Booknotes

Mr. JEFFREY MEYERS (Author, "Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation"): Well, that comes from Victor Pritchette's obituary notice of Orwell, January 1950. I think it's a very good phrase rather than just have the name of the author only because he was a wintry personality. He was aesthetic. He was hard on himself. He was critical of others. But he did have a kind of idealistic quality about him so that people respected his opinion because he had lived a life according to those opinions. Not just said what other people ought to do, but did them himself.

Mr. MEYERS: This picture is about 1946, taken in his flat in Canonberry Square, Islington. If you go there now, it's a very posh part of London. But in those days, it was working class, down and out, cold, six flights of steps up and Orwell carrying his adopted baby and maybe some coal for the fire and his groceries. And everybody said when he got to the top, he was gasping for breath. And everybody felt very bad that he had had to live in a place like that when he really had--was very ill with what turned out to be terminal TB.

Mr. MEYERS: 1950, when he was just 46 years old.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, this would be, I think, "Animal Farm" and "1984" combined from publication until the last couple of years when the--I think a bibliography came out two years ago which listed those figures. And part of it is that "Animal Farm" is used for an English language teaching text in many, many countries in the world. For example, in Japan.

But I think more important is, you know, the--the beauty of the style and the imp--importance of the political message, combined with a kind of lucidity and interest in the story, as well. So that both these books can be read on many different levels and have this kind of universal popularity and attraction, which does great credit to Orwell.

Mr. MEYERS: Right from the start?

Mr. MEYERS: Well, he was born in Motihari, Bihar, in northern India, not far from the border of Nepal, where his father worked for the opium department of the--of the British em--empire government of India. And I think--I think I made more of this than other people have. It--it was a kind of disgraceful job in many ways. He supervised the gathering and export to China of in--of opium. In other words, he was encouraging thousands of people in China to become addicts and--with all the social problems that go with them, like gang wars to control the drug trade, opium dens, crime in order to support the drug habit.

And I think Or--one of my themes in the book is that Orwell felt a lot of guilt about not only things that were appropriate to feel guilty about, like his father's job, but also felt guilty about things that other people wouldn't feel guilty about: for example, having a superior education at Eton or even coming from a middle-class family, which most people do come from, after all, and don't feel guilty about. But he feel guilt--he felt guilty if he had more than other people, and that's why he would want to live in a place like Islington, which was working class and--and hard.

So af--after only a few years in India, he's taken back to England. His father stays there, his mother returns to England. And eventually there's two other sisters. And he goes to a prep school called St. Cyrian's, which is the subject of his fam--very famous essay "Such, Such Were the Joys," an ironic essay. It comes from a poem by William Blake, and it's completely the opposite of joyful. In fact, it's utterly miserable. And a lot of people felt that Orwell exaggerated his time at St. Cyrian's; that it couldn't really have been as bad as he said it was because the essay is very, very powerful.

Mr. MEYERS: St. Cyrian's was in Eastbourne, which is in--in Sussex on the south coast of England, maybe 50 miles south of London. But a--a very distinguished bunch of old boys went to that school: Cyril Connally, who was a literary critic and Orwell's very close friend throughout life, but also people like David Ogilvy, the advertising man who just died a year or two ago...

Mr. MEYERS: Ye--yes.

Mr. MEYERS: I mean, he was a real pioneer in advertising throughout the world. A man called Henry Longhurst, who the golfing correspondent of The Times; Cecil Beaton, the very famous fashion photographer; somebody who was the chief of the Canadian Mounted Police and so on and so on. And all the--and Gavin Maxwell, who wrote "Ring of Bright Water." All these people went to St. Cyrian's.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, around Orwell's time. He would have been there, let's say, from nine to 14; that would have been about 1912 to 1917, something like that.

Mr. MEYERS: Then he went to Eton.

Mr. MEYERS: Eton is the most aristocratic and oldest and most--finest, what we would call a prep school call, they call a public school in England. It's--it's a school you go to before going to university. And it's very beautiful and very old and has many, many traditions. And it's always been the training place of the English elite.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, I--I went there, of course, a couple of times...

Mr. MEYERS: ...but I never went to the school.

Mr. MEYERS: I just went to the--to visit the school. And it--I had a--an afternoon left over for a trip in England, and we thought, `Let's go have a look at Eton again.' And I looked up the librarian there, who gave me almost a running tour. The Queen Mother was coming the next day, and he was in a--frantic. But we r--literally ran through the halls of Eton, and he's pointing out this and that. Thomas Gray wrote a--a very beautiful poem, "Ode on a Prospect from Eton College," which I think I quote in the book. And Orwell there found his feet much more. He was much happier than he was in St. Cyrians, partly because he was freer to do what he wanted and pursue his own interests.

And--but the odd thing about that was that--oh, I don't know--maybe 90 percent of the people who finished Eton went on to Oxford or Cambridge, especially in those days. A few went into the family business, a few went into the army. But Orwell did something that nobody in the 500-year history of Eton ever did, and that was to go into the Burmese police, which is a very strange thing to do.

And years ago, when I started working on "Orwell," I wrote to his tutor at Eton, a man called A.S.F. Gowe, who later became a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a very distinguished classical scholar, friend of A.E. Housman Housman and so on, and asked him, `Why did Orwell go to Burma instead of to Oxford or Cambridge, where most of his colleagues went?' And he said he couldn't afford to go to Oxford or Cambridge because his family had limited resources, and he didn't do any work at all, so he couldn't have gotten a scholarship and, therefore, Gowe didn't encourage him. And he just followed the old family tradition and went to Burma, where his grandparents had a teakwood business in Moulmein, a shipbuilding business. And I published that letter way back in about 1970, and I and everybody else felt that was the answer.

