14
PARTISAN REVIEW
summer of 1932 Mabel, planning an outdoor excursion, gushingly
wrote: "Take your costume in case we find a suitable place. [ hate the
usual swimming bath. Will also take tea. It
will
be nice. Not as you say
a
decent walk.
I prefer the opposite!" Was this a love letter? To me it
suggested a clandestine affair.
It
changed the whole nature of Orwell's
relations with this woman.
I remembered that twenty years earlier, when writing my life of
Katherine Mansfield, I'd visited her old school, Queen's College in
London, and met the headmistress, Stefanie Fierz. When I asked her:
"Doesn't your family have something to do with Orwell?" she replied:
"You
are
a clever young man." She invited me home to taste the same
greengage jam her mother-in-law, Mabel, had made for Orwell.
In 1998 I got back in touch with Stefanie and her husband Adrian
Fierz, and went to see them again. Orwell, in his mid-twenties, had been
a friend and mentor to the schoolboy Adrian. I hesitated to ask about
his mother's possible affair with Orwell, but need nor have worried.
Adrian said that he'd guessed the truth about their relationship early on,
and when he'd questioned his mother late in her life (she lived to be a
hundred years old) about her affair with Orwell, she confessed: "Yes,
you could say so. He was my lover."
Evidence of sexual relationships is rarely as clear as this-the biogra–
pher seldom finds a letter that says: "You were wonderful in bed last
night!" So he has to weigh the evidence carefully and make his judg–
ment. In this case, I had gotten to know a lot more about Mabel. She
was a bohemian literary type who not only encouraged Orwell to write,
and placed his first book with an agent, but also adored and worshipped
him. Back from Burma, lonely and hard up, Orwell was glad to sleep
with his patron, as he did with several other women in London and
Southwold (on the east coast of England), where his parents had retired,
and where he was temporarily living.
I found several printed sources unknown
to
previous biographers.
One example is
A Russian's England
by Elizaveta Fen, whose real name
was Lydia Jackson. A Russian emigree, she was a close friend of
Orwell's wife Eileen, and knew Orwell for several years in the late
L930s. At Eileen's urging she visited him when he was recuperating from
a flare-up of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Gloucestershire. Her mem–
oir reveals that Orwell was a lonely, sexually needy man. She felt so
sorry for him she allowed him to kiss her. Her kindness encouraged his
hopes of becoming her lover and he sent her love letters when he spent
a winter in Morocco. When he returned in 1939 he planned to seduce
her. Lydia, who loved Eileen and valued her friendship, was mortified
