Nom de Plume (17 page)

He rented a cheap room in Notting Hill for a while to fashion himself into a “FAMOUS AUTHOR,” but it wasn't until he set off for Paris that things seemed to click into place. Like so many other literary expatriates, Blair felt that in Paris life would truly begin. He arrived in 1928 in search of culture, education, writing material, and undoubtedly romance. (Brothels were legal at the time, so sex could be obtained one way or another.) The city had a buzz that dour London seemed to lack. Henry Miller was there, as were Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, among other famous writers.

Blair soon managed to complete his first novel, but when it was rejected for publication he burned it. At that time his heart was still set on fiction—he had no intention of becoming a celebrated essayist, even though he was deeply political (while refusing to join any one party) and interested in provocative reportage. He wasn't sure how he intended to use the sketches he wrote about the beggars and tramps he encountered on the city's streets, but “common people”—the kind he'd been raised to ignore, like a good and proper snob—interested him most. The self-declared socialist was drawn to down-and-out types much more than to writers or artists, and least of all to anyone with the odor of affluence.

With political unrest brewing in Europe, Blair eased up on his single-minded focus on fiction; he needed money. Even though he also wrote poetry, he realized that no earnings would come of it. He started writing for a left-wing weekly publication and other newspapers, with an eye toward stories with sociological and political issues—in particular the implications of censorship (exploring ideas that would incubate and later shape his dystopian masterpiece
Nineteen Eighty-four
), and the homeless. He started signing these pieces “E. A. Blair.”

Unfortunately, he was hardly getting by in Paris; he would learn firsthand what it felt like to be impoverished. His experiences there felt desultory. He was reduced to fishing (without success) in the Seine, rationing his food supply, and even pawning some of his possessions. “I underwent poverty and the sense of failure,” he recalled of his time in Paris. “This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes.”

After doing menial work and finding it wretched, he was pleased that a publication in London had accepted one of the essays he'd submitted. He decided that moving back to London would not signify failure but offer greater potential for becoming a professional writer. In December 1929 he left Paris and returned to his parents' house. “England is a very good country when you are not poor,” he wrote a few years later. Still, it was better to struggle in his own country than in France.

In no way embarrassed by having to work as a babysitter and take occasional odd jobs, Blair (who looked like a bum) started writing a nonfiction book about beggars and outcasts, based on his own experiences, which would evolve into
Down and Out in Paris and London.
He also began publishing criticism. It didn't earn him much money, but he established himself as a respected reviewer, or at least the beginnings of one.

Though slowly finding his way toward his vocation, Blair didn't fit neatly into any single category: he came from a snobbish family that was not wealthy; he'd been given the most prestigious public school education a student could hope for—yet unlike many of his contemporaries, who had already achieved fame and wealth, he had little to show for it. He disowned Eton but wore it as a badge of honor. He spoke in a posh accent but dressed in ill-fitting, rumpled clothing. And having immersed himself in Shakespeare, Chaucer, Twain, Poe, Ibsen, Dickens, and Thackeray, among others, he was well read and intellectual, but he had rejected a university education. Although he was bitter about not having gone to Oxford or Cambridge, it was also a point of pride that he had not. He was austere, but he enjoyed comfort. He was stridently political and deplored politics. He was unlucky in love and perpetually unable to sustain relationships with women. (Prostitutes, however, he did fine with.) He appeared to love women and despise them; even some of his friends described him as a misogynist. He sought out tramps and beggars, yet he was an intellectual snob and ill at ease in the presence of those who did not share his interests. He relished immersing himself in vagrant life, but had a pathological aversion to bad smells and dirt, and was oblivious to the foul stench of his own smoking habit. He was happy only when writing, but no matter how hard he worked, he couldn't earn a living doing it. He was frustrated by his frequent illnesses, which kept him from writing, yet he did not take responsibility for his health—he smoked heavily even while coughing up blood. All the intriguing contradictions of Eric Blair would find their way into the work of George Orwell. Blair might be judged by others as mentally unstable, paranoid, troubled, sadistic, and aberrant—but George Orwell? He was a noble and brilliant author.

Regardless of his quirks, and there were many, it was almost unnerving to see how little Blair cared about others' opinions of him. Still, he kept his writing ambition largely private. Slowly, Blair was developing a pioneering, novelistic style that blended reportage and memoir. His work was investigative yet highly personal, driven by a sense of moral outrage at social injustices. (The genre might be called Proletarian Lit—not exactly sexy stuff.) He had also taken to hanging out with vagrants in London and sometimes dressing like a tramp, sleeping in Trafalgar Square covered in newspapers. “He didn't look in the least like a poor man,” a friend recalled of Blair decades later. “God knows he was poor, but the formidable look didn't go with the rags.”

Nor did the rags go with the name Eric Arthur Blair. It was time to invent George Orwell. Blair had always been secretive in every respect; adopting a pseudonym would allow him to release the various facets of his personality. Doing so was not without some degree of shame: he wrote in
A Clergyman's Daughter
(in which a character uses a pseudonym) that “[i]t seemed a queer thing to have to do, to use a false name; dishonest—criminal, almost.”

As Eric Blair, he accepted a teaching job at a boys' school—hardly a posh one—which would make the twenty-nine-year-old seem somewhat respectable in the eyes of his parents. (Even though he had no university degree, his Eton schooling was impressive enough to win him the job.) He was bored by the work, and described the school as “foul.”

That summer, he received the best news he'd heard in a long time: he'd found a publisher for
Down and Out in Paris and London.
Under a different title, the manuscript had been rejected by Jonathan Cape, and also by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber—Eliot's elitist sensibility did not exactly savor tales of the malodorous downtrodden. In refusing the book, he wrote to Blair that it was “too loosely constructed.”

