The Road to Morocco by Gordon Bowker

The Road to Morocco

The extract below is taken from chapter 12 of Gordon Bowker’s George Orwell, reproduced by kind permission of the author.

Rick: ‘I came to Casablanca for the waters.’

Captain Renault: ‘The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.’

Rick: ‘I was misinformed.’

(Casablanca)

 

Read the first part of this chapter on Orwell’s return from Spain

 

Homage to Catalonia was published at the end of April 1938. Orwell was hoping for a good sale and wide coverage. In the event, Warburg printed 1,500 copies but sold only 800. The remainder was not finally sold until after Orwell’s death. There were reviews, some eulogistic. The Observer called Orwell ‘a great writer’, and the Manchester Guardian noted the author’s ‘fine air of classical detachment’ in describing the horrors of war. There were highly appreciative notices from Geoffrey Gorer in Time and Tide, John McNair in New Leader, Philip Mairet in the New English Weekly and Max Plowman in Peace News. Mairet observed shrewdly, ‘It shows us the heart of innocence that lies in revolution; also the miasma of lying that, far more than the cruelty, takes the heart out of it.’ and Gorer concluded, ‘Politically and as literature it is a work of first-class importance … George Orwell occupies a unique position among the younger English prose writers, a position which so far has prevented him getting his due recognition.’ Gorer had reason to stress this. Orwell had told him that he was convinced Gollancz was using every means to prevent his book being mentioned. He was even frightened, he said, that he might have him eliminated.  If this is what he told Gorer, it reveals how paranoid he now was about the Communists. After all, in Spain there were English commissars prepared to excuse ‘the necessary murder’ and sanction executions. ‘An education in Marxism and similar creeds,’ he wrote, ‘consists largely in destroying your moral sense.’ Herbert Read wrote to say that his book was ‘as good as anything that came out of the so-called Great War’. His referring to the Stalinists as ‘the new Jesuits’ would have struck a resounding chord with Orwell. He hoped that Connolly would review the book, promising in turn to write up his Enemies of Promise when it appeared (‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’) but, in the event, neither review was ever written.

 

There were hostile notices in the Tablet, however, from a Catholic critic who wondered why he had not troubled to get to know Fascist fighters and enquire about their motivations, in the TLS, from a Party-liner misrepresenting what Orwell had said (prompting an indignant letter from the author), and in the Listener, also from an obvious Communist, attacking the POUM but never mentioning the book – producing another angry response from Orwell. The Listener’s literary editor, J. R. Ackerley, sided with Orwell, but the chance of a fair notice there was lost. A somewhat ambivalent review in the New Statesman by V. S. Pritchett, appeased the editor no doubt by declaring Orwell politically naive about Spain, but adding, ‘No one excels him in bringing to the eyes, ears and nostrils the nasty ingredients of fevered situations; and I would recommend him warmly to all who are concerned about the realities of personal experience in a muddled cause.’ When he heard how few copies Warburg had sold in three months Orwell was horrified, and wrote asking [his agent Leonard] Moore to confirm the figures, fearing he had misread them. Gollancz and his friends, he now felt sure, were pressurising papers not to review it.

 

In what had come as a complete yet intriguing surprise, the previous November he had been invited by Desmond Young, editor of the Lucknow Pioneer in India, and later a distinguished war reporter, to work for him as a leader writer. The idea of returning to the land of his birth as a journalist, and to work for the Pioneer, as Kipling had, must have appealed greatly to the romantic in Orwell, and the chance to write against British imperialism was obviously a great temptation. But when Young approached the India Office in February he was discouraged from pursuing Orwell, who, because of his honesty and strength of character, was thought likely to cause trouble to the authorities.

 

In fact he was in no condition to travel to India, or anywhere for that matter. Just before Homage to Catalonia appeared, after a week in bed with bronchitis, he began coughing up blood. It was extremely frightening for Eileen, who told Jack Common, ‘The bleeding seemed prepared to go on for ever & on Sunday everyone agreed that Eric must be taken somewhere where really active steps could be taken if necessary – artificial pneumothorax to stop the blood or transfusion to replace it …’ Laurence O’Shaughnessy saw him and had him transferred immediately by ambulance to Preston Hall Village, a British Legion sanatorium, near Maidstone in Kent, where he was consultant thoracic surgeon. He was admitted on 17 March. Since childhood, hospitals had held a peculiar dread for him and he grumbled to Eileen about being sent to ‘an institution devised for murder’. But the fact that he was in the care of a doctor he knew clearly helped. Not only that, but he was put in a private room paid for by Laurence.