Now looking into it again, talking to the officials at Eton and talking to the last surviving member of Orwell's class, Sir Stephen Runcimen, who just died a few weeks ago at the age of 97, a very, very distinguished historian of the Crusades and of Byzantium, fall of Constantinople, and he said that w--that's what Gowe said was just a bunch of rubbish, that Orwell was perfectly capable of getting into Oxford and Cambridge, which was a lot easier to get into than Eton was, and that even if money was a problem, Eton supplied boys who needed scholarship money with sufficient funds if they were admitted to Oxford or Cambridge.

So I really had to look at that all over again. And--and Gowe and Runcimen were colleagues at Trinity College, and Gowe--they didn't get on. And Runcimen, who was a very fine man, I thought, said Gowe was just an old fusspot and he--he just wanted boys who did their Latin and Greek, and Orwell was rebellious and, you know, didn't care about doing the grammar and followed his own interests, and Gowe just considered him a problem.

Mr. MEYERS: He was in Burma for five years, 1922 to 1927, as a policeman. Now this is a job he never would have taken in England, a constable on the beat, you know, a bobby with one of those high blue hats. But he had much more judicial responsibility in Burma, and he was placed in about five different towns after he was trained in--at the fort in Mandalay. And he had, you know, in some ways life-and-death powers over people, and a very, very small number of British officers with a certain number of Burmese policemen were controlling a country of millions and millions of people.

Mr. MEYERS: His name was Eric Blair, which is the name he was born with. And he did not change his name to George Orwell until he published his first book, "Down and Out in Paris and London," in 1933, which was about six years after he came back from Burma.

Mr. MEYERS: Oh, they had, yes, striped trousers and cutaway coats, top hats and then boaters and striped jackets in the summer, yes. It was a very, very formal attire.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, everybody always said that even though Orwell disliked the values of Eton, he put his son down for Eton. Now that's an English expression. When your son is born, if he went to an--an illustrious school, you could put your son down 18 years before he would enter it--or 14 years before. Little Richard, the adopted son, in fact, did not--he just went to an agricultural college; he did not go to Eton. Orwell had what they called the Eton manner. It's a kind of slow, drawling way of speech and a kind of as--assumption of superiority, which just comes naturally to somebody who's been educated among the elite of the elite of England, especially in those days. It's a little more democratic now. But the boys still wear those very formal clothes.

Mr. MEYERS: Housemaster and like a dormitory and that sort of thing, yeah.

Mr. MEYERS: Oh, yes. And Orwell was--also there were--there were collegers and there were oppidans. And the collegers were the scholarship boys, the ones who had got in on their brains and had their fees paid, and they lived right there at the school. And the--the opadins lived in houses around the town. So there were--there were--were these two different groups of people. But the people who were in Orwell's group, Connally and Anthony Pole, who later became a very distinguished novelist, they were collegers.

Mr. MEYERS: I'm writing the 40th right now.

Mr. MEYERS: Oh, they're all non-fiction.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, my first biography was of Katherine Mansfield, and that was 1978. And then I wrote one on Windham Lewis, the first one on Windham Lewis and the only one until this year. And I was very pleased when a couple of the English reviewers said that my book was still the best one, even though the second book came out last year and much, much longer than mine, but in their view, not as good. I haven't read it myself yet; it's not yet in the American libraries.

Then I did a big one on Hemingway in 1985. I did--I did one on Robert Lowell and his circle; that is to say, a group of poets who were held together by personal friendship and also by mental illness, and that included Lowell, Barriman, Gerelle, Ted Retke and Sylvia Plath. And now I'm not sure exactly the order. I did one on Poe; I did Conrad; I did D.H. Lawrence; I did Fitzgerald; I did Frost. I did Edmund Wilson, the first book on Edmund Wilson, which came out in 19--in--on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1995.

And then I took a little detour and I did two film biographies on Bogart and on Gary Cooper. Gary Cooper's 100th birthday is coming up on May 6th, so there are going to be some celebrations in connection with that. And th...

Mr. MEYERS: I live in Berkeley.

Mr. MEYERS: That is where I got my doctorate in the '60s, and then I taught in American universities and in England and in Japan for 30 years. And then I left teaching a bit early in '92, and I've been writing professional--full-time writer ever since 1992, trying to do a book every year.

Mr. MEYERS: Born in New York and grew up in New York.

Mr. MEYERS: He did that when he came home, too, and that really annoyed his mother and his sister. And he--that was another thing he was guilty about, not only because police were oppressors--and he talks in a very short, but very powerful essay called "A Hanging." And I went to the prison later on where the hanging took place. It was in a place called Insein, I-N-S-E-I-N, which is very near the airport in Rangoon. In those days, it was a separate town, but now it's a kind of suburb.

And--and, you know, he--he was very strongly against capital punishment after the war with Arthur Kersler, and he felt guilty about what he had done. He had kicked, he had beaten his servants. He had ordered criminals to be beaten. He had been--he had attended executions. He had watched human beings lose their life. And it's interesting, in "A Hanging," that he never says what the criminal did. I mean, he's been convicted of a capital offense and he's hanged, and Orwell is a policeman on the scene to see that it's done properly. But in order to maintain sympathy with the convicted as--victim, an executed man, he never tells us what he did. Mostly likely he killed somebody himself. But he doesn't tell us that because he doesn't want us to feel lack of sympathy for the victim.

