Orwell 'assaulted his girlfriend'
ROBBIE
Nigee
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2583222,00.html
>
> ROBBIE
Publisher's site:
http://www.finlay-publisher.com/home.html
george...@email.com
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2583222,00.html
>
> ROBBIE
Blair, and had she wanted to include this detail in her book, she
would have done so. She probably would be horrified about it being
made public. A man pushes too far and a woman fends him off is not
exactly something new under the sun, but what is Dione Venables saying
here? If Orwell raped Jacintha then a horrible crime was committed. It
seems he attempted to start something - " though she struggled,
yelling at him to stop, he had torn her skirt and bruised a shoulder
and her left hip." A crime still, but one of a lesser degree. I think
if he had wanted to rape even "a strapping PE teacher" she could not
have "fought him off." The nature of a sexual assault covers quite a
broad field, but if there's anything much to this one, I'm sure we
would hear all about it in lurid detail. That Orwell could be an ass
is no surprise. Happily, the article ends with a quote from Venables,
[Jacintha] "had been thinking about him tremendously since they lost
touch . . . She never married. Nobody came up to his standard".
B.
Nigee
I agree.
>From the 1974 edition of 'Eric & Us' pp.117-119
"We were rather in the habit of going for country walks."
There was rather a country air to Rickmansworth in those days. I
remember one particular way we went, along a lane which was rather hot
and dusty in that very hot summer, so we kept to the shady side of the
hedges in the cornfields. He was probably thinking of these
cornfields when he wrote me another poem: I certainly thought of them
when I read it. We were in the Glencroft drawing-room, with the
gramophone playing Durand's Chaconne, when he gave me this quatrain to
which, on the lower part of the same page, I put a reply:
Eric:
Friendship and love are closely intertwined
My heart belongs to your befriending mind:
But chilling sunlit fields, cloud-shadows fall -
My love can't reach your heedless heart at all.
Jacintha:
By light
Too bright
Are dazzled eyes betrayed:
It's best
To rest
Content in tranquil shade
Typical of both of us, Eric with his straightforward, ten-syllable
couplets, and me chopping up the same metre into shorter lines with
extra rhymes to them, which I thought more fun to do and more
singable. It is because I sang this song to the so-favourite chaconne
that I remember it so well: it had to be sung: 'But chilling sunlit
fields, cloud-shadows *sometimes* fall', to comply with the tune. And
it was reversed for the second part, and adapted:
Its best
To rest
Content in tranquil shade:
By light
Too bright
Are dazzled eyes betrayed -
So,
Chilling sunlit fields, sometimes cloud-shadows fall
Although
Your love can't reach my heedless heart at all,
Still
Friendship and love are closely intertwined -
Will
Heart belong to true befriending mind?
I have not heard that Chaconne played since we left Rickmansworth, but
I can still hear it in my mind.
There is music in my mind most of the time, other people's or my own.
It's not surprising that Beethoven didn't care inconsolably that he
was deaf. I can *hear* my Flower Song, with a whole orchestra, and I
can see the scene: the woman singing to her child, with the wraiths
outside. Just as I can hear the Durand Chaconne that was *really*
heard so many years ago, and I can see the drawing room at Glencroft
with Eric in our young, and for me unclouded, friendship.
Friendship and love are closely intertwined
My heart belongs to your befriending mind.
By any standards, those are good lines: simple and good."
Reading that, especially "unclouded", it does not seem credible that
anything terrible occured between Jacintha Buddicom and Orwell,
irrespective of whether she chose to mention it.
ROBBIE
<george...@email.com> wrote in message
news:1170605761.7...@s48g2000cws.googlegroups.com...
I merely posted the link as a curiosity.
ROBBIE
Martha Bridegam
I can't get the Times story from here -- there's a screen saying the Web
site has "gone to the pub". Is someone alleging Orwell committed a
violent date rape, and if so, how reliably?
If it's any help I read *Eric and Us* in a library eleven years ago &
don't remember it well but IIRC it's admiring in a soft-focus way that
suggests pride in a brush with fame as well as personal affection. Under
such circumstances people giving accounts for public consumption have
been willing to skip over pretty serious bits of unattractiveness.
There's also of course the well-known tendency of rape victims to feel
shame rather than anger.
/M
ROBBIE
"Martha Bridegam" <brid...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:6gqxh.68675$qO4....@newssvr13.news.prodigy.net...
