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Chasing Orwell's Ghost
Aug. 2nd, 2014 10:05 amI've come across a little piece from a young writer trying to capture some of the magic of Orwell's "1984", titled "Chasing Orwell's Ghost". He went to Jura, an isolated, weather-beaten island off the west coast of Scotland, where Orwell ensconced himself to write his great novel. He presumably wanted to get a better feel for what influenced the artist and his work. I will keep a few notes.
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The death of his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy during surgery in March 1945 and the success of Animal Farm that same year had left Orwell with a peculiar mix of despair and triumph. He’d gained an international reputation and a small amount of money (his lifetime earnings from the book amounting to some £12,000) but lost a wife he confessed to have treated poorly throughout their union. During this period, as a result of what his biographer D.J Taylor called his “habitual ingenuousness with the opposite sex,” Orwell made a chain of unsuccessful marriage proposals to a series of younger women, some he barely knew and most of whom did not find him the least bit attractive.
[...]
Following O’Shaughnessy’s death he published some 130 essays—one article every two to three days. The work was of Orwell’s own making, but still he complained of relentless deadlines and other obligations. “I am anxious to get out of London for my own sake because I am constantly smothered under journalism,” he wrote to friends. For Orwell, Jura was likely an escape from both professional success and personal misery.
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Perhaps the biggest impact that Orwell’s stay on Jura had on Nineteen Eighty-Four was that he was constantly surrounded by death’s shadow. Orwell had initially gone to Jura to escape the memory of his wife’s passing, and upon his arrival was almost immediately confronted with his own mortality. Indeed, for much of his time on Jura he suffered from a serious TB infection that left him bedridden and in and out of consciousness for weeks on end. The delirium and disorientation of Orwell’s malaise, DJ Taylor argues, created the feverish intensity of the novel.
[We are indeed the dead of a dying world.]
-- Matthew Bremner at Roads and Kingdoms.com
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The death of his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy during surgery in March 1945 and the success of Animal Farm that same year had left Orwell with a peculiar mix of despair and triumph. He’d gained an international reputation and a small amount of money (his lifetime earnings from the book amounting to some £12,000) but lost a wife he confessed to have treated poorly throughout their union. During this period, as a result of what his biographer D.J Taylor called his “habitual ingenuousness with the opposite sex,” Orwell made a chain of unsuccessful marriage proposals to a series of younger women, some he barely knew and most of whom did not find him the least bit attractive.
[...]
Following O’Shaughnessy’s death he published some 130 essays—one article every two to three days. The work was of Orwell’s own making, but still he complained of relentless deadlines and other obligations. “I am anxious to get out of London for my own sake because I am constantly smothered under journalism,” he wrote to friends. For Orwell, Jura was likely an escape from both professional success and personal misery.
***
Perhaps the biggest impact that Orwell’s stay on Jura had on Nineteen Eighty-Four was that he was constantly surrounded by death’s shadow. Orwell had initially gone to Jura to escape the memory of his wife’s passing, and upon his arrival was almost immediately confronted with his own mortality. Indeed, for much of his time on Jura he suffered from a serious TB infection that left him bedridden and in and out of consciousness for weeks on end. The delirium and disorientation of Orwell’s malaise, DJ Taylor argues, created the feverish intensity of the novel.
[We are indeed the dead of a dying world.]
-- Matthew Bremner at Roads and Kingdoms.com
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