HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
19
when Orwell lived there. He idealized the place, and gave it up reluc–
tantly. He was not a very social person, and sought austerity and isola–
tion. He was fleeing London, the grime and destruction of the blitz, and
the struggle of life in the postwar years. The setting of Jura must have
heightened the dark images of London that filled his mind when he was
writing
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Details of behavior, dress, and speech help build the central character
and the atmosphere surrounding him. His former pupil, Geoffrey
Stevens, told me how Orwell, a conscientious teacher, would prod the
boys' stomachs with a ruler while urging them to respond to his queries.
His nieces and nephew-Jane, Lucy, and Henry Dakin-visited Orwell
on Jura. Lucy remembered her uncle's dour response when she first
arrived at the house, exhausted after the rail journey, the ferry, and the
miles of rutted dirt track. "Ah, there you are, Lu," he sa id, as if she had
just come back from a shop round the corner. Lucy and Henry were
with him when he misread the tidal tables, steered his twelve-foot
dinghy into one of the most perilous whirlpools in Europe, and came
very close to drowning them all. After their boating accident he infuri–
ated them by refusing their rescuer's offer to drop them off at Barnhill,
and casually remarked, "That's all right. We'll walk back." They had
lost their shoes in the whirlpool and had to go barefoot over three miles
of rough country.
Orwell made idiosyncratic remarks that people remembered all their
lives. Connolly remembered him saying at prep school: "Whoever wins
this war, we shall emerge a second-rate nation." William Empson heard
Orwell, when he worked in the wartime BBC, arguing with an Indian
colleague. [n a self-consciously cockney accent he desperately tried to
transcend racial differences and exclaimed through the thin partition of
his office: "The FACK that you're black ...and that I'm white, has
l1ud–
din whatever to do wiv
it."
When Susan Watson prepared a particularly
appetizing dish, Orwell, like the schoolboy he once was, would turn to
baby Richard and remark: "Gosh, boys, this looks good!" David Astor
captured the atmosphere of their weekly London lunches during the
war. He recalled Cyril Connolly (alluding to a British general and their
mutual friend Tosco Fyvel and imitating Arthur Koestler's strong Hun–
garian accent) asking: "The great kvestion iss: 'Who viII vin ze desert
var? Wavell, Fyvel, or Orvell?'"
Orwell-like Samuel Johnson and Anton Chekhov-was a great–
hearted and admirable man. But he had his human failings. He yearned
to
be rich, handsome, and a devil with the ladies. Women were always
important to him, and his weird proposals to Celia Paget and Anne