 

Hard work and neglect had taken their toll. Since returning from Spain, in addition to writing his book he had produced four articles, twelve reviews and several letters for publication. He was clearly exhausted, but still refusing to admit his wretched condition. Although no tubercle bacilli were found in his sputum, further tests told a rather different story, as his medical record reveals. The doctors found ‘heavy mottling over the lower lobe of the left lung.’ He was treated initially for pulmonary tuberculosis, but tests suggested ‘bronchiectasis of the Left lung, with nonspecific fibrosis of Right lung’, and he was treated with injections of vitamin D.  However, at the conclusion of their tests the doctors drew a darker conclusion, and a postscript to his report reads ‘T. B. confirmed’.

 

Even though, finally, he had to face up to the bad news, he still tried to play it down, telling Stephen Spender, ‘I am afraid from what they say it is TB all right but evidently a very old lesion and not serious.’ Two weeks later, writing to Gorer, the old complacent Orwell had returned, denying the cruel reality of his broken health. ‘I am much better,’ he wrote, ‘in fact I really doubt whether there is anything wrong with me.’ (Years later, clearly diagnosed as having full-blown tuberculosis, he blamed it on the freezing Spanish winter he had spent shivering and coughing in the trenches on the Aragón front. But he could have acquired it at any time in his life – as a child out in Burma, among tramps, even in a Paris hospital.)

 

He was ordered to rest and refrain even from ‘literary research’ for three months. It was particularly galling for Orwell, who already had another novel in mind. In December he had outlined the idea to Moore: ‘It will be about a man who is having a holiday and trying to make a temporary escape from his responsibilities, public and private. The title I thought of is “Coming Up For Air“.’  Escaping from reality, of course, is just what he found so unacceptable and difficult to understand in Henry Miller, the fatalist who himself advocated living like Jonah, ‘inside the whale’. Orwell wanted to explore this tendency in himself, a tendency already seen in a less political context in the ‘escapes’ of Dorothy Hare and Gordon Comstock. But the man who most needed air was George Orwell, the man whose lungs were refusing to work for him.

 

Two and half months after his admission he was still unable to get the novel started. Eileen told Leonard Moore that ‘the book seethes in his head and he is very anxious to get on with it’, but surrounded by movement and noise it was not easy to work. She told Lydia Jackson it was a novel ‘about a man with a couple of impossible children and a nagging wife’. His hope was to escape from the shadowland of European politics into sunlit uplands of literature, but he knew that was not possible. As he told Jack Common in May, ‘The rest … has made me keen to get started … though when I came here I had been thinking that what with Hitler, Stalin & the rest of them the day of novel-writing was over. As it is if I start it in August I daresay I’ll have to finish it in the concentration camp.’ The novel he was writing was somehow different, a first-person narrative with past, present and future ponderings mimicking the mind’s reflective movements and Orwell’s own attempt to see a way through the chaos of the times providing a political commentary. But he could not hope to do any serious work until the summer and would not be able to let Gollancz have the book until Christmas at the earliest. Meanwhile he killed time doing crossword puzzles and worrying about the state of his garden.

 

He felt a bit isolated in a private room, but was able to mix a little with other patients and receive visitors. Once a fortnight Eileen took the tortuous journey from Wallington to Maidstone (two buses to London, a trip across the city and a train down to Kent and back), once accompanied by her admirer Karl Schnetzler. There were also visits from Douglas Moyle, Reginald Reynolds and his wife Ethel Mannin, Stephen Spender and Lydia Jackson. Denys King-Farlow came more than once, and Max and Dorothy Plowman brought the novelist L. H. Myers, another Old Etonian, who had long admired Orwell’s work and was keen to meet him. Eileen, in fact, had written to all of his friends with news of his illness and this produced a spate of sympathetic letters and promises to visit. Richard Rees, still in Spain, wrote as soon as he heard of his illness. But Orwell was less worried about his health than his literary future. He continued to express anger with the dictators for interrupting his career now it was in its own rocky way at last launched. ‘I … see a lot of things that I want to do and to continue doing for another thirty years or so, and the idea that I’ve got to abandon them and either be bumped off or depart to some filthy concentration camp just infuriates me.’

