305. Orwell: Dark Secrets, The CIA, & His Forgotten Failures (Part 4)

27:10And Eileen, who was also brilliant and got herself a scholarship. She was head girl at her school, got herself a scholarship to Oxford to read English. she was funny and was taught by Tolkien Tolkien was her professor I mean that's amazing yes yes it is so she loved animal fables when she was first married to Orwell they lived in a tiny hovel in a village called Wollington 50 miles outside of London with no plumbing and no electricity so they were kind of both suffering for his art really she wrote in her first letter to Nora she said I'm really sorry it's taken me six months to write to you I would have written sooner, but we have quarreled so continuously and really bitterly since the wedding that I thought I'd just write one letter to everyone once the murder or separation was accomplished.

27:56So she's hilarious. And these letters were discovered in about 2005, a cache of six of them to her best friend. And my interest in Eileen was really that I found myself one summer kind of needing inspiration and have always loved Orwell and always loved his work. I didn't read 1984 till after I'd written Stasi-Land for some reason. I just really didn't want to. And then when I read it, it read like the GDR regime. So I read my way through his collected journalism essays and letters and watched him create his writing persona through those four edited volumes, edited by Sonia Brownell with another.

28:37And then when I finished that, I read the six biographies of him with great pleasure. You get these different views on the same person, depending on the personality of the biographer. And then I was still researching around and found these letters that I, not me personally, they had been found, but they were six letters from Eileen to her best friend, starting with this one where she wants to kill him at six months married. And I realized that there was no sense of her as a person and what she'd done in the biographies. And it's actually not because these six letters were missing. It's because the men who wrote the biographies were not looking.

29:11And also Orwell didn't help either because he sort of omits her. But look, we've jumped a step because we started off saying they met at a party. We need to know whether it was love at first sight. And then William sort of leapt in with the description. We need to know what happened. Were there fireworks? How did it develop? It was absolutely love at first sight for him. He was besotted and he thought this was the woman for him. She said the next day, she'd never heard of him. He was a complete unknown. He and Richard Rees were leaning on the fireplace in their threadbare suits, skinny men, looking, as Eileen's friend Lydia said, rather moth-eaten.

29:50Lydia was Russian, thought they looked like some sort of moth-eaten people out of Chekhov and didn't want Eileen to have anything to do with him. Eileen, the next day, said to a friend, Rosamund, who was the hostess, said, actually, he would really like to see you should I organize a dinner and Eileen was surprised and said oh my god I was so drunk rowdy behaving my worst so Eileen had had a good time Orwell had fallen in love Rosamund organized a dinner and it went from there so he yeah and then they married the next year and so I mean there's this bright wonderful woman who you know has has the eyes of everybody in the room on her because she has got this sort of this Irish beauty you know the green blue sea eyes and the dark hair and the translucent skin.

30:35How quickly does she start changing from her own woman, a very strong, educated, Tolkien-taught woman, into somebody who thinks that actually, you know, this man is worth me diverting my energies, my talent, my intelligence, to serve him in a way, to help him, to make him better? That's a really brilliant question. And that is the question, I think one of the big questions of Eileen's life it's one of the big questions of my book Wifedom and it's a question for many women who go into marriage or go into relationships it's a question of how much of yourself can you maintain in a relationship how much should you give in that relationship and negotiating those two sometimes conflicting things and sometimes if you give too much, it can be too late to get yourself back because you give so much, you end up in a state where you no longer have the strength to get yourself back whole.

31:33So something like that is going on in this marriage, but it's a complicated and interesting one. Three weeks after the party, she said to her friend, Lydia, you know that moth-eaten guy at the party? Well, he asked me to marry him. And Lydia says, she writes this in her memoir, Lydia, so we know it. Oh my God, no. Oh God, what did you say? And Eileen says, well, you know, I said to myself, if I weren't married by the time I was 30, I'd marry the first person who comes along. So maybe I will. So she's kind of having a bet with herself. But I think she was being kind of humorous there. What I really think was going on was at Oxford, she would have liked to have stayed and become a don of some kind.

