Kindle Notes & Highlights
Barbusse’s Monde, first to publish him, was a lively, highly respectable and stylish left-wing weekly, whose contributors included Dos Passos, Heinrich Mann, Roger Martin Du Gard, Ortega y Gasset, Diego Rivera and Madame Sun Yat Sen.
Children’s Hospital’, that gory poem of Tennyson’s,
The treatment, which included cupping, bleeding and the mustard-poultice torture, was positively medieval.
bal-musettes.
Gentleman in the Parlour,
a sort of kingdom of ghosts
‘He was really a radical conservative … like Cobbett. What he valued was the old concept of England based on the English countryside,
little Cambridgeshire village of Orwell,
But it was more than sexually deviant thoughts with which he was wrestling; it was, on his own admission, the fearful memories of the diabolical hatred of which he was capable.
‘golden afternoon of the capitalist age’
or M. P. Shiel, who he seems to have
a ‘Holy Goat’,
As Ruskin wrote, ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.’37 With Orwell the vision is always clear.
The headmaster who appointed him, but who had left before he took up the post, was a certain Captain Donovan, local commander of Mosley’s Blackshirts.57
It was left to Peter Quennell in the New Statesman to spot the novel’s central weakness – that, despite the forceful writing, Dorothy remained little more than a cipher.38
degrees of frowsiness,
also encounters with oddities
In Barnsley, his next stopover, the radio announced the news that Hitler had reoccupied the Rhineland. That evening in a pub, he said casually, ‘The German army has crossed the Rhine.’ The response surprised him. ‘With a vague air of remembering something, someone murmured “Parley-voo”. No more response than that … So also at every moment of crisis from 1931 onwards. You have all the time the sensation of kicking against an impenetrable wall of stupidity.’13 The impression that England was asleep was a strong one and became for him an abiding image of the 1930s.
later attended a Mosley rally in the town. To his dismay he found the audience of some seven hundred mostly supporting him. Mosley, he thought, although a very good orator, spoke ‘the usual tripe’ and tried to bamboozle the audience by seeming to speak from a socialist point of view. He was struck by how gullible the poorly educated audience seemed, and wrote to the Manchester Guardian about it, a letter which was never printed.
Wallington,
Rejection of the money-god and the god of cultural snobbery, were not just themes in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but central to his whole being.
an impossibility, since he had certainly read The Communist Manifesto and probably other Marxist literature, and his fascination with paradox dates from first reading Chesterton, a playful connoisseur of the form.
The Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone) depicted by him as mere figures of fun would soon become a more threatening reality,
Harry Pollitt,
‘A law of the Suspected,
September General Alexander Orlov of the NKVD arrived in Madrid and a month later supplies for the Republic began arriving from Russia.
Orwell was ignorant of such things, and in good British fashion learned to live with the boredom and the wretched conditions.
He had brought the dog simply to save it from the Catalan boys who were, he thought, unkind to their animals.
‘Felix Randal’,
Occasionally the boredom was relieved by moments of fleeting action, even bathos. Once, Orwell found himself in much the position he had in Burma faced with a peaceful elephant to shoot. This time it was a Fascist soldier, no threat because, as he ran across his sights he was holding up his trousers. Unlike Burma, there was no crowd to urge him to shoot and he resisted pulling the trigger. ‘I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers,’ he wrote. ‘I had come here to shoot at “Fascists”; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a “Fascist”, he is visibly a fellow
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Mercader was later sent on his own special mission, to Mexico, where he ingratiated himself with Leon Trotsky before murdering him with an ice pick.
Hugh O’Donnell, who was also working directly for Moscow. O’Donnell’s code name – amazingly – was ‘O’Brien’! It seems unlikely that Orwell ever knew that Crook was spying on him, or that his contact worked under that name, but the fact that the character in Nineteen Eighty-Four who first wins the confidence of Winston Smith and then betrays him is given the name ‘O’Brien’ must be one of the strangest coincidences in literature.
Bob Smillie,
This was a crucial event in Orwell’s life, more disturbing to him even than Kopp’s arrest. ‘Smillie’s death is not a thing I can easily forgive. Here was this brave and gifted boy, who had thrown up his career at Glasgow University in order to come and fight against Fascism, and who, as I saw for myself, had done his job at the front with faultless courage and willingness; and all they could find to do with him was to fling him into jail and let him die like a neglected animal … what angers one about a death like this is its utter pointlessness.’84 Kopp later claimed that, while in a slackly
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‘Curiously enough,’ he wrote, ‘the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.’
‘The essential fact about a totalitarian regime is that it has no laws. People are not punished for specific offences, but because they are considered to be politically or intellectually undesirable. What they have done or not done is irrelevant.’
What depressed Orwell about Spain, apart from the betrayal of the POUMists, the terror and the murder of Nin and Smillie, was the behaviour of the British press. ‘In Spain,’ he wrote, ‘for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines”.’98
SS Stratheden.
Unlike Dickens, Orwell, with his aristocratic strain and Eton education, was by birth and experience a man familiar with all social classes who believed that change of heart (misers becoming charitable) was no answer to the evils of capitalism.
‘The common man is still living in the world of Dickens,’ he wrote, ‘but nearly every modern intellectual had gone over to some or other form of totalitarianism.’19
time, Dwight Macdonald later hailed it as a pioneering work in ‘cultural studies’.
Whisky Galore
‘now that we are almost in earshot of Hitler’s guns, the Wellsian Utopia, a super-Welwyn [Garden City] constructed by benevolent scientists is somehow unconvincing’.41
Blimp class
Newspapers were still mostly advertising frivolities and unnecessary luxuries, and advertisers were cashing in on war neurosis.
A pile of plaster dummies outside the bomb-damaged John Lewis’s Oxford Street store recalled a pile of plaster saints from desecrated Barcelona churches, the whine of bombers brought back the sound of mosquitoes inside his mosquito net in Burma.51 Later in Greenwich, taking cover during a raid in a church crypt, he was horrified to see children playing among vaults full of corpses.52
At the news of the death of Italo Balbo, Mussolini’s air force chief responsible for bombing Ethiopia, he wrote that he was ‘thoroughly pleased … E[ileen] also delighted.’ And when Jean Chiappe, Fascist head of the Paris police, perished
But they were quite different in temperament. Koestler was highly combative, volatile and hedonistic; Orwell was ironic, more controlled and ascetic. Like Warburg and Fyvel, Koestler and Orwell agreed to disagree over Palestine. Even so, Koestler recognised Orwell immediately as the most important English writer he had met so far.
Farm. ‘All Governments, whatever they are called, are in point of fact oligarchies. The only question is whether you get good oligarchs or bad oligarchs.’
Fyvel,
