Retracing the Steps of George Orwell

Richard Lance Keeble reviews

Sur Les Traces de George Orwell, by Adrien Jaulmes

(Paris, Editions de Équateurs, 2019)

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Adrien Jaulmes, chief reporter at Le Figaro and award-winning war correspondent, bases his new book on a great journalistic idea: retrace the steps of George Orwell across the globe (at Eton, in Burma, in Paris, amongst the poor in the north of England, in Spain – and finally on the remote Scottish island of Jura) and see what remains in each of these places of his legacy.

The text is clearly aimed at a general newspaper readership who are expected to have little knowledge of Orwell – the man and writings. Thus, a considerable amount of time in this slender, fascinating text is given over in each chapter to reproducing sections from the celebrated works – ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, Burmese Days, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia and Nineteen Eighty-Four – and to spelling out the basic details of the biography.

In one of the best chapters, Jaulmes visits the sites where, in 1937, Orwell fought alongside the POUM militiamen against Franco’s fascist forces in Aragon, northern Spain. On the road from Saragossa, around 250 kilometres west of Barcelona, he spots a sign indicating ‘Ruta Orwell’ which leads to some reconstructed civil war trenches. Jaulmes speaks to Victor Pardo, journalist, historian and author of Orwell, Toma Café en Huesca (Orwell, a Coffee at Huesca). Pardo comments: ‘The Aragon front was important because it protected Barcelona even if it was not the most active region in the war. The Republicans wanted to take over the city of Huesca – but they never succeeded’ (p. 106-107). Many of Jaulmes’ comments on Orwell the man are perceptive. For instance, he writes: ‘Orwell was never as happy as when he was on the frontline. In England or in France, his attempts to make contact with people had most often been failures. Here, for the first time, he found himself totally accepted by his comrades. Among the volunteers, Spanish and foreign, no one cared about their social background. No one commented on his Old Etonian accent. England and its rigid class system seemed far away’ (pp 109-110).

Jaulmes next meets Miquel Berga, Professor of English Literature at the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, who tells him: ‘More than the war, the days of May [when he witnessed communist attempts to destroy the anarchists and Trotskyists in Barcelona] particularly marked Orwell. Both his politics and writings were transformed by this experience which influenced the rest of his work’ (p. 117).

Jaulmes even suggests (a little controversially) that O’Brien, who first befriends Winston Smith and then tortures him at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, is based in part on Georges Kopp, Orwell’s comrade and commander on the frontline.

In Barcelona, with the historian Nick Lloyd (spelled incorrectly with just one L), he sees that most of the décor of Orwell’s period remains intact: for instance, in a corner of Catalonia Square, the central telephone building (the focus of much of the fighting during the 1937 May days) is now occupied by the mobile telephone company, Movistar. The Hotel Colon of Orwell’s day is now a shop selling telephones and computers. Jaulmes comments: ‘The portraits of Lenin and Stalin and the revolutionary slogans which decorated the building during Orwell’s time have been replaced by an internationally recognised logo: in place of the red flags there is now the white apple of the famous American company’ (p. 121).

Walking down the Ramblas, he sees a plaque indicating the place where Andreas Nin, leader of the POUM, stood just before his arrest in June 1937. At No. 122, the Hotel Falcon no longer stands – replaced by a shop selling jeans. The Poliorama, where Orwell took up a roof-top position to observe the May days fighting, is now a venue for flamenco shows – and special authorisation is needed to climb to the roof. Next, at the Café Moka, often frequented by Orwell, a waiter says, a little embarrassed: ‘We are going to install a special “Orwell Room” in the basement, complete with books and portraits’ (p. 122).

Jaulmes reports: ‘In 1987, the town council decided to create an Orwell Square in the Gothic Quarter. Ironically, it was there where a few weeks later the city’s first surveillance camera was installed in anticipation of the Olympic Games’ (p. 123).

Earlier, following Orwell to the town of Katha in Burma (renamed Kyauktada in Burmese Days) where he was stationed in 1926 during his five years as an imperial policemen, Jaulmes meets Nyo Ko Naing in the Zone Cafe. A portrait of Orwell hangs on a wall close to television sets broadcasting a football match and a small altar dedicated to Buddha. Nyo Ko Naing has discovered a map of the town dating back to 1911 and a dozen of the buildings from that period remain standing. A large red-brick building is advertised as ‘Orwell’s building’, even though it was actually then occupied by the district commissioner, and Nyo Ko Naing has helped found the Katha Heritage Trust with the aim of transforming the building into a museum dedicated to Orwell. The wooden house occupied by the doctor and Indian friend of John Flory, Veraswami, still stands as does the Church of St Paul where, in the novel, Flory is publicly humiliated – but the Lackersteen’s home was destroyed in an earthquake in 1986 (p. 56).

