HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
1S
by his conduct, but understood his desperate desire to assert his mas–
culinity as his body began to betray him.
Eileen shared Orwell's need to suffer, but his masochism sometimes
became too much-even for her. One unnerving letter she wrote to him,
influenced by fear of her impending operation, conveys her horror of
urban life during World War II and foreshadows the grimmer passages
of
Nineteen Eighty-Four:
I don't think you understand what a nightmare the London life is
to me....
1
can't stand having people all over the place, every meal
makes me feel sick because every food has been handled by twenty
dirty hands.. .
.1
can't breathe the air, I can't think any more clearly
than one would expect
to
in the moment of being smothered.
After her death Orwell felt guilt-ridden for having neglected her.
Eileen's letter is desperately sad, but my sympathy for her led me to
understand rather than criticize Orwell. With tuberculosis hanging over
his head, he had a bleak future. People in London during the blitz were
under great stress and tended to be promiscuous. Sex was an escape
from a hard life of long hours and insufficient food, like the boiled cod
and bitter turnip tops in the BBC canteen. To me his human weaknesses
made his courage and achievement more remarkable.
Many of my interviews, the most pleasurable part of the research,
took place in bizarre circumstances: in freezing English houses where my
breath was visible in the sitting room, in convents, in insane asylums, and
on deathbeds. I've introduced people to brothers and sisters they'd never
known about. I found and held in my hands the brain of Wyndham
Lewis. Nothing is more riveting than talking to sympathetic and intelli–
gent people about a subject in which you're passionately interested. This
brings you as close as you will ever get to the character you're trying to
recreate. Two of the most interesting meetings were with women who'd
known Orwell, under unusual circumstances, in the mid-1940S.
After Eileen's sudden death during an operation at the age of thirty–
nine, Orwell, lonely, sick, and left with an adopted baby he refused to
give up, was desperate for a wife. He impulsively proposed to several
young women-including the exceptionally beautiful and charming
Celia Paget, whose twin sister Mamaine was married to Orwell's close
friend Arthur Koestler. Though Celia was many years younger, Koestler
implored her to marry Orwell. She liked him and enjoyed his sardonic
humor, but
to
her he seemed old and ill. She emphasized that Orwell
"expressed great concern for my happiness. He always seemed to feel
