Orwell's Nose: A Pathological Biography by John Sutherland

Author:John Sutherland [Sutherland, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

He was caught in a freezing rainstorm; his fourth bout of pneumonia followed. He was taken to Uxbridge Cottage Hospital, where his life was feared for. He hallucinated that he was back in a spike, and someone was trying to steal his money. He did not die, but was ordered to take at least half a year’s total convalescence if he wanted to live longer than six months. It was farewell to Uxbridge and back to Southwold. George Orwell’s teaching career was over. Two good things had come out of it. He had finally managed to lick Burmese Days into a shape that was acceptable to the finicky Gollancz. And he had worked out what his next major piece of writing should be.

Convalescence, he determined, would be a working sabbatical. His farewell to ‘god-forsaken’ Hayes was proclaimed in a poem, published in The Adelphi, ‘On a Ruined Farm near His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory’. It’s a work in the ‘pylon style’ popularized by Stephen Spender: ‘The acid smoke has soured the fields, / And browned the few and windworn flowers; / But there, where steel and concrete soar / In dizzy, geometric towers —’ and so it goes. Hateful: but it was the unstoppable future. A world in which, as he would later say, ‘children grow up with intimate knowledge of magnetos and in complete ignorance of the Bible’.

There had been changes in the Blair family fortunes which meant having a sick Eric hanging about the house was less of a burden. Ida had received a legacy – the last of the Limouzin wealth. With it the Blairs bought a handsome new home, Montague House, in Southwold’s High Street (as I write it is advertised as ‘Grade II listed’, with a £5,000 pcm rental; the Blairs picked it up for £100). Avril and Ida had sufficient start-up money left over for their longed-for Copper Kettle/Bridge club venture in the centre of town. One of his relatives suggested that Orwell might work there – he’d washed up quite happily at the Crillon in Paris, hadn’t he?

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