32:13It was pretty much impossible for women to do. And she didn't get a first. Eileen was the most self-deprecating to a dangerous degree person combined with this extraordinary cleverness. And the only time in her life where she behaves in such a disappointed way, almost embittered, is when she didn't get a first at Oxford. And I suspect that something happened there that she thought was unfair. She had a great sense of justice. She organized two walkouts of workers at secretarial offices that she'd worked in, actually one during the war at a ministry. She had a great sense of decency that was the decency that Orwell so wanted to have.

32:57And I think that he, you know, he modeled that decency on her. But yes, the issue of losing yourself in a marriage is a big one. And I don't know. I just have to give all the evidence and tell the story. So this strong, brilliant, beautiful woman who also sort of proves her mettle in that cauldron of the Spanish Civil War. Just tell us what Eileen was doing at that time. So Orwell goes to Spain to fight fascists. He wants to fight and kill fascists, something that used to seem like it was history and doesn't anymore. But that's what he's doing. And he leaves her in this tiny cottage. And I think that she just thinks, no way am I staying here looking after the chickens.

33:35and she sells part of the family silver to fund his kit. But also she manages to get herself a job in the head office of the International Labour Party in Barcelona. So she goes as a French-English typist and she's writing propaganda for Charles Orr, who's an American economist in that office. So she's working at the political headquarters and he's off in the trenches, bored out of his mind, trying to find a bullet to hit him, basically. So she goes there and so she saves his life when he's hit by a bullet. She saves his life by getting the visas to get them out of Spain. He's writing on bits of newspaper in these horrible trenches and the backs of envelopes and toilet paper and everything.

34:16And he's sending it back to her and she types it all up into what will become the basis for Homage to Catalonia, a book that I had read twice and loved without realising that Eileen was in Spain, let alone had saved his life. And basically her political now says informing that book. She must have typed that and realised in the typing of it that he was going to very deliberately tell the story to leave her out. But why did he do that, Anna, as somebody who's thought about him? Why do that? It's so churlish. It's churlish to the point of being actually quite cruel, isn't it? It's very deliberate.

34:53So he has to tell the whole story of being shot through the throat without saying that within a day, basically, or a day and a half, She was there and she organized all medical care, x-rays, all the transport, put him in the sanatorium. There's that. And then there's the episode when Stalin could see her perfectly clearly. There were Stalinist agents in her office who wanted to wine and dine her, romance her, get information from her. She was a target. She was terrified. When Richard Rees, Orwell's friend, turns up in Barcelona, he goes to see her at the office and says, let's go to lunch. And she says, I can't.

35:29and he says, oh, come on, you can just get away for an hour. And she says, takes him into the corridor because there were literally spies in her office spying for Stalin and says, it will be dangerous for you, Richard, to be seen with me. And he writes down, which all the biographers had access to, this is the first time I have witnessed somebody living under political terror. Political terror is Orwell's topic. She was the one who lived it and so she was informing his books. with it. I think the big answer to your question, why would he do that? Is it churlish? I think that, I mean, it's very deliberate.

36:02I see it more as something that is a cultural trope. All kinds of men are writing their stories as if women didn't make them possible. The fact that none of the biographers thought to look closely at this very famous episode, this very famous man, this very famous book and deconstruct it to see what is being hidden. I mean, I've done that. That sounds complicated, but I've done it in a narrative way in Wifedom. It's a shock to me that Orwell scholars who are much more informed than I am didn't do that. I mean, it's really exciting. It's Cherchez La Femme who saved his life and made this book possible, and yet she's nowhere.

