The Third Bullett

Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance.
Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.
(Ian Fleming, Goldfinger)

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In George Orwell’s 1936 novel Keep The Aspidistra Flying, set in 1934 and 1935, protagonist Gordon Comstock works with words. A minor poet, he has resigned as an advertising copywriter and has a job in a bookshop as the book begins. He feels his future is already behind him as he gazes at the bookshop shelves:

Mice, by Gordon Comstock; a sneaky little foolscap octavo, price three and sixpence but now reduced to a bob. Of the thirteen B.F.s who had reviewed it (and The Times Lit. Supp. had declared that it showed ‘exceptional promise’) not one had seen the none too subtle joke of that title. And in the two years he had been at McKechnie’s bookshop, not a single customer, not a single one, had ever taken Mice out of its shelf.

There are thirteen references to Mice in the novel, and its significance increases and decreases as Comstock’s spirits rise and fall. A work-in-progress that never seems to progress, London Pleasures, serves as his city on the hill. For instance, compare

Gordon had been at the shop about a month when Mice was published. No less than thirteen papers reviewed it! And The Times Lit. Supp. said that it showed ‘exceptional promise’. It was not till months later that he realized what a hopeless failure Mice had really been.

with:

He was a poet. Gordon Comstock, author of Mice. Even in London Pleasures he once again believed.

Extraordinarily, Orwell had given his protagonist the authorship of an existing book of poetry. Mice & Other Poems by Gerald Bullett, With A General Note by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch had been published at a price of a florin (two shillings: ten new pence) by the Cambridge publisher Perkin Warbeck in January 1921. In his Note Quiller Couch said that this collection was ‘… meant to preface a series of small volumes of verse by young writers, mostly Cambridge men.’ By ‘men’ ‘Q’ (the pseudonym under which Quiller Couch frequently published) meant undergraduates, as the other two volumes listed with Mice were Home-Made Verses By D. B. Haseler and R. H. D’Elboux, and Laughing Gas And Other Poems by Marguerite Few.

Gerald Bullett was a decade older than Orwell. He had been born in 1893, graduated from Jesus College, Cambridge, and already published one book through a much larger publisher, Constable, The Progress of Kay, A Series of Glimpses in 1916. By the time that Orwell wrote Keep The Aspidistra Flying, Bullett had written more than ten titles in various genres, including a collaboration with J. B. Priestley, I’ll Tell You Everything (1932).

Orwell’s publisher Victor Gollancz and his editor Norman Collins demanded serious changes to the products named in Keep The Aspidistra Flying, causing Orwell great difficulties, yet they never suggested that he should make Gordon Comstock the author of a fictional book: the reference to a real collection, Mice, was allowed to stand.

In April 1940 Orwell wrote a biographical outline for an American reference book, and included a paragraph on his proposed future work. He wrote staccato:

Am not at the moment writing a novel, chiefly owing to upsets caused by the war. But I am projecting a long novel in three parts, to be called either The Lion and the Unicorn or The Quick and the Dead, and hope to produce the first part by some time in 1941.

Professors Peter Davison and Bernard Crick have reported that Orwell left a notebook with two completely separate sets of pages of notes (but no plot or character lists) for the two novels, The Lion and the Unicorn and The Quick and the Dead. Within a year Orwell had used the first title for his non-fiction work on the progress of the World War. The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius was the first of the Searchlight Books series edited by Orwell and Tosco Fyvel. No book appeared with the second title. That is to say, no book from Orwell’s pen – the same Gerald Bullett had already published a novel with that title in 1933.

In 1945, Orwell for a time turned away from fiction to write, even to write about writing. He published ‘Politics and the English Language’ in 1946, in which he said:

I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

‘I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’

Orwell looked closely at his example and concluded:

The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague.

It was a very good phrase. In fact, Gerald Bullett had used it as the sub-title of another his books, The Snare of the Fowler: A Tragedy of Time and Chance, in 1936.

On the 30^th August 1941 the Empire Talks Director at the BBC wrote about his new staff member:

It seems to me that the arrival of Mr. George Orwell should synchronise with the responsibility being centralised for all talks in English which go out in both the Red and Green networks in the Eastern Service.

And concluded,

I think, incidentally, that Gerald Bullett could probably be of considerable help to him over his literary talks and I would feel much happier about the Service if both Mr. [Anthony] Weymouth and Mr. Bullett, who have no overseas experience, were working in far closer cooperation with people who have that experience.

It seems that Orwell worked for the next two years with both Bullett and Weymouth, as letters and memoranda exist showing them making arrangements for broadcasts and speakers on each others’ behalves. At one point Weymouth had to stand in for Orwell over several weeks as Orwell suffered one of his severe bronchitic attacks. Whether Weymouth knew what Orwell had written in the early days of the war about his published diary is unknown:

his wartime diary is worth glancing through, but it is mostly gossip of the lightest kind. And, considering what this war is going to demand in the way of sacrifices, it is rather dismaying to find a man with a son at Eton remarking that “large incomes are a thing of the past”.

George Orwell never broadcast on the Eastern Service under that name. He was Eric Blair. Weymouth seems to have been known only under that name, though it was a pseudonym: he was a Harley Street doctor specialising in neurology, the endocrine glands and the new science of hormones in his peacetime life; his name was Ivo Geikie-Cobb. Gerald Bullett, meanwhile, seems to have been known by that name and not by his occasional pen-name, Sebastian Fox. By the time Orwell met him at the BBC he had written books on English Fiction, on G K Chesterton, and on Germany. The two would have found they had many interests in common, yet the pressures of war may have meant that none of the three had any time for discussion of anything except the broadcasts they had planned. Whether Weymouth’s expertise on the growing association of pharmaceuticals and psychology (The Glands Of Destiny by him went through at least three editions; the third as late as 1947), for example, had any effect on the premises of Nineteen Eighty-Four we can only speculate.

Yet it remains a strange co-incidence that three phrases should link the work of George Orwell and Gerald Bullett. There may have been a connection: the university that Bullett reached and into which Orwell never matriculated, the university identified by Quiller Couch, Cambridge. In the notes for The Quick and the Dead Orwell left this couplet:

Oxford upstairs, eating all the cakes,
Cambridge downstairs, washing up the plates.

For many Etonians Cambridge was their university. Orwell’s school masters at Eton such as M R James and A S F Gow made that clear. Yet Orwell left that line associating Cambridge with his scullion days, Down and Out. Was it Gordon Comstock or Gerald Bullett at whom Orwell was driving when he wrote:

It was not till months later that he realized what a hopeless failure Mice had really been.

Did he intend a common identity? We may never know. Nor why.

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Note: Although asked in The Guardian’s Notes and Queries column, no one has identified ‘the none too subtle joke of that title [Mice]’.

Acknowledgements:

The Collected Works of George Orwell, edited by Professor Peter Davison

George Orwell: A Life, by Bernard Crick

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