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Orwell slyly represents Eileen’s words to Brenda as permission, when it’s more likely she’s saying, Just do it and shut up. Do not come to me for ‘permission’. Do not make my pain part of your pleasure.
the smudging of language here is a way of hinting at something Orwell was doing or wanted to do, without it being said. It is a way of telling the truth and covering it up at the same time.
Life has turned into a choice of harms, a child’s game of ‘What would you rather? Would you rather be a boy on a boat in a sea of warships, or a boy in a house under bombs?’ She
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’.
Perhaps Orwell’s affair with Inez was cooling, because she too writes him into an unlikeable character, ‘the survivor of an awful prep school where the boys were all “snob-brats”, using a tinder-lighter acquired while fighting in Spain, recovering from a wound in a squalid Paris hospital . . . and working in filthy hotel kitchens’. Orwell was not amused. Worse, it was for a radio story he’d commissioned from her.
To be someone’s prey is to see them up close, fang and prick and underbelly.
Often, they end up at the Selfridges coffee bar across the road, ‘so we had a sort of continuous conversation going on all the time’.
gelid
Animal Farm is written in three months. It is a masterpiece of allegory about the Russian Revolution curdling into a murderous dictatorship with a new ruling elite under Stalin.
‘It has so often been remarked that, unlike Orwell’s other works, Animal Farm is a supremely well-written little satire . . .’ This, he goes on, is because Orwell discussed it ‘with his wife as he worked on it.
In Animal Farm her psychological depth and sympathy met his political insights and made a masterpiece.
The euphemistic ‘attempted to make violent love to’ is a contorted way of saying he tried to rape her.
Her remark was one of those warnings one heeds momentarily with a painful contraction of the heart, only to brush aside as unfounded fears.
the biographer wants to imply that Eileen only became ill after Orwell left. He wants Orwell not to have abandoned a wife who was seriously ill, though both he and Orwell know that he did.
it would have been an uneasy sort of thing to be producing oneself as an ideal parent a fortnight after being told that one couldn’t live more than six months or something.
This is the most terrifying letter, with its dodges and feints by which a woman plays down her needs to the point where she does not deserve critical medical care, so that her husband should feel free to either come or not.
Self-effacement is a feminine virtue in patriarchy, but it eventually realises itself and looks like a crime.
There is something horrifying about a woman supplying an excuse for the man who is neglecting her, and his biographers then taking it up and running with it.
Afterwards, the letter was found by her bedside, and packed up with her things.
Premonition
Eileen's death is not foreshadowed. There is so much illness in this book I dudnt think she would die. All the clues are there afterwards if you look for them, buti didn't, and it has keft me feeling empty and sad.
What Orwell did after Eileen’s death is easy enough to find in the biographies. Less easy is to see how he must have grieved. But now that I’ve trained myself to read under the passive voice and omissions, I can see what he is really doing. For the rest of his life he is looking, more or less desperately, for someone – even a team of people – to replace her.
In her last letters, the part that most disturbs him, that he cannot get out of his mind, is this: . . . what worries me is that I really don’t think I’m worth the money. If you don’t care for someone, will they care less for themselves?
Orwell doesn’t seek any kind of justice. Instead, he sticks with comforting fictions. His fear was perhaps not that he would find fault with the surgeon, but that he would find it with himself.
After this Orwell seems to realise that he must try to offer something more than bad sex in return for the work he is asking a wife to do.
emendation
‘After that haemorrhage I think he felt his life span was shortening. I think he was worried. And he just started proposing to girls without any real confidence of being accepted. He proposed to them because he felt desperately lonely and disoriented. His working life was very successful and the baby was extremely fine, but as a person his needs were not being replenished. I think he would have loved a wife.’
I don’t much care who sleeps with whom, it seems to me what matters is being faithful in an emotional and intellectual sense.
interstices
He needs someone to read the draft, but she’s gone. 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.
He tells Warburg, his publisher, ‘I suppose everyone will be horrified, but apart from other considerations I really think I should stay alive longer if I were married.’
Warburg is already horrified – by the manuscript – which he considers among the most terrifying books he has ever read.
Sonia understands the arrangement as a new job.
There are terms to be negotiated.
There is sex (or possibly not, as he’s so ill). There is comfort, and ‘someone to encourage me’. There is an understanding of his work. Perhaps he repeats what he said to Anne, as heartbreaking as it was practical: what he is really asking is if Sonia would handle his literary estate as his widow. Though perhaps he doesn’t, because he also needs her to share in the fantasy that he is not dying.
But what he wants from her is not her, but wife-work.
Everyone thinks of Death and the Maiden, everyone is being asked to participate in a hopeless act of hope. But Orwell is joyful.
You can try to tell the truth your whole life and finish up needing serried fictions to sustain it.
I retrieved Eileen from behind the Cerberus, from under the ignoring, minimising and passive-voicing. I retrieved her from under her own self-erasure, her attentive listening. When I found her I could see what such forces – and I, as co-conspirator – had done to me.
In a strange synchronicity, it’s on Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt when she dared look back at Sodom. My daughter has noticed that the wife, who has no name, is blamed for her own death because she looked, disobediently. This is how, my daughter says, the wife is imagined to have deserved what she got, and no man, no system, no god is responsible. It gives me a sense of awe that someone at seventeen can understand instinctively what it seems to be my life’s work to unravel.