The final version of the manuscript was a semiautobiographical story narrated by an anonymous, penniless English writer—or, rather, it was a collection of essays about Blair's own experiences, recounted in fictionalized form. Most of the events in the book had occurred, but some fabrications were thrown in. It was startling for its up-close exploration of street people and others left behind by society. It was also a shocking exposé of harsh, filthy, inhumane conditions in the restaurant kitchens of Paris, where Blair had toiled as a lowly dishwasher.

“I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up,” the narrator reflects in the book's final paragraph. “I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.”

The publisher Victor Gollancz had accepted the work and paid Blair an advance of forty pounds. After some discussion about the title and potential libel issues, there was one significant matter to settle: the name of the author. Blair had informed his agent that he wished to use a pseudonym. “If by any chance you
do
get it accepted,” he wrote, “will you please see that it is published pseudonymously, as I am not proud of it.” (Perhaps he was ashamed by the rejections he'd received, and certain that his execrable book was doomed to failure.) Then there was the matter of his family: he did not want to embarrass them with sordid (if thinly disguised) tales of his adventures. He also wrote to Gollancz that “if the book has any kind of success I can always use the same pseudonym again.” The editor suggested simply signing the book with the letter “X,” but Blair wished to find a suitable name, perhaps thinking about his future career. He had trouble settling on a nom de plume, so he sent Gollancz four suggestions: H. Lewis Allways, P. S. Burton, Kenneth Miles—and George Orwell, which was his favorite.

His anxiety about concealing his authorship from his parents may have been genuine, but he didn't try very hard. Portions of the book had already appeared in literary periodicals under his own name; he confessed to his sister Avril that he was publishing his first book using a pseudonym; and he allowed his mother to read the book. Still, the pen name at least shielded the family from public scrutiny. It seems that another compelling reason for using an alter ego was the fact of his background. How credible was it for an Eton graduate to go undercover by living on the margins of society, rejecting respectability, and plunging himself into the lives of outcasts? It could also be perceived as highly offensive that such a genteel young man would “slum it” for the sake of creating a literary masterpiece. For him, vagrancy was a choice: if his situation became too dire, he could always borrow money from his mother; and he could find a place to sleep whenever he wished. He was certainly in a bad way, yet he could afford to be a part-time tramp; it was a role to play more than anything else.

Writing about poverty demanded authorial authenticity, and that meant erasing all traces of Eric Arthur Blair. He had to “pass” as a man living on the margins, and Eric Blair was not that man. Changing his name was also appealing because he claimed to detest his birth name. Perhaps it had to do with the strained relationship he'd had with his father.

Down and Out in Paris and London
by George Orwell was published in January 1933, with an initial print run of 1,500 copies. The author was relieved to have some validation of his efforts. “Isn't it a grand feeling when you see your thoughts taking shape at last in a solid lump?” he wrote to a friend.

There are a few reasons why Blair had settled on “George Orwell” as his literary persona. Some have speculated that the first name came from his admiration for the late-nineteenth-century writer George Gissing, who influenced his work. The surname seemed to have derived from the River Orwell in Suffolk, which Blair is said to have loved—Defoe had written of it—or from the village of Orwell in Bedfordshire, which Blair had once passed through.

In any case, it seemed perfect, and “George Orwell” became the most famous English pseudonym of the twentieth century. As well, thanks to his novel
Nineteen Eighty-four
, the adjective “Orwellian” became part of the lexicon. (It has a much better ring than, say, Milesian or Allwaysian, had he settled on his other choices.)

Anthony Powell once asked his friend if he'd ever considered adopting “George Orwell” as his legal name. “Well, I have,” he told Powell, “but then, of course, I'd have to write under another name if I did.” Why he felt such a profound need to separate himself in private life from his “writing self” is a mystery. But duality is present throughout his work: in
A Clergyman's Daughter
, for instance, and elsewhere Orwell's characters lead double lives and harbor hidden selves. “He was as secretive about his private life as any man I ever knew,” a friend recalled of him.

The book was well received in England and, upon its international publication, by critics abroad. “George Orwell is but trembling on the age of 30 this year, but he appears to have had about as much experience so far as the seamy side of life is concerned as a man of 50,” wrote a reviewer in the
New York Times
in 1933, adding that Orwell's chilling account “is apt to put an American with a ticklish stomach off filets mignon in the higher-priced hotel restaurants for ever. It is Mr. Orwell's argument bolstered by numerous horrible examples, that the more you pay for food in Paris, the less clean it is.”

With the modest success of
Down and Out
, Blair's metamorphosis into George Orwell was complete. He'd received fan letters addressed to Orwell, and had, for the first time, even signed a book review as Orwell. The persona endured. His family, friends, publisher, and agent knew him as Eric Blair, but to the public he was firmly established as George Orwell. He'd accepted that neither Eric Arthur Blair nor even “E. A. Blair” had ever found success as a writer, and that only Orwell would be taken seriously. Eric Blair was a loser.

His books came in rapid succession:
Burmese Days
(1934),
A Clergyman's Daughter
(1935),
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936),
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937),
Homage to Catalonia
(1938), and in the last few years of his life,
Animal Farm
(1945) and
Nineteen Eighty-four
, published a year before his death. Even when he was highly productive, his usual reaction was to be dismissive of his output. “I have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling that I was wasting time,” he wrote in his diary. “As soon as a book is finished, I begin, actually from the next day, worrying because the next one is not begun, & am haunted with the fear that there never will be a next one.” Nevertheless, despite having exasperated so many people with his polemics, he had by then endeared himself, more or less, to the literary establishment. “He writes in a lucid conversational style which wakens one up suddenly like cold water dashed in the face,” V. S. Pritchett wrote of Orwell's work.