George Orwell’s Jurassic period

Samuel Johnson shared George Orwell’s notorious hostility to the Scots.  Johnson particularly disliked the Presbyterian Church and the inordinate political influence of the Scottish Prime Minister Lord Bute.  In The False Alarm he maintained that “every one knows the malice, the subtlety, the industry, the vigilance and the greediness of the Scots”.  Like Orwell, Johnson visited the Hebrides toward the end of his life and partly overcame his prejudice.

Orwell had always disapproved of his slave-owning Blair ancestors in Jamaica, the cult of Scotland in his snobbish prep school that unjustly favored Scottish boys, and the large number of whisky-swilling, native-bashing Scottish soldiers, police officers and timber merchants in Burma.  In 1945, when Orwell was looking for a quiet place in the country, David Astor, his close friend and editor of the Observer, told him about Jura, where his family owned a deer-shooting lodge.  Sixteen miles off the west coast of Scotland, Jura then had about 250 people and 4,000 deer.

The hardship, bleakness and isolation of Jura appealed to Orwell’s austere character.  The arduous journey from London to Barnhill, Orwell’s house on Jura—by train to Glasgow, bus to the west coast, boat to the island of Kintyre often in rough sick-making seas, bus across Kintyre, boat to Jura, and taxi from Craighouse to Ardlussa—took forty-eight hours. The last seven miles along a rutted track had to be negotiated on foot.

The sea-level location, damp climate and strenuous life were precisely the opposite of the high altitude, thin dry air and prolonged rest required for patients with tuberculosis — with which Orwell would be diagnosed in 1947.  Jura was lonely, and Orwell admitted that it rained “all the time”. Violent gales tore the henhouse off the ground and blew it away.  The sea was icy, even in summer; the winter was “pretty bleak, dark and gloomy,” beastly cold and wet for two days out of three.  Jura also boasted venomous snakes filetted by Orwell when he caught them and swarms of midges that made it impossible to work outdoors.

In August 1947, on the way back from a fishing trip with his son, niece and nephew, Orwell misread the tidal tables and steered his twelve-foot dinghy straight into Corryvreckan, one of the most perilous whirlpools in Europe.  The small boat was bashed around the edge of the maelstrom and the outboard motor, which Orwell had failed to secure with a chain, was wrenched off the mounting and fell into the sea.  A long Atlantic swell, twelve feet high, thrust them toward a small rocky island.  The boat crashed into the rocks and turned over, and he lost most of his equipment.  Exhausted and soaked by the icy sea, gasping for breath and weaker than ever, Orwell confessed that he thought they were “goners”.  They were rescued with some difficulty by passing lobstermen, and walked home barefoot over three miles of rough country.

Les Wilson’s Orwell’s Island: George, Jura and 1984 (Glasgow: Saraband) uses both the incorrect numeral-title of Orwell’s novel and the correct one: Nineteen Eighty-Four.  His fairly obvious theme is that Orwell overcame his antagonism to the Scots when he lived on Jura and got to like the small group of atypical Gaelic-speaking farmers and fishermen: “It was such ordinary people on Jura . . . that had quietly impressed Orwell and swept away his long held anti-Scottish prejudice.”  Orwell had adopted his son in 1944 when Richard was an infant, and after his wife unexpectedly died in 1945 he surprised his friends by keeping the child.  Jura gave Richard an appealing rural rather than urban life.  Caring for him released Orwell’s most tender and compassionate feelings, and made him more sympathetic to his distant neighbors on the island.

Wilson asserts that Jura had a benign influence on Orwell and was a healthy place for the tubercular invalid to live, but all the substantial evidence he cites contradicts this.  Apart from the harsh and debilitating climate, Orwell’s remote house had no electricity.  In his workroom the paraffin stove gave off fumes, the fire belched smoke and his burning shag tobacco intensified the toxic atmosphere that was strong enough to cure kippers but not invalids.  Worse still, the only doctor on the island was too old to go to Barnhill and, Wilson admits, the “treatment for serious ills lay a twelve-hour journey by car, ferry and train to a Glasgow hospital.”  Orwell went to Jura to get away from the distractions of London and work on his novel.  But when he first settled there in May 1946 and was in comparatively good health, he spent all his time working on the house and garden, and did no writing at all for several months.  When he began to write he continued to interrupt his novel with many essays, reviews and columns.

