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D. J. Taylor, "Orwell: The New Life" (Pegasus Books, 2023)
00:46:29
An interview with T. J. Taylor
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Good day. Welcome to New Books in History, a podcast channel, New Books Network. My name is Dr. Charles Coutil of the Royal Historical Society. I'm a host on the channel. And today we are pleased and indeed honored to have with us master literary critic and novelist D.J. taylor. D.J. taylor is the author of a good number of, well, very well received books, including the Lost Girls, the Prose Factory, the Bright Young Things, and Orwell A Life, which won the prestigious White Bread Award. And today we are discussing his latest book, Orwell the New Life, published by Pegasus books. Welcome, D.J. taylor.
- [01:48]
C
It's very good to be with you.
- [01:49]
B
Why did you write this book?
- [01:51]
C
Ha. How long is the pleat of string? There are principally, there are three reasons for wanting to have another go at Orwell. One was the discovery of quite a large amount of new material. In the intervening period, two very substantial caches of letters came to light, which I was able to use. The second reason is that the number of people alive in the world who remember Orwell is dwindling rapidly. He died 73 years ago, and according to my calculations, there are only seven people left in the world viewing. So it's important to get them assembled. And the third reason, of course, is that biographies are necessarily snapshots of particular people at particular points in time. Written by other particular people and views change. And 20 years later, it seemed it'd be interesting to have another look at Orwell using some of different perspectives, perhaps from those used in the first attempt.
- [02:52]
B
What was Orwell's background on both sides of his family and who were his parents?
- [02:58]
C
That's very interesting because Orwell was always regarded, certainly in the UK as a quintessentially English writer, you know, whose fascination with various brands of Englishness is one of his strongest, strongest points. But in fact, Orwell had very little English blood at all. His father, Richard Blair, was a Lowland Scot from long generations of Scottish families. His mother was the daughter of a family of French builders from Bordeaux who migrated largely to Burma in the middle of the 19th century. And Sowell's background, I suppose, is somewhat different from the Persona that he liked to present to the world in his writings.
- [03:48]
B
How important was his family to Orwell and how close was he to his parents?
- [03:54]
C
Well, here that too is a fascinating question, because Orwell was very much a child of his time and his background. He described himself with a kind of a forensic precision that he brought to social arrangements as being, let me get this absolute. He described himself as being lower upper middle class, which meant that in terms of English class system, he was a gentleman. And although. And so his family, the key word that any of most of his friends use when describing the Blair family, because obviously his original name was Eric Arthur Blair before he began calling himself George Orwell. And. And the word that everybody seems to use is undemonstrative. And he got on very well with his family and they adored him while thinking him sort of rather odd and somewhat sort of detached from the world in which they knew. But it was one of those families in which very little was said. And so, for example, when Orwell came back from his period of serving as an Imperial policeman in Burma in 1927, when he came back and eventually announced to his parents that he wanted to be a writer, which of course was in sharp distinction to all the jobs and the kind of service that they'd ever done, they were horrified, but not very much was said about it. And so I think that his father, Richard Blair, although bitterly upset by his son throwing over at Imperial service, is supposed to have said that he was, quote, behaving like a dilettante, in other words, like a trifler, like an unserious person. Although I think they. He once, you know, he once very seriously asked of his friend Richard Rees, he said, you know, do you love your family? He implied it was very important that one did have these great reservoirs of affection for the people closest to you. But it was the kind of family in which so much was implied and unstated as to make it very difficult to interpret on the surface.
- [06:00]
B
How important was the Indian background for Orwell?
- [06:04]
C
I think it was very important because he. Not only did he. It sort of helped him towards his first choice of career in the Burma Police because his father had been an Indian civil servant for many years. His mother's family, as I've said, came from Burma and it pushed him towards working in the east, you know, in what was then a British. British imperial possession. Burma was part of the Indian Empire. But it also, according to his subsequent rationalization of it, it also pushed him towards the first things that he wrote about, because the first book that he. His first book published in 1933, of course, was down and out in Paris and London and all of explanation for the research that he took, going amongst the lowest of the low, pretending to be a tramp, working as a waiter in a Parisian hotel. His explanation to this was that he'd seen the exploitation of ordinary people in the British Empire when he worked in Burma. And so his mission, as he saw it, was to go native in his own country and see what social conditions were like down at the bottom of society when he came back to England and then went to France. So I think it was very. And his, you know, his interest and subsequent dislike of British imperialism. I think the scene to this was sown very, very early on and it was something to which he always returned. And a lot of the basis of his political thought, I think, was founded on his experience of serving the British empire in the 1920s in the East.
