Mrs. George Orwell

...I found myself looking at these papers in a new way, and for the first time wondering about her, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, Orwell's first wife, the woman who offered love and support through good times and bad times, the tests to which history subjected them, the trials to which he KATHARINE B YRNE is the former director of the Division of Continuing Education at Mundelein College, Chicago...

...Almost everything thus gathered together was, understandably, about him...

...How to explain this burst of self-denigration...

...In 1935, however, she was enrolled and doing well in a graduate program at the University of London, moving toward a master's 288: Commonweal called Black Bethlehem, says of a character who is quite clearly related to Eileen, "she is always staying late to finish office work...

...Fact, conjecture, argument, analysis, reputation...

...What, indeed, do we know about Charlotte Bront~'s husband, except that he was her father's curate...

...They adopted a three-week-old boy, Eileen apparently not as keen for this move as Eric was, but she agreed to it...

...A feminist reading of her life might insist that she had intemalized, unfortunately, a totally self-abnegating, supportive role for herself...

...She typed, edited, and prepared his papers for publication...

...She had taken the steps forward denied to a previous generation of women, but then she retired agreeably, apparently content to be "doing" for Eric...

...A friend says that before her marriage, when she was doing thesis typing, Eileen had rewritten a client's entire master's essay...

...Suffering from bronchitis, pneumonia, and lung hem- orrhaging, he was forced to enter a hospital...

...Even on good days, even the interruptions are interrupted...

...Young Richard, whom friends thought he should give up, was with him there, a loved child he was anxious to provide for...

...She was Anglo-Irish, a member of a warm and close-knit upper- middle-class family of middle-managers for the Empire...

...DEBORAH SMITH DOUGLAS IN THE FRACTIONING, WE ARE MADE WHOLE he other afternoon I was sitting at my desk, typing an article I was late in finishing...

...Here he could be found, as much of him as was accessible to me, in bits and pieces about his life, his world, his writing...

...When he received the news of his wife's death, Orwell doped himself with M & B tablets (something used before penicillin was available), took a military plane, and arrived after her funeral...

...At any given time, however, each of us projects his or her own experience on such an accumulation...

...I wanted to apologize to the woman I had failed to see in those years when I taught the Orwell course...

...Of course, their very diversity (and often outright disagreement with one another), as well as their lack of official standing, means that such groups cannot attain the visibility and authority of official teaching in addressing broad issues of public policy...

...I came upon a box of papers I had forgotten about--all the materials collected for the George Orwell class I taught: lecture notes, bibliographies, syllabuses, tests, monographs...

...effective when confined to the central purposes that animate it...

...And lugged him, the pram, the groceries, to the fiat high above London...

...The winter before he entered the hospital for the last time he lived on the bleak island of Jura where he wrote and rewrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, the whole thing twice on an old manual typewriter...

...If we cannot fully understand her motivation, we may appreciate BROKEN PIECES it, and even applaud the generous spirit that guided her...

...Eric had reason to believe that he was sterile, but he wanted them to have a child...

...As stated earlier, the real force of Rerum novarum and its offspring lies not in their particular prescriptions, useful as many of them are, but in their capacity to see our common public life, as secular social thought does not, in relation to the city of God...

...I KATHARINE BYRNE subjected himself and her, during the brief span of his great creative years...

...to arrange special transportation for Emily's dance class because Katie had an extra choir rehearsal on the same day, and that the deadline for the article I had only begun to type was now immi- nent...

...GEORGE ORWELL ANONYMOUS & ESSENTIAL rare impulse to throw things out came over me one snowbound Sunday afternoon last winter, and I wandered through rooms filled with accumulations, rummaging in drawers and clothes closets, thrusting the leftovers of my life into leaf-bags...

...In a letter to a friend, written shortly before her death, Eileen said that she hadn't wanted to make too much of her failing health for fear that the judge with whom they were negotiating the adoption of the baby would think that she was unfit to be his mother...

...The day-by-day realities turned out to be his wife's responsibility...

...And what did she accomplish...

...He was one of them...

...The Orwells' friend, Tosco Fyvel, having heard the couple talk about the book, notes that this is the only work that Orwell is known to have discussed with his wife, and that it sparkles with her loving touches...

...The top floor of a walk-up was not a place one would choose to live in during the blitz...

...Uncertain of pur- pose, she floundered through a variety of jobs, teaching in a girls' school, reading for a rich old lady, running a secretarial service...

...And who was Mr...

...I hung up the phone, sliced an apple, poured milk, found crackers, and realized I had forgotten to thaw anything for dinner...

...That is especially true, I think, of authority that rests its claims on spiritual ground...

