This article was published in the "Sanlian Life Weekly" No. 35, 2019, the original title of the original article is "< Orwell's Letters Collection >: The Meaning of the Road", it is strictly forbidden to reprint privately, and infringement must be investigated
Reporter/Zhang Congzhi
George Orwell (Courtesy of Visual China)
Amateur tramp
In August 1920, George Orwell wrote a letter to his classmates at Eton College, excitedly recounting his experience as an amateur tramp for the first time. On this trip, he returned from the end of his training at the Eton College of Officers, missed the train, and was left with only 7.5 pence for the ticket, which was only enough to stay in a hotel for one night or have a full meal, which he chose, and slept in the farmer's crop field at night. At the end of the letter, Orwell wrote: "I am very proud of my adventure, but I will never relive it again. ”
Orwell was 17 years old at the time of writing, and he may not have imagined that he would not only fail to keep the "promise" in the letter, but would continue to "relive" the experience of wandering and adventure.
Orwell entered Eton College, Britain's most famous aristocratic school, on a scholarship to one of the 70 "Scholars of the King" who lived at the main campus. But after graduation, the family's financial conditions were not enough to support Orwell to go to college, so he had to go to Burma and work as a colonial policeman for five years. Orwell couldn't stand the job that made him guilty, and decided to resign when he returned home for leave.
Orwell, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, was born in 1903 in Bengal, India, the son of a low-ranking British civilian in the Indian colonies. Orwell described his family as "middle-class, middle-class, middle-class without money." The lack of money did plague Orwell all his life, and it wasn't until a few years before his death that he gasped slightly from the financial pressure.
After returning from Burma in 1928, Orwell began to write and began another "tramp" life. From Paris to London, Orwell worked at the bottom of society, working as a dishwasher in the kitchen, as a tutor, as a hop picker, and as a part-time clerk in a bookstore. Dressed in tattered clothes, he lived in slums, mingling with workers, beggars, and vagrants. But with a London upper-class accent, Orwell had a hard time really blending into life at the bottom. He is said to have provoked the police in order to go to jail for Christmas with the poor, but the police heard his accent and let him go.
But Orwell also could not enter the circles of high society. While his classmates from prominent backgrounds began to enter the halls of literature and art, Orwell was still writing unpopular book reviews for newspapers and magazines. In 1938, in a letter to his classmates in the Ethn period, Orwell wrote: "When you were in school you were much more successful than I was in every way, and my position was complex, in fact governed by the fact that I was far less rich than those around me. ”
The Road, Meaning, and Life: Letters of George Orwell (the Collected Letters of George Orwell) is a selection of nearly 300 letters, both for classmates and friends, for loved ones, and for a large number of correspondence with publishers, brokers, and newspaper editors.
His wanderings in Paris and London were later written by Orwell as The Fall of Paris and London, which he first used under the pen name George Orwell when it was published in 1933. Later, in letters to new friends and editors, he would always remind them at the end of the letter that he had written under the pseudonym George Orwell.
Nagging grocery store owner
During the first eight years of his writing career, Orwell published a book almost every year and wrote numerous columns and reviews, but often fell into contradictions between mediocre writing and making more money. After becoming famous, he once admitted that many of his works were sold in writing that "should not have been published."
Even so, writing was no guarantee of his source of livelihood, especially after marrying Eileen. They moved to a small village in Hertfordshire called Warrington because it was quiet and rented cheaply. As he wrote, Orwell opened a grocery store selling candy and butter and the like, which was open every afternoon, making little money but paying rent.
At the grocery store in Warrington, the Orwells lived for several years. During this time, Orwell left for a while as a volunteer to participate in the civil war in Spain, but he was shot through the throat on the battlefield and returned to England not long after. In 1938, Orwell's tuberculosis disease recurred, and before the cold winter arrived, he went to Marrakech, French Morocco, for recuperation. While in Morocco, Orwell was always worried about the grocery store in Warrington Village, writing letters to his good friend Jack Couman, who helped him with his business. In the letter, Orwell was like a small farmer who was chattering, calculating when the newly raised hens laid eggs, when the eggs were left to sell for more profit, what kind of chicken feed was most cost-effective to buy, when the rams in the family should be bred, and even what brand of hand paper to use for the toilet. After talking about the shortness of parents, he will talk about the current situation without any surprise, and then criticize the politicians and media who do not like him.
The cost of recuperation in Morocco was not cheap, or an admirer funded him anonymously through Orwell's friend, £300, which Orwell had always used as a loan, which was mentioned in later letters to different friends, but it was not until 1946 that he was able to send £150 to his friend as his first repayment. By that time, Animal Farm had been published and swept the world, bringing him a huge royalty, and his financial situation improved. In the letter, Orwell said his greatest regret was that Eileen did not live to see animal farm published, "she loved the book so much that she even helped me with the planning."
Eileen died in a medical malpractice the year before, which was originally a surgery that was "considered not dangerous." Orwell was covering France as an accompanying reporter to witness the final nazi rout. When Orwell returned, he found in Eileen's letters a letter she had been writing an hour before her death, "and it was obvious that she wanted to continue writing after waking up from surgery."
"I think it says what it should say"
Orwell completed the manuscript of Animal Farm in February 1944, but its publication took several twists and turns. For political reasons, Orwell's contracted publishers, as well as many major publishers in Britain and the United States, refused to publish the novel, which used animal fables as a metaphor for politics. In a letter to a newspaper editor, Orwell said meaningfully: "I am only 42 years old, and I can remember the days when saying things that supported Russia were as dangerous as saying things against Russia now." ”
Frustrated, Orwell told his agent that if no publisher was willing to publish it, he would go to a small publisher and print it out— meaning he probably wouldn't have any royalties —"I think it says what it should say, even though it's not in line with the current trend."
In August 1945, as World War II drew to a close and the world situation quietly changed, Animal Farm was finally timely and published in Britain. It was also at this time that Orwell began to write the novel that had been brewing for a long time, "Nineteen Eighty-Four". The idea of writing a dystopian novel was first mentioned by Orwell in a February 1944 letter to a Russian scholar, and he said he had been taking notes.
In later letters, Orwell recounted the motivation for writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, "I do not believe that the society I describe in the book will surely come, but I believe that something similar to it may happen." Orwell finished Nineteen Eighty-Four almost from a hospital bed, and by 1947 his lung disease had worsened and he began a long hospitalization, but as long as he recovered, Orwell continued to write until 1948, when the novel was completed. Orwell reversed the last two digits of the year and named the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book depleted almost all of Orwell's vitality, and early the following year, Orwell became ill and transferred to University College London Hospital for treatment.
In the last letter from the Collected Letters, Orwell thanked his friend for the preserves and tea he had sent from his hospital bed, and said that he was recovering quite well and that his appetite was much better than before. But more than two months later, on January 12, 1950, Orwell was transferred to Switzerland for convalescence, and before boarding the plane, he suddenly vomited a lot of blood, and his life ended at the age of 47.
The Way, Meaning, and Life: Letters of George Orwell
Author: George Orwell
Translator: Gan Jianfeng
Guizhou People's Publishing House 2019