A week or two ago, I pointed out that Brexiteers and Remainers alike are convinced that if George Orwell were alive today he would be firmly on their side
A week or two ago, I pointed out that Brexiteers and Remainers alike are convinced that if George Orwell were alive today he would be firmly on their side.
This raises another question. In our contemporary climate, would George Orwell be allowed a platform to speak up about anything?
In America, the wonderful comic writer Garrison Keillor has been silenced following allegations of improper conduct. The long-running radio show he created has been given a new name and old episodes are no longer being repeated; his weekly newspaper column has been cancelled; and a plaque in his honour at his old university has been removed.
And what exactly was his crime? No one is saying. According to Keillor, he placed his hand on a woman’s back, meaning to console her after she told him of her unhappiness.
‘She recoiled. I apologised. I sent her an email of apology and she replied that she had forgiven me and not to think about it. We were friends. We continued to be friendly right up until her lawyer called.’
Nearly 70 years after his death, George Orwell is still regarded as one of our greatest essayists and novelists, but a trawl through his life and work by the Thought Police would, I’m sorry to say, unearth far worse.
Even his most sympathetic biographers acknowledge that, as an officer of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he paid regular visits to the waterfront brothels of Rangoon. After spending time in Morocco, he also confessed to his friend Harold Acton that he ‘seldom tasted such bliss as with certain Moroccan girls’.
A friend recalled Orwell saying that ‘he found himself increasingly attracted by the young Arab girls’. He confessed to the same friend that he told his wife, Eileen, he ‘had to have one of these girls on just one occasion’. Eileen agreed, and so he went ahead.
During his marriage to Eileen, Orwell made an improper advance to a young woman, Lydia Jackson. ‘He did not attract me as a man and his ill health even aroused in me a slight feeling of revulsion,’ she recalled.
Once he was better, he wrote Lydia a suggestive letter, letting her know when his wife was away, and adding: ‘I know it’s indiscreet to write such things in letters, but you’ll be clever & burn this, won’t you?’
But Lydia had no wish to go along with this deceit. ‘His masculine conceit annoyed me,’ she said.
After the sudden death of Eileen, Orwell made a pass at another young woman, who lived in the flat below.
‘I wonder if you were angry or surprised when I sort of made advances to you that night . . .’ he wrote to her. ‘It is only that I feel so desperately alone . . . Of course, it’s absurd to make love to someone of your age.’
In the current climate, Orwell might even find himself in court on a charge of historic sex abuse.
In our contemporary climate, would George Orwell be allowed a platform to speak up about anything?
A few years ago, letters were discovered in which a childhood friend, Jacintha Buddicom, revealed that when Orwell was 15 and she was 17, a bit of canoodling had accelerated into something more violent, and he had attempted to rape her. Jacintha shouted, kicked and screamed before running home with a bruised hip and a torn skirt. Afterwards, she broke off all contact with him.
Nearly 60 years later, Jacintha wrote to a relative about the additional hurt she suffered when she realised he had turned her into a character in his most famous book.
She wrote: ‘At least you have not had the public shame of being destroyed in a classic book as Eric did to me. Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four is clearly Jacintha, of that I feel certain . . . in the end he absolutely destroys me, like a man in hobnailed boots stamping on a spider.
‘It hurt my mother so much when she read that book that we always thought it brought on her final heart attack a few days later. Be glad you have not been torn limb from limb in public.’
Does this mean the works of George Orwell should be removed from libraries and bookshops? Of course not. But if he is to be excused, then why not other literary heroes?