Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“WIFEDOM – Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life” by Anna Funder (Penguin-Random House; $NZ40 )

 

 

There’s one thing that has to be said clearly about Australian author Anna Funder. She really does admire the literary work of George Orwell (pseudonym of Eric Blair). In fact she goes out of her way to say how much she admires him. “I’ve always loved Orwell – his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on,” she says. And “in his work, if not his life, Orwell is on my side. He delved into the living conditions of the colonial oppressed in Burma, of northern English miners, of British tramps and French dishwashers. His desire to expose hidden people from under society’s hypocrisies that keep us blind to them is so admirable, and so exciting. 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).” But, after reading all Orwell’s works and all six of the most authoritative biographies that have been written about him; after delving into all the relevant archives; after interviewing very old witnesses to Orwell’s life; after travelling through Spain and other places with Orwell’s adopted son Richard Blair; and especially after reading the few surviving letters written by Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, to her friend Norah, Anna Funder has come to see Orwell as a deeply flawed man in many ways.

What triggered this view was her coming across, in Orwell’s notebooks, a [third person] passage Orwell wrote denouncing women as slovenly, demanding, and insatiable about sex. After this discovery, she found more and more examples of Orwell’s misogyny, and she focused on the way the biographers (all male) had managed to blot out of their narratives the importance of Eileen O’Shaughnessy in influencing Orwell’s work. Eileen becomes “invisible”, as the book’s title says. Anna Funder comments “Orwell’s work is precious to me. I didn’t want to take it, or him, down in any way. I worried he might risk being ‘cancelled’ by the story I’m telling. Though she [Eileen], of course, has been cancelled already – by patriarchy.” Married and with three children, Anna Funder does not practise misandry but she is very much of the era of the MeToo movement. She discusses it with her teenaged daughters [in a way, dare I say, that sounds just a bit too neat for her theme] and this morphs into reflections on Mrs Orwell’s position as unrewarded house-keeper, drudge and unpaid secretary to Orwell. 

 

 

Eileen O’Shaughnessy came from a very well-to-do upper-middle-class Anglo-Irish family. Eric Blair-Orwell came from a shabby lower-middle class family, even if he did go to Eton (on a scholarship). Eileen won a scholarship to Oxford in 1934 and seemed to be doing well there, but she gave up on both academe and her own writing when she failed to get a First.  Anna Funder says, perhaps not too convincingly: “In any event, from this point forward her efforts to put writing at the centre of her life are displaced. She will not write academic work on literature. She will not persevere with the poetry she has been writing. Now, her literary talents will be sublimated into helping other people realise theirs.” Orwell did not go to university. He went straight from school to being a policeman in Burma, which was then one of Britain’s imperial possessions. Orwell was well into his literary career before he met Eileen. He was already a controversialist in journalism, and he had already written and published Down and Out in Paris and London, Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter and other titles.

George Orwell and Eileen O’Shaughnessy met in 1935 and married in 1936, she aged 30, he aged 33, and by mutual agreement in their marriage vows, they deleted the word “obey” from the traditional promise to the “love, honour and obey”. This should have been an equitable marriage. Eileen, when they married, was fully aware that George had diseased lungs  - the tuberculosis that would gradually kill him – but she herself was often physically feeble and in the end she died (in 1945) of uterine cancer. To this reader at least, it is ironical that both of them were chain smokers, rarely without cigarettes in their mouths, and this can’t have induced good health.

The couple spent much of their marriage living in a rather primitive and cramped cottage in the countryside. At first this seemed idyllic – at least for the first six months or so – but Eileen soon became aware that George would suddenly proclaim that he was very ill if Eileen wanted to visit friends or go to London. In that respect, Orwell was very controlling and possessive. Also, writes Funder, “While [George] writes, Eileen deals with the ‘dreadful’ resident Aunt (there for two months!) [George’s aunt], the flood, the cesspit, the shop, the house, the garden, his illnesses, the chickens, the goat and the visitors.” When the latrine backs up, it is Eileen who has to take a bucket, dig out all the excrement, and bury it. It is Eileen who has to walk miles to get provisions . It is Eileen who runs the small – and totally unprofitable – shop attached to their cottage. And all the time they are short of funds, often living “hand to mouth”. Orwell is bailed out a number of times by wealthy patrons – the novelist L. H. Myers (once admired by intellectuals but now forgotten) and the left-leaning aristocrat Richard Rees.

