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I am part proud and part heartbroken, which may be the defining emotional condition of parenting young adults. We watch as those who were our children come to see the world – from which we have spent over a decade and a half vainly sheltering them – for what it is. Including, of course, us.
But the sky today was huge and high and blue. From the end of the pier the beach a golden smile. She felt she could walk forever.
In the end, the biographies started to seem like fictions of omission.
Eileen loved Orwell ‘deeply, but with a tender amusement’. She noted his extraordinary political simplicity
Eileen was a wisp of a human but inhumanly strong; her nickname, for reasons no one remembers, was Pig.
Perhaps Lydia can’t see that a man who can propose in the same breath as he declares his ineligibility for marriage may have met his match in a woman who just lets him talk on, and whose acceptance might, or might not, be part of a bet with herself.
Orwell wears tailored but dishevelled tweed, as if signalling the remnants of money and class his family lost generations ago. He enters a party like a ragged John the Baptist coming in from the wilderness, and the jolly rich girls quiver in their furs.
People there remembered him as happy, though in private he quickly made one of the most fundamental realisations of his life: colonialism is a racist system of ‘despotism with theft as its final object’.
Whether Orwell saw it that evening at Rosalind’s or later, Eileen’s unshakeable integrity and her independent mind, her gift for storytelling and her ability to prick the absurdities of those around her clearly delighted him.
Another was the pleasure in finding a moment in which the unspeakable truth – unspeakable because so common as to go without saying, but, once spoken, unspeakably bad – was said: a wife was an unpaid sexual and domestic worker. I should be warned.
Access to time, as to any other valuable good, is gendered. One person’s time to work is created by another person’s work in time: the more time he has to work, the more she is working to make it for him.
Statistically, there is an irrefutable, globally intransigent heterosexual norm that pervades across ethnicity, colour and class. There is not one place on the planet where women as a group have the same power, freedom, leisure or money as their male partners.
pretend I am equal while I am: walking the dog/doing the grocery shopping/waiting in the orthodontist’s/commiserating about mean teens/folding laundry. I pretend I am equal when I am chopping vegetables/organising the counsellor or the hospital or the solicitor/de-griming the fridge. Actually, I mind none of it. This is my real life, with my real loves. I know that when I’m old I’ll envy my younger self her busyness, her purpose, her big-hearted whirligig life. But still, the distribution of labour is hard to make equal, because so much of it is hard to see, wrapped up in the definition of
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Patriarchy is a fiction in which all the main characters are male and the world is seen from their point of view. Women are supporting cast – or caste. It is a story we all live in, so powerful that it has replaced reality with itself. We can see no other narrative for our lives, no roles outside of it, because there is no outside of it. In this fiction, the vanishing trick has two main purposes. The first is to make what she does disappear (so he can appear to have done it all, alone). The second is to make what he does to a woman disappear (so he can be innocent). This trick is the dark,
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The moment one introduces a lover to one’s family is inevitably uncomfortable. Who we choose reveals more about ourselves than we can know, about what we want and what we need, and the gap between self-revelation and self-knowledge is a chasm of vulnerability.
Kay saw clearly the cost to Eileen of her decision. ‘I thought it was rather tragic that she should give it all up,’ she said about her degree and career. ‘I don’t think I would have.’
For a writer, the conditions of production are the conditions of happiness. Even if you’re writing in penury and misery (or, as Orwell is, broke and bronchitic in a hovel), at least you’re writing, and to write is to wrest the happiness of production from your life by putting a word count between yourself and oblivion. It is the difference between action and entropy; between life and psychic death.
This book is a risk: to show you the injustice of the world might harrow and harm you. Or, it might arm you against it.
Lydia has made peace with none of it. ‘I came in a mood still barely resigned to the fact of her marriage, vaguely antagonistic to her husband and ready to be critical of his attitude to his wife.’ What she finds at the cottage appears to be some kind of masochistic rustic fantasy in full swing, an experiment in living on the breadline and suffering for someone else’s art.
Any man, I thought, ought to treasure such a wife – most attractive to look at, highly intelligent, an amusing and witty talker, an excellent cook. Yet I did not detect any fond glances or small gestures of attention from him to her.
She’d asked the vicar to take ‘obey’ out of the marriage vows because it’s a ridiculous thing to say, a relic from when the slavery of the arrangement had been explicit. The vicar, pale lashes behind his wire-rimmed glasses, didn’t blink; he’d known her for her whole life. George was startled, but then quickly said he’d no objection. He’s not a Neanderthal. Yet here she is, obediently corralled with the other domesticated animals, without anything having needed to be said. There is a way of feeling alone that is not about being alone. But these are not things to write to Norah.
The revolutionaries quickly outlawed tipping, the capitalist custom by which the undertaxed get to feel generous at whim in a world of the underpaid.
We want people to be ‘decent’ and we want our writers to be too. Orwell engaged with this question of good work coming from flawed people. Does it also require doublethink to admire the work and ignore the behaviour of the private man? The question arises for him thinking about Dalí, Dickens and Shakespeare – and, tellingly, how they treated their wives.
In an essay on Dickens, Orwell argues explicitly that an author’s mistreatment of a woman in private life should not affect how we read his work. He dismisses a novel about Dickens as ‘a merely personal attack; concerned for the most part with Dickens’s treatment of his wife’.
To my mind, a person is not their work, just where it came from. To want the two to be the same, on pain of ‘cancellation’, is a new kind of tyranny. And from there, no art comes.
The problem is that she can see past what he does and love what she finds.
Now, she’s on a triple shift, working by day at the Ministry; doing all the housework, shopping and cooking; and editing and typing his work in the hours that are left. She left no complaints – a good friend of hers later said she seemed ‘unruffled’ by their ‘gypsy lifestyle’.
Fidelity is a peculiar promise. To some people it’s fundamental; to others it’s a matter of lip service, of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. In my own life, I feel pretty strongly that other people’s affairs are exactly that – theirs, and none of my business.
He must at the same time face – or efface – not one, but two devastating truths: the previous incumbent died of overwork and neglect, and he, too, may not have long.
LIFE IS BAD BUT DEATH IS WORSE George Orwell, last notebook
Looked at one way, things are holding together. Looked at another, they can come apart any time.
Nevertheless he will not stay. He doesn’t want to be an invalid in someone else’s house. A house is a life you make, and if he is in his own house he’ll still be in his own life.
The healthiest of writers can feel terror racing to finish a book. The idea that it must go off into the world is like watching your inner life continue without you. It will emerge leaving you husked like a cicada skin, to be blown away.
Everyone thinks of Death and the Maiden, everyone is being asked to participate in a hopeless act of hope.
Possibly, there is no happy end without fiction. Or, it depends where you stop the story: early for happy, or keep going for the inevitable other.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
What to do with love that has lost its object? It lives on, lost and looking.