Mr. MEYERS: Then he does another thing that's almost as odd as going to Burma. He comes back to Southfold on the east coast of England on the North Sea, where his father has finally retired. And his father is much older than his mother, and the father's a bit of a crusty old conservative fusspot, you know, a kind of real--what they called an Anglo-Indian, an Englishman who had spent his life in India. And Orwell has some very funny descriptions in his novels of the interior, the household stuff of--especially I remember an elephant foot umbrella stand. I don't know if you've ever seen it. You can see it sometimes in antique stores in England, and you see those great big toenails of the elephant and then it's cut off, and then you put the umbrellas in it. Trichanopoli cigars and brassware, beaten and benoris and that sort of thing. And Orwell just hated that. And he found it very stifling at Southfold.

So he decided to--he wanted to be a writer. The question is: What do you write about? He didn't seem to be able to deal with the Burmese material as soon as he got back from Burma. So he decided to become a bum, a tramp, a hobo. He went to Paris, and he worked as a dish washer in the kitchen of a luxury hotel. And he describes it with excruciating detail: the squalor, the horror, the filth, waiters resenting the customers, literally spitting in the food before they served it in order to get even with this high-class clientele. This, by the--this time, if you're--if you're talking about the early '30s, we're in the Depression.

Mr. MEYERS: He's still Eric Blair. And he didn't like the name because Blair is a Scottish name, and Scotland was associated with hunting lodges and snobbery and castles and, you know, boys who had great wealth. And he didn't like the name Eric because there was a--a children's book called "Eric, or Little by Little" about a very goody-goody boy who always did everything right, always did everything the way he was supposed to. That book has been forgotten, but in the 19th century and into the early 20th century, it was a very popular book, and he--so he didn't like Eric, he didn't like Blair either.

So he took George because George is the patron saint in England, St. George and the dragon. And he took Orwell because Orwell was a river right near his house in Suffolk. It flows into the North Sea. And it does now seem a very appropriate name. He--one of the other names he was going to use was H. Lewis Always, which somehow doesn't have the same resonance as George Orwell. And, of course, if he ever changed his political views, then Always would be a very unfortunate name, you know, to have because people do change their views. And they say, `Well, you're not always.' "Always" was also a kind of sentimental song. Think of the '20s. Remember?

Mr. MEYERS: He changed it when he--when he published "Down and Out in Paris and London," which was about his hobo--his--he was literally a bum on the road. He just went from flophouse to flophouse. You weren't allowed to stay more than a day--and tramped around England. He picked hops in the summer, which is a very difficult job. And he did it for much, much longer than he needed to do in order to get sufficient experience to write the book.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, that was an essay.

Mr. MEYERS: And it's often quoted. An--another thing I should say in connection with his works is that last year, an English editor called Peter Davison published a 20-volume, 8,500-page collected works of Orwell, which is really the most brilliant job of editing. And I'm--I must say that that was a great help to me in writing this book because Peter Davison brought into that edition all kinds of material, not only written by Orwell, but letters written to him, especially there were some very, very beautiful and moving letters by his wife, Eileen, just before she died. And there was a lot of new material which I was able to use that Peter Davison put into the edition. And he was really a very--very good friend and colleague to me, too, because when he finished this 20-year job, he didn't want to let go of it, you know, the way sometimes you just can't let go of it.

So both of us were interested to know if Orwell had published anything while he was in Burma. He--he couldn't have published it under the name of Eric Blair because, as a government official, he wasn't allowed to do that. But Peter actually went up to Colindale and read through the Rangoon Times, I think it was called, for those five years, trying to see if there was anything not signed by Orwell or Blair, but which may have been written by him. And we did find--he did find another essay about shooting an elephant, not by Orwell, but to show that every once in a while, an--an elephant really did go on rampage and did have to be killed. And--and although it was unusual, it wasn't completely unknown...

Mr. MEYERS: ...for police or...

Mr. MEYERS: Well, he was in Paris, I guess he was there about five years--five months, I'm sorry. And he was in England, well, off and on for years and years. And that's when he, you know, started writing his--his little socialist essays. I think he first essay was actually published--written in English and translated into French and published in a French magazine somewhere around 1929.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, he had two stages of recognition. I mean, the first was his first book, "Down and Out in Paris and London," which is still very readable and important to see what that kind of subterranean life was like. It was modeled on a Jack London book, whose title I can't remember this second. It's in the index. "Gorky" wrote about the lower depths. So he was known in a small way, but these books did not sell very well. And then he--he didn't really have big fame until "Animal Farm" was published in 1945, just after the war.

Mr. MEYERS: In 1949. People say the title of "1984" is the year he wrote the book, with the last two digits reversed, 1948, turning into "1984," which is probably as good an explanation as any that you'll find.

Mr. MEYERS: Oh, there--well, this new bibliography, which is a very good book, it was something like 40, 50 different languages, like even obscure languages like Telugu or, you--you know, I mean, you'd just be amazed to see what languages that book has gotten into. And when it was first published, the future Nobel Prize winner, Czeslaw Milosz, who is a retired professor at Berkeley, where I live, wrote in the "Captive Mind," a book about living under totalitarianism, he just couldn't understand how Orwell had such tremendous penetrating knowledge of totalitarianism without actually having lived under it himself. And the answer to that, we haven't got to that part of his life yet--the answer to that really is his experience in the Spanish Civil War.

Mr. MEYERS: Very tall, about 6'3", very thin, prematurely aged. Grooves on the side of his face. After all, he was only 46 when he died. Basically, he had TB all his life, even as a child. And I have an appendix in the back of the book, history of his illness. And while you're showing that picture, I wonder if we could just briefly talk about it for a minute because there are some things there that are interesting.