36:45So I think that the biographers are also part of this trope where a great man must do everything on his own, and he must not owe anything to a woman because that could possibly take away from his achievement. I don't think it does. I think the story is much more interesting when you can see both sides. Anna, tell us about her literary additions to his, because from the very beginning, from Wigan Pier, which is being written just as the early days of their marriage, she is not only typing stuff out, but she's editing and contributing to his literary work. That's one of the great revelations of your book.

37:20Not only is she humanly in the story much more than the other biographers have allowed her up to date, but she's actually a major literary presence, which is a very important literary contribution that you've made by unmasking this. Yes. So just after they were married in 1936, several people who knew him well, including Richard Rees and Fred Warburg, who were editors and publishers of his, said it was remarkable how much his writing improved after he got married. But they too wouldn't name her. It was as if perhaps his happiness in general, perhaps regular sex. There's all these sort of theories.

37:59It was obviously because she had started. He was reluctant at first, but she was very keen to edit his stuff. Eventually, she ended up writing what she called emendations on the back of everything that he did. And she was widely thought by her friends to have improved his work by reining in the paranoia, reining in the sadism, reining in the hyperbole. All tobacconists are fascists. I love that one. These sort of provocations that could make your writing a bit less serious. Can we just zone in on Animal Farm, which is a book that I think most people listening to this will have either been forced to read at school or, you know, like me, really enjoyed reading at school.

38:42Eileen's fingerprints are all over that and you just wouldn't know it, would you? So tell me what she did. Tell me how that is a clear bit of evidence of her impact on his work. Animal Farm was written during the war. Orwell, since their time in Spain really, had been terrified a Stalinist was going to come and kill him. A real terror, but a very unlikely thing to happen because he had been a pretty low-level militia man. But he thought that someone might knock on the door in Britain and have been sent by Stalin to kill him. In fact, when that did happen one time, he grabbed a gun in the cottage, jumped behind the door and said to Eileen, open the door.

39:22anyway he's he decides during the war he wants to write an essay critical of stalin eileen always worked to support them financially during their whole relationship one of the jobs that she did that in was in the office of censorship in the department of information or vice versa department of censorship in the office of information so she had been in the department of censorship during the war working there which is room 101 isn't that the protein room 101 right in senate house She worked at the Senate House, which he then later took as the model for the Ministry of Truth, i.e. lies. So she knew what could be published and what couldn't be published.

39:58And she said to him, no one is going to publish an essay critical of Stalin right now because he is helping us win the war. But I don't know what the next bit of the conversation was. But the upshot of that conversation was that they turned to writing an animal fable of the kind she had studied under Tolkien, the kind that she had wanted to write because she watched very closely the chickens when they were just married and they're living in the cottage and they all had personalities and she wanted to write about them so they write this book animal farm it takes them three months she goes off to work at a different ministry the ministry of food at this time and then she shops for them to find whatever she can find for dinner she comes home and cooks for whoever's been burnt out and then they hop into bed together because they can't afford to heat the flat and they work on the book together every night.

40:42So whatever he's done during the day, they work over and they work out what he's going to do the next day. And we know this because every day she went into the ministry and she told her friend Lettuce Cooper about it. And Lettuce Cooper was a novelist who wrote about this. And all her friends at the ministry knew these installments. And Eileen was having a ball. When it's finally finished, Orwell gives it to Fred Warburg, his publisher, who's his friend, who's known him for a long time, and Warburg is absolutely stunned. He says he cannot understand how somebody who's written books with a stand-in, grumpy character who is himself before has suddenly taken wings and become a poet.

41:25He cannot understand it. And he knows Eileen well, and he still can't see it. And neither can Richard Rees, who says we had no idea he was capable of such a thing. And the fact was, that book, which Orwell considered to be his best book, he loved it, was the only thing he ever produced that was remotely like that. Everything else is completely different and no one has looked. So do we think that she actually wrote great chunks of it? Or do we think that she pushed him to write in the style that she was bringing to the table? How much do we think this came from the mind and heart of Eileen Nao Shaughnessy.

