. This was indeed a revelation, for when I myself studied Child Psychology some sixty-five years later, that same Cyril Burt, whose research lent support to the eleven-plus examination on the premise that children inherited IQ and subsequently a pre-set level of intelligence, had been completely discredited when it was discovered that his research was both flawed and falsified.

It was during the second term of her Psychology course in the Spring of 1935 that she met Orwell at a party in Hampstead. Shortly after their first meeting, Orwell proclaimed to his friend that she was ‘the type of girl he would like to marry’, and after a whirlwind courtship, and in typical defiance of convention, they set off together on the morning of their wedding with Orwell carrying her from the gateway to the church door.. The chapters dealing with their first months of wedded bliss give us a masterfully detailed account of the rustic cottage they chose for their first home and of the trials and struggles of their everyday life in Wallington. It often seems like they could not have chosen a more unsuitable abode for Orwell’s awkward 6ft 4ins frame. Having studied the house intensely, Ms Topp appears to have cleverly viewed the interior from Orwell’s perspective, highlighting the low ceilings and doors and the tiny original staircase – ‘One can easily imagine Orwell’s head popping through the opening to the upper floor before he’d taken his first step’.

(Wallington  church, where Eric Blair married Eileen O’Shaughnessy)

I also think it is here that we learn a little bit more about Orwell’s personality that we didn’t know before. From my reading, I’m left with the impression that certain personality traits of his were far more marked than I first imagined. We knew he was very particular about everything culinary from his work – for insistence he left us his nine-stage instructions on how ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’ should be made, and his famous essay ‘In Defence of English Cooking’ he betrays a firm belief that the beef should always be roasted with the potatoes under it. Eileen had to be schooled into conformity with his stubborn rigidity about meal preparation. This went beyond an insistence that the marmalade should always be served in a jam dish – to having her pick through the stewed-apple to ensure there was no core in his favourite apple-meringue pie – his enjoyment of which was always confirmed by accompanying noises while he ate. It wasn’t only Eileen who suffered – her friends too were additionally drilled into having to adapt to his ‘wall of obstinacy’ regarding his taste, his schedule and the measure of discomfort that he forced upon himself and his wife with his ‘masochistic cottage life’. One of Eileen’s friends remembers his insistence that she should drink strong black beer, while ignoring her request for lager. Another remembers sleeping on a thin mattress in the freezing cold spare room, only to be woken at 6.30 by the loud alarm set for the feeding of the hens that carried through the whole house even on Sundays – loud enough ‘to nearly make you jump out of your skin’. When she complained, his ‘deadpan explanation’ was simply that ‘The hens don’t know it’s Sunday’. The smoke belching from the downstairs fireplace that would have had a terrible effect on Orwell’s delicate lungs, was just another added discomfort for her to look forward to.

Another thing that we learn about Orwell through Eileen’s associates concerns his persistence in perusing women for the purpose of extra-marital relations. Orwell never really intended to remain faithful to Eileen during their married life, and upon discovering that Eileen was likely to have also had a fling with his Platoon Commander Georges Kopp in Spain, he thereafter considered their association to have been an open marriage; even her best friend Lydia Jackson ultimately became a willing recipient of his advances. This is also I think the first book to have furthered an image of Orwell having actually been attractive to women. By all accounts he almost always looked unkempt with a dewy nose and with deep creases down the side of his face; his clothes never seemed to hang right, he was awkward looking and gangly – and now we learn that there was something about his gaunt and shaggy ‘John the Baptist’ figure that made him strangely ‘irresistible’ to women at parties. The fact that he was also a published author (albeit little-known) merely added to their fascination.

A critical aim of the book, something I think Sylvia Topp succeeds very well in achieving, is to illuminate Eileen’s positive influence on Orwell’s work, and we do not have to read too far into the book before this starts to become clear. He had been in the process of writing his third novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying during his early courtship with Eileen, and friends have since noted that the character of Rosemary has clearly been endowed with a measure of Eileen’s personality. Observations of the interplay between the couple in the early days of their association reinforce the similarities between Gordon and Rosemary in the novel, and it is thought to be probable that she helped him to develop other characters in the novel. It is well known that later in his career as a writer he came to regard her as someone he could trust to oversee his work and to make whatever changes were required by publishers at times when he couldn’t be around. She dealt with all the required amendments to The Road to Wigan Pier, and when Homage to Catalonia was finished, many scholars praised Eileen’s obvious influence, and yet she never received any recognition. The claim is also made that Eileen had a much stronger belief in Orwell’s talent than he had in himself.