On the upper left is the bottom part of a family portrait of his ancestor, Lady Mary Blair, who married an earl in the 18th century. Orwell, socialist as he was, was very proud of this aristocratic connection, although another source of guilt was the fact that that same family did own slaves in Jamaica when slavery was still legal in the British empire. So obviously, this was a very brutal and horrible way to earn money. These were slaves who worked on sugar plantations in Jamaica.

On the middle right-hand side, behind Orwell, is a screen, maybe three or four feet high, which Orwell decorated by cutting out pictures from magazines and pasting them onto the screen in a kind of collage of mish-mosh of art. He was very, very proud of it. His friends found it slightly embarrassing and ludicrous. But there it is. He is wearing very heavy, a kind of Harris tweed jacket with a sweater underneath and a thick flannel shirt because it was very cold in English houses after the war. There was still a fuel shortage right up to 1948. This picture's in 1946.

I want to point out his proletarian haircut, very short over the ears on the sides, with this high, typically Orwell high crown of hair--not flat but high in front--and this extremely unusual mustache, which Englishmen did not wear in those days and even today looks much more French than English. And Anthony Pole points that out and says, `It must have been a lot of trouble taking care of that little mustache and cutting that--that space between the top of the mustache and the bottom of his nose.'

I would also point out that he has a handkerchief in his pocket, which looks slightly dandyish, but, in fact, it was practical because he--at this point, he had very serious TB, and there was a lot of coughing and a lot of spitting and sometimes even blood.

Mr. MEYERS: He married twice. The first marriage was around 1935, I think, just before he went to the Spanish War. And he married a--a woman that everybody thought was just terrific, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, very pretty woman. And she was long-suffering because Orwell had what I would call a kind of hairshirt need, a--a need to kind of punish himself in--in living in very, very difficult ways. And they got this house--or a shack, a country shack, in Wallingford, sort of roughly speaking between London and Oxford, very, very hard to get to. No indoor toilet, no heating, no electricity, no running water. They kept a little sh--village shop, which didn't amount to much more than selling some groceries and candy to children. They kept some animals. He was always very fond--this is the beginning of "Animal Farm." He knew goats and pigs and chickens and so on firsthand. But the place was so uncomfortable, so leaky when it rained, so windy when the wind was high that even if he offered it to friends on weekends free of charge, nobody would ever come and stay. It was just too uncomfortable.

And, of course, Eileen had been a graduate student at the University of London as a child psychologist, and she was close to finishing, and it would have made so much more sense to let her finish her degree, her masters, and then to live in a place where she could continue her career because Orwell was desperately, desparately hard up until "Animal Farm" was a success 10 years after he married. But he really didn't want his wife to work, and Eileen kind of went along with him. And then they had very uncomfortable places when they moved back to London during the Blitz, which is interesting because many, many people in London left London during the Blitz.

Mr. MEYERS: That would have been 1941 or so, '42, you know, when the V1 and V2 rockets were shot into London and also London was--was bombed. And then the Battle of the Britain--Battle of Britain, which--which England won, prevented German planes then. But there were still raids on the east coast of England, and--and whole towns like Coventry were destroyed.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, he had...

Mr. MEYERS: Yes. That's--we have to go back to that. A--a lot of committed leftists throughout Europe and--and in America went to Spain because they thought it was the big fight against fascism by democracy and...

Mr. MEYERS: A leftist would be somebody who supported what was called the loyalists or the republicans; that is to say the legitimate government of Spain, democratic government, which had been overthrown by Franco in a revolution, not from the left, but from the right. And so the Spanish Civil War broke out in I think it was July 1936, and shortly after that people from all over Europe came to fight in the International Brigades to try to fight Franco and defeat fascism in Spain.

Mr. MEYERS: Franco was really right-wing government supported by big landowners, the Catholic Church and the army.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, this is very important, because Mussolini had been in power in Italy since 1922. Hitler--so there was a Fascist government in Italy. Hitler had been legally elected to power in January 1933. So you had a Fascist government in Germany. And Germany and Italy both sent huge numbers of troops, planes, tanks, weapons and soldiers to fight on Franco soil. And they had much, much more military aid on the right, on the Fascist side, than they did on the left.

The left was al--the democratic governments in Europe, like England and France, and the democratic government in America--Franklin Roosevelt was president then; it was his second term--took a policy which later turned out to be very faulty of neutrality. That is to say they--they wouldn't support actively either side. They allowed citizens to go there. So the active intervention was by Germany and Italy on the right; and on the left by Stalin's Russia.

Mr. MEYERS: "A Clergyman's Daughter" was a--his weakest book, sort of slightly autobi--autobiographical novel. It takes place in Suffolk where he--his family was living. And it--it's really about small-town life and this woman who wants to find some kind of sexual and emotional fulfillment. And she kind of runs away from an unwelcome suitor and from an oppressive father and has a kind of adventurous existence. She even sleeps out with bums in Trafalgar Square one night. And then eventually, in a circular format, she goes back and kind of resolves to accept the life that's cut out for her there. It's a kind of defeated novel, in a way.

Mr. MEYERS: That was a very personal book, also. The--the main character there very much like Orwell, Rabelston, based on Richard Rees, who was an aristocratic friend of his who had gone to Eton a little bit before Orwell, and who supported a magazine called The Adelphi, which Orwell wrote for, which Rees edited, which was later edited by John Middleton Murray. It was kind of left-wing, Socialist. Orwell didn't much care for those early novels. So there's a certain real power, I think, in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying." It's a terrible title. Aspidistra is this kind of house--rubbery houseplant which Orwell took as a symbol of middle-class life.

