Gordon Bowker: The Road to Morocco (Part 3 of 3)
This extract on the reception of Orwell's Coming Up for Air, from chapter 12 of Gordon Bowker's George Orwell, is reproduced by kind permission of the author.
Rick: 'I came to Casablanca for the waters.'
Captain Renault: 'The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.'
Rick: 'I was misinformed.'
(Casablanca)
Coming Up For Air was published on 12 June. Gollancz ('that Stalinist publisher', Orwell now called him) is said to have disapproved of it politically, but published it nevertheless - perhaps to deflect accusations of prejudice against a dissident leftist, and perhaps because he saw in its singularly oracular quality a book that would strike a chord with readers. If so, his judgement was sound. It proved to be a novel of the moment, catching the mood of nervous tension widespread during that uncertain summer of 1939, and the feeling that an old world, already fading over the past two decades, was about to pass away forever. The TLS made it a Recommended Novel of the Week, highlighting a passage that had clearly touched the imagination of its anonymous critic:
And yet I've enough sense to see that the old life we're used to is being sawn off at the roots. I can feel it happening. I can see the war that's coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loud-speakers telling you what to think ... There are millions of others like me ... They can feel things cracking and collapsing under their feet.
The reviewer noted that the book's indirect, 'conversational and slangy' style, which made it so readable, carried not just a narrative but a running commentary on the state of the world. The author seemed to be saying that the old way of story-telling was over and readers must nerve themselves for the bad times ahead. There was also applause from the Times, heralding it as the answer to 'one of the age's puzzles' - 'the cult of the "little man'''. Kate O'Brien in the Spectator, thought it 'above average' but not as sharp as Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and detected signs of haste and weariness. She did, however, note that Orwell 'manages to make his novels easily distinguishable from those of other people', perhaps the first public recognition of the authentically 'Orwellian' voice. There was recognition, too, in the national press, where James Agate featured it prominently in his book column for the Daily Express. Most interesting, and perhaps significant, was a letter from Max Plowman who wrote, 'My Golly! What a book! I could write another about it ... It's done to the life and your little man lives all right & so gets his immortality,' adding the strangely portentous afterthought, 'Imagining I know you, I rather hope you've started on a Fairy Tale by way of reaction!' Plowman was right, and, if Orwell is to be believed, that fairy tale was already ticking away in his mind and had been doing so for the past two years.
Two weeks after his book appeared his father's condition worsened, and Orwell went home to Southwold to be with him. On 25 June, George's thirty-sixth birthday, Richard was close to death. That day, the Sunday Times carried a review of his novel. At the very last it must have seemed that an erring son had somehow redeemed himself. In a letter to Moore he gave 'a touching account of the old man's end:
I was with the poor old man for the last week of his life, and then there was the funeral etc., etc., all terribly upsetting and depressing. However, he was 82 and had been very active till he was over 80, so he had had a good life, and I am very glad that latterly he had not been so disappointed in me as before. Curiously enough his last moment of consciousness was hearing that review I had in the Sunday Times. He heard about it and wanted to see it, and my sister took it in and read it to him, and a little later he lost consciousness for the last time.
He told Rees that, in accordance with tradition, he had placed pennies on the old man's eyes, and had then thrown the pennies into the sea. 'Do you think some people would have put them back in their pockets?' he asked. He now inherited the Blair family Bible to stand beside Great Uncle Horatio's books, and a portrait of Lady Mary Blair to hang in the cottage beside his Burmese swords, all perhaps to act as totemic inspirations in the writing of his family saga. The death of a parent is often the occasion for an increased sense of one's own mortality. No doubt he found some consolation in contriving to meet his old flame Brenda Salkeld and taking her for a nostalgic walk, across the old bridge to Blythburgh. George Bowling would have done no less. He tried to broach the subject of an affair, intimating that he and Eileen enjoyed an open marriage and neither was at all jealous and possessive of the other. But Brenda, the clergyman's daughter, no doubt scandalised, had simply changed the subject. She had read all about Mr Warburton and knew just how to handle his real-life alter ego.
After attending his father's funeral, he returned to Wallington and again opened a diary. He wanted to plot the slow but inevitable approach of war from a careful reading of the press and weekly reviews. Ruminating later on diary keeping, he wrote how it helped to put the immediate present into wider perspective and keep track of one's opinions. 'Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong, but even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating.' In July he recorded the build up to the Danzig crisis, fighting in Manchuria, agitation for Churchill to be allowed into the Cabinet, British and German overtures to Russia and the call up of reservists. In passing he noted the annual Eton versus Harrow cricket match at Lord's had ended in fighting, for the first time since 1919. It was strangely symbolic of the times.