Odd odds and ends

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Thin scrapings from the bottom of the Orwell archives, this volume; less than ten years after Peter Davison’s 20- volume complete Orwell, he has taken the opportunity to put some subsequent discoveries into print. The on dit is that the publishers of the complete edition declined the opportunity of presenting this supplement. Though this decision falls squarely into the ha’porth of tar category, and the complete Orwell must have been much more commercially successful than most comparable enterprises, it’s an understandable one. Orwell’s ephemeral writings fared unusually well in the 50 years after his death, thanks to two editors. First, his wife Sonia’s four-volume survey (‘It’s your plain duty,’ Ivy Compton-Burnett told her); secondly, Davison’s much more complete and thoroughly annotated collection. There may not be all that much left to find, and it’s a testament to our continuing fascination with a writer whose concerns might be thought essentially of their period that such a book is considered to be worth publishing by anyone.

What we have here is a series of exchanges between Orwell and the translator of Down and Out in Paris and London, amusing and weirdly courtly; an enchanting set of letters from Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, about the privations of their mid-1930s life; some letters from Orwell or relating to Orwell, almost all routine professional correspondence (‘I can just as easily turn my stuff in on Thursdays, or for that matter Wednesdays or Tuesdays, i.e. provided I have had the books in time’); and two previously overlooked articles.

One of these articles, on immediately postwar Paris, is interesting and was worth resurrecting. The other, an obituary survey of H. G. Wells for the Manchester Evening News, raises the highest hopes. Sonia knew of it from Orwell’s workbook, but was unable to track it down.