- [07:44]
B
Why did his parents, really, his mother, choose St Cyprian's School for Orwell?
- [07:51]
C
I think they chose it because they didn't know a great deal about the British educational system, but they knew that a fashionable prepar school, as they're called in England, but away into a prestigious public school, as they're called in England. And I think news of St Cyprian's, which is on the south coast near Brighton in England, was brought to them by Orwell's uncle Charles, his mother's brother, who was the secretary of a golf club down on the south coast. And it had the reputation of getting bright boys into leading public schools. And it was also in the case of Orwell, whose parents didn't have that much money, they were prepared to take him at half the regular fee on the ground. The Plausible ground that he would then win a scholarship to a major public school, which is what he did, which would then be a very good advertisement to the education they provided. So I think that's the reason he went to St Cyprian's.
- [08:45]
B
Was the portrait of the school painted in Orwell's essay? Such Such were the joys at all true?
- [08:51]
C
It's very difficult to say. Like much of what Orwell wrote, like much of what Orwell wrote about his own life, it's performative. I mean, Orwell is performing in public and he certainly, I think, believes it to be literally true. And I suppose all I can say is that I've researched, I've read many a memoir by boys who went to that school and I've read many a memoir by boys who went to other similar establishments in the early years of the 20th century and some of them liked their education and some of them didn't like it, but nobody at all ever wrote a their formative years with such undisguised fury and savagery and satire as Orwell did. Old verse of Cyprian and such. Such were the joys.
- [09:38]
B
How did Orwell find his time in Eden? And why did he, for lack of better expression, slack off while there?
- [09:46]
C
Well, I think I get the impression that although he was sort of. I get the impression that he quite enjoyed in Shepherd Eton and that he liked the comparative freedom that it allowed because he obviously he disliked St Cyprian so much that he wrote a 15,000 word essay about it. He writes virtually nothing about Eton at all and we know that he was actually quite interested in certain aspects of it. There's an annual cricket match between Eton and Harrow, one of the other leading English public schools, at Lords Cricket Ground every summer, and Orwell not only attended this, but seems to be mildly fixated on it and it's referred to in his diaries deep into the 1930s, there was obviously something there that I think appealed to him. As for why he didn't do any work, I think that he'd simply been. That the efforts required of him when he was at prep school to win that scholarship was such that when he arrived aged 13 at Eton and although the amount of sort of nose to the grindstone that prevailed at his prep school was not so. Not so present, at least you know, you were expected to work hard, but if you didn't, nobody was going to stand over you and beat you until you did. And I think probably Orwell was just grateful for the child not to have to work so hard when he was in his mid teens and he frankly sort of idled. I mean, this is a boy who at the age of 13 was one of the most brilliant classical scholars in England and yet who I think a year or two years later was coming bottom of his class at Latitude Greek, which was wholly unexpected for a boy of. And I think he just decided that it was just easier just to do the things that he wanted to do and not work so hard. Which of course completely stymied his chances of going to a major British university. I mean, according to his track record, Orwell should have proceeded to Oxford or Cambridge when he was 18 or 19, but he just hadn't done enough work to win the scholarship that would have been necessary to get it in there.
- [11:52]
B
Why did Orwell go to Burma as part of the Indian Imperial Police?
