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‘After the age of about thirty,’ Orwell writes, most people ‘abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery.’
My first guess: too much cleaning and not enough, or not good enough, sex.
I am part proud and part heartbroken, which may be the defining emotional condition of parenting young adults.
She hasn’t really been in the biographies. Orwell’s biographers are seven men looking at a man.
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.
These are conversational grenades, lobbed in to provoke a reaction. They are the pre-emptive strikes of a man who feels he rubs up against the world somehow wrongly, and who wants to see how it pushes back.
So he had learned to live inwardly, secretly, in books and secret thoughts that could not be uttered . . . But it is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret.
In this system the oppressors can imagine themselves innocent of crimes against a people, not by denying the crimes, but by denying the equal humanity of the people.
All her life she turned her experiences into stories, which involved seeing those around her more clearly, in many cases, than they saw themselves.
But this ability to imagine yourself into the skin of another can be an openness to the other so radical it leaves you unprotected; it can be a sign of someone who may not even be on their own side.
Men wanted to exert control over the reproduction of children, so women’s sexuality was controlled by the institution of monogamous marriage,
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.
So many of these men benefited from a social arrangement defying both the moral and the physical laws of the universe in which the unpaid, invisible work of a woman creates the time and – neat, warmed and cushion-plumped – space for their work.
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.
What did she give and what did it cost her? I find this question so chilling, coming out of twenty years of intense life-and-home-making, that I prefer to think it does not apply to me.
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.
Every society in the world is built on the unpaid or underpaid work of women. If it had to be paid for it would cost, apparently, US$10.9 trillion. But to pay for it would be to redistribute wealth and power in a way that might defund and de-fang patriarchy.
Pretending I am not subject to modern versions of the same forces Eileen was, by ‘practising acceptance’ or ‘just getting on with it’, is a kind of lived insanity: to pretend to be liberated from the work while doing it.
For some reason she is the only one who can see, as she passes the drying rack, that the laundry needs putting away.
Wifedom is a wicked magic trick we have learned to play on ourselves. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked, tricking power away.
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, doublethinking heart of patriarchy.
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,
There was a basking pleasure of being found worthy of being in his orbit. But the thing that comes with that is the abandonment of your own talent, and the centrality to yourself you must claim in order to feed it.
His work was her purpose. He and it were in the place where she and hers should have been. She was in the slipstream of him.
Orwell’s ‘combination of elements and circumstances’ which mean he can work as he wishes are, apparently, happy accidents rather than a situation tailor-made for him by someone else’s labour. These conditions appear to exist without a creator, because the passive voice has made her disappear. But as we know, Eileen is there, working. And managing her impulses towards murder or separation when George doesn’t want his work interrupted by life.
She tells Lydia, though, that she can rely on her brother. ‘If we were at opposite ends of the world and I sent him a telegram saying “Come at once”, he would come,’ she says. ‘George would not do that. For him his work comes before anybody.’ Lydia is not reassured.
The project of good writing (to reveal to us the world we thought we knew) is perfectly combined with a political project (to reveal the world we thought we knew so we can change it).
A wife gives a man a double life: one to go off in, and another to come back to.
‘In secret I was frightened.’ But once they get into the dugouts the problem is boredom, not bullets.
Tioli and Wickes pay Eileen a lot of attention, as does at least one other spy. Deep interest in everything you do and say and think can be love, or spying – or both.
Orwell spends over 2500 words telling us of his hospital treatment without mentioning that Eileen was there. I wonder what she felt, later, as she typed them.
She feels she has been turned inside out like a glove, defiled like the pockets of her cardigans.
After I had pieced together Eileen’s time in Spain I still puzzled over how I could have read Homage to Catalonia twice before and never understood she was there.
She felt she had nothing to explain, and yet it was the case that if a man wanted you, suddenly you did. His desire is your fault.
When she confronts him about meeting Brenda for a walk in the woods George defends himself by saying he hasn’t slept with her. ‘I know. You wouldn’t be this obsessed if you had.’ ‘So . . .’ he smiles. ‘What if I wished it – just twice a year? Get her out of my system.’ ‘That’s hardly out of your system,’ she says, her voice stony.
Patriarchy is the doublethink that allows an apparently ‘decent’ man to behave badly to women, in the same way as colonialism and racism are the systems that allow apparently ‘decent’ people to do unspeakable things to other people.
How is it Orwell comes to see the world as split between decent and indecent, conscious and unconscious? Perhaps his ability to see both sides comes from experiencing splits in his own life.
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?
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’.
I channel the novelist Richard Ford. I once heard him explain why he feels he is always, inevitably, a disappointment to readers when they meet him. ‘I put my best self into my work,’ he said, opening out his hands, ‘and I am not my best work.’
In the gap between his hands I saw the gap between an author and their work. This is not an empty space. It’s full of dark matter, matter that holds together the writer, the work and the reader.
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. If
This would be the moment to ask him whether fucking other women fuels his work, or his sense of himself as man enough to do it. This is the question both of them know is here, standing shyly, patiently, expectantly between the bed and the chair, waiting to be asked.
She could not have predicted the lurid detail of it – that he would ask her ‘permission’ for sex with others. She wonders if it’s the sex with them that makes him feel powerful, or if her humiliation does the trick.
Faced with blood and death she finds herself firmly on his side, and other women, girls, vanish.
Perhaps, even, she sees what he will never say, which is that his output requires the work of two.
‘Eileen’s own grip on life,’ Lydia writes, ‘which had never been very firm, loosened considerably after her brother’s death.