Mr. MEYERS: Yeah, "Wigan Pier." Well, that's important because that really was about life, especially among the coal miners in industrialing them during the Depression. And Orwell went up there and lived in incredible squaller. He describes renting a room above a tripe shop. They used to have--well, you know, poor neighborhoods during the Depression, they--they ate tripe, which is kind of animal intestines, innards, stomach innards.

And evidently it was just--it really turns your stomach. Orwell loves it. He delights in these kind of horrible details, like the kitchen in the Paris hotel or the tripe shop.

Basically, he investigated industrial conditions in mi--in the Midland--English Midlands during the war, during the Depression, and it--it's a very grim kind of book, but it tells you, as no other book does, what it's like to be a coal miner. For example, I never realized, till I read the book, that coal miners have to, what they call, travel to work. They have to go as long as a mile underground, after they've gone down the shaft, and they don't get paid for that. The ceiling's about 3 feet high or 2 1/2 feet high, and they are crouching or crawling on their hands and knees for a whole mile, till they get to the coal face, and only then do they begin to get paid. Tremendous silicosis. I mean, miners were just physical wrecks by the time they were 30.

Mr. MEYERS: Very little. He was just struggling through on subsistence wages and managing to exist by little bit of vegetable gardening, these animals, the shop. He was getting 40 or 50 pounds for a book.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, it was about $5. But, you know, that's $250, you know, for a book.

Mr. MEYERS: Yeah. I mean, it's not much.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, "Hom"--Catalonia is the region of northeast Spain which--where Barcelona's the capital. Part of it includes the Basque Country, and that's where Orwell fought, in northeast Spain. And Huesca is a town in that region, and he was at the front. There's a n--sort of fuzzy picture in the book, and not a very good one--a snapshot--but it's interesting because Eileen is there. She came to Barcelona to work in the--in a political office, and she did visit Orwell at the front, which was brave because a bombardment was going on, bullets were flying.

Orwell was a tall guy, and he had had experience with the OTC, the Office of Training Corps, in Eton. He had gone--he knew how to handle a gun. But he was a tall guy, and he took risks. And one--one day, with the sun coming up behind him, he stood up, which made him a perfect target, and if the bullet had been a couple of centimeters t--in a different direction, it would have severed his spine and--spinal cord and killed him, and we would have never had...

Mr. MEYERS: Right--right through the throat and out the other end. So he--he did manage to survive. He had a--his vocal cords were damaged. He had a kind of a weak voice afterwards. He--he went to a field hospital, and then he took a--an ambulance and a very, very rough ride back. But eventually he got into a clinic in Barcelona. But the really horrifying part was not being wounded, but when he got bar--back to Barcelona on leave, medical leave, after the wound, before--before going back to the front again, he found that his contingent on the left, the independent Labour Party, was being hunted by the Communists, who were supposed to be their allies, but which had turned into their enemies.

So instead of having a civil war between the right and the left, there were really two wars. There was a war between the right and the left, and there was also a civil war between factions or parties or elements on the left, as Stalin tried to eliminate all the different splintered parties who--and bring everybody under Communist rule. So Orwell was actually hunted in Barcelona. He was not allowed to go back to the hotel, where Eileen was. The Soviet secret police went to the hotel and searched the room, and Eileen had the presence of mind to sit on her bed and sit on the papers that they were looking for. And they never asked her to get up, so that was kind of lucky.

And Orwell, sleeping out in abandoned churches or on the street or in parks, gradually got on the train in Barcelona, met--met Eileen and had the guts to go to the main prison, where his commandant, George Kopp, the hero of "Homage to Catalonia," a--a Belgian, a great soldier, very brave, had been rounded up when the Communists were catching their enemies on the left. George Kopp eventually got out of that jail, but he was tortured and he--he was very badly treated. But he went--he's a tough guy, and he went on to have a very distinguished career with the French underground. During World War II, he was parachuted in by the--by British intelligence, and he sent reports back. And they met...

Mr. MEYERS: ...they met after the war.

Mr. MEYERS: George Kopp is in there holding up a baby.

Mr. MEYERS: Quenton Kopp is George's son. George had about five children, and I managed to get in touch with three of them, and I interviewed them all quite extensively. I think two are living in France. And Quenton was the son who was living in England and who looks, in fact, quite a lot like his father. So there's a picture at the end of Quenton, the son of George Kopp, Orwell's commander in Spain, and Richard, Orwell's adopted son. So the two sons became friends, as the two fathers had been friends previously.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, he was a Socialist.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, it meant--well, there was a Socialist Party, which eventually got in. Clement Attlee was elected after the war, and Churchill, who had led England through the war, somehow just didn't seem to be the right leader after the war. It meant--it tried to make all people equal in society economically insofar as that was possible, so that you don't have a very rich and a very poor class, and you don't have people who are oppressed and downtrodden and unemployed and starving the way you did during the Depression in England and in this country, too, which really means that the government takes over big industries, railroads, utilities, airlines. It's really nationalization of big corporations.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, he thought capitalism was an oppressive system, which--which--which had broken down and failed during the Depression and which had led to tremendous misery.

Mr. MEYERS: That's because after Orwell died, the book was taken up by the right in America in order to use as a stick to beat communism. See, Orwell was the--virtually the only writer on the left in the 1930s who was not only critical of the right, as all the left writers were, but also critical of the left. And in "The Road to Wigan Pier"--in the second half of "The Road to Wigan Pier," he has a n--a long autobiographical section about how he became a Socialist, going all the way back to his father and his elite education and his police experience in Burma, his--his working as a bum and so on--tramping as a bum, working in the hotel.

