Orwell the fraud?

No, George Orwell wasn't a fraud. Orwell was never a fraud. But he faked it until he made it. For instance he changed his name from Eric Blair and faked his accent in a way PM Tony Blair would be proud of when talking to the plebs all those years ago by adapting his vowels to what is now called, 'mockney'. Unlike Tony Blair, Eric Blair would have been dead against the war in Iraq. But let us keep to his later name of George Orwell.

I like Orwell. I have done since reading Down and Out in Paris & London in my formative years. However, my take on the man has now been influenced by my reading of an acclaimed biography by D. J. Taylor. This is not a book review but a review of Orwell as seen through a biographical prism written nearly a decade ago.

Does your increased knowledge of his life and personality alter your appreciation of his literary work? a friend asks.

Well, I think it does. But not in the way I expected. My opinion of Orwell is affected by having some knowledge of his family and upbringing. He seems to personify what has become of the BBC today. Left Wing and full of guilt about their Middle Class identity. So what you get in the end is, I believe, a form of psychological compensation rather than truth.

Orwell's father worked in the opium trade in India. This was the British Raj of the late 19th century. After leaving Eton, Orwell signed up as an Imperial Policeman in Burma. Here he would experience killing an Elephant or at least eventually write about the experience.

After about seven years telling Burmese people what to do Orwell arrived back in England and decided that he would live and breathe amongst the working classes occasionally faking his accent to be accepted as one of them. Nevertheless many ordinary people realized that this tall strange man was somehow different and called him "sir" despite themselves.

But what motivated Orwell?

Many things, but guilt may have played its part in shaping his character which may have been the reason for a self pitying essay he once wrote which detailed an emotionally blighted education at a Prep school prior to obtaining an Eton scholarship.

After some investigation by the author, however, it turned out that Orwell magnified his grievances by a smaller or larger degree. For me it was the same old story of someone gaining a great education, finding success, and then saying such an education ought to banned.

Orwell complains about his childhood education; but it seems to me that without it he would have struggled to have made an impact in this world.

Orwell's biography reads differently. I liked his sense of independence although even this is tempered by the fact that he remained dependent on his parents for a long time - they would send him ten bob every now and then while he was writing about how hard it was to exist on a pittance while down and out in Paris and London - until the age of thirty five Orwell lived in the north Suffolk coastal town of Southwold, sometimes privately teaching local children.

What I did not know was that Orwell was a bit of a womanizer and cheated on his wife. Many times. In fact he asked her if she would accept his being with a 15 or 16 year Arab prostitute while on holiday in Marrakesh in Morocco. Apparently, his wife relented and the prostitute consented.

Now I would not wish to throw the first stone for reasons obvious to anyone with a degree in human nature but for someone who is often described by the Left as a secular saint I find all this at odds with sainthood unless the definition has changed in which case I would like my application to be considered with immediate effect.

Then there is the writing. Animal Farm is a brilliant fable which revealed something of the nature of communism - the reality of Soviet communism confronted Orwell in 1936 whilst fighting for the Republicans in Spain - which previous Western governments appeared at the time unable or unwilling to expose. In this sense Orwell shaped the modern world and can be considered as influential as Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul in defeating Soviet communist tyranny.

Personally, I think Orwell revealed a world previously unthought of in an earlier book, 'Down and Out in Paris & London'. This was an account of days out tramping about two cities exploring life and inspiring social conscience at the same time. Not a bad combination for a good man but like many before and after, he certainly was no saint.

Keats: A personal view

As everyone knows John Keats (1795 - 1821) was an English poet who spent a somewhat idyllic childhood in leafy Enfield. For myself this is where our similarities begin and end. Or do they?

Keats was born above a Pub. It is now called The Globe but was once named the Swan and Hoop Inn.

In a biography by Andrew Motion on Keats it is written that Keats's father was killed in a riding accident on his way to work as a publican at the The Swan and Hoop Inn in Moorgate, London.

By this account this accident occurred not very far from Ye Olde Cherry Tree public house in Southgate which lends itself to the idea of Keats's father having popped into Ye Olde Cherry Tree for a pint or two. Then stumbling outside onto his horse and shortly off again a few moments after having been thrown to the ground.

Did Keats's father visit the same hostelry as my forefathers? My parents and paternal grandparents before them met at Ye Old Cherry Tree public house in Southgate and established marital bonds soon after. This atavistic quality in the neighbourhood has not yet, however, born fruit in my life.