 

Anna Funder’s first major criticism of Orwell is that he used his wife as unpaid secretary, typist and housekeeper for years without ever admitting how much she influenced his work. Apparently she worked harder than he in keeping their various homes together (they had to move to various flats and apartments in London over the years) and she was often the one bringing in the only income they had. She organised both his hospital care and their going to North Africa for his health [Morocco] where he wrote Coming Up for Air. On the outbreak of war, for the first two years it was Eileen who earned all their income, working for the censorship board of the Ministry of Information. Orwell was rejected for military service because of his health (though he later joined the Home Guard). Funder says “It’s impossible to know exactly what kind of censorship Eileen was involved with in Senate House [which housed the Ministry of Information]. Possibly Orwell was inspired and informed by her work there, erasing certain truths so that some unalloyed version of the nation could replace them. He probably took the building as his model for the Ministry of Truth (i.e. lies) in Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Eileen typed up all George’s drafts and often discussed with him what he had written, though George never acknowledged her contributions. Funder credits Eileen with inspiring Orwell to write an animal fable which became Animal Farm. Says Funder “… the book has a perfect structure and a tone foreign to all Orwell’s other works: of close and sympathetic observation of character foibles, of humour and whimsy. The animals are not stupid or paranoid or grim, they’re just themselves – seen. Once again, as after his marriage, Orwell’s friends are astonished at the change in his work. Richard Rees can’t understand how Orwell has discovered in himself a ‘new vein of fantasy, humour and tenderness’. His publisher Fred Warburg is stunned by its brilliance.”

Anna Funder’s second major criticism of Orwell is that he wrote Eileen out of his non-fiction works, even when they recorded events in which both she and he had been involved. This is especially true of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, his account of his time in the Spanish Civil War, in which she was as involved as he was. Funder has already chastised the (male) biographers who overlook women, and in effect make women disappear. Concerning Orwell’s upbringing and how his left-wing interests were nurtured, she asks the rhetorical question “How is a woman made to disappear?” Then she answers her own question:  “Orwell’s biographers start with fundamental omissions, such as his cultural and intellectual inheritance, which came through his mother’s side. …. you would not learn that his mother, Ida, was a Fabian socialist and suffragette, educated in England. Nor that her sister, Nellie, had been on the London stage, demonstrated for women’s suffrage with the Pankhursts (and been imprisoned for it), and belonged to the Women’s Freedom League which advocated against censorship, for equal pay and to revolutionise the relations between the sexes.”

But it is Homage to Catalonia that most enrages her. Orwell rushed off to Spain to fight against Franco, but it was Eileen who had to kit him out, deal with his literary correspondence, and type up his Road to Wigan Pier etc. Orwell joined the militia of the POUM  - the Spanish branch of the (anti-Stalinist) International Labour Party – and served at the front, but it is largely a quiet front with little fighting. Eileen wangled a way of getting to Spain. She was in Barcelona and sent goods to Orwell as well as typing up all the dispatches he sent to her which would form the basis of Homage to Catalonia.  And Eileen became a major figure in organising the POUM.  However, like other POUM comrades, she unwittingly befriended some Communist spies who infiltrated the POUM and passed essential documents over to the Communists, who were planning to “liquidate” the POUM.

Nowhere in Homage to Catalonia does Orwell mention his wife’s important role in POUM. Eileen visits George at the front. Orwell doesn’t mention this either. Eileen gradually understands that the Communists are about to eliminate the POUM in Catalonia. George doesn’t mention her foresight because to do so would be to reveal her importance in office. After leave in Barcelona, George goes back to the front and is badly wounded when a bullet passes through his throat. Eileen immediately takes care of him. “She arrived within forty-eight hours of the injury. She was with him ‘every minute’ for the days at Lérida and at Tarragona. She nursed him, travelled with him, dealt with the doctors and organised his transport to the Sanatorio Maurín.” With extreme violence, and having suborned the Barcelona’s armed police, the Communists arrest or kill members of the POUM. In the midst of this bloody coup, it is Eileen who manages to get George and herself safely back to England… where once again she is his slavey typing his drafts of Homage to Catalonia in a nasty little cottage. She takes him to hospital when he begins coughing blood copiously.

