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George Orwell
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Homage to a lost love
George Orwell’s youthful indiscretion left him plagued by guilt, writes Gerald Isaaman
Eric & Us by Jacintha Buddicom is published by Finlay at £8.50
SHE sat unknown and no doubt unnoticed at the back of Christ Church, Albany Street, for the funeral service of Eric Blair, otherwise George Orwell, the Eton-educated champion of Socialism, hailed now as a genius who changed our thinking.
He had fought his final battle – for and against mankind, let alone tuberculosis – in nearby University College Hospital, dying, aged 46, a wasted figure, on 21 January, 1950, after marrying the beautiful Sonia Brownell at his bedside.
His female friends at the funeral were more irritated by that than the presence of Jacintha Buddicom, who had come to say a poignant farewell to her dedicated teenage friend with whom she had grown up in the village of Shiplake, Oxfordshire, where, not far away, at All Saints, Sutton Courtenay, the body of Eric Blair now lies buried in a country churchyard he knew in his early days.
Jacintha, secretary of the Poetry Society, mistress to a peer, unmarried mother of a son, later revealed her ghostly identity by writing Eric & Us, her warm first-hand memoir of Orwell’s formative years. Indeed, it is a memorable book, published in 1974, which has been the only secure basis for all the future Orwell books and biographies that have poured out.
Now that basis has been shattered and Jacintha’s story found to be seriously wanting, by the equally unrecognised Dione Venables, a friend of the family who has re-published Jacintha’s fragment of the Orwell saga – and added a postscript revealing devastating written evidence of why Jacintha never married her beloved Eric.
And why their encounter altered fundamentally both their lives, never being able to look at each other again. Dione writes simply: “During the course of one of their almost daily walks round the Rickmansworth lanes and fields, Eric, it seems, had attempted to take things further, and make serious love to Jacintha.
“He had held her down (by that time he was 6ft 4ins and she was still under 5ft) and although she struggled, yelling at him to stop, he hard torn her skirt and badly bruised a shoulder and her left hip.”
He did stop. So he didn’t become a rapist. Yet it is only now, after the mountains of significant detail about Eric Blair’s life have been published, that this remarkable skeleton his cupboard has been revealed.
Nowadays it may well be dismissed as a youthful exuberance hardly worth recalling given the undisciplined behaviour of today’s youth. But back in 1921 morals still had meaning and such transgressions were the cause of lasting scandal.
Not that it need necessarily tarnish the heroic image of George Orwell or the memory of Jacintha, who died in 1993, the more so as, their unrequited love haunted both of them to the grave, her discovery of his fame turning her white with shock.
Yet what it does do is provide a new perspective on why Eric Blair was such an awkward spirit, an ungainly man rarely at social ease, especially with women, who had to satisfy his sexual desires with prostitutes in Burma and other places.
His conscience about his youthful indiscretion continually plagued him, trying to make contact with Jacintha, trying to make amends, leaving her three poems by way of compensation. Maybe this was why he demanded that no biography be written of his tragic – and triumphant – times.
As Dione points out: “She (Jacintha) must have realised that Eric was not entirely to blame over this incident because she had not stopped his adolescent romancing earlier. She may well have recognised at last that the two-year gap in their ages was now more like a five-year gap in physical maturity – and she was not prepared for anyone to force himself on her – even Eric.”
She held back from marriage, travelled extensively. Venables writes: “She went through a period very similar to that of Eric’s deliberate descent into degradation. She explored the darker side of mysticism and briefly became an acolyte of ‘The Beast’ Aleister Crowley, simply to discover what it was all about. Her basic sense of good being better than evil quickly lifted her out of that snakepit…”
Hazlitt truly fits the bill with his observation: “Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonisation.”
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What I find most remarkable about this book is that Jacintha Buddicom, in her idiosyncratic way, has provided us with an unique insight in to one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. There just are not that many primary sources that are as eloquent or poignant as this. The 1974 edition missed out key elements that Jacintha and her generation were simply not able to talk about. Without them, there were too many questions that allowed literary historians to overlook their importance. With this latest edition, Dione Venables has enabled Jacintha to go to some sensitive places she herself was unable to visit in public. But she knew that her cousin, Dione (not just a friend as your article suggests) also a published author, could go there in her place. Jacintha must have given her tacit assent in granting the publishing right to Dione when she died. That continuity of knowledge is what makes this book so valuable to our understanding of Eric Blair. Jacintha has allowed us to get closer to the boy who became George Orwell it will take years to unravel so many of the assumptions that we have made both privately and publicly about the man. Perhaps now, with context, it is time for some more candid and open debate - perhaps whilst living memory still exists.
Guy Loftus
Houston, USA
Dione Venables's postscript to her Cousin Jacintha's ERIC & US is
indeed fascinating, and the details relating to Jacintha's pregnancy, and
the adoption that followed, make one feel deeply sorry for her situation.
The detail that Venables supplies relating to Jacintha being the model for
Julia in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (the date of May Second being the day Julia
and Winston make love - the date of Jacintha's birthday) is a revelation.
This poscript is brimming with illuminating insights. A terrific read as is
ERIC & us.
Lorraine Saunders |
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