Homage to Orwell
Seventy years ago this week George Orwell died having only recently published his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The first book cover I can clearly recall was a puzzle. Weird images that both disturbed and intrigued: an outsized ear growing out of a tree trunk, a razor-clawed beast emerging from a tube, a horse-like animal suckled by its spiny-backed ‘calf’. The book was dog-eared and yellowed, its pages bleeding with scribbles, a bite taken out of its back cover. The title too made no sense to a ten-year-old weaned on the literal universe of Ladybird books. Animal Farm, whatever could it mean, this strange book in my big brother’s battered school bag? Seventy years on from his death in 1950, George Orwell’s ‘fairy tale’ continues to resonate in a world never easy with ‘happy ever afters’. That odd cover was the 1975 Penguin Classics edition with its detail from Joan Miro’s The Tilled Field, maybe the publishers’ little homage to Catalonia. Despite the ever presence of that slim volume, I would read Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s visionary authoritarian warning, long before his tale of revolutionary horses and two-legged pigs. And from the moment the clocks struck 13, I was bewitched by both book and author, the writer born Eric Arthur Blair.
Orwell gave his final years to Nineteen Eighty-Four (working title The Last Man in Europe) in a cottage on the remote Scottish island of Jura. Under the gloom of post-war Britain, wracked by ill health and gripped by personal tragedy (his wife, Eileen, died during a routine operation while he was away on a newspaper assignment), Orwell was a man alone, with no electricity (gas was used to cook and heat water) and a battery radio his umbilical link to the outside world.
Later, some would write that this masterpiece killed Orwell, bad weather (the winter of 1946-47 was historically cold), his creaky lungs and brutal deadlines taking its toll. Diagnosed with TB, he was hospitalised, treated, and on his release continued with endless rewrites, before the book was published to universal acclaim on June 8, 1949. By then his body was in irreversible decline, but the spirit undimmed (he married Sonia Brownell in his hospital room that October) before dying alone in a London hospital on January 21, 1950. He was 46 years old.