In exasperation, Anna Funder writes: “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. Eileen had worked at the political headquarters, visited him at the front, cared for him when wounded, saved Orwell’s manuscript by giving it to [an English contact] McNair, saved the passports, saved Orwell from almost certain arrest at the hotel, and somehow got the visas to save them all. How is it that she remains invisible? I scanned through the electronic text of the book. Orwell mentions ‘my wife’ thirty-seven times. And then I see: not once is Eileen named. No character can come to life without a name. But from a wife, which is a job description, it can all be stolen.”

Anna Funder’s third major criticism of Orwell is his crass and promiscuous sex-life with undertones of misogyny. Orwell, she says, was genuinely disgusted by his time as a British policeman in Burma, coming to understand that imperialism was a massive fraud. But he made free use of the available Burmese brothels. When he returned to England, he spent some time searching for a girlfriend or a wife, which led to a series of brief liaisons. Apparently he once nearly forced himself upon – and wounded – a young woman. In his Down and Out in Paris and London, he omitted the fact that his Aunt Nellie regularly gave him money. He also failed to mention that he spent some time sharing a flat – and a bed – with a prostitute. In months before he set off north to research The Road to Wigan Pier, he shifted his residence simply to prevent Eileen, whom he was then courting, from knowing that he was regularly sleeping with two other women at that time. When he was, with Eileen, in Morocco for his health, he spent a night with a Moroccan girl. Back in England, he made advances to Eileen’s friend Lydia, who hastened to avoid him. With many potential partners, he claimed that he had an “open marriage” and that Eileen didn’t mind his having a sexual dalliance. This was far from what Eileen really thought. When he gained a position as a broadcaster of talks at the BBC, he gained a reputation for attempting to seduce numerous women who worked there. Orwell was able to hold down a role as literary editor for the Tribune for only 16 months. When he had yet another affair with a secretary there, Eileen threatened to leave him.

A very retrograde reader might think this was just laddish behaviour, but Anna Funder sees something more sinister in his sexual behaviour. It appears that Orwell’s sexual intercourse with women was always perfunctory, as if he didn’t really like women. He often rolled over after coition saying “That’s better” as if he was getting over an unpleasant duty. Funder suggests misogyny. Worst story of all involves Eileen. Her much-loved elder brother  Laurence died in the evacuation of Dunkirk. This made Eileen go into deep and sustained depression, even though she was “still working full time to support them as well as keeping the house, provisioning it and doing the cooking”. And in the midst of her deep sorrow, George attempts to start an affair with an old flame who had never given in to him.

Perhaps straining her theories a bit, Anna Funder suggests that Orwell might have been essentially homosexual, but loathing the fact. She implies that Orwell was immediately attracted to male company in the International Brigades in the Spanish war.  She declares “He’s going ‘down and out’ again, into another, all-male world, where intimacy is with men and sex means prostitutes.” She also notes that the poet and novelist Stevie Smith, who didn’t like Orwell at all, wrote a novel called The Holiday in which she presented a thinly-disguised version of Orwell as a homosexual. But while Funder’s theories of Orwell’s misogyny might be accurate, it is really hard to reasonably categorise him as homosexual.

There was, however, one final major display by Orwell of callousness to Eileen. Orwell, who believed he was sterile, wanted to have a son. Eileen agreed that they could adopt. With Eileen doing all the paper work, it was Eileen who picked up and brought home the boy they called Richard Blair, when he was three weeks old… and of course it was Eileen who did most of the baby-care. But by now, in 1945, she was a very sick woman. She had always had problems with menstruation and excessive bleeding and now her uterine cancer was catching up with her. Yet six months after the baby was adopted, Orwell decided to go over to Europe to witness the retreat of Germans from France. Eileen was seriously sick. Now aged 39 she arranged for a hysterectomy, but she did not have the funds to get the best care. And she died in the surgery after taking a cheaper option which she could afford. Orwell knew of the pitiful state she was in, and had no real reason to be in Europe at the time. He had left his wife when she most needed his support.

Anna Funder provides an “aftermath’ to this story – Orwell getting help from his sister Avril to raise his adopted son; Orwell retreating to the Scottish island of Jura where he does not flourish, does quite a few foolish things, but does get on with writing 1984; Orwell looking for another wife to inspire him as Eileen did;  and finally Orwell, virtually in his death-bed, marrying Sonia Brownell and making her his literary executor before he dies in 1950, five years after Eileen.