ATTROTNG: Here we go...
ROBBIE
Martha Bridegam
Huh?
I don't necessarily have an opinion on whether the story is true or
false. I'm just guessing Jacintha Buddicom was the sort who might have
indulged in the oysterish memory-process of applying soft glowy stuff to
an irritating unpleasant fact.
But supposing someone were to summarize the article for us?
/M
ROBBIE
Aside to the Rest of the Newsgroup.
Wearily I said 'here we go.'
Orwell gay/rapist etc. You already seemed to be making a case for the
'rape'.
ROBBIE
Martha Bridegam
[Snipped: my suggestion that Buddicom may have indulged in the
oyster-process of softening an unpleasant memory over time.]
>>
>
> Aside to the Rest of the Newsgroup.
>
> Wearily I said 'here we go.'
>
> Orwell gay/rapist etc. You already seemed to be making a case for the
> 'rape'.
No, I was making a case for Jacintha Buddicom being an unreliable
witness, which if you're keeping score is arguably anti-feminist.
But I was hoping you would summarize the actual allegations. Any chance?
/M
ROBBIE
Page is down.
ROBBIE
george...@email.com
> ROBBIE wrote:
> > "Martha Bridegam" <bride...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
> >news:dHqxh.68676$qO4....@newssvr13.news.prodigy.net...
> >> ROBBIE wrote:
> >>> "Martha Bridegam" <bride...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
> >>>news:6gqxh.68675$qO4....@newssvr13.news.prodigy.net...
>
> - Afficher le texte des messages précédents -
Here it is:
Orwell 'assaulted his girlfriend'
Jack Grimston
HIS public image was as an austere socialist of impeccable moral
standards. But a new book claims that George Orwell sexually assaulted
a young woman who was his closest friend when he was growing up and
who inspired characters in some of his most famous novels, including
Julia in 1984.
The episode left Jacintha Buddicom bruised, with a torn skirt and in
tears. The author never spoke of it, but scholars of Orwell believe it
displayed the ham-fisted approach to seduction that hampered him for
decades. It is also thought to have provided ideas for the jilted love
portrayed in Burmese Days, his first novel.
Despite his previous intimacy with Buddicom and her family, they broke
off relations until 1949 when she wrote to him as he was dying of
tuberculosis. The book, Eric & Us - Postscript, published by Finlay,
is partly a reprinting of Buddicom's memoir of her childhood with the
author, whose real name was Eric Blair. But it also includes a
postscript by Dione Venables, her cousin, on the basis of long
conversations with Buddicom, who died in 1993, and her sister Guiny.
Venables, 76, from Chichester, West Sussex, describes how Orwell
became closer and closer to Buddicom. He had been a family friend
since he was 11 and visited during holidays from Eton. One day in
September 1921, on a walk with Jacintha in the lanes around
Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, he went too far.
Although Buddicom, at 20, was two years older than Orwell, he was 6ft
4in tall and towered nearly 18in above her.
Venables writes: "Eric, it seems, had attempted to take things further
and make serious love to Jacintha. He had held her down . . . and
though she struggled, yelling at him to stop, he had torn her skirt
and bruised a shoulder and her left hip."
Soon after, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma - an
experience that led him to reject the empire. He never saw Buddicom
again.
"They were such a unit for eight years, they did all their growing up
together," said Venables. "He wanted to be betrothed to Jacintha. But
because he had too big a dollop of testosterone one day, he jumped on
her."
Venables published the story after encouragement from Gordon Bowker,
Orwell's biographer. "Orwell had a record of it.," he said. "He tried
the same thing later on a woman in Southwold, but she was a strapping
PE teacher and fought him off."
Until 1949, Buddicom never realised Eric Blair and George Orwell were
one. When she found out, she wrote to him. He replied with two letters
and managed one wheezy phone call, but they did not meet and he
married his second wife in October 1949, dying the following year.
Venables said that despite their long separation, she "had been
Martha Bridegam
Thanks for the article. Unpleasant enough tho it sounds like an attempt
only.
/M
Nigee
>
> - Show quoted text -
Are you serious with that crisp classification of attempted rape?
Martha Bridegam
Only in the sense that one may as well know the extent of what happened,
and if we are applying criminal labels they may as well be accurate.
Morally I suppose what matters is whether he gave up out of belated
decency, or intended to go through with it but was physically prevented,
and from this distance we can't know which it was.