42:03So when you read Eileen's letters, this whimsy, the murder or separation letter, or the letters about other people, she's someone who can see other people as characters and always has been able to tell stories about them. She's whimsical. She's hilarious. She's astute about people. Orwell is not whimsical. He has no idea about other people. He has never written another character. He's certainly never written another female character who's convincing. When you read her letters and you read Animal Farm, the voice is the same. So I'm sure this could be fed into some computer now to work it out. So I don't know how that practically worked.

42:35I mean, they're sitting in bed together, they're writing this thing. I don't know. But it was joyful for both of them. And another of your revelations is 1984, that not only was she helping him write this, but she'd already written a book much earlier in her life, or a story, called End of the Century 1984. I know. Do you know, Willie, I feel that is a much more minor thing. It looks extraordinary. She wrote a poem called End of the Century 1984 before she met Orwell. It was to commemorate something to do with her high school. It is imagining a dystopian future of telepathy and mind control. She dies before Animal Farm was published, very tragically.

43:18He's writing 1984. He doesn't know what he's going to call it till the end. He thinks he might call it, The Last Man in Europe, and so on, and he calls it 1984. There is no evidence why he did that or how much they had talked about that before she died or whether the poem inspired it or whether 1984 is his homage to her. I don't see that as anything like the kind of really significant contribution, such as the co-writing of Animal Farm. You sort of mentioned that Eileen died, and this might be an homage to her memory, calling it 1984, but we haven't really said how she died. I mean, it's all sort of, you know, what happened?

43:57Was it very sudden? Was there warning? How did he feel about it? I'm always a little bit, well, I have been in the past. The book has been out two years now, and I've been reluctant to talk about that because for my own very selfish reasons, it is the plot shock of the book. But yes, so he was ill with TB. She was very unwell. They adopted a baby in 1944 called Richard. Orwell didn't really want, he didn't turn up for the adoption hearing. As the war was finishing, he wanted to go and do some reporting from Europe. So she has this new baby and he goes off to Europe to do some reporting of kind of very minor consequence really for the observer and leaves her.

44:39And she's very ill. She has uterine cancer at this point. She'd had a long history of endometriosis. She'd had bleeds and faints where she'd fallen unconscious and that he knew of. She had spent the best part of her life from the age of 30 ministering to his health, saving his life in every way possible, making everything possible. And when she needed care, it didn't occur to him, it was his responsibility, I don't think. I think it just didn't, and he buggers off. And she organises an operation, a hysterectomy, He's been very, very controlling about money, even though she's been the one who's been earning it.

45:21And she writes in these agonizing letters, organizing his life and hers and writing wills, organizing the baby's life, organizing her medical care to Europe. He spent a month in the Hotel Scrib in Paris, drinking, meeting Hemingway, having a very good time. He didn't write back to her in a very timely way. Anyway, she chose in the end to have an operation that was cheaper than one that would have been safer. And she seems to have done that because she says to him, I know you don't want me to have this operation at all. I know you're very worried about money. She defends herself. She says, I have to tell you that when I was organizing all your medical care, a lot of that was done by my brother.

46:03So you got that for free. And this procedure would have cost 40 guineas, but we didn't pay for it. But anyway, I'm going to do this cheaply. and it was a disaster. And she dies alone or is he back when she's done? No, she's alone. She's 39 and she dies on the operating table. She's very well connected medically. Her brother had been this Harley Street specialist and one of them said, she weighed 45 kilos. She's a tall woman. You are so anemic that you have to have a series of blood transfusions and go to hospital and get fatter before we can operate on you. and she says, I'm going to have the cheaper option up here in the north.

46:43And she does and she dies on the table. Oh, gosh. Allergy to the anesthesia, is it? What's the...? The anesthetist was a woman and basically the coroner wanted it to be no one's fault. The surgeon who performed the operation didn't even turn up at the coronal inquiry and Orwell, when he got back, didn't go and see the surgeon, didn't go to the coronal inquiry and made no inquiries. He was distraught. But it didn't seem like the sort of thing that he felt that he needed justice for.