- [11:57]
C
Well, I think it's, again, it's to do with the family background. I mean it's sometimes seen, this departure to Burma is sometimes seen as a kind of dreadful exile. You know, sending a 19 year old boy 8,000 miles across the globe to this far flung and deeply remote and uncivilized part of the world. And yet, as Orwell pointed out in his application form to the India Office, you know, there was a long tradition of members of his family serving in the East. He had two, he had a grandmother and an aunt actually living in Burma at the time, you saw socially. So it wasn't really, it wasn't an exile. And there are, I think too that he may have had some kind of what we might call romantic vision of the east, because boys who were friends with his at school remember him talking about the east in this kind of sort of glowing Kipling esque terms. I wonder if that didn't have something to do with them. And interestingly, his friend Anthony Pole, who was a very shrewd observer of Orwell, remarked of the decision to go work in Burma that for all his brilliance and for all his astuteness, Orwell never really had much idea of what particular jobs consisted of. And so it was perfectly possible that he might have signed up for the Burma Police without really knowing what the job would have entailed.
- [13:14]
B
And how important was his experience in Burma to his future as a writer?
- [13:20]
C
Oh, very important. I mean, he produced two of his very. Two of his finest pieces of early reportage, which are the essays A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant. And it also of course gave him the whole of his first novel, Burmese days, published in 1935. So in terms of its formative influence on it, yes, Burma was very, very important.
- [13:44]
B
And why did he quit Berber and returned to the UK in 1927?
- [13:49]
C
Again, it's often assumed, I mean, if you're looking at his career in the run, it's assumed that he simply became disgusted with British imperialism. He was forced to serve and came home and simply repudiated it and came home. Now that's not entirely the case because he came home from Burma in 1927 because he was ill. He had dengue fever, which is a very nasty ticket born virus prevalent in the East. He came home to recover, had six months leave and although he then he'd had, you know, he was obviously having serious qualms about serving British imperialism at that point. But I don't think he made his mind up. And the other interesting thing too is that he came back with Burma, from Burma with an engagement ring which he'd intended to present to a girl, a woman called Jacintha Dullikum, whom he wanted to marry. And she wouldn't have him for various reasons. And I've often wondered what would have happened if she'd have said yes. Now my suspicion is that Orwell would. The married couple would have simply gone back to Burma because that was the only means he had of earning any money at that time. And I think he would have carried on serving the Raj. So it's not quite as clear cut, his decision to resign from the Burma police as it sometimes seems.
- [15:03]
B
Why did he decide to become a writer?
- [15:06]
C
Youthful literary imaginings, I think he'd always. Jacintha Balikim, who wrote a very interesting memoir of knowing him when he's in his teens, he always had this thing about wanting to be, quote, a famous author. And even at the age of sort of 13, he would have these immensely sort of imaginative conversations about, you know, when the time came for his collected works, what color would they be bound in this sort of thing. So I think the seeds of his literary imagination was sown very, very early on.
- [15:34]
B
How would you rate his reportage, his book down and out in Paris and London?
- [15:39]
C
How would I rate it? Oh, I think it's a fantastic book. It's wonderfully sharp and vivid and there are descriptions in it. One remembers as much as some of the great novels. There are ways obviously in which it's a first book, it's an apprentice work and you can see him. And he's also, I think, sometimes taking liberties with his material. Not simply writing, but I mean, all writers work up their material and, you know, nothing is ever quite written down as realistically as it Happened. But no, it's one of my favorite, I think one of the first few of his books that I read.
- [16:17]
B
And How Good Is Fiction was his book about Burmese Days?
- [16:22]
C
Well, it got a lot of critic. It got a lot of criticism at the time from people who'd served in Burma saying it was exaggerated and its portrait of the English colonialist was biased. The thing I want it, and it's a very gloomy, goomy. I mean, it's not giving too much away to say that Flory the hero commits suicide at the end to blows his brains out, but people often forget. There are two points I'd make about Burmese Day which I find fascinating and enhanced my enjoyment of it. One is that he was completely obsessed and overcome by the landscapes of Burber. He'd seen nothing like them in his life before. And this affects the prose style, which is very much more aesthetic than some of his later stuff, with immense, immensely imagined, disfigurative descriptions of the landscape. There's that aspect. The other thing that I like about it is actually very funny. It's very satirical and its portrait of the scheming Burmese magnate Yu Po Kim is very, very amusing, albeit it ends with tragic consequences for flories. So although it ends, it's a very gloomy book in lots of ways. In another way, it's a very savage, satirical book, which I always rather like.
- [17:30]
B
How good overall were the novels that he wrote after Burmese days in the 1930s and why did he refuse to have them reprinted later on?