But he also has a hilarious description of what he calls vegetarian, teetotalers, saddle-wearers, bearded cranks; you know, these kind of off-the-wall Socialists that he used to see in Socialist summer camps or at Socialist magazines. So he was--I think it's very healthy to be critical of your own side as well as the other side, not simply dig in and take a partisan view and say, `We're right and they're wrong, or they think they're right and we're wrong,' and there's never any kind of meeting.

But people still think Orwell betrayed the cause, old lefties, because he criticized the left in the Spanish Civil War, although the right was the real subject of his criticism; he criticized English Socialists; and two of his girlfriends, who are still around--I interviewed them. They were, say, in their late 80s. Both called themselves Communists, and both were still pretty annoyed at Orwell because he had dared to criticize the left.

Mr. MEYERS: One was Kay Eckfall, and the other one was Sally Jerome. And these were girlfriends--these were girls that he was taking out, you know, as a young man in the early '30s, before he married Eileen.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, it's really kind of amazing in a way. I think one of the things I do in this book that wasn't done before, and partly I've done it with the help of this edition, is we know much more about Orwell's emotional and sexual life than we did before. And I find that very interesting because Orwell was always considered a cold fish, you know, somebody very reserved, didn't show his emotions. For example, he said after Eileen died, `She was a good old stick,' and he was criticized for saying that, as if, you know, `Is that all she meant to you?'

But that was very high praise for Orwell, and it was really saying a lot, if you understand the--the nuances and the--the suggestion that she really was, you know, not only a wife and a lover, but really a--a good companion, a good pal, somebody who would go to Spain and risk her life and share Orwell's life in every way a--which meant sacrificing.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, I--I mentioned Kay Eckfall and Sally Jerome. A very important woman was Mabel Fierz, who everybody knew was in his life as a--as a patron who helped get his first book published. It happened that I had met, during my Katherine Mansfield book, Mabel Fierz's daughter-in-law, who was the headmistress of Katherine Mansfield's old school. And I remember saying to her, `That name, Fierz, does--doesn't your family have something to do with Orwell?' And she said to me, `You are a clever young man.' And I always thought--I just loved being called `a clever young man' by Mrs. Fierz.

So when I got back to "Orwell," I thought, `I'd better get in touch with her again,' and I did. She was still in London. And her name is unusual. It's a Swiss-German name. And her husband was the son of Mabel Fierz, Orwell's patron. But while I was going through the papers in the Orwell Archive, which many people had done before, I come across a letter from Mabel to Orwell, which strikes me obviously as a love letter, and it struck my wife, who was reading the--the papers with me. And I said, `Surely--I mean, th--this is a love letter.' Nobody ever saw that before.

So I went to see Mabel Fierz and her son, Adrian, and I said, `Did you ever ask your mother, you know, whether anything was going on?' He said, `Oh, yes.' She lived to be over 100, and she just died maybe five years ago. A--she outlived Orwell for almost 50 years. And they said, `Yes, yes. You might say we were lovers.' So now it turns out that Mabel Fierz was not just a patron, not just a helper, somebody whose house Orwell stayed in when she was married, someone who took his first manuscript and brought it to a literary agent, who was in her tennis club in North London, who then gave it to Victor Galangst, the publisher who published it, but, in fact, they were lovers as well. And I thought that was awfully interesting that that letter had been there all that time, and all these people had read it, and nobody had really seen what was in it.

Then there are the letters that Eileen wrote to Orwell during the war, when he was still on the farm and she was in London. And when she was in hospital and everybody was told that it was just for a kind of minor, simple operation, in fact, she had uterine cancer, and she didn't really want to upset Orwell about it. He was then in Europe reporting the end of World War II in Germany for The Observer. This was about the early months of 1945. And literally minutes before she was wheeled into the operating room, she wrote these, to me--I mean, they're so moving and so beautiful, and--and they really could make you weep to read them because you realize what a terrific woman she was.

Mr. MEYERS: She died in '45, early '45.

Mr. MEYERS: Very unexpectedly.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, Sonia Brownell was somebody who worked for Cyril Connally on Horizon. Horizon was a very important literary magazine which ran for 10 years in the 1940s, edited by Connally. Connally had been to Eton with Orwell, and he'd even been to St. Cyrian's with Orwell. And he was a very sybaritic, aesthete, very fat--loved food, loved the good life, didn't care for details. So he was the editor, but Sonia kind of did the nuts and bolts of running the magazine.

And when the magazine came to an end in about 1949, Sonia, who had love affairs with a lot of famous people, like Lucien Freud, the painter, and Victor Pasmore, the painter, and quite a lot of other lovers--she looked around and picked up with Orwell again because Orwell--I mean, the--the--this is harsh on Sonia, but I think it's true: that Orwell had two qualities or three qualities that Sonia really wanted in a husband. Number one, he was a big literary name. Number two, a lot of money was coming in from "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four." And number three, he was dying, so there were no sexual demands. The marriage was never consummated.

They were married in Orwell's hospital room, and David Astor was there and described to me it was just the most ghastly and embarrassing thing. Orwell could hardly sit up in bed. They gave him a new smoking jacket with the velvet trim, like a bathrobe, sort of. And then when Orwell died, Sonia became the--the heir of the Orwell estate. She was very mean, in the English sense; ne--very stingy in the American sense, not really giving much money to little Richard, who was the adopted boy that Eileen and Orwell had adopted in 1945. And right after they adopted this baby, Eileen died.

So here was Orwell left with a--a baby that everybody thought he would give up, but he w--he loved the baby. He always wanted to have a child, and he couldn't, for whatever reason. We don't know whose fault it was.