47:16Distraught, okay. Distraught in a really dysfunctional way. Not there when she needed him. Tight with money when she really needed that. And then I also read that bit of an essay about women's sexuality and how they're always pressing men for sex. They're always demanding sex. Men have to run away from it. And I said at the time, he's talking about Eileen. I mean, was he talking about Eileen? Does he look back on Eileen's contribution? What does he leave as her legacy or does he leave nothing at all? He leaves nothing at all. He moved on very, very quickly. And usually for the time, he wanted to keep the baby Richard.

47:55He wanted to keep looking after him. So he hired a very nice young woman who was divorcing a Cambridge don. She was a 27-year-old with a child of her own who was in boarding school. And she came as a sort of housekeeper to him. And so we have her testimony, really. She's spoken on radio and spoke to people about what he was like in those days. And she said, I never noticed any grief in him, but he did seem sad and lonely. He offered her all Eileen's clothes. He started proposing to other women he barely knew. Very interesting women. All his girlfriends have always been pretty much, except for the young prostitutes in Burma, usually literary women, interesting women, he started proposing to many other interesting women.

48:43You could read this as evidence of his loneliness, or you could read this as evidence of his callousness, couldn't you? You could look at it two different ways. That's true. It is callous, certainly, to the women. I mean, good friends of his said, a woman who lived till she was 101 called Brenda Saukeld, who was a clergyman's daughter. He wrote a novel before he met Eileen called Clergyman's Daughter. He was in love with her. She refused to have anything to do with him. He said to her, if we got married, you would have to stop seeing your brother. And she said, don't be ridiculous. I'm devoted to my brother.

49:16So he had this isolationist impulse from the beginning. We call it coercive control these days. You can get done for it in a court of law. Yes, exactly. And she also said to him, Brenda, and a couple of girlfriends, this is women who saw him up close and knew him well and liked him, said, you really shouldn't write about people, you haven't got a clue. So I just think he was one of those people who didn't really see other people. I just don't know how to feel about all of this because I have loved Orwell. I have absolutely loved his work. I have been profoundly moved by it. I've been educated by it.

49:50It's taken me into chapters of history that I then became obsessed with. And then to hear this, you know, sort of this very deficient stroke, possibly downright cruel and sadistic man. I don't know how to feel about him now. And I wonder whether you, having discovered all of this and put all of this together, do you still like Orwell? Do you know, I think it's more shocking when you first encounter it. I have a huge admiration for what he did. He worked so hard. And I love his writing. And I really can separate it from his so-called pouncing and sexual assaults, putting a knife through a live adder.

50:31You know, there are all kinds of bizarre things that he, gauche, awkward, cruel, sadistic things that he did. But we're looking at the man who wrote about Room 101 and having rats in a cage on your face. This is a sadistic, grim, paranoid, prescient, important thing to have in literature. We should not expect a Hale fellow, well met, well adjusted, sexually content, every man, decent, upright, upstanding fellow to produce a work like that. It is our reader's fantasy that is disappointing. We need Orwell to be the man he was, to have written the work he did, and we need her to have been the woman she was, to have co-written Animal Farm.

51:20And I don't think knowing any of that takes anything away. I think it's a great addition to our knowledge. If you look at the other writers of his generation, most of them are also pretty hopeless with women and not particularly nice to their wives. Do you think he was any worse than any of the rest of them? I mean, if you look at Evil of War, for example, who's a kind of monster in many ways at home. Orwell looks benign compared to him. But what's so extraordinary about Orwell is that he isn't the man of his generation when he's writing about imperialism. He isn't the man of his generation when he's writing about fascism.