- [17:39]
C
Well, this is always like they have all his books, not just his 30s novels. I mean, he even said in 1984 when he handed it in that it was a good idea, but he thought he mucked it up. But he particularly. Right, he particularly took against Clergyman's Daughter and keep the asterisk to Flying, which were the two next novels he wrote in the 1930s and as you say, he refused to have. Have them reprinted in a standard edition of his books published that began to be published just before he died. And in some way this is misplaced condemnation to me because Clergyman's Daughter, his second novel, was actually the first book novel of his that I read when I was about 13. And it had an extraordinary effect on me. I mean, I had no sort of emotional or connect. Connect or I had no literal social connection to the people in it. It's about a 20 something spinster who lives in a Suffolk rectory and loses her memory and goes on the road with a gang of tramps, just as Ord himself had done. And yet there's a directness about the style and a kind of immediacy and a vividness about the descriptions that appeal to me as a boy of 12 or 13 when I first read it and continues to do now. I mean, I suppose. I mean, it's not his greatest novel. It's quite transparently bits of his own autobiography stitched together to produce, you know, to produce a 250 page book. But it's got some. It also. The other fascinating thing about it to me is that it advertised as it first advertises what to me is a particular concern of Orwell's that shines through all his work and is also evident in 1984, which is Orwell's concern for what might be called the reservoirs of displaced religious sensibility floating around in the world. I mean, it's a novel, it's a rather old fashioned novel in some ways about losing your religious faith and what happens to you if you do so and what happens to a world in which people don't believe anymore. So it's a very important book in terms of Orwell's intellectual development.
- [19:45]
B
What was the background to his nonfiction book, the Road to Wigan?
- [19:48]
C
Pierre well, this is interesting. It was published in 1937 at a time when tours of the depressed. This was the time, the depression of the 1930s, when in certain towns and cities in the north of England, as much as a third of the adult male population would be unemployed. And Orwell went up there, I think simply as a journalist in search of a subject. I mean, it is sometimes seen as the first stirring, this political awakening. But to read the diaries that he wrote when he was up there, he doesn't seem to know very much about the political situation or the left wing politics in the north in the 1930s. And it's full of sympathy, it's full of empathy, it's full of, you know, he is generally distressed by what he sees and very sympathetic to the people he meets and outraged by the poor state of municipal housing up at least the night of northern towns that he goes to. And then there's a very another fascinating the second half of this very polemical sort of a response to the idea of socialism and left wing politics in the 1930s, where one of the things that Orwell exhibits, he doesn't really know very much about its subject as yet. So again, it's a formative book, it's a stepping stone on the way to which I think his real political awakening, which comes the following year when he goes to Spain and fights in the Spanish Civil War.
- [21:13]
B
Why did Oro decide to marry Eileen o' Shaughnessy and what was she like?
- [21:19]
C
Eileen is still that. There's been a whole, you know, a whole biography has been written of Eileen by a wonderful woman called Sylvia Topp who researched her life. And even at the end of it, and even having read such letters for 35, I still can't quite get my head around Eileen. Orwell was completely. Orwell decided he wanted to marry her at the Nighty Messa, you know, at a party in 1935. And her letters, which are all that really survive of her, are the most wonderful things. They're wonderfully witty. And the ones that survive are mostly turned to a friend of hers called Nora Miles. And her remarks, she's wonderfully astute about Orwell himself. I mean, he clearly neglected her at some times and we know that he was an unfaithful. But on the other hand, he, you know, very much he was absolutely distraught at her death. But Eileen is very astute about Orwell in a way that many of those closest to him weren't. And so, for example, the example I always quote is that in the early years of the Second World War he wrote a very, very radical pamphlet called the lion of the Unicorn, subtitled Socialism and the English Genius. It's much more left wing than anything that the British Labour Party was currently promulgating. And yet all Orwell's instincts beyond politics were small c Conservative. He was a very old fashioned man with a very old fashioned outlook. And so Eileen writes to her friend Nora that, you know, George is writing this book and she sums it up as to how to be a socialist wild story, which I think is very funny and in one sentence actually gets to the heart of one of the great contradictions of Orwell's outlook.