Mr. MEYERS: No. She died in 1980.

Mr. MEYERS: Richard's alive. He was a farmer. And he grew up in Scotland, brought up by Orwell's youngest sister, Avril. And he's a very nice fellow, not an intellectual, you know, completely unpretentious, very well off. He was a farmer. He went to Agricultural College, and then he sold agricultural machinery, and he--you know, he takes an interest in "Orwell." He's helpful, very unpretentious, nice, just a good guy.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, there's a--there was an Orwell pub at Wigan Pier. Wigan Pier is a kind of joke because a pier in England is usually associated with a pleasure resort, like Brighton, where the pier goes out into the water and they have entertainment there or places to eat or that sort of thing. So th--there never really was a pier at Wigan in the sense of a--of an extended pier, but there was a--a dockside where coal barges came in. And I went to Wigan, and it--it's pretty grim. I mean, the water is all brown and polluted and slightly smelly, and, you know, Wigan is--it's the kind of, well, like Appalachia is in this country. You know, it's kind of backward and poor and--and industrialized and polluted. And--but there was a kind of Orwell tavern or Orwell pub that we ate in, you know? And I remember taking a--a beer--a beer ho--holder. What else is there? There's the Orwell Archive in London, which has his papers, but it's not really a museum.

Mr. MEYERS: Oh, yeah. I spent a lot of time there. And as I mentioned to you before the program, after my book was finished and after even it was printed, but not yet published--it was published last September--in August, I got a chance to lecture on a cruise that went from Mandalay, where Orwell was trained before he became a policeman, all the way up the Irawadi River to Baumo, near the Chinese border. And I took this opportunity of being in Burma, which had just opened up this year, the spring of 2000, where you could stay more than a week. You can now stay a month. And there were no travel restrictions. The Burmese government, repressive as it is, had made peace with a lot of the warring tribes on the border of India and China.

So I had a list of all the Orwell places, and I had some very good Burmese contacts, people at the--at the library and at the university, and I think I managed to see about eight out of the nine Orwell places.

Mr. MEYERS: On the west is India, and on the east is China. And they kind of come to a point at the top of Burma almost like a mountain peak, and that's where these kind of remote-hill tribes are.

Mr. MEYERS: And Thailand is also on the southeast of Burma.

Mr. MEYERS: I think "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

Mr. MEYERS: "Animal Farm" was written during World War II when Stalin and Russia was an ally of England and France and the United States. So the British government, quite reasonably, did not want published in England during the war a book that attacked Stalin and Russia. Fair enough. So Orwell, at one point, decided that he would publish it himself. You know, he--paper was very short in England during the war, but he found a little magazine that had some paper. And then, in the end, he f--he found a new publisher called Fred Warburg, who had just bought Secker and had turned it into Secker & Warburg. Now it's a very important firm, but you have to imagine back in 1945, Fred Warburg was just starting. He belonged to the Jewish banking--Jewish-German banking family, the Warburgs.

And they brought this out. It had been turned down by many people, and it had even been turned down by Orwell's acquaintance, T.S. Eliot, who was the chairman of Faber and Faber and who saw some of the strong points. But nobody really saw where that book was going and what was in it and how good it would be. And one American publisher even completely missed the political allegory and said, `There's no market for animal stories in England,' which was maybe the dumb...

Mr. MEYERS: Well, the story was--it was really an allegory of Russian history from the Revolution up until the Yalta Conference, which took place in about '44 or '45. W--and it--it--the theme of the book is, really, how the idealists take power and then--the revolutionaries--and when they do, they just become as repressive and corrupt and rotten as the people they replaced.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, wh--one was Major, who I think was--I can't remember exactly--Lenin.

Mr. MEYERS: Sn--Snowball was Trotsky. Napoleon was Stalin. But the interesting thing about it--and I worked this out years ago, and then re--refined it in this book--is--is that every single detail in the book, right down to Molly, this kind of vain little horse, is--Molly, I think, is based on Sonia because she loves fine clothes and she's very pretty, and she's looking in the mirror all the time and likes to be admired.

Mr. MEYERS: Yeah, 'cause he knew Sonia, you know, from Horizon all the way through the '40s before they married in 1949. So every detail has something to do with what happened in Russia at the time: the Five-Year Plan; the NEP, the new economic plan; the collapse; the whole fight between Trotsky and Stalin; the exile of Trotsky; the murder. I mean, it's really kind of amazing to see the way he used the kind of simplicity, and I think some of that came from "Gulliver's Travels."

But we know what--all the different sort of literary influences. There was a Russian futuristic novel by Zamyatin called "We," which Orwell was one of the first people in England to read. There was a novel by Jack London called "The Iron Heel." There was a non-fiction book by the American James Burnham called "A Managerial Revolution," where Burnham predicted that the war would be divided into--th--now--this is "Nineteen Eighty-Four" now--would be divided into three parts. So it's the combination of a kind of charming, witty, amusing style with a kind of real satiric political allegory that makes "Animal Farm" so effective. It can be read in these different ways.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, people saw it. I mean, they did understand it, but it took a while to take off. I mean, the first printing was 3,000 copies or something like that, nothing much, but then it was reprinted and reprinted and reprinted, and it really make Secker & Warburg as a firm. And then "Nineteen Eighty-Four" solidified it, and that's wh--what's really got them on the ground. And they were able to have all these high-brow, European writers. I mean, Thomas Mann, Kamu, people like that, Kafka, were published by Secker & Warburg. But all of those authors put together never sold as much as either "Animal Farm" or "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in the...

