Cover of the March 1957 edition of The London Magazine, with a tribute to George Orwell by Paul Potts.

Paul Potts


Don Quixote on a Bicycle: In Memoriam, George Orwell

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The full tribute to George Orwell, by his friend and poet Paul Potts, was published in the March 1957 edition of The London Magazine. A long piece, dedicated to Orwell’s son, Richard, we publish extracts today, 75 years on from his death.

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How George Orwell would have hated a panegyric. The proper way for the still living to talk about the already dead is to speak about them now as one did when they were still alive. What I am going to say about Orwell here, then, will not differ in tone from what I said in print when he was my friend and still alive. Actually, after his death, I was sometimes quite embarrassed at being respected by people I did not know solely because I had been a friend of his. Naturally I wanted to be respected, if at all, on my own account. I have never made a great deal out of my writing – that’s an understatement, if ever there was one – probably half of it, however, has been earned by writing about him. Making a profit out of one’s dead friends! Certainly the largest advance I have received was to do a book on him. However, he left a clause in his will asking that no such book be written. This was legally binding on no one, but it was morally binding on me. It was a pity, because it was the only book that I would have had no trouble in getting published.

The great thing about Orwell was Orwell. He was ultimately better than anything he wrote. That makes him very good indeed. To me he was a greater poet than Dylan Thomas. This, of course, is private language and needs some explaining. Dylan Thomas would have both allowed and understood this kind of remark. Orwell never wrote any poetry. In a certain sense he wasn’t an artist at all. He was a journalist, but only as Swift and Hazlitt were journalists.

The only two modern poets he really liked were Yeats and Eliot. But there was something about him, the proud man apart, the Don Quixote on a bicycle that caught one’s imagination right away. That made one think of a knight errant and of social justice as the Holy Grail. One felt safe with him; he was so intellectually honest. His mind was a court where the judge was the lawyer for the defence. One fact that has never been mentioned about Orwell, despite all that has been published on him since his death, is that his mother was a French woman.

He worked regularly but never made a fetish of it.

From this Latin distaff side he got his love of living and of life. But being Orwell he did not try to ape the French as so many intellectuals do. He used the French taste he had inherited to live an English life well. Nothing could be more pleasant than the sight of his living-room in Canonbury Square early on a winter’s evening at high-tea-time. A huge fire, the table crowded with marvellous things, gentleman’s relish and various jams, kippers, crumpets and toast. And always the Gentleman’s Relish, with its peculiar unique flat jar and the Latin inscription on the label. Next to it usually stood the Coopers-Oxford marmalade pot. He thought in terms of vintage tea and had the same attitude to bubble and squeak as a Frenchman has to Camembert. I’ll swear he valued tea and roast beef above the OM and the Nobel Prize. Then there was the conversation and the company; his first wife, some members of his family or hers, a refugee radical or an English writer. There was something very innocent and terribly simple about him. He wasn’t a very good judge of character. He was of roast beef, however. He loved being a host, only as civilized men can, who have been very poor. There was nothing bohemian about him at all. However poor he had been it did not make him precarious. But he tolerated in others faults he did not possess himself. I don’t think there was a man in all England, who could say Orwell had ever borrowed half-a-crown from him. And I know – I am absolutely certain – that there was not a man anywhere in Europe who could say that he had borrowed one without returning it.

He carried independence to such lengths that it became sheer poetry. One day up on the Isle of Jura in the Hebrides we had to move some furniture from the nearest village to his house. A distance of some seven miles over a road that made that famous one, leading to the Irish capital, look like an auto-strada crossing the Plains of Lombardy. Some very rich people, friends of Orwell’s, who had a hunting lodge on the other side of the island, had a whole garage full of brakes and station wagons and jeeps – five, I believe. Yet he refused to borrow the use of one for a few hours. We had to haul those chairs and that table on our backs across seven miles of some of the most beautiful scenery in Europe. This by a man who was a chronic invalid. He could have borrowed the use of one of those cars almost as easily as he could have been told the time had his watch stopped.