 

Spender found him endearingly phoney. He thought that the deliberate descent into tramping had been an act, turning himself into a make-believe member of the working class. However, he did not find this annoying. ‘Even his phoniness was perfectly acceptable, I think. Orwell had something about him like a character in a Charlie Chaplin movie, if not like Charlie Chaplin himself. He was a person who was always playing a role, but with great pathos and great sincerity. He probably impressed us more than he impressed the working class; in fact, I’m sure he did. I always found him a very nice and rather amusing kind of man to be with.’ Jon Kimche had observed this role-playing element in Orwell previously; Anthony Powell and Michael Foot would notice it later, and Ruth Pitter noted his ‘dual nature’. Most intriguing to Spender was Orwell’s telling him that, although he had attacked him, he had changed his mind on meeting him. ‘It is partly for this reason that I don’t mix much in literary circles,’ he said, ‘because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to, like the Labour MPs who get patted on the back by dukes & are lost forever more.’

 

One visitor who intrigued him was John Sceats, a contributor to Controversy, whose articles Orwell admired. They spent a day together discussing Homage to Catalonia, and the prospect of war with Germany. To Sceats Orwell seemed defeatist on the question of war, feeling that Fascism within would be the main problem, and the need to oppose it through secret political activity and the use of clandestine presses. The fact that his visitor had once worked as an insurance salesman gave Orwell the occupation of the central character in his new novel. Even though he was unable to get down to serious work, the character of ‘Tubby’ George Bowling was obviously evolving.

 

It was spring when Lydia visited him. The time of year and his improved health probably led to a situation which, according to her, left her profoundly embarrassed. Orwell took her for a stroll through the sanatorium grounds and, to her embarrassment made a sudden pass to which she responded. She did so, she said, out of pity for the man but in truth found contact with him distasteful, and felt guilty because of Eileen. Unfortunately for her she failed to make her feelings clear enough to Orwell and he was encouraged to think she welcomed his attentions. Perhaps it was Bowling (the fat man struggling to get out of the emaciated Orwell) whose wayward lusts were being rehearsed in this moment of dalliance.

 

In June he joined the Independent Labour Party. That warrior cast of mind which had urged him to fight in Spain had been supplanted by a pacifism based on opposition to the Popular Front policy of the Communists, which he saw as yet another racket – to lure the democracies into a war against Fascism, a war that he thought would not defeat Fascism but simply bring it to Britain. The ILP served no moneyed interest and he found its vision of socialism closer to his own than that of any other party. But he was in no mood or condition to accept an invitation to attend the Eton Collegers Dinner held on 7 July at the Park Lane Hotel. King-Farlow and members of his Election, saluted their sick schoolfellow afterwards, sending him the menu, signed by all present, bearing the slogan, ‘Homage to Blair’. It was a kind recognition of his latest work by erstwhile readers of College Days.

 

When finally allowed to do a little writing he reviewed Assignment in Utopia by Eugene Lyons who had spent several years in the USSR, witnessing starvation in the Ukraine, the Five-Year Plan and the all-pervading power of the secret police. ‘The system that Mr Lyons describes,’ he wrote, ‘does not seem to be very different from Fascism.’ All real power was in the hands of the few, the proletariat ‘reduced to a status resembling serfdom’. ‘The GPU, are everywhere, everyone lives in constant terror of denunciation, freedom of speech and of the press are obliterated to an extent we can hardly imagine.’ There were periodic waves of terror, ‘liquidations’ of whole peoples, idiotic show trials, betrayals of parents by their children, while the invisible Stalin was worshipped like a Roman Emperor. Here too one was expected to accept unquestioningly all pronouncements by the omniscient and omnipotent ruler. If 2+2=5 (the slogan for the Soviet Five-Year Plan) so be it. Lyons had interviewed the dictator and, like Wells, found him ‘human, simple and likeable’. But, observed the old College cynic, Al Capone was a good husband and father, and the Brides in the Bath murderer was deeply loved by his first wife. Lyons’s description of a totalitarian state was a foreshadow of the fictional state Orwell himself created out of the nightmare of Spain which would consume him until the end of his life. It was one that would be glimpsed also in his next novel. By the end of June he was able to report to Leonard Moore that he had completed a sketch of it, and also a pamphlet on pacifism.

