The Coward

It’s jam-packed with people.

It never rains but it pours!

01 My Early Home

The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end. Over the hedge on one side we looked into a plowed field, and on the other we looked over a gate at our master’s house, which stood by the roadside; at the top of the meadow was a grove of fir trees, and at the bottom a running brook overhung by a steep bank.

While I was young I lived upon my mother’s milk, as I could not eat grass. In the daytime I ran by her side, and at night I lay down close by her. When it was hot we used to stand by the pond in the shade of the trees, and when it was cold we had a nice warm shed near the grove.

As soon as I was old enough to eat grass my mother used to go out to work in the daytime, and come back in the evening.

There were six young colts in the meadow besides me; they were older than I was; some were nearly as large as grown-up horses. I used to run with them, and had great fun; we used to gallop all together round and round the field as hard as we could go. Sometimes we had rather rough play, for they would frequently bite and kick as well as gallop.

One day, when there was a good deal of kicking, my mother whinnied to me to come to her, and then she said:

“I wish you to pay attention to what I am going to say to you. The colts who live here are very good colts, but they are cart-horse colts, and of course they have not learned manners. You have been well-bred and well-born; your father has a great name in these parts, and your grandfather won the cup two years at the Newmarket races; your grandmother had the sweetest temper of any horse I ever knew, and I think you have never seen me kick or bite. I hope you will grow up gentle and good, and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will, lift your feet up well when you trot, and never bite or kick even in play.”

I have never forgotten my mother’s advice; I knew she was a wise old horse, and our master thought a great deal of her. Her name was Duchess, but he often called her Pet.

Our master was a good, kind man. He gave us good food, good lodging, and kind words; he spoke as kindly to us as he did to his little children. We were all fond of him, and my mother loved him very much. When she saw him at the gate she would neigh with joy, and trot up to him. He would pat and stroke her and say, “Well, old Pet, and how is your little Darkie?” I was a dull black, so he called me Darkie; then he would give me a piece of bread, which was very good, and sometimes he brought a carrot for my mother. All the horses would come to him, but I think we were his favorites. My mother always took him to the town on a market day in a light gig.

There was a plowboy, Dick, who sometimes came into our field to pluck blackberries from the hedge. When he had eaten all he wanted he would have what he called fun with the colts, throwing stones and sticks at them to make them gallop. We did not much mind him, for we could gallop off; but sometimes a stone would hit and hurt us.

One day he was at this game, and did not know that the master was in the next field; but he was there, watching what was going on; over the hedge he jumped in a snap, and catching Dick by the arm, he gave him such a box on the ear as made him roar with the pain and surprise. As soon as we saw the master we trotted up nearer to see what went on.

“Bad boy!” he said, “bad boy! to chase the colts. This is not the first time, nor the second, but it shall be the last. There—take your money and go home; I shall not want you on my farm again.” So we never saw Dick any more. Old Daniel, the man who looked after the horses, was just as gentle as our master, so we were well off.

George Orwell (1903-1950) was born in Motihari, Bengal, India, as the second child of Richard Walmesley Blair and Ida Mabel Limonzin. His father was a civil servant in the opium department and his mother was the daughter of a tea-merchant in Burma. In 1904 Orwell moved with his mother and sister to England, where he attended Eton. His first writings Orwell published in college periodicals. During these years Orwell developed his antipathy towards the English class systems. Also Orwell’s years at St Cyprian’s Preparatory School in Easbourne were not happy. His bitter, barely disguised attack on St. Cyprian’s, SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS, was not published until 1968 for fear of libel action.

At the age of seventeen Orwell had his first experiences as an “amateur tramp” in Plymouth, where he was stranded accidentally without much money. After Orwell failing to win a scholarship to university, Orwell went in 1922 to Burma to serve in the Indian Imperial Police (1922-27) as an assistant superintendent. Like his colleagues, Orwell had a native mistresses. Eventually Orwell’s mounting dislike of imperial rule led to his resignation. SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1950) is collection of essays revealing the behaviour of the colonial officers. One of his most famous early essays is ‘A Hanging'(1931), in which a Hindu man is hanged in a hurry, but with a great routine. “An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily.”

Orwell returned to Europe and lived as a tramp and beggar, working low paid jobs in England and France (1928-29), where his aunt lived. He picked hops in Kent as a migratory laborer and once Orwell tried to get himself arrested as a drunk to have some knowledge about life in prison. After forty-eight hours he was released. In 1928 he had decided to become a writer, but his first amateurish efforts arose smiles. A poet friend described him “like a cow with a musket.” Orwell’s experiences in poverty gave material for DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON (1933). However, the author was never a full-time vagrant, but he stayed every now and then with his older sister or with his parents, and plunged to the lower depths of society like an explorer. “The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people – people who ave fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.” (from Down and Out in Paris and London) From 1930 Orwell contributed regularly to the New Adelphi. In 1933 he assumed the pseudonym by which he would sign all his publications – Orwell was the name of a small river in East Anglia, and George was definitely a British Christian name.