- [23:03]
B
Why did Orwell go to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War?
- [23:07]
C
I think he originally went because in the way of many other writers, he wanted to write journalism about it. He wanted to be a war reporter and write reportage. But as soon as he got there and saw what was going on in revolutionary Barcelona in the first weeks of 1937, he changed his mind to the side he had actually to fight because he believed so much in the cause that they were, that they were representing. He thought when he got to Barcelona in 1937, he thought that he discovered a society in which there was genuine equality, which was not something happened anywhere else in the world in which people considered themselves equals and behaved as such. And this was so sort of revolutionary. To him that I think he thought he wanted to be a part of it.
- [23:52]
B
Was he at all aware of the atrocities committed by the Republican forces in their zone?
- [23:58]
C
I think he didn't really know very much about anything other than what he read in the English newspapers, which of course had their own sort of slanted view of these things. And he certainly, you know, as the war went on, he became aware of the atrocities perpetrated by both right and left. But the point of the interesting thing, the thing that I suppose is so why it made it such, why it became such a formative experience for him, is that although he was fighting against Francois on the side of the Republic, he was almost literally being shot by both sides because he joined up with a small Trotsky splinter group, the poum, rather than serving with the Marxist International Brigade. So on the one hand, he was literally, he was shot through the throat by a fascist sniper while on guard duty one morning. And yet, when he came back to Barcelona after he'd been in hospital, he was pursued by Soviet, you know, by Soviet elements of the left who regarded his brand of socialism as unorthodox. And so he was virtually, I mean, when he got out of Spain, he discovered that his name was on a death list, so he could easily have been shot by his own side. So that's what gives his writing, his writings about Spain, such interest is, although that he's politically on one side, he's also fighting against people on his own side suspicious of his orthodoxy. So it was a very, very formative experience. As he later said, it was in Spain that he first saw what the uses to which propaganda could be put by the left, that he saw accounts of battles that hadn't taken place and saw troops, soldiers, condemned, the cowardice that he knew and fought bravely. And I think in some ways the beginnings of this long, long campaign of his writings about propaganda and manipulation. So I think begin here in Spain in 1937.
- [25:55]
B
Why was his book Homage to Catalonia such a controversial one?
- [26:00]
C
It was controversial because, to use another phrase, it filled the Spanish beams and it indicated very plainly what Russia had been up to in Spain in 1937. And the controversy lay in the fact that he had a terrific row with the English left wing newspaper, the New Statesman, or, as he maintained, suppressing his ability to tell the truth about Spain, because it was thought that this would then frustrate the whole of the Republican campaign against Franco. And some of his most powerful writing of the late 1930s is along those lines, exposing what he thought were some of the deceits practiced in the main Spanish Republic.
- [26:44]
B
How did Warwell explain to himself and to other people his flip flop on whether or not to support the UK in the Second World War?
- [26:53]
C
I think according to him, it was a moment of revelation that he came back. He'd been following us after he came back from Spain. He's been following the pacifist left wing line, which was the war. If a war broke out, even if, you know, even if it were conducted against Nazi Germany, it was essentially a capitalist plot. And then he came downstairs one morning, saw the news of the Russo German Pact in which the non aggression pact signed between the Soviet Union and Hitler in August 1939 and suddenly sort of saw through it and saw that if the only way to try and get rid of what he called all the smelly little orthodoxies of Americans sending for our souls, the only way that there was no point, you couldn't sit by and sort of adopt. You couldn't sit on the sidelines, anything like that was happening. You had actually to take sides. And so his side obviously was going to be against Nazi Germany.
- [27:50]
B
Did Oriel actually believe that the UK was going to experience the social revolution in 1940?
- [27:56]
C
I think in 1940 he actually did. If you read the lion of the Unicorns, he seems to believe that the local defense volunteers who later became the Home Guard local defense force, he seriously believed that they had the potential to be a kind of revolutionary army. And there is an essay in which he talks about the rifles handed out to. There was almost a suspicion that he thinks that the rifle handed out to Mendel, heavier guard, could almost be used for insurrectionary purposes. He then quickly backtracked and he candidly admitted that he got it wrong and that there wasn't. He detected an air of revolutionary feeling that didn't really exist. And so Socialism in the English Genius is published in 1941. He writes another essay in 1943 called the English People, which is much, much more muted and much more sort of gradualist, as we would say on the left here in England, Much less believing that revolution is going to happen and just hoping that social change begins incrementally. But yes, it was a very radical position for 1940.