Mr. MEYERS: Just--again, little. Nobody really saw where that book was going. Nobody saw it...

Mr. MEYERS: Yeah.

Mr. MEYERS: Just a few hundred dollars, nothing...

Mr. MEYERS: Well, there, it's a much darker book. That's the one influenced by Zamyatin and by Burnham and by Jack London. I want to make that clear; that it's different from the--an "Animal Farm." A lot of the torture--and Winston looking at his body...

Mr. MEYERS: Winston Smith is the hero. And he looks at his body in the mirror, after he's been tortured, and he's all emaciated and broken and ghastly, coughing, and that's what Orwell looked like when he wrote the book because...

Mr. MEYERS: ...because he had TB. Well, he finished it in '48. He started it after the--he finished it in '48, and he--and it was published in '49, and he started writing it after the war, after "Animal Farm's" finish.

Mr. MEYERS: Takes place in--in the f--in London, in the future, 35 years ahead of time--ahead of the writing time. When the world is divided up into three parts, Eura--I think it's called Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania, which basically stands for the Communist part, the European part and the sort of American--American part. And, basically, it's a kind of totalitarian dictatorship, where every single aspect of your life is under scrutiny. There's a television--television had, I think, been invented in the '30s and became commercial after the war. I remember when my family had a television in, you know, 1947 or '8. But this is a television that watches you; you don't watch it. So it--it--it spies on you. It's on all the time.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, these are--I think the model for that is a German motto over the gate of one of the concentration camps: (German spoken) `Work makes you free.' And it's--it's bitterly ironic because these were slave laborers, and they weren't free at all. And I think what Orwell's trying to do there is show how political slogans are turned into lies that people, through unremitting propaganda, are forced to believe.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, he was very prophetic, and a lot of the things he said are apt today. W--he wrote an essay about nationalism in sport, for example, where he showed that, you know, a soccer game, for example, is not just a sporting event, but it's one country against another. And you see--we don't have that so much in this country, but in--in Europe, you know, during the World Cup, you know, you have these soccer yabos, and they go over to another country, and they--you know, they get into fights, and they beat people up, and, you know, they fight with the police and th--their heads are cracked, and they're sent to jail and so on.

He was--he was interested in pollution, for example, environmental pollution. And in his 1939 novel "Coming Up for Air," he goes back to the village where he had grown up, which is based on Henley, in Oxfordshire on the Thames, and he finds the whole thing polluted.

People say, `What would Orwell believe now?' Everybody wants Orwell on their side, so in a famous essay by Norman Podhoretz, who's a neo-conservative, he said, `If Orwell were alive today, he'd be a neo-conservative.' In other words, `Orwell would agree with me,' Podhoretz says. I don't think he would, though he did have a conservative strain. I mean, somebody called him a Tory anarchist, which is a way of saying he was both conservative and anarchistic at the same time. I mean, he could be left and he could--he was a conservative in the sense that he wanted to preserve what he thought were the best in England, traditional life. And sometimes he associated it as simply as--as just simply an ideal pub or a fire or a garden or--or frogs in nature or listening to birds in the spring.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, that's very sad. He went to live in this island off the east coast of Scotland called Jura. Even today, it takes 24 hours to get there from London.

Mr. MEYERS: Yeah. I mean, it's just, you know--like, you can get to Burma faster than you can get to Jura if you get on a plane. It was very, very harsh. It rained all the time, very high wind, extreme discomfort, very, very far from a doctor. Little Ri--Richard, the baby, fell off a stool once and cut his head, and he had to have his head stitched, and it took six hours to get him to a doctor. If Orwell had ever had a hemorrhage while he was on Jura, that would have finished him because there was no way to get him to--to medical attention.

Anyway, he liked it. Most people, when they had their first success with "Animal Farm," after 12 years as a writer, would sit in London and say, `This is what I've been waiting for.' You know, `Now I'm a famous literary guy, and they all want me.' Orwell didn't like that. He wanted to be alone in Jura. He knew he was dying; he wanted to write "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in peace. So he wrote it up there under very, very harsh conditions. And I interviewed a lot of people who went up there to see him and who lived there with him.

Mr. MEYERS: I didn't. I was discouraged from going there because there's just the house, which is all closed up. It was November. You're likely to get marooned on the island for a week, you know, if the seas come up. In a way, there was nothing to see there. Next time I go up to Scotland, Richard promised me he would just take me across on his boat. That's the way to go.

Mr. MEYERS: He died in University College Hospital, where it happens my daughter was born, by chance--same hospital--and he died there in January of 1950. It's right around the corner, virtually, from the British Museum, from the University of London on--on Garrow Street. It's a very good hospital, but by the time Orwell got in there, he was terminal.

Mr. MEYERS: Well, this is the beginning of--you know, the middle or the beginning of the Cold War. You know, Churchill had made his Iron Curtain speech, I think, in Missouri in 1946. Stalin was alive till 1953. The Korean War was just heating up. I think the Korean...

Mr. MEYERS: Oh, yeah. I think they did. I mean, he had a very modest funeral. He's buried in--in a--in a little country town, in Oxfordshire, in the same cemetery where Asquith, the World War I British prime minister, is s--and--and right near some huge nuclear reactor, which is really kind of horribly appropriate since Orwell, you know, was kind of warning against, you know, what atomic bombs could do.

Mr. MEYERS: I'm writing a life now--a father and son biography of Errol Flynn, the actor, and his son, Sean, who was a war correspondent in Vietnam and who was captured in 1970 and disappeared. And I have been on his trail and found out what happened to him.

Mr. MEYERS: '46 in London.

Mr. MEYERS: Thank you.