Unable to support himself with his writings, Orwell took up a teaching post at a private school, where he finished his first novel, BURMESE DAYS (1934). In 1936 Orwell married Eileen O’Shaugnessy, a doctor’s daughter. KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING, the story of a young bookseller’s assistant, appeared in 1936. From 1936 to 1940 Orwell worked as a shopkeeper in Wallington, Hertfordshire. He was commissioned in 1936 by the publisher Victor Gollancz to produce a documentary account of unemployment in the North of England for the Left Book Club. The result, THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER, is considered a milestone in modern literary journalism.

In the1930s Orwell had adopted socialistic views. Like many other writers, he travelled to Spain to report on the Civil War. He fought alongside the United Workers Marxist Party militia and was shot through the throat by a Francoist sniper’s bullet. When Stalinists on their own side started to hunt down Anarchists and his friends were thrown into prison, Orwell escaped with his Eileen Blair from the chaos. The war made him a strong opposer of communism and an advocate of the English brand of socialism. Orwell’s book on Spain, HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, appeared in 1938 after some troubles with its publication. The book was coldly received by left-wing intelligentsia, who regarded Communists as heroes of the war. In Orwell’s lifetime Homage to Catalonia sold only about fifty copies a year.

Orwell had opposed a war with Germany, declaring that the British Empire was worse than Hitler, but during World War II Orwell served as a sergeant in the Home Guard and worked as a journalist for the BBC, Observer and Tribune, where he was literary editor from 1943 to 1945. Toward the end of the war, he wrote Animal Farm, which depicted the betrayal of a revolution. After the war, Orwell went to Germany as a reporter, but in his dispatches he sent to The Observer and The Manchester Evening News he did not mention the extermination camps or Auschwitz. In England he lived mostly on the remote island of Jura in the Western Isles of Scotland. With Eileen he had adopted a little boy. His wife died in 1945 – “Yes, she was a good old stick,” Orwell said to his friend. In 1949 Orwell married Sonia Brownell (1918-1980), who had been an editorial assistant on Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon. Her marriage to Orwell lasted only three months. Orwell died from tuberculosis in London University Hospital on January 21, 1950, soon after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The biting satire of Communist ideology in The Animal Farm made Orwell for the first time prosperous. Another world wide success was Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the classical works of science fiction along with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and H.G. Wells novels Time Machine, War of The World and Invisible Man. Animal Farm was a satirical allegory of the Russian Revolution, particularly directed against Stalin’s policies. Led by the pigs, the Animals on Mr Jones’s farm revolt against their human masters. After their victory they decide to run the farm themselves on egalitarian principles. Inspired by the example of Boxer, the hard-working horse, the cooperation prosper. The pigs become corrupted by power and a new tyranny is established under Napoleon (Stalin). “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Snowball (Trotsky), an idealist, is driven out. The final betrayal is made when the pigs engineer a rapprochement with Mr Jones. The book was originally rejected for publication in 1944 at Faber and Faber by T.S. Eliot, who wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intellectual than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public spirited pigs.” Since its appearance the book has gained a status of a classic. – Film adaptation from 1955 was a faithful rendition of Orwell’s original work, but watered in the end the satire, and presented a socialist viewpoint: the system is good, but the individuals are corruptible.

1984 was a bitter protest against the nightmarish future and corruption of truth and free speech of the modern world. In the story, Britannia has become Airstrip One in the superstate Oceania, which is controlled by Big Brother and the Party. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.”(from Nineteen Eighty-Four) The Party’s agents constantly rewrite history. The official language is Newspeak, and the society is dominated by such slogans as “War is Peace”, “Freedom is Slavery”, “Ignorance is Strength.” Goldstein with his book is supposedly plotting against Oceania, and a target of a hate period. The hero, Winston Smith, a minor Party operative, rewrites the past at the Ministry of Truth. He keeps a secret diary and has a brief love affair with a girl named Julia. He believes that O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party, is not sympathetic to Big Brother. O’Brien enrolls him and Julia in a conspiracy. One day Winston is arrested by the Thought Police, tortured and brainwashed. O’Brien directs Winston’s torture and rehabilitation and tells that Goldstein is the invention of the Party. His spirit broken, Winston learns to love Big Brother. Winston and Julia meet briefly one day, they both have gone through the process and have lost their former love for each other. Some critics have related Smith’s sufferings to those the author underwent at preparatory school – Winston is finally broken by rats. Orwell has said that the book was written “to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after.”

In 1998 Martin Seymour-Smith listed Orwell’s dystopia among 100 most influential books ever written. It has inspired less or more directly a number of other science fiction novels, among them Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Orwell himself implicitly acknowledged his debt to Evgeny Zamyatin’s (1884-1937) novel We (in Russia My), which was written in 1920 and translated into English 1924. Although Orwell is best-known as a novelist, his essays are among the finest of the 20th-century. He also produced newspaper articles and reviews, which were written for money, but he carefully crafted his other essays for such journals as Partisan Review, Adelphi, and Horizon. Without hesitation he accused that Yeats is a fascist, H.G. Wells was out of touch with reality, Salvador Dali he found decadent, but he defended P.G. Wodehouse. In ‘Why Write?’ and ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1948) Orwell argued that writers have an obligation of fighting social injustice, oppression, and the power of totalitarian regimes.
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