...She needed an operation described by her husband immediately afterward as "minor," but she died while the anesthetic was being administered...

...Animals exploited and exploitive...

...and why it matters to critics fight or left or allegedly unaligned...

...Because of his poor health he had been forced to work on the home front during World War II...

...While certainly not merely the Angel of the House beloved of the Victorians, Eileen had inherited some of the qualities of the ministering angel, finding satisfaction in helping others...

...And her regret that the operation will cost so much...

...As the bombs fell on London, they lay in bed making up a story about farm animals which possessed all the virtues and vices of humans...

...Note on that to authors S. and A.: Gentlemen: It is also true that the writer's husband, unless he is a writer, is simply "her husband...

...one night the entire ceiling came down in a bombing raid...

...Now he did not hesitate to go off again "adventuring," as his biographer, Bernard Crick, has it...

...We cannot say that societal givens and constraints denied her personal advancement...

...How much does the perfect fable, Animal Farm, owe to Eileen's bright wit and humorous intelligence...

...I am old enough to have undergone as a child the forced mem- orization of many pious and admonitory lines...

...In this pile of paper and in the row of books on my Orwell shelf I wanted to find Eileen, the writer's wife, between the lines of his life...

...The ribbon in my typewriter expired, and as I began the inky process of changing it, my nine-year-old daughter Katie called from her room: could I help her with her homework "for just a second...

...Few knew about his wife...

...He did not hesitate to go off once more, as he had many times earlier: to Burma, to Paris, to Wigan Pier, to Spain...

...Although she was worn and exhausted from the pressure of her war work, and in failing health from an apparently unrecognized or unattended physical problem of her own, she accepted and loved this child, named Richard Horatio...

...He became seriously ill in Paris...

...But American experience has taught us that authority of any kind is seriously eroded when it is misapplied beyond its proper scope, and most MRS...

...There is also the possibility that Wives of some great men remind us-Those men whose lives are called sublime-"We are here if you can find us, Footnotes on the sands of time...

...In "Why I Write," Orwell points out that most people over the age of thirty live for others, but there are those few "...gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end...

...Harriet Beecher Stowe...

...And there was the baby...

...Carolyn Heilbrun, in her Writing a Woman's Life, talks about women who transform their need to be loved into a need to love, a pen- chant that tidily, housewifely serves their husbands...

...In this letter to him she talks about money...

...All that was left was the little pile of notes and papers I had been looking for, allusions to the shadowy figure, the writer's wife...

...He found an unfinished letter still in her typewriter, begun on the morning of her operation...

...If only Animal Farm had not been turned down again and again because of the sensitive polit- ical problem it posed during the years of England's alliance with Russia, the hard-pressed couple would not have been so des- perately worded about money...

...As I put the bits and pieces about Eric's Eileen close to my word processor, there flashed across the screen of memory a Longfellow poem I was called upon to recite long ago, with its final cautionary lines, "Lives of all great men remind us...

...Like Prufrock, I measure out my life in coffeespoons...

...She was thirty-nine years old...

...The death of Eileen's much loved brother in the British defeat at Dunkirk was a heavy blow to her...

...290: Commonweal Orwell took off on his investigative assignment to the capitals of Westem Europe in February 1945...

...He wrote to a friend at this time, "Eileen is working in a government department, but I want to get her out of it as they are simply working her to death, besides making it impossible for us to be together...

...Although his own course was relentless, Orwell was not totally selfish or unaware...

...And Eileen...

...It was while she was teaching a course on Orwell at Mundelein that two of her essays appeared in Commonweal: "George Orwell and the American Character" (April 12, 1974) and "A Different-looking Orwell" (March 11, 1983...

...One of her friends adds these qualities to the list: sophisticated, fastidious, intelligent, and intellectual...

...Although the book had developed out of their many conversations about those oppressed and oppres- sive participants in the barnyard revolution, it was not published until months after Eileen was dead...

...The only work for which she demonstrated continuing enthusiasm was the labor of love she performed for an admired older brother, a brilliant surgeon...

...There is no unbroken moment...

...It is more understandable when one recalls that in those times, almost fifty years ago, there was no National Health assistance for proud, poor, middle-class persons and that the good brother who had facilitated Eric's hospitalization early in their marriage had died at Dunkirk...

...photocopies of articles and reviews, a few of these my own...

...The politics of international relationships had shifted...

...Staring into the refrigerator, improvising a menu for four from its uninspiring contents, I heard Katie call, reproachfully, "Morn...

...Who he was, where he went, what he said...

...As I was on the phone in the kitchen, rescheduling an appointment, my six-year-old Emily wandered in and asked for a snack...

...There are now the if-only's...