 

He was to remain at the sanatorium for five and a half months, by which time he had gained nine pounds. That summer it was decided that he needed to go abroad, ’somewhere south’ to convalesce for the coming winter. He asked Yvonne Davet, a French woman who was translating Homage to Catalonia, to help find him a place beside the Mediterranean, and suggested to Common that he might like to have the Wallington cottage rent-free in return for looking after the animals – thirty chickens and two goats – and George’s lovingly tended garden.

 

The idea of the south of France was dropped when Laurence suggested Morocco which, according to a French colleague, would be both equable and dry, the perfect place for a man in his condition. The only snag was that their money had again run out. Their plight came to the ears of L. H. Myers who arranged with Max Plowman to send them an anonymous gift of £300 to cover their expenses. Myers was a wealthy Marxist who readily gave away his money (from a sense of guilt, according to Orwell). He never knew the source of this money but happily accepted it on the understanding that it be regarded as a loan.

 

They planned to travel to Marrakech via Gibraltar, Tangier and Casablanca, while Common and his wife moved into The Stores. Marx was evacuated temporarily to the Dakins’ new home in Bristol, after accompanying Eileen on a brief visit to Windermere, probably to commune with the Lake poets. Later, together, they visited Southwold where Richard Blair was in failing health. Now eighty-one, he had still not been persuaded that his son could make anything of his life from writing. What this old Tory thought of having fathered a boy who was a socialist and had fought with Communists in Spain, can only be surmised.

 

Just before leaving for Morocco Orwell began a Domestic Diary, mostly nature notes following the tradition of Gilbert White and W. H. Hudson, which he kept up throughout his time in Africa and on his return to Wallington. They reveal his love of lists, of detail, of how things work and his encyclopaedic knowledge of flora and fauna. His old teacher Mr Sillar’s enthusiasm had produced a more-than-enthusiastic disciple.

 

When Orwell left England, there was always the hope of escaping to a better future. On 3 September he and Eileen sailed from Tilbury tourist dock on the SS Stratheden. It was Orwell’s second voyage out through the Bay of Biscay and he must have looked with some amusement on the colonials and their memsahibs heading East to take up the white man’s burden. On the passenger list he had designated himself ‘Profession – Novelist’, while Eileen had written ‘Profession – Nil’. He had taken a patent seasickness remedy which he was pleased to find worked, and, according to Eileen, ‘walked around the boat with a seraphic smile watching people being sick & insisted on my going to the “Ladies’ Cabin” to report on disasters there’.

 

On board the Stratheden he had a strange reunion. Tony Hyams, his old pupil from Frays College, was also a passenger, travelling with his mother to the Sudan where his father was in government service. He spotted Mr Blair standing alone on the deck one day and went up to say hello. Orwell was quite pleased to see him but seemed preoccupied. He told Hyams that, having fought in Spain, he was now terrified that, passing through Spanish Morocco to reach Marrakech he might be arrested and end up in a concentration camp. The terror inspired in Catalonia obviously lingered.

 

From Gibraltar they went by boat to Tangier, and next day ran the Spanish gauntlet into French Morocco without incident. The following day they arrived in Marrakech where they chose the highly recommended Hotel Continental. However, as Eileen told Ida Blair, it might have been quite good once, but ‘lately it has changed hands & is obviously a brothel’, something she noticed immediately but George did not. They quickly moved to the cheaper, more respectable Majestic, where Eileen took to her bed with a fever while George made plans for them to move into a villa of their own.

 

Although surrounded by luxuriant groves and gardens and set on the Bad el Hamra plain with spectacular views of the Atlas Mountains, Marrakech was in a state of some decay. Apart from the impressive palace of the sultan and its imperial parks, and the dominant presence of the Katubia Mosque, many areas were crime-ridden slums. They found a villa outside the town but were unable to move in for a month, so were stuck meantime in a city they found uncongenial. The countryside around was practically all desert; in Marrakech itself the native quarter was, according to Eileen, picturesque, but with smells which were only rivalled by the noise.

