In Defence of George Orwell
Did he really make first wife ‘invisible’?
Wifedom by Anna Funder (Penguin, 2023)
In 1918 a woman an early Soviet dissident Fanny Kaplan shot and seriously wounded Lenin. When she was captured, the Bolshevik leader insisted that Kaplan should remain unharmed.
As as a young loony leftie, I would often quote this display of magnanimity in defence of Lenin. No way was he a bloodthirsty tyrant like Stalin.
Only he didn’t pardon Kaplan. I got that bit wrong.
You can’t always trust Wikipedia but it's hard to better their pithy summary. “Interrogated by the Cheka, she refused to name any accomplices and was executed.” This was despite — or perhaps because of — considerable doubt as to whether she was the shooter.
Where did I get my version from? Read it somewhere or thought I did. Put bluntly, I read what I wanted to believe.
Anna Funder seems to have had a similar experience after reading Homage to Catalonia (twice). She had no recollection of the presence of Orwell’s wife, despite there being thirty-seven references to her in the text.
Another misreading, then? Funder suspects something more insidious afoot. In raising a literary sledgehammer to the statue of Saint George, she pays close attention those thirty seven mentions. None of them, she points out, identifies Eileen by name.
True, though names are generally problematic in Blair/Orwell world. Eileen O’Shaughnessy had recently become Mrs Blair but called her husband George rather than Eric as his family did. No matter — the charge is that Mrs Blair/Orwell was effectively erased, ‘reduced to a job description’. Memory holed’ to use the phrase her husband would later introduce to the language.
There is a simpler explanation. Eileen would not have expected a personalised shout out because Homage to Catalonia is not a memoir in the conventional sense. The homage is to the Catalan people and Orwell expresses it in a testimony or witness to what he experienced.
Above all it is a polemical political document. Orwell enthusiastically, if somewhat naively, celebrates what he experienced in Barcelona: “There was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no boot-licking, no cap-touching.”
There is plenty to question in this assessment (no priests or prostitutes, George?) but not his sincerity. As he writes: “I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan”
The personal story of George and Eileen in Spain is an extraordinary one — I outline it here. Executive summary: they both risked their lives for a cause they passionately believed in.
Orwell doesn’t deserve to get it in the neck for his conduct in Spain. He did, after all, have a real bullet lodged there by a Franco-supporting sniper.
The raison d’etre for Anna Funder’s Wifedom is to acknowledge the importance of Eileen— to make her ‘visible’. This was also the intention of other recent Orwell biographies: most notably the two by D. J Taylor and The Making of George Orwell by Sylvia Topp.
One distinguishing feature is that Funder goes further in pointing an accusing finger at Orwell himself. The portrait she paints is of a distant Victorian patriarch — a seedy Mr Rochester without the looks or charisma. And forget about asking George to do the dishes.
But hasn’t the taciturn, miserable git side of Orwell always been self evident? It’s there in the hunched unsmiling photographs and the essays that initially inspired Funder’s interest. To quote the most obvious example:
the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
Swiftian comic energy underpinned by bar room prejudice — and perhaps a broader more subtle point about the gullibility of the left intelligentsia.. That was the package, in writing at least. Friends suggested that he was far less ferocious in person — again no surprise. Even Mr Hyde needed Doctor Jekyll, front of house.
The most controversial criticisms relate to Orwell’s relations with women. These were clearly troubled, as demonstrated by his behaviour as a widower. Any young woman meeting the writer in the two years following Eileen’s death had an even money chance of receiving a marriage proposal. Sonia Brownell, working as an assistant in the Horizon office eventually took the gig in 1949. She strongly divided opinion along ruthless gold-digger/indispensable comfort lines.
Until the 2000s the broad consensus was that Orwell was often clumsy and crass, but not predatory. Times and attitudes have changed and the emergence of previously unpublished letters have edged his status towards that of a full-on sex pest pariah.
This seems harsh. Yes, the letters and diaries have creepy passages, but they don’t quite descend to the open misogyny of pals like Arthur Koestler and Henry Miller. Orwell also shows amazing brass neck but seems more like the man who asks every female in the disco for a slow dance. Womanising was not his strong suit.
Ultimately, Eileen was prepared to stay in the marriage and it was her call.
I think the most substantive charge against Orwell is that he neglected Eileen’s welfare. Astounding self-absorption led to a series of frankly bonkers living arrangements — a freezing cottage in Hertfordshire and wintering in the most isolated building on the Scottish island of Jura being particular lowlights.
Eileen never got to experience the last one. She survived the war but died on the operating table while undergoing a hysterectomy in 1945.
Orwell was once again absent and Anna Funder is right to cut through the feeble excuses this. His journalistic assignment in Europe was distinctly non-urgent and Eileen obviously unwell (with severe anaemia resulting from uterine tumours).
As per usual, the tall man bailed a week early without bothering to inform her that he had skipped the country.
Eileen was alone at the end, as she had been at the final adoption hearing for their son. No letter arrived before she died, though he did find a moment to telephone his mistress from Paris.
Funder weakens her case by creating a counterpoint between biographer and subject. Eileen was an accomplished woman neglected and undervalued/I too have had to cope with ‘a motherload of wifedom’
This seems to me be misguided. Remembering that then is not now is essential. Especially when making moral judgements according to our very different social mores.
Would Eileen have approved of her husband’s biography opening with the conclusion that he was ‘an arsehole’? I think not. I suspect she would also be baffled by the notion that she more or less co-wrote Animal Farm.
That said, no sentient being could read Eileen’s heart rendering last letters without indignation on her behalf. As she meekly requests that her Orwell find a moment to drop her a line she apologises for the cost of her hysterectomy. ‘What worries me,’ she writes, ‘is that I really don’t think I’m worth the money.’
In this specific instance, that word beginning with ‘a’ does seem the only one appropriate to describe her absent husband.
There are undeniably bleak elements of the story of the Orwell marriage. Both died young from medical conditions they would probably survive today. They accepted their fates stoically, sharing a temperamental aversion to death-bed theatrics or garment rending displays of grief.
On the second anniversary of Eileen’s death Orwell wrote to Koestler, “Each winter I find it harder and harder to believe that spring will actually come,”. That was as far as his stiff upper lip would wobble. His most effusive public comment in memoriam was ‘she wasn’t a bad old stick’.
Yet in her understated way Eileen lives on and will do so long after the rest of us leave the building, not least in her creative contribution to two of the most influential novels of the Twentieth Century.
She is not invisible. She never has been.
Spanish Testament — the story behind Animal Farm (5 min read)