When Orwell and Eileen returned from Spain, having fled a Communist witch-hunt of the Trotskyist Militia with whom Orwell had fought, the couple relocated to French Morocco on the recommendation of her surgeon brother in an effort to improve his health. Both came to regard the whole exercise as a complete waste of time, except for the writing of his fourth novel Coming up for Air. Eileen’s influence is again evident in its being the first book of Orwell’s to receive excellent reviews. Thereafter when war broke out, the death of her brother Eric at Dunkirk severely damaged her spirit – she made it known to friends that she no longer cared whether she lived or died, leaving Orwell feeling powerless and inadequate in the face of her grief. Having relocated to London, each found themselves in very frustrating jobs – Orwell broadcasting to India for the BBC which he came to regard as two wasted years, and Eileen scriptwriting for radio programmes for the Ministry of Food including a regular broadcast called ‘The Kitchen Front’. There is much surviving material on the inter-office rivalries from this period of Eileen’s life that some might find tiresome, although it would be valuable material to anyone with a particular interest in this aspect of the Home Front. Upon leaving the BBC Orwell took on the Literary Editorship of Tribune and became ‘smothered under journalism’ for much of the remainder of the war.

Under pressure from Eileen to get on with writing another book, Orwell began work on an idea he had been thinking about for some time – ‘A little squib that might amuse you’ he told a friend. Orwell would read parts of what became Animal Farm to Eileen in bed, and she would cut in with enthusiastic suggestions on how it could be improved. Upon publication, it was clear to friends and commentators that Animal Farm contained touches of Eileen’s humour and it was clearly something she had collaborated on. Many examples are given of personality traits in the animals that Eileen might have suggested given her knowledge of psychology. Having trolled through much of Orwell’s rather messy archive material, I remember the surviving completed manuscript for Animal Farm being as clean and as beautifully typed as Sylvia suggests – almost certainly by Eileen.

Regrettably, because of the difficulties explained in the book over finding a publisher for Animal Farm, Eileen never got to enjoy, either seeing her contribution in print, nor the financial security that it brought them. She died under anaesthetic during a minor operation at the age of just thirty-nine. It was additionally tragic, as the couple had adopted their son Richard just over nine months earlier, and she was discovering a new happiness in her role as a mother following all the grief and discomfort in her life. Having thrown himself into his work again almost immediately, Orwell clearly did suffer the grief of her loss more deeply than previous biographers would have us believe, be it in his own way without giving too much away. It does seem true that Orwell seldom came across as particularly appreciative or empathetic on the subject of Eileen before, or even after her death – particularly as he habitually referred to her as having been ‘Not a bad old stick’ to his friends. It was just his way.

If there was one thing I would like to have seen included in the work it would have been a paragraph or two about her lasting influence on the remainder of Orwell’s work, in particular how much her knowledge of experimental or behavioural psychology might have rubbed off on him in the creation of his final novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some years ago I entered into a disagreement with Orwell’s first biographer Sir Bernard Crick in that I believed the novel showed greater psychological understanding, rather than sociological as he had claimed in his book George Orwell – A Life. I argued the case that Orwell’s final novel reveals a very deep level of psychological imagination – after all, what is Oceania if not a huge working laboratory wherein a diet of deceptive illusions and lies is continually fed to outer-party members (those whose consciousness has been arrested almost from birth and conditioned only to serve and to love Big Brother)? Have not all human emotions, feelings, desires and motivations been manipulated in accordance with scientifically tested principles? For me the ‘phantasmagoric effect’ created by Orwell in his final novel is something as intensely psychological as the human behaviour that it controls, and I cannot help but think Eileen had something to do with that.

Regardless of that minor observation, I wholeheartedly congratulate Sylvia on a remarkably well researched contribution to the study of all things Orwell, and in particular for highlighting just how important Eileen was to his development as a writer. She has indeed brought Eileen out of the shadows, and my enjoyment of this biography is confirmed to me by the fact that I completed the book inside three absorbing days.

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Eileen: The Making of George Orwell by Sylvia Topp (Unbound, ISBN-13: 9781783527083)

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Orwell Society member Ron Bateman is the editor of Rifleman of the Raj: A Soldier’s Journal of British India (2018).