I'm skeptical, on reflection, that Jacintha Buddicom did not know who
"George Orwell" was until 1949. Would the families, already friends for
many years, not have kept in touch after 1921? Or was the friendship
suddenly dropped and might this assault story explain why?
It even brings up some (tenuous, yes) questions about what went on in
Orwell's mind as he drafted the plot for "A Smoking-Room Story" (come to
think of it, circa 1949). Orwell's notes suggest the novel was going to
involve a young Englishman chatting with others on a ship home from
Burma to England, telling a shameful story about an event in his past.
The notes suggest the shameful event has taken place in Burma -- but
there's this association between the journey home and having to face
something in the past.... and then there's the fact that Orwell's
decision to join the Burma police was considered slightly odd despite
his family's history in colonial service...
/M
george...@email.com
get the impression that he was cut off by the Buddicoms. He saw
Prosper and Guinever in 1927, and knew that Prosper was married in
1930. Later, in 1949 it seems Jacintha wrote to Orwell immediately
after learning of his identity. In his letter of reply, he blamed
himself and his circumstances for being out of touch and that he
also had lost touch with many other old friends. He goes on to say
"you were such a tenderhearted girl, always full of pity for the
creatures we others shot and killed. But you were not so tender-
hearted to me when you abandoned me to Burma with all hope
denied." (She did not come to visit him in the hospital and they never
met again).
Orwell had been in love with Jacintha and had asked her to marry him.
She did not return that love and refused him, but nevertheless admired
and valued his friendship. That was difficult emotionally for him as
it would be for anyone. Going far away to Burma might have been his
way of handling it. He did write to her from there 3 times, but she
only answered once. Looking at it from her point of view, it would be
problematic for her as well. He had put her under pressure to return
his love. Cutting off the relationship totally might have seemed the
best solution, in spite of the fact that she was also losing something
very precious to her.
In the Times article Gordon Bowker compares the assault with an
incident which occurred between Orwell and Brenda Salkeld. In his GO
biography he writes: "One Sunday in July he invited Brenda for a
fishing expedition-cum-picnic. On this occasion she must have
permitted a little canoodling, and he must have then gone much too far
for her - the abrupt move perhaps or his usual blunt proposition. When
she rebuffed him he told her that if she did not want to make love to
him it was better they part. Outraged at this, she stormed off back to
her lodgings." This does display GO's "ham-fisted approach to
seduction" but to compare it with an assault seems to go to far,
unless his purpose is to downplay what happened with Jacintha.
B.
Martha Bridegam
Thanks, some good points from more careful and recent looking at the
history, sorry to have been careless there.
...but Bowker has a small tendency to show originality by reading
salacious things into Peter Davison's finds, doesn't he?
/M
george...@email.com
I suppose attempts at originality are the bane of the biographer-come-
lately. Though Bowker's biography is quite readable, you do want to
laugh out loud sometimes at his leaps and speculations, as in: "If
young Eric was first taught by Catholic nuns as a lone boy in a school
of girls, it would explain...his unremitting hostility towards Roman
Catholicism." Sure, that explains everything. Also he often uses the
phrase "is said" > "Stevie Smith...may have been a victim of the
Orwell pounce - she is said to have hinted at a fling."
B.
Martha Bridegam
Similarly Jeffrey Meyers, to whom dead men apparently tell tales:
"The door to his room had glass panels and a night-light was on, but he
wasn't able to ring for a nurse and no one heard his strangled cry for
help. When someone came to check on him, he was already dead."
/M
jmm1951
>
> read more »
This new Google system of displaying messages is a mess.
It seems fairly plausible to me that old George (or young Eric)
probably did display a bit too much sexual enthusiasm for the decent
young middle class women he knew when he was young, and the Buddicom
story seems very plausible to me.
He would not have been the first testosterone-rich young man to be
shipped off to the Orient to sow some wild oats, and in fact even
today I understand that Thailand, which is not a million miles from
Burma is a favorite destination of single men. I can't be bothered to
search for references, but somewhere Orwell writes of Burmese women
being incredibly clean, and I think you can take it as a given that he
obtained sexual experience with Burmese women at a time when the
standard of personal hygiene and plumbing in England was rather poor
by modern standards. Roger Beadon did not think Orwell was a womanizer
in Burma, but he may have been wrong.
Of course, Orwell was notorious for writing about the smell of the
working classes.