- [29:05]
B
Why did Orwell work at the BBC and how did he find it? Did he provide a model for parts of his novel in 1984?
- [29:12]
C
I think he works at the BBC because he was desperate for any kind of work which would sort of facilitate the war effort. His health was so bad. I mean, I should make the point that he suffered from all. From ill health all his adult life and probably before his health was so bad in the early years of the war that he was graded C3, which means unfit for military service. He was desperate to find something to do and the chance not only to work for the BBC but to broadcast to the east, which he had many family associations, memories of, seemed a really good idea. Retrospectively, he believed that his time at the BBC had been wasted. And he didn't like the atmosphere there was uncongenial to it. In fact, some of the programming he was involved in, particularly the on air poetry magazine Voice, was very innovative and brought together many prominent people of the time. You know, he was broadcasting with T.S. eliot and William Emson and people like that. So I think he exaggerates his hostility to the BBC. And of course, the atmosphere of the place, I think did contribute something to 1984. I mean, the Ministry of Truth, where Winston labored so joylessly in 1984, I think has something to do with the cramped corridors, the broadcasting house and 200 Oxford street where Orwell worked as a talks assistant. So I think there's, I think there are, you know, the BBC probably contributed more to him than. More to his development than he would perhaps allow.
- [30:36]
B
What were the origins of his novel Animal Farm and why was it so difficult to publish Animal Farm?
- [30:44]
C
He got the idea, I think, in the 1930s, simply from seeing a small boy leading a cart horse down a country lane and thinking, you know, why can't surely a beast of this size and that he really ought to be able to, you know, if it felt like it could go off and leave a small boy far behind. It's a satire of the Russian Revolution, which he wrote very quickly between 1943, the end of 1943, beginning of 1940, it took him, I think, three months. The difficulties. There were many difficulties he'd had in publishing it, not all to do with its propagandist nature. Several publishers thought it was Simply too short. 30,000 words, it's only 100 pages long. There was a kind of thought too, that here, at a time when the Soviet Union was our great ally and Stalin was regarded as a kind of benevolent old uncle by even right wing people in England, Uncle Joe, he was known, as it was thought to be not a terribly good idea to publish a novel immensely critical of the entirety of the Soviet revolution at a time when we were gearing up the D day. Having said that, there were forces at work to prevent the novel from being published at all. And in Fact, the publishing firm of Jonathan Cape in England, who had accepted it for publication, were warned off it by a man subsequently revealed as a Soviet spy who worked for the Ministry of Information, who made this point about. Orwell was very bitter about this, but he was also objective enough to find it funny. There's an entry in his friend Innes Holden's diary sometime in 1944 where after the book had been rejected on the grounds that, quote, Stalin wouldn't like it, Orwell said to his friend, you know, the idea of Joe Stalin, who doesn't understand any European language, sitting in the Kremlin with a copy of Animal Farms either, I don't like this. So he could have used that as well. The other thing too, quite apart from all these political machinations, paper was very short at the time. It was very difficult to publish any kind of book. And so even when he was accepted as a publication by Secker and Warburg, it took many more months than they'd anticipated to be able to publish it. And the book didn't actually come out until August 1945, when the war was over.
- [33:06]
B
Why was the novel so successful with the public?
- [33:10]
C
I think because it's. Not only did it have an evident political purpose, you know, at a time when people were beginning, obviously with the war coming to an end, people were considering what would happen in the post war world and the Soviet Union's role in it. It's also, it's got mass appeal. It appealed to our, to a mass readership. In fact, Orwell spent the day of publication going around the West End bookshops in London and taking the books out of a children's section and putting them in the adult section. It was a book that anybody could read and it's written with a freshness, immediacy and a vividness. There's not a word out of place. It's one of the greatest short novels ever written, Animal Farm, and was immediately recognized by the public and the critics for those qualities.