51:55He is years ahead about the way he writes about totalitarianism and communism. Is this sort of attitude not exactly the sort of patriarchal attitudes we should expect of a writer from the 1920s and 1930s in a tweed suit? So his vision of colonialism, for instance, and then later, as you say, communism and fascism, that vision, as I mentioned, is very much informed by his mother's feminism and socialism. We have to bear that in mind. It's not as if he was some genius that was totally self-made. He was utterly educated by these left-wing Fabian suffragette women to look at things from the point of view of the oppressed.

52:36but he could not look at things from the point of view of women. So he could do it with regard to race in Burma and say the empire is a system of despotism with theft as its aim. Way before everybody else of his generation does. Way before everybody else. But you could also say that patriarchy is a system of wage theft and sexual exploitation as its aim. But that was something impossible for a man of his generation, even with a feminist aunt and mother. So I think that's where we get in. As with all the other writers of his generation, I haven't done a comparative study, but what I am interested in is the fact that they were all able to pretend to be and to be seen as decent fellows in public at the same time as doing this horrendous stuff in private.

53:24And women's shame, which is a patriarchal concept, kept what was being done to them private. And I think that is a core element of patriarchy. And if you look today at Trumpism, so fascism is a very extreme form of patriarchy, comes out of patriarchy, and you look at what it's doing to women, we need to be very aware of how these things work. So it's not that he was particularly bad or not as bad as the other men. It's that they were all entitled to this behavior in a system which is like racism, only it's patriarchy. I've loved this. Absolutely loved this. Thank you so, so much. Anna Fondant, as I say, her book, if you would like to order it, we have discount on our club, empirepoduk.com.

54:06I really hope you've enjoyed this mini-series. Next up, we're going to be talking about another of our Imperial writers, and Joseph Conrad is his name. This may or may not be of any interest. It might just be a background thing. But Orwell loved Conrad, just admired him and absolutely loved his work. and when he was in UCL hospital, Sonia brought to him a copy of a biography that Conrad's wife had written about Conrad and the next time Sonia turned up in the room, he threw this book across the room and hissed, never do that to me and she took that so seriously, I think. She was, as you mentioned before, very serious about protecting his legacy from biographers and terrible filmmakers and so on and I wonder if that was the start of it.

54:54It's been so wonderful having you on Anna. I can't tell you how much you've given, well me personally but I'm sure everybody listens to this, to think about and Joseph Conrad is with the wonderful Maya Jasanoff, another extraordinary woman writer, woohoo, too, on the trot. Why don't you tell us about something else that people can enjoy, William, as a bonus episode if they join the club. A wonderful bonus episode on John Buchan of The 39 Steps, another writer who is obsessed with empire and who's writing about it reflects very interestingly on imperialism. We've got back our wonderful friend of the show, Murray Pittock from Scotland to talk about him.

55:35So that's if you join up to the Empire Club, you can get access to that. So till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William de Rumpel.

56:13looked into each other's eyes at that moment. And of course, interrogations at this time, I mean, we say interrogations as if they're just being questioned, but interrogations are brutal, violent events. Yeah, and it's going to get much, much more violent. Fawkes stands up to the king in a way that actually even impresses the king. He's open that they plan to blow up parliament. He said that the aim had been to blow King James and the other Scots back to their Scottish mountains. He says that to the king. It takes guts. but it's also not the most diplomatic thing to say to the person you've just tried to murder and your fate is in his hands.

56:46Well I think Fawkes knows what's going to happen. I mean the king was impressed by his obstinacy that he would not reveal the names of his co-conspirators that he was willing to insult the king to his face and you have to say about Guy Fawkes a man who'd been a soldier for 10 years my god he had guts. I mean he is a bad man. He is a religious fanatic. He's not somebody I admire, but my God, he was brave. You can be brave and wrong. You can be brave and involved in things that are evil at the same time. And he was all of those things. But this willingness to stand up to the king, this is before the torture.

57:24If you want to hear more about gunpowder, treason, and plot, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.