Orwell by Jeffrey Meyers Read Free Book Online Page A

known.” Mr. A. S. F. Gow, Orwell's classical tutor at Eton, whom Orwell visited after Burma in 1927 and later corresponded with, has written to me (in a letter of January 1, 1969) that Orwell's father said he “could not go to a University unless he got a scholarship and … there was not thefaintest hope of his getting one…. He had shown so little taste or aptitude for academic subjects that I doubted whether in any case a University would be worth while for him.” (Orwell had won scholarships to both St. Cyprian's and Eton but resolved to “slack off and cram no longer” after prep school. He writes of Eton, “I did no work there and learned very little, and I don't feel that Eton has been much of a formative influence in my life.” 6 Mr. Gow also writes that Orwell's father then “spoke of the Burmese police”; and the job was undoubtedly secured through personal connections which, writes Orwell, his family had “with the country over three generations. My grandmother lived forty years in Burma.” His statement that when he was there “nationalist feelings in Burma were not very marked, and relations between the English and the Burmese were not particularly bad” is very different from the atmosphere portrayed in
Burmese Days.
Leonard Woolf's
Growing
and Philip Woodruff's
The Men Who Ruled India
describe the social and political background of Orwell's Burmese period.
    Another obscure phase of his life is his decision in 1946 to live the extremely arduous and exhausting existence on the remote island of Jura in the Hebrides. Mr. Angus’ explanation that he had gone to Jura “to find some peace away from journalism, the telephone, etc.” is clearly unsatisfactory since an equally quiet place could be found in a more salubrious climate, closer to medical assistance and away from the country that Orwell professed to dislike (see
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, 42). The terminal phase of Orwell's very serious illness (he could speak, like Pope, of “this long disease, my Life”) dates from the winter of 1946, part of which he spent on Jura.
    One pattern that emerges from these volumes is the terrible state of Orwell's health. Like D. H. Lawrence, he seems to have had defective lungs since boyhood—“after about the age of ten, I was seldom in good health…. I had defective bronchial tubes and a lesion in one lung that was not discovered till many years later”—which tormented him for the rest of his life. The Burmese climate ruined his health, he had pneumonia in February 1929 (see “How the Poor Die”), was shot through the throat in Spain in May 1937, had tuberculosis in March 1938, was unfit for service in the Second World War due to bronchiectasis and was gravely ill during the last three years of his life.
    Orwell's published letters, like Conrad's, are strangely impersonal, rather pedestrian and unvarying with each correspondent, but they become extraordinarily moving during the last months of his life when he faces the gravity of his disease with a Keatsian courage. He was deeply devoted to his adopted son, Richard, and poignantly writes: “I am so afraid of his growing away from me, or getting to think of me as just a person who is always lying down & can't play. Of course children can't understand illness.He used to come to me & say ‘Where have you hurt yourself?’” In May 1949 he admits: “I am in most ghastly health…. When the picture is taken I am afraid there is not much doubt it will show that both lungs have deteriorated badly. I asked the doctor recently whether she thought I would survive, & she wouldn't go further than saying she didn't know…. Don't think I am making up my mind to peg out. On the contrary, I have the strongest reasons for wanting to stay alive. But I want to get a clear idea of
how long
I am likely to last, & not just be jollied along the way doctors usually