- [34:00]
B
Well, how did Orwell react to the death of his wife, Eileen O' Shaughnessy in 1945?
- [34:06]
C
He was at the time Orwell was away in occupied Europe as a war correspondent. The observer and the Manchester Evening News. And again, Orwell's phlegmatism, his stoicism was much in evidence when Eileen died. He's supposed to remark to a friend that she, quote, wasn't a bad old stick. And this has led to accusations of all, well, being sort of indifferent, but that's not the case. Frenzy is who he met in the Weeks after her death, when he came back from Europe, say that he was absolutely devastated and he makes the pay was. So one consequence of this was, I mean, he went around London in the following year in a state of complete sort of emotional breakdown, one of whose symptoms was that he would sort of propose marriage to any remotely plausible young woman that he came across. And all of whom they all turned him down. And this made him even more unhappy. But he seemed at that point a desperately sad race like man. The immediately post war period in London trying of course to bring with great success to bring up his adopted son Richard, who at this point was only just over a year old. But Orwell quite easily just returned him to the adoption services, whereas he made a very successful effort to bring him up himself.
- [35:23]
B
Why in God's name did Orwell decide to bury himself in the far northern Scottish island of Jurassic?
- [35:30]
C
He'd always had this. The idea of retreating to a Hebridean island turns up in his diaries very early on in the Second World War, although he wasn't able to fulfill this dream until after the war has ended. His friend Anthony Pole had a theory that this was one of Orwell's ways of coping with success. That, you know, the first sort of, the first hint of fame and money. The Orwell immediately wanted to retreat from it. He was also, I think, on. He was terrified of what might happen to Richard. He thought there was going to be a nuclear war and he thought that one of the ways in which you might be able to avoid some of its worst consequences was to be as far away as possible. So there he was. He also thought he might be able to do more work up in Dura rather than constantly being frustrated by sort of social things and telephones ringing. So he spent quite a lot of the last four years of his life living on Jura and getting on with his final novel, 1984.
- [36:26]
B
Why did Orwell compile a list of communist and pro communist figures which he shared with the Foreign Office?
- [36:33]
C
This is the famous list composed for the International Research Department foreign office in 1949. And I can a lot of there have been attempts to sort of to criticize Orwell for exposing people to the light of public scrutiny and sort of, you know, calling them out and frustrating. But in fact the work you did for the Foreign Office had a perfectly brief, straightforward explanation. This was 1949, the Cold War was beginning. Many of the former democracies of Eastern Europe were falling to Soviets, falling down to sort of Soviet stooge governments placed there by Moscow and the International Research Department of the Foreign Office had a brief to issue pamphlets, printed work advocating the desirability of democracy in the East. And it was important that the people they got to write these pamphlets were not fellow traveling Soviet stooges who would undermine the basis of the operation. And so, although Orwell's list has some quite odd names on, does have many people who shouldn't have been anywhere near writing pamphlets of that sort. And the instance that I always quote of just how deeply embedded Soviet espionage was in the British establishment at this point was that Celia Kirwan, the woman who commissioned these pamphlets and who Orwell supplied his supposedly notorious list, the man who sat at the desk next to her was Guy Burgess, subsequently exposed to the Soviet side. So those were the kind of conditions in which one was operating in the late 1940s. And so I think, you know, the occasional note of spirit that stuck about this is somewhat exaggerated.
- [38:17]
B
What were the origins of his novel in 1984 and why was it so successful?