...Sometimes it feels as though it is not only time and strength and order that 3May 1991:291...

...and is usually found washing up after midnight...

...And such voluntary Catholic or ecumenical organizations and their "teaching" pub- lications will inevitably be much smaller and more poorly funded than agencies run by the Catholic church itself...

...Their close friend Tosco Fyvel remembers her warmly: "I thought him lucky to have a wife who looked after him so well...

...The burdens may be light, but they are many: like Gulliver, bound by the Lilliputians with innumerable fine threads, I am immobilized by small things...

...Of him she told a friend, "I always knew that if I called to him for help he would come to me, no matter where he might be...

...She kept her husband alive, at great personal price, alive to do the work he was impelled to do, calling his countrymen back to some mythic past and warning them of some awful future, an extension of the evils he observed in the world he experienced...

...Eric's need, as she saw it, was for peace and quiet, fresh vegetables, hot tea, unquestioning encour- agement to be off in whatever direction his demon sent him...

...Agatha Christie...

...Who, I wondered, was Eileen O'Shaughnessy, the woman described by her husband's friends as tall, thin, pretty, witty, and channing...

...The calendar reminded me that a dozen books were overdue at the library, that the school rummage sale was this weekend, that I needed DEBORAH SMITH DOUGLAS has degrees in literature and law, lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband and daughters, and has written previously for The Other Side and Emmanuel...

...she cooks and cleans for her brilliant and erratic husband and their friends...

...Early darkness closed down on the house by the time my searching and sifting were done...

...It is when it can genuinely illumine issues of worldly existence from that point of view, as the best official social teaching has done, that the church contributes most effectively to the common good of the society that it inhabits, as well as refreshing the wellsprings of its own inner life...

...The life I have chosen makes demands that fracture and splinter the days...

...Why bother...

...At the same time, Eileen's failing health caught up with her apparent reluctance to admit that anything serious was wrong with her, or to undertake a necessary building-up of her resistance...

...The book was an immediate success...

...Bernard Crick thinks that Eileen was anxious not to make her husband feel guilty, reasoning that she had discounted the seriousness of her condition because she wanted him to go abroad "peacefully" (her word), and not be worried about her...

...I can respond to all the myriad small demands each day presents only if I never stop moving...

...With Eric she knew, "his work would come first, before anyone or anything else...

...What about my homework...

...about "hating to use your money...what worries me is that I really don't think I'm worth the money...

...With Rilke I want to protest that "my life is not this steeply-sloping hour in which you see me hurrying...

...The pieces of her life available to me do not fit the classic pattern of female privation...

...Although a highly autobiographical writer, Orwell did not write about Eileen or talk about her to associates, during their marriage or after her death...

...s the war waned in Europe, the urge to experience the first days of peace, to test the political climate and the survivors' response to it, impelled Eric to leave England with an assignment as correspondent for the Observer...

...On the other hand, the sociologist Richard Sennett speaks of poor men's wives, who know how hard the world's demands are on the men they love, women whose willingness to play such a role .9is not to be denied, denigrated, or despised...

...She had a scholarship to St...

...Edith Wharton...

...Hugh's College, Oxford, and was grad- uated with a "very good second" in English, not good enough, she thought, to encourage an academic career...

...And so it goes...

...The evidence is that Eileen freely chose to give her life to another's needs...

...English 282 was in the trash bag tied up and propped against the kitchen door...

...Like the country idyll of a piece of land with his own garden and goat, the idea of fatherhood appealed to Orwell...

...Orwell, "a quantifier," Mary McCarthy called him, might have observed that all of the above was stored in a 10- by-18-by-8 1/2 Pet Milk carton and weighed approximately twenty pounds...

...On the way out of the kitchen I wiped cracker crumbs off the counter, put milk on the shopping list, and made a note of the changed appointment time on the calendar...

...After I had untangled the knot of long division for Katie, I began again to change the ribbon in my typewriter when the phone rang again...

...All of them fit into one legal-size envelope and grew into this essay...

...Sometimes I am afraid that all my hours will steeply slope, that I will always be this hurried, this distracted...

...Stansky and Abrahams, thoughtful and sympathetic biogra- phers of George Orwell, observe that the writer's wife, unless she is herself a writer, exists only as she relates to him and usually ends up in literary history, if at all, simply as that shadowy figure, "his wife...

...but I am afraid that it is...

...I left the ribbon half-changed and had no more than bent over her notebook when the telephone rang...

...she was one of them, wife of a working writer poor most of his life...

...I can hold chaos at bay only by breaking each moment into as many pieces as possible, hoping almost desperately that there will be enough to go around, that I can spread myself thin enough to cover it all...