But perhaps some similarities persist after all. As a child I was invariably involved in some fight or other and usually with children much older than myself. On further reading I have learnt that Keats also had something of a pugilistic reputation in his early life. Not bad for five feet nothing with latent poetic sensibilities. So we both liked a punch up did me and Keats.

Many years later, Keats went to live with his elder brother George in Cheapside. From this base he had hoped to commute a shorter distance to Guy's hospital to train as an Apothecary but felt compelled to do what he had to do which was to write poetry. Keats was in his late teens during this period.

I began my first job at Companies House in Old Street near Moorgate. Within a few years I went on to work in another Government Department in Gresham Street near Cheapside. But this all happened well over one hundred and fifty years after Keats.

Keats's first published poem, 'To Solitude' - appeared in 'The Examiner' on 5th May 1816. Leigh Hunt was the editor who had lived in Southgate but later closer to the centre of London in Hampstead shared similar radical political liberal ideals as Keats. Indeed, Hunt's magazine was considered to be London's primary radical arts publication of that time.


O SOLITUDE! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,-
Nature’s observatory - whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

Here Keats observes nature and binds it to his soul.

As time passed, however, Hunt and Keats found that the quality of their relationship depended more on the mutual appreciation of poetry than it did on their shared political views. Keats had many influential friends and Leigh Hunt was one of the first but he was not the last. In the late summer of 1817 Charles Brown, a Scottish Poet of independent means, met Keats. They travelled to many parts of Britain together. This experience shaped Keats who drew upon this experience to embellish his naturalistic observations. But it was Joseph Severn the Christian and painter who would nurse Keats as he lay dying in Rome in February 1821. Severn later painted the Keats of his imagination and memory. It is a stunning result and may be viewed at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

I have rarely had much inclination to write poetry and so it is hardly likely that I would have had a poem published but when I was about eighteen I did write and publish a magazine in London called 'Teenage Depression' which involved reporting and writing on music as well as interviewing some of the famous counter culture musicians of the time. Some thought it radical and sales did on occasion reach a thousand or so copies when it appeared which was often quartely. The magazine attracted some interest and went on for several years.

Occasionally, with some of my friends, we chanced to walk on Hampstead Heath not knowing or caring that this was where Keats had once been.

A few days ago I went with a friend to see the Keats Museum in Keats Grove, Hampstead. I imagined how Keats must once have lived. What Keats must have seen includes an old low to the ground fan like mulberry tree which still offers plenty of its delicious fruit. A scene viewed only a small distance away from the large window through which Keats once observed a natural and sublime world. Here he wrote another poem and must rank as one of his best and one of his last. It is -

To Autumn:

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.


"Keats believed that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority."

I agree.

The French General

De Gaulle despite his faults, his pride, his sometimes apparent absurdity, remained the bedrock of France. He alone represented a French dream and an independent French identity. Gaullist certainly. But as a Catholic, De Gaulle was anti-Communist and under no illusion what this atheist regime stood for. Yet, De Gaulle also found a friend and the future of France in 1960’s Moscow. This is politics. It was and possibly still is the French way of finding influence in the world.

Dr Livingstone I presume?

After reading a fair bit of the new biography about the explorer Henry Stanley I was surprised to learn of just how much adversity he had to overcome before "finding Livingstone". And, that, in deepest dark Africa, he probably never said: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume".

Apparently, what Stanley said about himself owed much to a deep insecurity about his childhood which developed into a need to exaggerate short comings or any perceived weakness.

Consequently, some have placed too much trust in what Stanley said instead of what Stanley did. Nevertheless, what Stanley did was extraordinary enough. He had to overcome being rejected by almost everyone he knew including his parents. Though it is not this that concerns me.

It appears that an Arab/Swahili Muslim slave trade was at work throughout East and Central Africa during the 19th century. David Livingstone, a Christian Missionary, witnessed the reality of this and considered that the only effective way to end the slave trade was by opening up the whole region to colonialization and trade. For trade in goods and ideas rather than people.

It is notable that Stanley was to some extent duped by King Leopold ll of Belgium who placed Colonial and nationalistic ambitions above any altruistic or Christian ideas for ending the slave trade. King Leopold also used Stanley to compete with the French for land in the Congo.

But it is Henry Stanley the misunderstood hero who emerges from these pages of history as a man of our times. Who overcame personal disadvantage to continue in the vision set down by Livingstone.

So instead of immersing ourselves in shame about British history let us consider the facts. That William Wilberforce was an English Tory. That David Livingstone was a Scot. That Henry Stanley was Welsh (albeit with an American accent). And, that, alongside the might of British Navy and British public opinion, all helped to fight against the slave trade in Central and East Africa.