He was also living in Paris in the 1920's and it seems likely to me
that one of the reasons he went there for easy access to prostitutes,
or at least to a more sexually free existence than would have been
available in London, than out of a pure desire to be Down and Out. It
is on the record that he met Henry Miller in Paris. Despite the air of
innocence portrayed in the Gene Kelly musical movie, An American In
Paris, one suspects that it was more than just the cheap living and
the French cuisine that drew so many expatriates to that city.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that one episode in Down and Out
in which his money is stolen by a male room mate is actually based on
an episode involving a woman.
Adam
> I seem to remember reading somewhere that one episode in Down and Out
> in which his money is stolen by a male room mate is actually based on
> an episode involving a woman.
Gods turban and tu-tu !!!
Martha Bridegam
> Of course, Orwell was notorious for writing about the smell of the
> working classes.
No, he was notorious for writing that he had been taught to *think* they
smelled, as a middle-class "they're not like us" distancing mechanism.
/M
Martha Bridegam
> It
> is on the record that he met Henry Miller in Paris.
...on the way to Spain in 1937, not in the early days.
Though his enthusiasm for Miller's work does suggest a sense of
fellow-feeling about Paris, doesn't it?
/M
jmm1951
That was what I thought. Actually I knew that he met Miller later, but
was too lazy too point it out.
Ah, now I have found the quotation I was looking for in Sheldon, pp
138-139. (Place a book in the bathroom and sooner or later you will
find the bit you are looking for.)
"A mysterious young Italian 'with side whiskers' had stolen money from
him, Orwell says in the book, having gained entry to his room by the
use of a duplicate key."
"Several years later he told Mabel Fierz, ... that his money had
actually been taken by a girlfriend named Suzanne--'a little trollop'
whom he had 'picked up in a cafe in Paris. She was beautiful and had a
figure like a boy, an Eton crop, and was in every way desirable.'
"At some point it seems that she moved in with him, but Suzanne also
had another boyfriend elsewhere in the city--an Arab man--and one day
there was some kind of violent altercation between him and Blair. A
few days later Blair returned to his room to discover that Suzanne had
disappeared with all his luggage and money..."
So regardless of whether he preferred boys like girls or girls like
boys, it seems likely that his time in Paris was not devoted entirely
to celibacy. (And though he may have "gone down", he was never
"outed".)
jmm1951
Poem written by Blair on Burmese Government note paper.
Romance
When I was young and had no sense
In far off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day
Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,
Her teeth were ivory
I said "for twenty silver pieces,
Maiden sleep with me".
She looked at me, so pure, so sad,
The loveliest thing alive,
And in her lisping, virgin voice,
Stood out for twenty-five.
Martha Bridegam
> On Feb 6, 12:27 pm, Martha Bridegam <bride...@pacbell.net> wrote:
>> jmm1951 wrote:
>>> It
>>> is on the record that he met Henry Miller in Paris.
>> ...on the way to Spain in 1937, not in the early days.
>>
>> Though his enthusiasm for Miller's work does suggest a sense of
>> fellow-feeling about Paris, doesn't it?
>>
>> /M
>
> That was what I thought. Actually I knew that he met Miller later, but
> was too lazy too point it out.
Apologies. I guess I knew you knew that.
>
> Ah, now I have found the quotation I was looking for in Sheldon, pp
> 138-139. (Place a book in the bathroom and sooner or later you will
> find the bit you are looking for.)
>
> "A mysterious young Italian 'with side whiskers' had stolen money from
> him, Orwell says in the book, having gained entry to his room by the
> use of a duplicate key."
>
> "Several years later he told Mabel Fierz, ... that his money had
> actually been taken by a girlfriend named Suzanne--'a little trollop'
> whom he had 'picked up in a cafe in Paris. She was beautiful and had a
> figure like a boy, an Eton crop, and was in every way desirable.'
>
> "At some point it seems that she moved in with him, but Suzanne also
> had another boyfriend elsewhere in the city--an Arab man--and one day
> there was some kind of violent altercation between him and Blair. A
> few days later Blair returned to his room to discover that Suzanne had
> disappeared with all his luggage and money..."
>
> So regardless of whether he preferred boys like girls or girls like
> boys,
...or just anybody with belly muscles of steel...
> it seems likely that his time in Paris was not devoted entirely
> to celibacy.
[Shocking pun snipped.]
Erm, nope, probably not.
/M