- [38:23]
C
1984'S origins, I think, go back to the Tehran conference of late 1943, in which Churchill, Roofel and Stalin effectively sat down and sort of parceled up the post war world into zones of influence. While I was fascinated by this, the idea that the world was turning into a series of huge, endlessly contending autocracies, I think he got the idea there. It took him quite a long time to work all this out. And in fact one of the fascinations of 1984's development, of course he was seriously, increasingly ill at the time, but he's working out his intellectual position on all of this and kind of formulate getting the background to this extraordinary dystopian landscape together. I think one of the reasons, it was several reasons for its huge success, one of which obviously there are political implications. It was seen as an attack on the Soviet Union, although it's, I think more properly described as an attack on totalitarianism generally. But that aspect, or this is a time again, you know, when the Cold War has become very serious. Late 1949, you know, America and with Britain's support and the west and the east were beginning to, you know, were eyeing each other up very suspiciously. I think one of the reasons for its success in the UK was that it uses the landscapes of war torn London. I mean, all the great landmarks of Oceania in 1984 are actually based on things that Orwell could see on his bus ride home from Tribune, the left wing magazine where he worked in the mid-1940s. Trafalgar Square with Nelson's Plenty of Place by the statue of Big Brother, that sort of thing. And I think that a lot of the original readers thought, yes, this is supposedly set in 1948, in 1984, but it's our world. It's the world that we can see outside our window, given this frightening, you know, this frightening dystopian twist. So although it's a prophecy or a warning, as all well described it, it's also a very realistic novel about the sights and sounds of 1940s London.
- [40:25]
B
Does 1984 still speak to us today?
- [40:30]
C
I think it does. I mean, it's warnings about what has happened to the concept of objective truth, about surveillance technology, about the state being able to open a window into the mind of the average citizen. I think all while it's extraordinary, it's an extraordinary prophetic book in many ways. I think we can see this in the way that sales. When anything particularly awful happens in the world, when people start talking about alternative facts, or when a particular sort of technological outrage is brought upon, a sales suddenly spike and up it goes again. It must be pointed out that I think in the week that Donald Trump was inaugurated as president in 2017, the Amazon sales went up by 950%. As a direct correlation.
- [41:23]
B
Why was Orel so anti Catholic?
- [41:27]
C
I think he was educated very early on by some Catholic, by some Catholic nuns. But I think he thought. I don't think they were particular, I don't think they were unkind to him or anything. And he took. He. But he did. He was anti Catholic, you're quite correct. And he did think that Catholicism was a form of totalitarianism, but he also took a serious interest in Catholicism, the faith, and several times wrote that it should be taken seriously because the people advocated it. And in fact, there's a very. I found one of the new letters that was discovered, very, very interesting one, where he had a kind of controversy with the Jesuit theologian Father Martindale. And, you know, there is a slight connection between the meeting, I think, that Orwell had with him and between some of the scenes in 1984 where O', Brien, his principal interrogator, is at one point described as resembling, quote, even a priest. And I slightly wonder whether that scene had its origins in Orwell's dispute with Father Martindale back in 1932.
- [42:28]
B
Why did Orwell decide to get married when he was mortally ill?
- [42:33]
C
I think he'd been wanting to get married for some time. I think there were practical, I mean, obviously very much in love with Samuel Brownlee. His second wife. But there were practical reasons and that he needed. He knew that he was dying. I think he knew that he was dying by that point. He needed somebody to look after his affairs and he needed somebody to look after Richard, the adopted son. So I think there were a lot of practical reasons as well as emotional ones. And he was very much cheered by the marriage. His friends make this point. It perked him up no end. And it was at one point thought that he might actually have sufficient physical resources to recover. But then he had a relapse in November 1949. It was clear after the fact that he was going to die. And Sonia, although she didn't take any great interest in Richard, who was eventually brought up by his aunt, sister Avril Sony, was a very efficient, at least to the early part for the first few years, was a very efficient custodian in his interests and did the original four volume Collected Journalism essays and letters. And he could have done worse than to leave her in charge of his affairs. Although she was eventually swindled, if not swindled in grievously, sort of let down by his accountants towards the end of her life.
- [43:49]
B
Does Orwell still reign as a secular saint?
- [43:51]
C
A secular saint, that's a very interesting phrase. I think he's. Rather than describing him as a secular saint, I describe him as a piece of moral litmus paper. And if you dip it into the waters of whatever's going on in the world these days, you get pretty clear indication of the best way to think.
- [44:10]
B
About, the best way to respond on that observation. I would like to thank you very much, DJ Taylor, for being so kind and speak with us today.
- [44:18]
C
This is Charles. Thank you for your excellent. You're quite welcome, excellent questions and again.
- [44:23]
B
Let me thank you very much. You've been listening to New Books in History, a podcast channel and New Books Network. Thank you once again, DJ Taylor.
- [44:33]
C
Thank you very much, Sam.