 

The day after they arrived, Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to discuss Hitler’s demand to incorporate the Sudetenland into his Third Reich. Orwell noted the lack of interest in the local papers and the refusal to believe that a war was likely. ‘The whole thing seems to me so utterly meaningless,’ he told Common, ‘that I think I shall just concentrate on remaining alive.’ At that moment his lungs must have seemed a greater threat to his health than the Wehrmacht or the menacing prospect of a Fascist Britain. However, letters from England spoke of war fever – air-raid shelters being built, gas masks being issued, and pro- and anti-war demonstrations in London. Both he and Eileen were firmly in the anti-war camp. Eileen thought that had they been at home George would probably have landed in jail, but they were strangely supportive of the Conservative Prime Minister. Eileen wrote to her sister-in-law Marjorie, ‘It’s very odd to feel that Chamberlain is our only hope, but I do believe he doesn’t want war either at the moment & certainly the man has courage.’ They decided that the English people, given a voice, would not want a war either, but would fight if a war was declared.

 

They were finding Marrakech not much to their liking – interesting but … dreadful to live in. ‘There are beautiful arches with vile smells coming out of them & adorable children covered in ringworm and flies,’ wrote Eileen, and an open space which they thought a lovely spot for observing the sunset turned out to be a graveyard. It was, Orwell told Connolly, ‘a beastly dull country’ – no forests, no wild animals and the people near the big towns ‘utterly debauched by the tourist racket’ which had turned them into ‘a race of beggars and curio-sellers.’ The place seemed so unhealthy, that they wondered how a leading doctor could recommend it as a place to convalesce. 

 

Arab funerals both fascinated and horrified them. Eileen described one to Gorer: ‘The Arabs favour bright green [shrouds] & don’t have coffins which is nice on funeral days for the flies who leave even a restaurant for a few minutes to sample a passing corpse.’ This memorable and revolting image would form the opening to an Orwell essay on Marrakech, and suggests that key ideas in his later work may have emerged from mutual observations and discussion with the poetic Eileen.

 

In their temporary villa, Orwell worked on his novel, kept up his diary and wrote regularly to his parents and friends. In his diary he monitored the daily press, observed the strange ethnic composition of the French colonial forces, noted the effect of a two-year drought, the prevalence of female labour on French estates, the large numbers of homeless, beggars and street children, the blackmailing tourist guides and the poverty and squalor of the Jewish quarter. As in Burma he hoped to visit a place of worship to talk to Muslim priests but found the mosques closed to foreigners. He was fascinated by the veiled Arab women, by the Touareg tribesmen and the French Foreign Legionnaires, who seemed to him surprisingly puny. He was hoping vaguely to write a book about Morocco on his return to England, where his future looked a little insecure. With the sales of Homage to Catalonia so poor, he faced the prospect of returning with little more than £50 to his name and a debt of £300.

 

War to him was a nightmare prospect, not only because he had a vision of Fascism and the concentration camp descending on England, but also saw his writing plans for the coming thirty years under threat. A sense of isolation and defeatism threatened to overwhelm him. He and Eileen planned to survive if possible if only to ‘add to the number of sane people’. He signed several ILP anti-war manifestos, one asserting ‘the need for resisting political censorship and the suppression of truth.’ In this frame of his mind his new novel was taking shape – ‘Tubby’ Bowling was articulating his pacifist sentiments and seeking comfort in memories of the England of his childhood.

 

When Chamberlain, returned from Munich at the end of September clutching his ‘piece of paper’ signed by Hitler, guaranteeing peace, Orwell recorded his relief. ‘Thank goodness the war danger seems to be over, at any rate for the time being, so we can breathe again.’ They were in one mind over this. Eileen told Geoffrey Gorer, ‘I am determined to be pleased with Chamberlain because I want a rest.’

 

With the weather growing hot and intolerable, in October they moved to their new home, the Villa Simont, which stood in an orange grove at the foot of the Atlas mountains. They furnished it cheaply from the bazaars and attempted to recreate their WaIlington life by keeping chickens and goats and even growing a few vegetables. Orwell soon buckled down to work, reviewing two books on Spain for the New English Weekly, producing an article, ‘Political Reflections on the Crisis’ for the Adelphi, attacking ‘gangster and pansy’ warmongers, and continuing with his novel.

