The Heart of the Matter

George Orwell and Fatherhood: Part Three

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Orwell as a Father: Confounding All Expectations

Orwell had long expressed his wish to become a father. For instance, in April 1940, when his friends Rayner and Margaret Heppenstall celebrated the birth of a daughter, he said: ‘What a wonderful thing to have a kid of one’s own. I’ve always wanted one’ (Meyers 2000: 227). But by 1944, after eight years of marriage to Eileen O’Shaughnessy, it became clear that there were not able to have a child of their own. ‘Orwell believed he was biologically sterile, though he never actually took the test which he thought would be “disgusting”. He had a similar distaste for condoms and seems not to have used them’ (ibid). Eileen, exhausted by ill health and looking after Orwell, was reluctant to become a parent. But, she eventually succumbed to his persistence – and in June 1944, after Gwen O’Shaughnessy was told by her doctor partner that a child had become available, they adopted Richard Robertson, on 14 May (Topp 2020: 377). Both parents were thrilled with their baby whom they named Richard Horatio Blair.

Yet soon afterwards, in February 1945, Orwell set off to the Continent to report on the final days of the Second World War for his friend, David Astor’s Observer – and Manchester Evening News (MEN). As Sylvia Topp comments perceptively on the complex emotional strands in the relationship:

‘Once again, just as he had interrupted his joyful marriage after six months to fight in Spain [in December 1936], he abruptly left alone at home the son he loved and the wife who had newly dedicated herself to him, while he followed the retreating German troops, an activity he knew to be extremely dangerous. … Orwell must have realised on some level how serious ill Eileen was. He knew she often spent days in bed and was getting weaker. But she continued to refuse to admit to herself, let alone tell him, that she needed him at home. Perhaps she was afraid he would reject her wishes even if she did ask him to stay (ibid: 393).

There is another side to the story. In September 1944, Orwell visited the Scottish island of Jura which he began to imagine as a home for his new family far away from the demands of journalism and London. W. J. West (1992: 122-124) suggests that the main motive for Orwell taking on the assignment was to earn a ‘large lump sum’ to help pay for this move. Davison records (1996: 472) that Orwell earned £500 (£100 a month) from the Observer for his assignment. But at £35 an article, he suggests, this was not particularly large. The need for money also appeared to be behind Orwell’s links with the MEN. John Beavan, London editor of the Manchester Guardian, told Fyvel that after adopting Richard, Orwell had declared his need for a regular income and so Beavan had arranged a weekly book-reviewing assignment for the MEN, the Manchester Guardian’s popular sister paper (Fyvel 1982: 128-129). Moreover, Orwell could well have been on some kind of intelligence mission for Astor – which he clearly considered crucial in the country’s fight against Nazi Germany (Keeble 2001). Tragically, while Orwell was away on the Continent, Eileen died on the operating table at a Newcastle hospital, aged just 39. Orwell was left a widow – in constant search of a woman to join him and look after little Richard.

Yet, much to the surprise of his friends, Orwell proved to be a remarkably affectionate, devoted and hands-on father. As Bernard Crick comments (1980: 464): ‘… he mastered the domestic arts of fatherhood with skill and pleasure.’ For Christmas 1945, he spent time with Arthur and Mamaime Koestler at their farm house near Blaenau Ffestiniog in Merionethshire not far from Bertrand Russell’s home. ‘There were long walks and talks that Christmas. Orwell would carry Richard along on his hip and Celia Kirwan [then separated from her husband and seeking a divorce] noticed how competently he coped with the little boy, bathing and changing him as if to the manner born, relaxed and unanxious about him – practical abilities very unusual in fathers of his generation’ (ibid: 483). Michael Scammell comments on this same gathering in his biography of Koestler (2009: 265):

At the Christmas gathering in Wales Celia Paget and Mamaine Koestler were both ‘impressed by the skilful way he carried Richard on his hip and bathed and changed him with total confidence. Koestler was less enamoured of the baby who drove him to distraction by clambering over him in smelly diapers, then crawling about the house and then turning everything upside down. He felt that Orwell was too lenient with the child. But when the baby woke one morning while the exhausted Orwell was trying to sleep (he and the baby shared a room), Koestler spent an entire hour making faces through the bars of Richard’s cot so Orwell could get some rest.

Biographer D. J. Taylor comments (2003: 361):

Orwell’s treatment of Richard seemed to combine lavish affection with comical cack-handedness. He asked Mary Fyvel if she would like to watch Richard have his bath. Mary suggested it would be a good idea to close the bathroom window which was admitting freezing January air. Orwell agreed enthusiastically. The bath over, he picked up Richard, draped him – undried – in a flimsy towel and carried him off along the icy passage to the sitting room. Again, advice on the correct procedure was gratefully received. … Orwell accepted compliments on his upbringing with suitable gravity. ‘Yes. You see I’ve always been good with animals.’

