On Nineteen Eighty-Four by D. J. Taylor

Author:D. J. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The bed-bound month hunched over the typewriter while the Atlantic winds beat at the window was less an unconscious attempt to kill himself than a classic example of how Orwell behaved, what Warburg and Sonia Brownell diagnose as his failure to recognise the need for precautions and his dislike of having to behave like an invalid. The relapse that followed his return trip to Hairmyres was, according to Warburg, merely the result of Orwell not taking sufficient care of himself—in this case omitting to reserve a room at a time when all the Glasgow hotels were full and having to traipse from one venue to another carrying a heavy bag.

And so the task ground on. The typing was nearly half-finished. Orwell would let him have the completed job early in December, he told Warburg on 22 November. Six days later he wrote to his sister-in-law, Gwen O’Shaughnessy, asking her to recommend a sanatorium where he might stay for the worst of the winter. By now the typing was almost finished. A typically self-deprecating letter to Moore worries that the typing agencies his agent had applied to had been put to unnecessary trouble and suggests that ‘it really wasn’t worth all this fuss’. Then, on 4 December, he breasted the finishing tape. ‘I have sent off two copies of the MS of my book to you and one to Warburg’, he told Moore, adding the diffident sign-off ‘Perhaps you could acknowledge them when received, because there is always a slight possibility of a mishap in the post’. The domestic diary for 7 December mentions a little rain in the morning, a calm sea, Avril bringing back chunks of fat from the butcher after the slaughtering of the Barnhill pig, and finally, the fact that the writer is ‘Feeling very unwell’.

In fact, he was in a state of complete physical collapse, confined to bed and awaiting news from the sanatoria recommended by Gwen. The likeliest destination was Cranham in Gloucestershire, he told his friend Tosco Fyvel. (‘E is still far from well & is going to take some more treatment in Jan & Feb’, an equally stoical Avril informed her brother-in-law, adding that ‘he has just finished his book which he has been working at for the last eighteen months, so I think that is a relief to his mind’). By now the consequences of the typing stint had begun to sink in. ‘I am really very ill’, he admitted to Fyvel. He should have headed south two months before, ‘but I simply had to finish the book I am writing’. Still he was worried about book reviews he had promised to file (‘The latter I will do & send off in the next few days’, he told David Astor, ‘but the other I just can’t in my present state’). He acknowledged that ‘I feel I simply must stop working, or rather trying to work, for a month or two’. The final diary entry dates from Christmas Eve (‘Snowdrops up all over the place.

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