 

The fate of the POUM leaders on trial in Spain began to concern him, and he wrote to various people seeking their support. But Moscow’s attempt to mount a show trial against the Spanish ‘Trotskyists’ failed when their confessions, extracted under threat, were retracted in court, and the charges were shown to be preposterous. As yet, Republican Spain was not a Soviet dictatorship, but Orwell was suitably horrified when British papers such as the News Chronicle and Observer and pro-Franco French papers reported that they had been found guilty. ‘It gives one the feeling that our civilization is going down into a sort of mist of lies where it will be impossible ever to find out the truth about anything.’ Another dimension of his nightmare – the end of truth – seemed to be getting that much closer.

 

Much to his disgust, in November he became ill and was confined to bed for three weeks, ‘What with all this illness,’ he told John Sceats, ‘I’ve decided to count 1938 as a blank year and sort of cross it off the calendar.’ In that frame of mind he was cheered by a request from Penguin Books for permission to republish one of his novels in paperback. He offered Burmese Days, Down and Out in Paris and London, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (which later he would want suppressed, along with A Clergyman’s Daughter, written, he said, simply for money). As the weather improved and there were signs of things growing, his health showed some improvement, he coughed less and began putting on a little weight. Their hens were laying, their two goats kept them well-supplied with milk, and they acquired bicycles for shopping excursions to the town bazaars.

 

In his essay, ‘Marrakech’, Orwell captured the drift of his thoughts about the place. It begins with that disturbingly gruesome image Eileen had conjured up for Gorer: ‘As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.’ It developed into a methodical attack on European imperialism. Somehow the hurried funerals, the shallow burial ground, ‘merely a huge waste of hummocky earth’, symbolised for him the degradation to which imperialism condemned whole populations, in Morocco as much as in Burma. In a few vivid images he captured the wretchedness of the people’s lives: the neglected graveyard, the wolfish hunger of the poor, their windowless homes, crowds of sore-eyed children clustered like flies, the swarming Jewish ghetto, the back-breaking misery of peasant life, shrunken old women ‘mummified by age and the sun’, invisible under heavy bundles of firewood. But finally he wondered how long it would be before the black colonial soldiers he saw would turn their guns on their French masters.

 

Writing Coming Up For Air focused his mind on his childhood, and he discovered how very retentive a memory he had. He told Jack Common, ‘It’s suddenly revealed to me a big subject which I’d never really touched before and haven’t time to work out now.’ Reflecting a fortnight later on his family and idyllic days in Henley and Shiplake, he had conceived the idea for a further novel, in fact a trilogy. ‘I have been bitten with the desire to write a Saga. I don’t know that in a novelist this is not the sign of premature senile decay, but I have the idea for an enormous novel in three parts which would take about five years to write.’ Since he thought himself incapable of perpetuating the Blair line, at least he could leave some trace behind by enshrining his family history in a novel – yet another reason not to want a European war.

 

Doubtless in that same mood of nostalgia he and Eileen passed their spare time reading Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and Henry James to one another. Connolly may have helped prompt this plunge into literary nostalgia. His Enemies of Promise, of which Orwell had now seen reviews, dwelt on his Eton and prep school years, reliving memories with which he had long wrestled and which he would deal with head-on in his own later reminiscence of St Cyprian’s. His passion for Dickens and other nineteenth-century novelists stemmed from his schooldays, and rereading them was another way of returning there in imagination. In that world an England threatened by war would have been unthinkable.

 

However, with the left baying for a Popular Front war ‘in defence of democracy’, and Chamberlain, having bought time at Munich, now slowly gearing up to confront Hitler, the outlook for peace looked uncertain. In the New Year he wrote, in some secrecy, to Herbert Read, the anarchist, suggesting that, in anticipation of this, they should organise a clandestine press to ensure that a dissenting voice could continue to be heard once the totalitarian darkness descended.

 

George Kopp, in Paris and free at last, got a letter to them which can only have intensified Orwell’s nightmares. Kopp described in detail his eighteen months in prison, how he had been isolated, beaten and left in a dark room overrun by rats. When he refused to sign papers admitting collaboration with Franco and implicating others, his Communist gaolers had attempted to poison him, and then to work him to death. He was released finally when Belgian trade unions put pressure on the Republican Government through the Belgian embassy, but his health was shattered and he had lost seven stone. By now, however, the Francoists were winning the Spanish war, the power of the Communists and NKVD was reduced, and Barcelona was a shambles. The ‘war for democracy’ in Spain was about to be lost.

