Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

His entire writing career lasted for only sixteen years; the quantity and quality of work produced during this relatively brief span of time would be remarkable even for a healthy man of leisure; that it was achieved in his appalling state of permanent ill-health and poverty is simply stupendous.

WOMEN

In his relations with women, Orwell seems to have been generally awkward and clumsy. He was easily attracted to them, whereas they seldom found him attractive. Still, by miraculous luck, he found in Eileen O’Shaughnessy a wife who was able not only to understand him in depth, but also to love him truly and bear with his eccentricities without giving up any of her own originality — an originality that shines through all her letters. If Orwell was a failed poet, Eileen, for her part, was pure poetry.

Her premature death left Orwell stunned and lost for a long time. A year later he abruptly approached a talented young woman he hardly knew (they lived in the same building); with a self-pity that was utterly and painfully out of character for such a proud man, he wrote to her telling her how sick he was and inviting her “to become the widow of a literary man.” “I fully realise that I’m not suited to someone like you who is young and pretty… it is only that I feel so desperately alone… I have no woman who takes an interest in me and can encourage me… of course it’s absurd a person like me wanting to make love to someone of your age. I do want to, but I wouldn’t be offended or even hurt if you say no…” The woman was flabbergasted and politely discouraged him.

Some years earlier he had made an unfortunate and unwelcome pass at another woman. This episode is documented by the editor with embarrassing precision — at which point readers might remember Orwell’s hostility to the very concept of biography (“every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats too humiliating and disgraceful to contemplate”). Do biographers, however serious and scrupulous, really need or have the right to explore and disclose such intimate details? Yet we still read them. Is it right for us to do so? These questions are not rhetorical: I honestly do not know the answer.

SOLID OBJECTS AND SCRAPS OF USELESS INFORMATION — TREES, FISHES, BUTTERFLIES AND TOADS

Just as in “Why I Write,” Orwell evoked the simple pleasure he took “in solid objects and scraps of useless information,” in his famous “Thoughts on the Common Toad” he added: “If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia?… I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.” His endearing and quirky tastes, his inexhaustible and loving attention to all aspects of the natural world crop up constantly in his correspondence. The Letters are full of disarming non sequiturs : for instance, he interrupts some reflections on the Spanish Inquisition to note the daily visit a hedgehog pays to his bathroom. While away from home in 1939, he writes to the friend who looks after his cottage: his apprehension regarding the looming war gives way without transition to concerns for the growth of his vegetables and for the mating of his goat: “I hope Muriel’s mating went through. It is a most unedifying spectacle by the way, if you happened to watch it. Did my rhubarb come up, I wonder? I had a lot and then last year the frost buggered it up.” To an anarchist friend (later a professor of English in a Canadian university) he writes an entire page from his Scottish retreat, describing in minute detail all aspects of the life and work of local crofters: again the constant and inexhaustible interest in “men who do things” in the real world.

THE END

While already lying in hospital, he married Sonia Brownell[4] three months before his death. At the time he entertained the illusion that he might still have a couple of years to live and he was planning for the following year a book of essays that would have included “a long essay on Joseph Conrad” (if it was ever written, it is now lost). He also said that he still had “two books on his mind”—alongside “the stunning idea for a short novel” mentioned earlier.

He began drawing up plans to keep a pig, or preferably a sow, at his hermitage in the Hebrides. As he wrote to his sister, who was in charge of the place, “the only difficulty is about getting her to a hog once a year. I suppose one could buy a gravid sow in autumn, to litter about March, but one would have to make very sure that she really was in pig the first time.”

In his hospital room, at the time of his death, he kept in front of him, against the wall, a fine new fishing rod, a luxury in which he had indulged himself on receiving the first royalties from Nineteen Eighty-Four . He never had the chance to use it.

His first love — dating back to his adolescence and youth — who was now a middle-aged woman, wrote to him in hospital out of the blue, after an estrangement and silence of some twenty-seven years. He was surprised and overjoyed and resumed correspondence with her. In his last letter to her, he concluded that, though he could only entertain a vague belief in some sort of after-life, he had one certainty: “Nothing ever dies.”

*See my earlier essay “Orwell, or the Horror of Politics,” Quadrant , December 1983, reprinted in my collection of essays The Angel and the Octopus (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

Evelyn Waugh

ON READING Stephen Spender’s autobiography, Evelyn Waugh commented: “To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.” One would have to devise a statement to the exact opposite effect to describe accurately the delight which Waugh’s grace and dexterity with words never fails to arouse in his readers.

Waugh exemplifies the primordial importance of style . He infuriated a great many fools in his time, not only because he took a mischievous pleasure in taunting them (let us admit it, to irritate idiots actually is enjoyable), but, more essentially, because he stubbornly held onto a timeless (and therefore untimely) truth. The arbiters of public opinion do not forgive those who openly mock intellectual fashions or transgress political and aesthetic taboos. Social conformity has its dungeons where the irreverent are to be confined behind thick walls of silence until complete oblivion. With Waugh, however, the trouble was that, while alive, his flamboyant and formidable personality could not easily be ignored or dismissed. On his death, the intelligentsia at last breathed a sigh of relief, and, from the grudging homages that were paid to the deceased, one could see that the dour undertakers of the literary establishment had firmly set their minds on burying him for good. Actually, this task proved quite impracticable and Waugh’s wit continued to shine more brightly than ever, however much the stern guardians of political correctness would have wished to turn it off. The fact is, in order to get rid of Waugh, one would probably first have to get rid of the English language.

In his time, the splendour of his style as well as his hilarious inventions ensured that all his works remained in print. Twenty-five years later, a new generation of readers now discovers that Waugh is not merely fun, he is also wise — and his wisdom addresses our present anguish at a depth that none of his contemporaries seem to reach. Which of them indeed could promise us what he was already offering his readers nearly half a century ago—“A hope, not indeed that anything but disaster lies ahead, but that the human spirit, redeemed, can survive all disasters”?