Behind the Door to Room 101
Orwell’s famous adage in joining the working-class cause ‘you’ve nothing to lose but your aitches’ was gloriously ironic for a man with one of the plumiest accents of his age. The life of Eric Blair (his real name) was peppered...
Orwell’s famous adage in joining the working-class cause ‘you’ve nothing to lose but your aitches’ was gloriously ironic for a man with one of the plumiest accents of his age. The life of Eric Blair (his real name) was peppered with similar, apparent contradictions.
A journalist whose ambitions lay in fiction; a profound anti-nationalist who was posted to the colonies to enforce British law; a devout truth-seeker who became a propagandist; a hobo educated at Eton. However it was, of course, these very experiences which informed all his greatest work.
Credit: Postcard via Picryl.com
The sight from the train to Wigan of a woman struggling indefatigably to clear the outhouse drain would appear in 1984 as his neighbour Parson’s wife. A woman left alone, and nobly soldiering on after her own children had testified their father was a traitor. The grotesque humanity of the condemned man in Invitation to a Beheading, stepping over a puddle on his way to the scaffold – so as not to get his feet wet - is thematically central to so much of his first novel, Burmese Days.
George ORWELL. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London, 1949
Perhaps most tellingly, was his work for the BBC World Service during the war, broadcasting anti-fascist propaganda, jingoistic fantasies, false battle reports and the like from a small room at Broadcasting House. For Orwell these were unprincipled acts but performed for the best of all reasons.
Throughout his life, across his whole oeuvre, right to the end, and to his eternal credit, he aimed always to ‘do the right thing’. It cost him friendships, it cost him his publisher, maybe even his health. He died of tuberculosis having refused to stop smoking, having stayed too long on the island of Jura, having committed everything to the completion of his final masterpiece, 1984. A book as sadly accurate in its description of 1948 as it has been prescient for these times in which we find ourselves.
Oh and by the way, the room he was given at Broadcasting House, in which he slept and worked had a number. It was Room 101.