 

In the New Year a draft of Coming Up For Air was completed, and he and Eileen left for a week’s break at Taddert in the Atlas Mountains. He was very taken by the Berbers who lived there, especially the women. ‘[They] are fascinating people,’ he told Gorer,’ … & the women have the most wonderful eyes. But what fascinates me about them is that they are so dirty. You will see exquisitely beautiful women walking about with their necks almost invisible under dirt.’ He later told the wife of a friend that ‘he found himself increasingly attracted to the young Arab girls and the moment came when he told Eileen that he had to have one of these girls … Eileen agreed and so he had his Arab girl.’ In his diary he only hinted at the attraction they held for him. ‘All the women have tattooing on their chins and sometimes down each cheek. Their manner is less timid than most Arab women.’ Harold Acton, the Old Etonian aesthete, reported him enthusing not only about the ’sweetness’ of Burmese women but also about the beauties of Morocco. ‘This cadaverous ascetic whom one scarcely connected with fleshly gratification admitted that he had seldom tasted such bliss as with certain Moroccan girls, whose complete naturalness and grace and candid sensuality described in language so simple and direct that one could visualise their slender flanks and pointed breasts, and almost sniff the odour of spices that clung to their satiny skins.’ Eileen’s friend Lettice Cooper neatly summed up this aspect of Orwell. ‘I don’t think George was the kind of person who likes being married all the time.’ she said.

 

His encounter with the Berber women and the mood of secrecy he had shared with Herbert Read perhaps inspired him to write to Lydia Jackson, in the hope of pursuing further their amorous encounter at Preston Hall. As with Read, he asked her to keep his letters secret. ‘So looking forward to seeing you!’ he wrote. ‘I have thought of you so often – have you thought about me, I wonder? I know it’s indiscreet to write such things in letters, but you’ll be clever and burn this, will you? … Take care of yourself. Hoping to see you early in April. With love, Eric.’ He wrote to her again but neither letter appears to have brought a reply.

 

Their plan was to return directly to England by boat from Casablanca at the end of March (thereby avoiding Spanish territory), then find a house somewhere a little warmer and further south than Wallington. Dorset was the preferred choice, no doubt reflecting his prevailing mood of nostalgia and urge to write a family saga. With his father’s life approaching its end, how better to get back to his Blair roots than to live in the county of his paternal ancestors? His novel was almost finished, and as usual he thought it good only in parts. Now his mind turned homewards – to the flowers, the rhubarb, Muriel and Kate. He wrote asking Common if he would mind putting up Kopp, presently convalescing in Greenwich with the O’Shaughnessys. Kopp, however, declined the invitation. Perhaps the primitive cottage sounded too much like the grim conditions he had just escaped in Spain.

 

On 28 March 1939 they sailed from Casablanca on board the SS Yasukunimaru, a Japanese liner bound for London from Yokohama. The weather was good and he hardly needed his seasickness pills. Arriving in London, the first thing he did was deliver to Moore the manuscript of Coming Up For Air, which Eileen had typed just before they left. One thing about it made him rather proud – there was not a single semi-colon in it, he claimed. It was an unnecessary stop, he had decided, and had to be banished. He was still unhappy about Gollancz. ‘If he tries to bugger me abt I think I shall leave him,’ he told Common. He then hurried to Lydia’s flat in Woburn Place, and was disappointed to find her out, even though he had cabled ahead to be sure she was there.

 

Unable to linger, he travelled on to Southwold, where his father’s condition continued to deteriorate and his mother was also ill with phlebitis. From there he rang Lydia three times, without success, so wrote to her complaining that she had let him down. When Eileen arrived at Montague House he had gone down with flu and taken to his bed. But his mind was still on Lydia. As if she had not ignored his letters and avoided him, he wrote to her again, apologising for not turning up and promising to meet her when next in London. However, she was not, she claimed, at all flattered by his attentions. ‘I was annoyed by his assuming that I would conceal our meetings from Eileen, revolted by deception creeping in against my wishes. I wanted to avoid meeting him when I was in that hostile mood, capable of pushing him away if he tried to embrace me.’ At this stage, it was a strange, one-sided affair, conducted by an apparently self-deluded Casanova. However, she did reply to him later, and even agreed to see him, though, according to her, only on a platonic basis.

