From: WORD_CHEMIST@HOTMAIL.COM   
      
   He can't imagine Orwell in a 'pastoral situation'. How odd.   
      
   Issue: 20 May 2006   
   Odd odds and ends   
   Philip Hensher   
   The Lost Orwell   
   edited by Peter Davison   
   Timewell Press, 224pp, £18.99, ISBN 1857252144   
      
   Thin scrapings from the bottom of the Orwell archives, this volume; less   
   than ten years after Peter Davison's 20- volume complete Orwell, he has   
   taken the opportunity to put some subsequent discoveries into print. The on   
   dit is that the publishers of the complete edition declined the opportunity   
   of presenting this supplement. Though this decision falls squarely into the   
   ha'porth of tar category, and the complete Orwell must have been much more   
   commercially successful than most comparable enterprises, it's an   
   understandable one. Orwell's ephemeral writings fared unusually well in the   
   50 years after his death, thanks to two editors. First, his wife Sonia's   
   four-volume survey ('It's your plain duty,' Ivy Compton-Burnett told her);   
   secondly, Davison's much more complete and thoroughly annotated collection.   
   There may not be all that much left to find, and it's a testament to our   
   continuing fascination with a writer whose concerns might be thought   
   essentially of their period that such a book is considered to be worth   
   publishing by anyone.   
   What we have here is a series of exchanges between Orwell and the translator   
   of Down and Out in Paris and London, amusing and weirdly courtly; an   
   enchanting set of letters from Orwell's first wife, Eileen, about the   
   privations of their mid-1930s life; some letters from Orwell or relating to   
   Orwell, almost all routine professional correspondence ('I can just as   
   easily turn my stuff in on Thursdays, or for that matter Wednesdays or   
   Tuesdays, i.e. provided I have had the books in time'); and two previously   
   overlooked articles.   
   One of these articles, on immediately postwar Paris, is interesting and was   
   worth resurrecting. The other, an obituary survey of H. G. Wells for the   
   Manchester Evening News, raises the highest hopes. Sonia knew of it from   
   Orwell's workbook, but was unable to track it down. Orwell had that sort of   
   highly fraught relationship with Wells ('Read my early works, you s***,'   
   Wells had written to him) which springs from boyhood adulation, and in   
   theory there are few essays one would rather read than high-period Orwell   
   taking Wells to pieces. Maddeningly, it proves the most routine piece of   
   work, running through the oeuvre without offering any surprising or even   
   interesting judgments - 'his deep disgust with the planless, greedy society   
   of the early 20th century supplies a sort of driving force which can be felt   
   on every page [of Tono-Bungay].'   
   There is also quite an interesting essay on the career of a deeply suspect   
   associate of Orwell's called Georges Kopp, and, something I really don't   
   understand, summaries of letters to his early 1930s mistress Brenda Salkeld,   
   taken directly from Gordon Bowker's exhausting 2003 biography. These, for   
   some reason, can't be printed in full, but anyone that interested will have   
   seen Bowker's summaries already.   
   Finally, there is a fuller version of the famous list which Orwell compiled   
   of communists and fellow-travellers, including the names of those who have   
   died since its initial publication. There are no real surprises here, though   
   some crisp judgments - 'silly sympathiser' he terms Naomi Mitchison.   
   Personally, I find the most telling aspect of this much-discussed list is   
   the way he scrupulously adds the racial origins of his subjects - 'Jewess',   
   'Half-Caste', 'English Jew', 'Polish Jew' - and some observations which   
   perhaps came more readily to the sensational novelist side of Orwell than   
   the dispassionate observer of political factions. 'Has crippled hand,' he   
   helpfully notes of Alex Comfort.   
   Not that Orwell would ever have admitted to holding any remotely irrational   
   prejudices. One of the discovered letters is a terrifically touchy yelp on   
   reading a 1945 article on his work. The writer made a crude journalistic   
   error in describing 'Shooting an Elephant' as an extract from Burmese Days,   
   but this is Orwell's main complaint:   
   The writer of the article states: 'One thing [Orwell] obviously is in   
   earnest about is his assertion that the working class, as a whole, smells -   
   in fact stinks. And there is very little evidence in any of his more recent   
   writings to make us suppose that he has radically altered this view.'   
   Orwell violently protested against this, but it seems to me that J. E.   
   Miller, who wrote the article, was on to something. You could compile a   
   small anthology of Orwell's expressions of physical disgust, from Down and   
   Out in Paris and London to Nineteen Eighty-Four, often very specifically   
   describing the stench of the human body, usually that of the working   
   classes. If he didn't believe that 'the working class, as a whole, smells',   
   then all one can say is that he was powerfully and horribly drawn, as a   
   writer, to those apparently rare occasions when it did so.   
   Though there are no major discoveries here, the new material almost always   
   conveys Orwell's peculiar, prickly, slightly absurd personality. There are   
   some very touching letters from the end of his life, describing his time   
   with his small son Richard on the remote Scottish island of Jura. I don't   
   know why, but I find it terribly hard to envisage Orwell in any pastoral   
   situation - one supposes that he must have milked the cows, but it is   
   completely impossible to imagine. These letters sometimes go, rather   
   unfairly, into denunciations of his four-year-old son's deplorable keenness   
   on 'a horrible low-class comic paper', though Orwell, rather keen on boys'   
   papers, was soon hypocritically describing his excitement at finding the   
   editor of Hotspur in the bed next to his own in a sanatorium. (Someone tell   
   Alan Bennett to write a play about it.)   
   The letters to the French translator of Down and Out in Paris and London are   
   just as surprising. René-Noel Raimbault rather wonderfully called it La   
   Vache Enragée, after the French idiom 'to eat a mad cow', meaning to go to   
   the dogs. It's a lovely, chatty correspondence, full of mutual flowery   
   compliments and those translator's specific inquiries which, for whatever   
   reason, are always howlingly funny:   
   'The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is ------. Quel   
   est cet adjectif?' 'Cet adjectif,' Orwell wrote back firmly, 'est "f***ing".   
   "F***" veut dire "foutre", et "f***ing" est le participe present.' A shame,   
   though, that some un-Orwellian anachronisms have crept into the   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)