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| EILEEN O'SHAUGHNESSY [BLAIR], c 1936 |
END OF THE CENTURY, 1984
Death
Synthetic winds have blown away
Material dust, but this one room
Rebukes the constant violet ray
And dustless sheds a dusty gloom.
Wrecked on the outmoded past
Lie North and Hillard, Virgil, Horace,
Shakespeare's bones are quiet at last,
Dead as Yeats or William Morris.
Have not the inmates earned their rest?
A hundred circles traversed they
Complaining of the classic quest
And, each inevitable day,
Illogically trying to place
A ball within an empty space.
Birth
Every loss is now a gain
For every chance must follow reason.
A crystal palace meets the rain
That falls at its appointed season.
No book disturbs the lucid line
For sun-bronzed scholars tune their thought
To Telepathic Station 9
From which they know just what they ought:
The useful sciences; the arts
Of telesalesmanship and Spanish
As registered in Western parts;
Mental cremation that shall banish
Relics, philosophies and colds —
Mañana-minded ten-year-olds.
The Phoenix
Worlds have died that they may live,
May plume again their fairest feathers
And in their clearest songs may give
Welcome to all spontaneous weathers.
Bacon's colleague is called Einstein,
Huxley shares Platonic food,
Violet rays are only sunshine
Christened in the modern mood,
In this house if in no other
Past and future may agree,
Each herself, but each the other
In a curious harmony,
Finding both a proper place
In the silken gown's embrace.
(1934)
This poem was written in 1934 by Eileen O'Shaughnessy, first wife of George Orwell (AKA Eric Arthur Blair), for a commemorative volume celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of her alma mater, the Sunderland High School for Girls.
The poem was reprinted in the notes section of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life, a 2023 biography by Anna Funder that sets out to explain why Eileen — Mrs Blair as she was known after marrying her still obscure writer husband on 9 June 1936 — has been so thoroughly erased from the work he published under the pseudonym 'George Orwell' and why her invaluable contributions to both that work and his life have been consistently downplayed if not rigorously ignored by his numerous male biographers.
Funder employs several techniques to do this, including trying to extrapolate Eileen's feelings about her life with Orwell from her surviving letters and 'recreating' key scenes from their marriage that, while engagingly written, are nonetheless speculations which cannot be said to have any firm basis in reality. While insisting that her intention was not to 'cancel' Orwell — a writer she claims to have always admired — the picture Funder paints of his life with Eileen and his persistently shabby treatment of her is seldom a flattering or, indeed, a positive one. Indeed, it shows Eric Blair/George Orwell to have been a classic example of a man who failed in his personal life to live up to the ideals he espoused in his public life as a novelist, journalist and broadcaster. Blair/Orwell was, to put it bluntly, a bit of a shit who routinely put his own needs first and his wife's needs a distant second — an attitude that, while considered completely unacceptable in the second decade of the twenty-first century, was entirely typical of the male-dominated society of 1930s and 1940s England.
The pity is that Eileen, who attended Oxford University where she read English and eventually graduated with an MA in Educational Psychology, wrote no memoir before her untimely death at the age of thirty-nine. She was clearly an exceptional human being whose contributions to Orwell's work, both in England and in war-torn Spain where they went shortly after their marriage to support the anti-Franco Republican cause, were undoubtedly crucial to its success.
I say 'probably' because, speculative biographies notwithstanding, Eileen O'Shaughnessy-Blair remains an elusive figure whose motivations for marrying and staying with such a difficult man can never be known for certain. According to Charles Orr, a colleague of hers who worked with her in Spain creating propaganda on behalf of the Independent Labor Party, '[Eileen] could not resist talking about Eric — her hero husband, whom she obviously loved and admired.' That does not sound like the behaviour of someone who regretted her marriage or her choice of life partner. For all anybody knows, Mrs Blair may have preferred to keep a low profile, content to let Orwell receive all the attention while she focused on maintaining their often precarious household. Not a particularly fulfilling role for someone possessed of her obvious intelligence and literary talent, but again a typical one for the majority of women, even educated women, of her class and generation after becoming wives all but robbed them of any sense of autonomy or individual identity.
While it may console us to retrospectively apply today's moral standards to yesterday's events, doing so is largely an exercise in futility. The past was what it was, just as the present is unfortunately and often very unfairly what it is. Better to admit that women — not just the wives of illustrious if openly sexist writers like Orwell but in fact all women — got a raw deal back then and do whatever is necessary to prevent that from being the case today and on into the future.
Use the link below to read a review of Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, an earlier biography of EILEEN BLAIR (née O'SHAUGHNESSY) by SYLVIA TOPP published in 2020:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/10/eileen-the-making-of-george-orwell-sylvia-topp-review
You might also enjoy:
Poet of the Month 039: GEORGE ORWELL
The Write Advice 191: ANNA FUNDER
Poet of the Month 075: STEVIE SMITH
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