 

After his bout of flu, his brother-in-law Laurence referred him to the Miller Chest Hospital to see Herbert Morlock, a Harley Street consultant, inventor of the bronchoscope. Orwell was duly tested, and confirmed as having bronchiectatis, an enlargement and distension of the bronchial tubes leaving the lungs prone to infection – a condition possibly caused by child-hood pneumonia and explaining that ‘chronic cough’ to which he was still susceptible. Morlock was a breezy extrovert who wore morning dress, stiff and cuffs, a cravat with a pearl pin and (when out) a silk top hat. Blithely he told Orwell not to worry about coughing up blood; it might be good for him. Orwell was impressed with the up-beat manner of this colourful character, and years later, when he was very much worse, he expressed a repeated wish to see him again. After his tests Orwell spent a week with the O’Shaughnessys in Greenwich.

 

The novel he had left with Moore reflected the state of mind in which Orwell faced the prospect of war. Many of the acute fears he felt at this time permeate Coming Up For Air – a repetition of 1914 and the abolition of the bombing of towns and the threat of the concentration camp. Isolation in Morocco had distanced him from the daily ebb and flow of news and the prevailing air of crisis which would have engulfed him in England. Apart from events and yet part of them, he was able to achieve a novel that was both highly personal and yet politically and socially perceptive at the same time. Its first person narrator is his self-reflective alter ego and social commentator rolled into one. As he himself said of fiction-writers, ‘By their subject-matter ye shall know them.’

 

He hoped it would offend Gollancz, with its sneers at young Communists and its guying of Left Book Club meetings, even if it meant losing the £100 advance on acceptance specified in his contract. But neither the sneers nor the satirical jibes put off the publisher who paid up promptly and put the novel on his list for publication in June. If A Clergyman’s Daughter was the Orwell novel most influenced by Joyce, Coming Up For Air is more suggestive of Proust. But whereas it is a subtle taste that triggers the memory of the author of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, here it is sparked by a veritable spectrum of smells. This was no mere device, and can only be an honest account of how memory worked for the author attempting consciously to recapture a forgotten past. More obviously it is a novel in Wellsian vein, the tale of a ‘little man’ trying to make sense of the modern world – ‘Wells watered down,’ Orwell called it.

 

George Bowling (a surname borrowed from the old folk song about Tom Bowling or perhaps from Smollett’s Roderick Random) is, like all Orwell’s protagonists, trapped in a soul-destroying routine and champing to get free. The action begins with Orwell’s usual chronological precision. ‘I remember the morning well. At about a quarter to eight I’d nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut the kids out.’ He has been fitted with his first set of false teeth and feels that his life is already more than half over. A newspaper headline and a whiff of horse dung arouse memories and stir longings, and soon George is set upon rediscovering the Golden Age of his past. A win at the races tempts him into truancy – a lie to his wife, an illicit trip to the small town where he grew up, with its memories of boyhood adventures in a bygone age. He is also in search of Katie Simmons, the love of his youth and the idyllic countryside where he played, but above all the hidden pool where he dreamed one day of fishing for a massive and elusive pike. There again is the Laurentian reverie, recalling his first taste of sex with Katie out in the open fields. Here, in Orwell’s memorable phrase, is his ‘thin man struggling to get out’ of the fat insurance salesman. Not only is Bowling fat but unattractive in many other ways – worn down by a loveless marriage, the expense of a family, children who despise him, a man henpecked by a colourless money-obsessed wife and her carping mother. Of course, his journey is doomed – the small town had been engulfed by suburbia and his woodland paradise infested with fruit juice-drinking, sandal-wearing, nudist vegetarians, and Garden City cranks. The Golden Age is done for, Katie, his childhood sweetheart, is now a worn out middle-aged drab and the secret pool with its giant pike, the symbolic centre of his childhood fantasy, turned into a rubbish dump. The horrors of mass society have overwhelmed the holy places and Doomsday threatens in the form of Hitler, Stalin and their streamlined battalions, dedicated to ruling through terror, the distortion of the truth and the elimination of the past. George returns to his bourgeois prison to face again his nagging wife and unlovable children. The Paradise Gained was no more than a sad illusion.

 

Read the final part of this chapter on Coming Up for Air’s reception – CONTAINS DIARY SPOILERS