And Orwell’s great friend David Astor, later editor of the Observer, commented, when I interviewed him at his London home in 2000, just a year before he died: ‘I saw him bath Richard with the greatest care but with a cigarette in his mouth’ (Keeble 2020b: 41).

Photograph taken by George Orwell’s friend Vernon Richards

Orwell’s relaxed intimacy with his son and clear enjoyment of being a father is captured beautifully in the photographs taken of them together in Islington, north London, by the anarchist Vernon Richards (1998: 9-14). Born Vero Ricchioni, the son of a leading Italian anarchist, he married Marie Louise Berneri, daughter of an anarchist leader murdered by the communists in Spain. In one photograph, Richard sits on Orwell’s lap as his shoe laces are being done; in others, Orwell is pushing his son in a pram down a London street with a look of quiet contentment on his face.

Richard Blair, now retired and Patron of The Orwell Society, sums up: ‘My father was completely devoted to me. When Eileen died, he really cared for me, which was very rare at that time. He fed me, changed my clothes and nappies, he gave me baths: most fathers at that time never did that sort of thing’ (2019).

Conclusion

This essay has highlighted the significance of fatherhood in both Orwell’s life and writings. Most commentators have placed the reconciliation between father and son to the late 1930s – yet there is considerable evidence to suggest it began much earlier. Richard Blair tends to be considered a dull and grumpy old man. His courage in volunteering for the army in 1917 when he was 60 has not been sufficiently acknowledged – nor has his understandable change of personality once he relaxed into retirement in the Suffolk coastal resort of Southwold. The extraordinary courage that Orwell showed throughout his life together with his constant, quirky desire to surprise and confound expectations may well have been traits he inherited from his father. The essay also shows how fatherhood remains a constant preoccupation in Orwell’s novels – though it has been downplayed in the academic analyses to date. Finally, Orwell, in demonstrating such intimate and constant devotion to his son, Richard, particularly as they lived the ‘simple life’ in the remote house, Barnhill, on the Scottish island of Jura, proved himself to be a ‘New Man’ well before the term was coined.

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References

Blair, Richard (2019) George Orwell today, franceculture.fr, 4 October. Available online at https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/linvite-des-matins/george-orwell-au-present. Translation from the French by the author

Bowker, Gordon (2003) George Orwell, London: Little, Brown

Buddicom, Jacintha (2006 [1974]) Eric & Us, Chichester: Finlay Publisher, with a postscript by Dione Venables

Davison, Peter (1996) George Orwell: A Literary Life, Basingstoke: Macmillan

Davison, Peter (1998) The Complete Works of George Orwell, 20 Volumes, London: Secker & Warburg

Crick, Bernard (1980) George Orwell: A Life, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin

Fyvel, T. R. (1982) George Orwell: A Personal Memoir, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Hurst, L. J. (2019) Neither lions nor donkeys: Richard Walmesley Blair and the mules, Orwell Society Journal, No. 14, Spring pp 20-23

Keeble, Richard (2001) George Orwell as a war correspondent: A reassessment, Journalism Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3 pp 393-406

Keeble, Richard Lance (2020a) Orwell and dress: The naked truth?, George Orwell Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 pp 78-94

Keeble, Richard Lance (2020b) George Orwell, the Secret State and the Making of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bury St Edmunds: Abramis

Meyers, Jeffrey (2000) George Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation, New York and London: W. W. Norton

Orwell, George (1976 [1935]) A Clergyman’s Daughter, in Animal Farm and Other Novels, London: Secker & Warburg/Octopus pp 255-425

Orwell, George (1976 [1939]) Coming Up For Air, in Animal Farm and Other Novels, London: Secker & Warburg/Octopus pp 431-471

Orwell, George (2000 [1949]) Nineteen Eighty-Four, London: Penguin, with an introduction by Thomas Pynchon

Orwell, George (1970 [1946]) ‘Why I Write’, Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1: An Age Like This, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin pp 23-30; originally published in Gangrel, No. 4, summer

Richards, Vernon (1998) Orwell the humanist, George Orwell at Home (And Among the Anarchists), London: Freedom Press pp 9-14

Scammell, Michael (2009) Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic, New York: Random House

Stansky, Peter and Abrahams, William (1921) The Unknown Orwell, London: Constable

Sutherland, John (2016) Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography, London: Reaktion Books

Taylor, D. J. (2003) Orwell: The Life, London: Chatto & Windus

Topp, Sylvia (2020) Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, London: Unbound

West, W. J. (1992) The Larger Evils: Nineteen Eighty-Four – The Truth Behind the Satire, Edinburgh: Canongate Press

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Richard Lance Keeble is the out-going chair of The Orwell Society.