He was proud and his pride got him into the literature of the world; he was chivalrous and his chivalry put him among the great radicals of England.

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His mind was limited but he knew his own limitations. Inside those wide limits it was a first rate mind. It had more kindness than love, but more anger than contempt. It was like a breath of fresh air to hear him talk about literature, politics, history or Victoriana. He was a storehouse of odd information about weird subjects. Yet I would have trembled to think what would have been the result had he written a book about Ireland. He wrote beautiful English prose. The kind of English that people, usually embarrassed by beauty, could appreciate. As you can sometimes get the feeling of a city through the memory of one street (to me all Paris is contained in any one of those thin little streets, running down to the Seine from the church of St. Germain-des-Près), so too one can grasp the atmosphere of a writer’s work by the temperature of one of his sentences. In Orwell this is the sentence:

No wall in the world is well built enough, to be allowed to remain standing, if it surrounds a concentration camp.

When I first read that, in his essay on Salvator Dali, I felt a movement down my back as I had done the first time I read the great love poems of William Butler Yeats or walked for the first time into the presence of a Van Gogh. This is what I call physical criticism. It can’t make a mistake.

He had an awful job getting Animal Farm, the first book that really made him famous, published at all. It was right at the height At one point before Secker and Warburg finally agreed to take it on, I myself became the publisher of Animal Farm – which only means that we were going to bring it out on our own. Orwell was going to pay the printer, using the paper quota to which the Whitman Press was entitled because of the broadsheets and pamphlets I had published before the war. We had actually started work on the scheme. I had been down to Bedford with the manuscript to see the printer twice – the birthplace of John Bunyan seemed a happy omen. I first read Animal Farm in the train on one of those journeys. As I got half-way through it I found myself looking at my fellow passengers and feeling myself tempted to have a peep under the seat to see if there was any more dynamite about. The printer was an old-fashioned working-man radical. A real craftsman and a spiritual descendant of the printers who were willing to go to prison rather than refuse to print The Rights of Man.

We often wondered when looking at reviews of Animal Farm pouring in from Spanish, Danish and Czech papers what would have been its fate in the world, if it had first appeared in pamphlet form under the imprint of the Whitman Press. Very often the only words we could understand in some of the reviews in the foreign press were ‘Swift’ and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’; however when we came across them we knew it was a good review!

No death had affected me so much since my father’s.

The two books, Animal Farm and 1984, on which his fame is built are by no means his best work. But they are better than his early novels. He wasn’t of course a novelist at all, but critics who concern themselves with him as such are merely trying to dismiss, obscure or ignore his more serious work. The canon of his writings consists of Down and Out in London and Paris, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, possibly his best work. And in the Essays, always the Essays, all of the Essays, but especially the one on Dickens and the second section of Inside the Whale which is concerned not with Henry Miller himself, to whom the essay as a whole is devoted, but with English writing at that period. Orwell played a role in the literature of his time not unlike that played by Parnell in the politics of his day. Given just a few more writers of equal calibre with his burning passionate integrity we might have enjoyed a new Augustan age, for he had the independence of Swift mixed up with the humility of Oliver Goldsmith.

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The happiest years of my life were those during which I was a friend of his. Nobody who ever knew him, at all well, will ever forget the shy excited warmth of his welcome, if one dropped in on him unexpectedly. He worked regularly but never made a fetish of it. No editor could ever complain that he was late with a manuscript. Even after he was world famous he could never refuse a request for an article from the editor of a small magazine that could not afford to pay. I twice caught him, while he was literary editor of Tribune, shoving a banknote into an envelope with the manuscript of a poem that was too hopelessly bad even for him to be able to print. (Other literary editors please copy.) He looked as guilty when I caught him doing this, as he must have, when as a small boy he was caught helping himself to the jam.