But Eileen, the “invisible wife”, has been the focus of Funder’s story, and for her  Eileen’s tragedy has to do with ingrained male blindness. Taking the word Orwell invented, she says “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. In order for men to do their deeds and be innocent of them at the same time, women must be human – but not fully so, or a ‘sense of falsity and hence of guilt’ would set in. So women are said to have the same human rights as men, but our lesser amounts of time and money and status and safety tell us we do not. Women, too must keep two contradictory things in our heads at all times: I am human, but I am also less than human. Our lived experience makes a lie of the rhetoric of the world. We live on the dark side of Doublethink.”

Knowing that her depiction of Orwell has been largely negative, Funder spends some time wrestling with the old problem of how much we can separate the author from the work the author produces. Is it reasonable for a reader to think less of a book because the author was an unpleasant or even reprehensible person? Despite her ire that Orwell never acknowledged the contributions Eileen made to his work, Funder concludes sensibly enough that Orwell’s polemics, novels and non-fiction should still be taken seriously. Fair enough. At the same time, Funder inserts a made-up conversation where Eileen sits with Orwell as they discuss editing Orwell’s essay on Salvador Dali and she is plumbing the depth of vileness in Orwell’s own mind.

Which brings us to a major flaw in Wifedom – Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life. I am sure that Funder’s research is accurate, but this book is written in a variety of styles. Sometimes it is straight historical reportage, sometimes the author’s speculations, and sometimes deliberate fictionalisation of events. We are not always sure whether we are reading verifiable fact or fiction. To give one example, after Funder has told us about Eileen’s terrors at what is happening in Barcelona, Funder cuts to this: “That same dawn Orwell is at the front. He stands ‘head and shoulders’ above the parapet, a black silhouette against the pale world. It’s the changing of the guard. He’s lit a cigarette, is regaling the boys with stories of his exploits in the brothels of Paris, of how cheap it was, actually, to install the ‘little trollop’ in his hotel. The bullet goes clean through his neck.” Apart from the verifiable fact that Orwell was shot through the throat, how can Funder possibly know what Orwell was saying to his comrades and how he was saying it? At another point, to cover the fact that she has just made something up, Funder says : “Something – not this, but essentially this – must have happened.” This is not the most reliable way of presenting real people. A hard reality, then, is that at least some of this book is fiction. And, though Eileen O'Shaughnessy was doubtless a great inspiration to Orwell in the nine years they were together, it is also true that Orwell was already a literary figure before they had met, had already produced a number of books, and was already on his way to forming his views on imperialism, socialism, fascism and communism. Eileen did not "make" him.

In spite of which, Wifedom – Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life remains a thoughtful book which throws much light on Eileen O’Shaughnessy and her husband… and my immediate reaction to it is to go back and read or re-read the books by the husband. I apologise that on this blog over the years I have so far reviewed only one of Orwell's novels - Keep the Aspidistra Flying - but I will get around to re-reading and reviewing others in due course.

One final note - nine times out of ten, professional authors are very anti-social creatures, withdrawing from family and friends and demanding silence and no distractions as they set about writing. To write is to be disciplined and focussed (unless the writer is a hack) and that often means leaving it to others to tidy up, produce meals etc. If one is to chastise George Orwell for his behaviour towards his wife then one might as well chastise at least half the novels you have admired.

FOOTNOTES

Snarky and unpleasant footnote. To the annoyance of some on the left, it could be argued that Franco should have awarded the Communists with medals when the Spanish Civil War was over. After all, by smashing up the united front against Franco, the Communists helped Franco to win the war. Reading of the Communists liquidating the POUM and others in Barcelona reminded me of this.

Pedantic footnote. In the end-notes, Anna Funder quotes in full a poem Eileen O’Shaughnessy wrote in 1934 called “End of the Century, 1984”. Some have attempted to see this poem as an inspiration for George Orwell’s novel “1984”, but when one reads the poem, it is clear that poem and novel have nothing in common. Written in 1934, Eileen's poem was called “End of the Century, 1984” only because 1934 was the 50th anniversary of her college which was being celebrated, and her poem was speculating what the college would be like in another 50 years.

Silly footnote. There is one genuinely funny anecdote in Funder’s Wifedom – Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life. It concerns a disastrous dinner party Eileen and George had with H. G. Wells … but you’ll have to look it up for yourself.