CLASSICAL CORNER
244: BY GEORGE!
Might seem a drastic flit from my customary ancient affairs.
Hang on, though. Lots of people around to whom the 1930s are ancient history.
And, Orwell was steeped in Greek and Latin. For the full story, see Paul Burton’s exhaustive ‘George Orwell and the Classics,’ Classical and Modern Literature 25/1 (2005), pp53-75, with lavish quotations and meticulous tracing of Orwell’s evershifting attitudes – available online.
At his (much-maligned, by himself) prep school, George came top of the class in Greek and Latin. When translated to Eton, though, he plummeted to the bottom. The College Archive ‘Orwell at Eton’ shows a facsimile of his dismal report, part of a display to mark the 101st anniversary of Orwell (then, of course, Eric Blair) entering the school. 101 may seem an odd anniversary – until you think of Room 101…
Blair/Orwell’s Classics beak was the distinguished editor of Hellenistic Poetry, ASF Gow, who (rightly, his errant pupil confessed) blamed this precipitous decline on sheer idleness. Later, they occasionally corresponded and met. Anthony Blunt thought highly of Gow’s knowledge of art history, which perhaps inspired the halfbaked notion (see, e.g., Daily Mail ,20Oct 2012, online) that he was the ‘Fifth Man’ in the Cambridge Spy Ring.
In spite of his Etonian classical delinquency, Orwell chose Greek and Latin as his options for the 1922 India Office exams. Thanks to his high marks in these, he scraped through and was off to his notso-happy Burmese Days.
Philip Bounds in his Orwell and the Paranormal (published online by the Orwell Society) details his lifelong preoccupation with the occult, claiming its affinity with the ‘far right’ in his dissection of WB Yeats (Horizon, Jan 1943, published by his former Eton classmate Cyril Connolly), and seeing it manifest in some of the Winston Smith imagery in 1984.
In his biography of Orwell (2003), Gordon Bowker interviewed the late, great Byzantinist Sir Steven Runciman (see forthcoming FT column on this classical curiosity), a fellow-Etonian. Runciman revealed that he and Blair had practised voodoo on Philip Yorke, an older boy and Flashman-style bully. Blair, inspired by RH Barham’s ghost story ‘The Leech of Folkestone’, moulded a melted candle into a crude effigy of Yorke. Ranchman blenched at the idea of sticking a pin into its heart, so they compromised by breaking off its right leg. A few days later, Yorke broke his leg playing football – and died young of acute lymphatic leukaemia in July 1917, three months after Orwell entered Eton. Before Runciman’s disclosure, both men had hugged this guilty secret to themselves. Catherine Milner, reviewing Bowker (D.Telegraph, 18 May 2003), mentions sources that say Blair changed his name out of fear his enemies would use black magic against his real one.
Two other macabre episodes described by Orwell are detailed by Ronald Binns in his superlative Orwell in Southwold (2018, pp45-6, 60-1), the first one also by Bounds. Binns also caters to FT readers with his The Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded (2017), published on the 50th anniversary of the local newspaper’s report of Nessie’s epiphany – Binns was a member of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau.
In a letter (16 Aug 1931) to his friend Dennis Collings, Orwell describes what happened to him at 5.20pm, Monday, 27 July, at Walberswick Cemetery in the grounds of the Church of St Andrew. This exact chronological pinpointing enhances the impression this experience made on him.
I’ll let Orwell tell this story of his ghostly encounter: “I wasn’t looking directly at it & so couldn’t make out more than it was a man’s figure, small & stooping & dressed in lightish brown; I should have said a workman. I had the impression that it glanced towards me in passing, but I made out nothing of the features. At the moment of its passing I thought nothing, but a few seconds later it struck me that the figure had made no noise, & I followed it out into the churchyard. There was no one in the churchyard, & no one within possible distance along the road – this was about 20 seconds after I had seen it.” Orwell included a sketch of the church, marking the ghost’s route. He then dismissed
– trying to laugh it off? – the vision as “presumably an hallucination”.
Mysterious boxes are not uncommon. Dictys’s Diary of the Trojan War was supposedly found in an excavated one inscribed with Phoenician characters and taken to emperor Nero. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries there was Joanna Southcott’s Box of Sealed Writings, claimed by adherents to contain allembracing Prophecies of the Future [see FT151:21, 152:48-49, 296:15] – I recall many newspaper advertisements of this, with fevered demands that it be opened in the presence of the 24 bishops of England. But none comes stranger than the one found by Orwell in 1930 and described by him in a letter (6 July 1940) to Sacheverell Sitwell, whose book Poltergeists Orwell reviewed in Horizon (Sept 1940).
What follows owes much to Binns’s account – I cannot recommend his book too highly. One afternoon, Orwell was taking a disabled lad, Bryan Morgan, on a walk across Walberswick Common, a characteristic act of kindness. Bryan spotted a parcel under a gorse bush. It contained a cardboard shoebox, set up like a doll’s house with miniature furniture and tiny women’s clothes. There was also a note reading THIS IS NOT BAD IS IT? Orwell calculated that the polio-wracked Bryan could not have wrought such delicate work. He jumped to the conclusion that it was intended to be found and, more dramatically, that it was the creation of a local woman “suffering from some kind of sexual aberration.” All a bit Midsomer Murderish. Orwell felt this ‘deviant’ could easily be flushed out from so small a village, but (oddly or not) made no effort to do so. They returned the box to its place. Some days later, it was gone.
End of story. Orwell long pondered the mystery, judging it “vaguely unwholesome”. Binns makes the interesting suggestion that his account resembled the kind of police report he was used to making in Burma.
Talk about boxing clever…