Jaulmes goes on to meet Thurein Win, the Burmese translator of Orwell’s works, who argues that those five years as an imperial policeman (1922-1927) actually inspired a linked trilogy about oppression: Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (p. 61).

In a chapter titled ‘Le Robinson de Jura’, Jaulmes narrates his journey, along with members of the Orwell Society, to the remote farmhouse, Barnhill, on the Scottish island where Orwell bashed out Nineteen Eighty-Four in his dying days (I was actually on that very same trip). He writes: ‘The house has hardly changed since Orwell’s days. The rooms are small and rural. The narrow windows look out on to the surrounding fields or the sea. … the chipped earthenware bathtub is the same one as used by Orwell. … The only heat is provided by pipes from the coal stove’ (pp 130-131). Jamie Fletcher, a descendant of the family which let the house to Orwell, and his wife, Damaris (known as Mimsie), continue to rent it out to holiday-makers from time to time. Mimsie says she tries to dissuade folk from coming: ‘I like to warn visitors: some of them after all can be a little put off by the conditions of life here’ (p. 131).

Jamie, who grew up on Jura, was too young to retain any memory of Orwell but he remembers well his sister Avril, who came to the island to help look after his young son, Richard. ‘I was a little afraid of her; she even resembled him physically: moustache included…’ (p. 132). The Orwell Society members, led by Richard – now retired – and Quentin Kopp, son of Orwell’s commander in the Spanish civil war, are described as being ‘completely transported on visiting the rooms once inhabited by their Great Hero’. And Jaulmes watches as they explore every nook and touch the very table where Orwell wrote his masterpiece ‘as if these places had conserved something of the spirit of the master’ (p. 134). But Jaulmes does reproduce uncritically the myth that Orwell chose the title Nineteen Eighty-Four simply by reversing the order of the last two numbers in 1948 (p. 139). It is more likely that Orwell used the title of a poem written by his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, celebrating the 50th anniversary of her school in Sunderland in 1934 – and looking ahead another 50 years.

For his early chapter on Eton, Jaulmes speaks to Alex Renton, author of Stiff Upper Lip, a book highly critical of public schools. But Renton moderates his criticisms for Eton: ‘If the school trains its pupils for the establishment, it also produces a certain number of independent spirits. An Etonian will tend to say that if the majority think one way, he will think differently. In this sense, Orwell was a perfect product of the school’ (p. 22). Renton has done much to expose bravely the high levels of sexual abuse at private schools. In 2014, for instance, he wrote a personal memoir in the Guardian of his time at Ashdown House in the early 1970s where he suffered appalling sexual abuse from a staff member – and reported the findings by a Times investigation of a ‘surge in criminal prosecutions’ at 130 private schools, 20 of them feeders to Eton. Would it not have been interesting to discuss that with Renton?

Jaulmes rightly says that Orwell remained an Old Etonian to the very end (p. 32). And leaves it at that. Would it not have been good to mention, briefly, all the Old Etonians who played such crucial roles throughout Orwell’s life: such as Andrew Gow, Richard Rees, L. H. Myers, Cyril Connolly and David Astor?

The final chapter considers Orwell’s legacy today – in particular his recent appropriation by intellectuals of the political Right in France (of particular interest to readers of Le Figaro). The journalist Ben Judah takes the opportunity to take a swipe (somewhat gratuitously) at Orwell and the Left in general for their allegedly anti-Jewish prejudices (p. 152). But Jaulmes ends with a quote from Quentin Kopp which stresses Orwell’s ‘clear language and his great honesty’: ‘He was open to the facts and never hesitated to change his opinion, a quality which is too little evident today’ (p. 153).

• All the translations from the original French are by the author.
• Richard Lance Keeble is chair of The Orwell Society. His next book, Journalism Beyond Orwell, a collection of his essays on a range of themes (literary journalism, war and peace, the secret state and Orwell) is to be published by Routledge in February.

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Uploaded 7 December 2019