All Orwell’s friends, quoted by Wilson, agreed that Jura was suicidal. David Astor thought Jura was suitable for a brief summer holiday and was horrified when he heard of Orwell’s plans: “It was an extremely uncomfortable place to live.  There was only one doctor on the island. no telephone and no proper road.  For a person in delicate health it was a crazy place to go.”  Richard Rees, another friend who spent several weeks on Jura, exclaimed, “I ought to have foreseen that he would contrive to find the most uninhabitable house in the British Isles.”  Orwell’s sister Avril, who lived there and kept house for him, convincingly concluded, “If he’d gone into a convalescent home then, he probably would have been cured, but as it was he came back and insisted on living a quite ordinary life.  It really was extremely stupid.”

Sonia Brownell (whose name includes an anagram for Orwell) refused to visit Jura and would never have agreed to live there.  She was mainly interested in marrying him on his deathbed, inheriting his substantial royalties and queening it up in London as his literary widow.  She thought living on Jura “was a very bad idea; it killed him in the end”. Though safe from his fear of the atomic bomb, Orwell fell victim to his own self-destructive impulse.  He linked creativity and disease, and famously believed, “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.”  A tubercular hemorrhage on Jura would have killed him before he could finish Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Part One of Orwell’s Island, on his life before Jura, relies on the standard biographies and is completely familiar.  Part Two on Jura, where readers would expect new insights, also summarises what is already well known.  Wilson’s short book suffers from scores of repetitions, and even recycles banal comments in the same paragraph.  In 12 lines on page 31, for example, he repeats that Orwell “draws attention to the over-representation of Scots around the empire”; “draws attention to the disproportionate number of Scots lording it over the natives in Britain’s empire”;  and “experienced Scots planters, engineers, oil men and officials who had set themselves up as Burma’s pukka-sahibs.”  But his endless repetitions are not convincing arguments.  Orwell’s Island gives one the impression of reading the same book over and over again, and Wilson’s text cries out for the help of a severe editor.  If readers subtract the endless repetitions, numerous quotes from Orwell, his friends and his biographers, pointless digressions into the films of Powell and Pressburger, plus extraneous comments on the current political situation, only about one quarter of the text would remain.

Wilson notes that five of Orwell’s novels—Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air and Nineteen Eighty-Four—“begin with time-checks or rude alarms in the first paragraph, jolting the reader to attention and setting the time of the events.”  But most of his literary criticism is superficial.  He writes that “A Hanging” “describes the execution of a Burmese native,” though the victim is actually an Indian; “Shooting an Elephant” “tells of killing such a creature.”  Animal Farm, “one of his most significant novels” is a “coruscating satire . . . destined to become a classic of English literature.”  Nineteen Eighty-Four “was very different to Orwell’s previous book. . . . Society is rigidly and ruthlessly divided into the Inner Party, the Outer Party and the proles.”  Wilson does not mention one vivid incident on Jura.  When a truck arrived to pick up a bull, Orwell locked his son Richard and his nursemaid Susan in the upstairs bedroom and guarded the entrance with a loaded revolver.  He was ready to shoot a bull, just as he had shot the elephant in Burma.

Wilson says nothing significant about Orwell’s Jurassic novel.  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, under the strict surveillance of Big Brother (first named in Joyce’s Ulysses,  p.414), Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth.  He rewrites history with Newspeak, which replaces Oldspeak or standard English, and is designed to diminish rather than extend the range of thought by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.  It’s worth noting that Orwell’s passionate interest in the purity of language and belief that good prose should be as clear as a windowpane has a distinguished literary ancestry.

In The Peloponnesian War the ancient Greek historian Thucydides lamented the perversion of language for political ends.  The collapse of law and moral standards was accompanied by the corruption of language: “To fit in with the change of events, words too had to change their usual meanings.  A thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member: any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character.”  In the 18th century the philosophe Denis Diderot observed that “when intolerance is instilled in a nation, not only are the people brutalised, but so is the language.”  A contemporary of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky noted the corruption of language in totalitarian regimes: “an authoritarian state can steal people’s language and then, since language is extremely vulnerable to taboo, lease it back in a doctored condition, using it as an instrument of social and mental control.”

The English artist Lucian Freud visited Orwell in his London hospital in January 1950, the month he died.  He recalled that Orwell, raging against the dying of the light, took bitter mental revenge against his enemies: “When he was in pain he cheered himself up by imagining worse things happening to people he disliked.”

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, a biography Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation and Orwell: Life and Art.

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