There is a passage somewhere in Homage to Catalonia which might be taken to be a true portrait of the kind of man he was. He was describing how, during a lull in the fighting one day on the Catalan Front, he had been detailed to go out into a fox-hole in the no-man’s land between the opposing lines of trenches, and try a spot of sniping at the enemy. Whenever Orwell was about to write or say anything at all romantic he always prefaced it, as if by explaining to excuse himself, by making some very ordinary down to earth statement. In this case he starts off:

Perhaps it was because I was cold and hungry and very bored and I wanted to get back into my own lines as soon as possible, as I had been waiting for hours and had not seen anybody. When suddenly, quite unexpected by me, a man appeared above the enemy lines running in a great hurry, holding up his trousers – he had neither belt nor braces – rushing along to the lavatory.

Orwell continues:

Well, I came out here to shoot Fascists and a man caught short like that is not a Fascist. So I returned to behind my own lines, without firing at him.

I wonder what his political commissar thought of that bit of Englishness. I quote him from memory.

The enormous courtesy of the man; the shy, almost awkward respect for life and the desire to give a fair field to an opponent. In this man’s presence, there have been kings who would have looked parvenus.

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He wasn’t very conscious of the kind of writers whose work in literature was like his. He loved nineteenth-century America. Mark Twain could easily have been his favourite author. In many small things he was more like a New Englander then than an Englishman now. He loved good bad poets, Vachel Lindsay, Kipling and Chesterton. I would have rather known him, than have won the Nobel Prize; when one asked him out to dinner, in one’s turn, he always had the generosity to let one pay the bill, although I’m sure he always had the extra money in his pocket just in case. He rolled his own cigarettes with the strongest tobacco he could find; would have liked to have been able to brew his own beer. Hated staying in other people’s houses, loved having friends in his own. Knew nothing about painting, but knew that he knew nothing. Didn’t think having talent was all that important; said that talent by itself was like a tart, would go anywhere the money was. Smoked more than he drank. Listened as much as he talked. Loved appreciation from his peers, never troubled what the others thought. Knew who his peers were. Was incapable of playing to the gallery. Had as much moral courage as a whole Commando full of Irishmen have of the other kind, loved England, about the only left-wing middle class intellectual of the time to do so. This made him a good traveller. Loved Bertrand Russell, hated the New Statesman – they often tried in vain to get him to write for them. Could tell a joke against himself. One morning Beaverbrook telephoned and asked him to dinner; he was writing a weekly article in the Evening Standard at the time, not political or literary but about ‘How to make a cup of tea, etc’. Not wanting to go, he answered, ‘I haven’t got a dinner jacket’. Back came the answer immediately, ‘Come to lunch then’. He did go and enjoyed it. But he never would do serious political reporting for the Beaverbrook Press. He died on the eve of going to Switzerland. I, like a lot of his friends, called to say goodbye. Cut into the door of his hospital room was a small window. One could look through it, and see him before knocking. That afternoon I saw he had fallen off to sleep. He needed sleep badly, found it hard to come by. I left without waking him, leaving a packet of tea outside the door. After all, he’d be back in a couple of months and up again. Ever since I had known him he’d been given up as hopeless. During that time he’d lived a fuller life than a whole company of A1 recruits. Under his influence all his friends stopped taking the doctors seriously.

Later that same evening someone brought me the Evening Standard in which it said that he was dead. It also said that he had been a great English writer. No death had affected me so much since my father’s. Yet I had been through two wars. I didn’t go to his funeral, it was a literary affair. I was a bit too shabby again. There never seems much use going to a funeral unless, of course, there is no one else to do so.

For myself I shall always remember a man with a cough, mending a kitchen table with a piece of wood he had cut from a dying tree. I shall never forget the widowed husband looking after the orphaned son. This always sick man made his typewriter take on the suggestion of a white steed. In his hand the Biro he used for corrections could never quite help looking a bit like a drawn sword. His doctors thought him a bad patient. They should have heard, they probably did, what he thought about them. In his company a walk down the street became an adventure into the unknown. Indeed there will always be an England, as long as there is, from time to time, an occasional Englishman like this. In short his life was a duel fought against lies; the weapon he chose, the English language.

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George Orwell was an English novelist and essayist, best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Paul Potts was a British poet, author of Dante Called You Beatrice.


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