At the end of May he told his publisher, Fred Warburg: "I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time because I really have been in most wretched health this year ever since about January my chest as usual and can't quite shake it off.
Mindful of his publisher's impatience for the new novel, Orwell added: "Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job. After that, he said, he would need another six months to polish up the text for publication.
But then, disaster. Part of the pleasure of life on Jura was that he and his young son could enjoy the outdoor life together, go fishing, explore the island, and potter about in boats. In August, during a spell of lovely summer weather, Orwell, Avril, Richard and some friends, returning from a hike up the coast in a small motor boat, were nearly drowned in the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool.
Richard Blair remembers being "bloody cold" in the freezing water, and Orwell, whose constant coughing worried his friends, did his lungs no favours. Within two months he was seriously ill. Typically, his account to David Astor of this narrow escape was laconic, even nonchalant.
The long struggle with "The Last Man in Europe" continued. In late October , oppressed with "wretched health", Orwell recognised that his novel was still "a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be retyped entirely". He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with "inflammation of the lungs" and told Koestler that he was "very ill in bed".
Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB. A few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: "I still feel deadly sick," and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, "like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing.
Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US. Richard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails but in March , after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared.
As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. Just when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in "early December", and coping with "filthy weather" on autumnal Jura.
Early in October he confided to Astor: "I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive.
This is one of Orwell's exceedingly rare references to the theme of his book. He believed, as many writers do, that it was bad luck to discuss work-in-progress. Later, to Anthony Powell, he described it as "a Utopia written in the form of a novel".
The typing of the fair copy of "The Last Man in Europe" became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his "unbelievably bad" manuscript the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. It was, he told his agent, "extremely long, even , words".
With characteristic candour, he noted: "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB.
Now he just needed a stenographer to help make sense of it all. It was a desperate race against time. Orwell's health was deteriorating, the "unbelievably bad" manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming. Warburg promised to help, and so did Orwell's agent. At cross-purposes over possible typists, they somehow contrived to make a bad situation infinitely worse. Orwell, feeling beyond help, followed his ex-public schoolboy's instincts: he would go it alone. By mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter" by himself.
Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November it was virtually done. Now Orwell, the old campaigner, protested to his agent that "it really wasn't worth all this fuss.
It's merely that, as it tires me to sit upright for any length of time, I can't type very neatly and can't do many pages a day. The typescript of George Orwell's latest novel reached London in mid December, as promised.
Warburg recognised its qualities at once "amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read" and so did his colleagues. An in-house memo noted "if we can't sell 15 to 20 thousand copies we ought to be shot". As word of Nineteen Eighty-Four began to circulate, Astor's journalistic instincts kicked in and he began to plan an Observer Profile, a significant accolade but an idea that Orwell contemplated "with a certain alarm".
As spring came he was "having haemoptyses" spitting blood and "feeling ghastly most of the time" but was able to involve himself in the pre-publication rituals of the novel, registering "quite good notices" with satisfaction.
He joked to Astor that it wouldn't surprise him "if you had to change that profile into an obituary". Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June five days later in the US and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. Another of Orwell's creations for is Newspeak , a form of English that the book's totalitarian government utilizes to discourage free thinking.
Orwell believed that, without a word or words to express an idea, the idea itself was impossible to conceive and retain. Thus Newspeak has eliminated the word "bad," replacing it with the less-harsh "ungood. Next Book Summary. Removing book from your Reading List will also remove any bookmarked pages associated with this title.
Are you sure you want to remove bookConfirmation and any corresponding bookmarks? Capitalism and liberal democracy seemed moribund; centralized economies and authoritarian regimes looked like the only way modern mass societies could be governed.
But they were not twin totalitarian monsters, the Fasolt and Fafner of twentieth-century geopolitics. They may often have mirrored each other in tactics, but they were different systems defending different ideologies.
Orwell, who had little interest in and no fondness for the United States, missed that. There are some parts of the novel whose relevance seems never to fade, though.
By torturing him. This seems a rather primitive form of brainwashing. So Orwell was right about that. Orwell created a story that had suspense and had characters whom readers identify with. We are more likely all Winstons, knowing that something is wrong, that we are losing control of our lives, but also knowing that we are powerless to resist.
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