Of all the women writers with whom George Orwell worked, collaborated and socialized in the 1940s – their number included Ethel Mannin, “Elisaveta Fen” (the pseudonym of Lydia Jackson), Stevie Smith and Kay Dick – by far the most tantalizing is Inez Holden (1903–74). Part of this allure lies in the sheer fascination of her backstory: the 1920s debut as a party-going Bright Young Person (she turns up in Evelyn Waugh’s diary from 1927, when the two tyro journalists were briefly employed by the Daily Express); the early novels published by Duckworth; part-time work as a columnist on society magazines; an infinitely mysterious mid-1930s period when she may or may not have been a member of the Communist Party. By the time she met Orwell in the early years of the Second World War, she seems already to have accumulated enough experience for half-a-dozen CVs.
Much more of it, though, has to do with her unfailing habit of being present at key moments in Orwell’s life: a kind of one-woman Greek chorus, eavesdropping on his encounters with other writers or marking down his reactions to moments of personal trauma. It was Inez, for example, who introduced him to Anthony Powell – a bizarre wartime encounter in which Orwell, noting that Powell was wearing dress uniform, began by observing “I see your trousers strap under the foot” – and who convened the famously argumentative sit-down with H. G. Wells in 1941, in whose coruscating wake Wells sent a furious letter advising the younger man to “read my early works, you shit”. Even more significant, perhaps, is Orwell’s arrival on her London doorstep in the spring of 1945, after he had been summoned back from occupied Europe by news that his wife, Eileen, had died – gaunt, wraith-like, “terribly sad”, and needing to be escorted to King’s Cross station to catch a late-evening train to the north.
The principal source for Inez’s dealings with Orwell, or “G. K.” as she tended to refer to him – this may have been a joke about Chesterton – is her voluminous diary, only fragments of which have ever been allowed into print. That Orwell had strong romantic feelings for her is clear from the first entry, dated May 30, 1941. Orwell was then living in St John’s Wood, Inez on Albany Street, NW1.
The writer G.K. has been here several times. I met him one evening at supper, then afterwards when I was bycycling about [sic] … he came with his wife to have a drink, and then suddenly he appeared here and took me out to lunch at the Zoo and we spent this charming day and had lunch there and I went back and had tea at his flat and then just as he was dressed up in his Home Guard uniform and ready to go off to his Parade he more or less “pounced” … I was surprised by this, by the intensity and urgency.
Whether or not there was a full-blown affair, Orwell’s interest in Inez was as much professional as physical. At this point he was reviewing films and theatre for the weekly magazine Time and Tide, bored by his duties and desperate to lighten the administrative load. The next diary entry records his subcontracting some of the work, with Inez attending plays on his behalf and providing summaries for the bona fide critic to burnish for publication: “This gives him time to get on with some of his more important work, he says he will give me half the money”. If this seems to cast Inez in the role of admiring amanuensis, then Orwell had no doubt about her talent. Reviewing her short-story collection To the Boating for the Manchester Evening News in 1945, he admits that she is “an uneven writer” but praises the accuracy of her detail, the “remarkably lifelike dialogue” and her ability to “make a pattern” by means of individual phrases that recur “like the refrain of a song”.
There was even a plan for them to collaborate on a war diary, to be published by Victor Gollancz, only for the project to falter at the hurdle of contending styles, although there is a suspicion that differing interpretations of world events may have something to do with its eventual derailing. (Inez later claimed that the scheme was abandoned “because she wanted to alter anything Orwell said with which she disagreed or believed to be inaccurate”; her own version appeared as It Was Different at the Time in 1943.) By this time Orwell had moved on from Time and Tide to a berth as talks producer in the Eastern Service of the BBC. Here, too, Inez looms large in his professional life, talent-spotting, introducing him to useful contacts and helping him to ginger up the somewhat antiquated institution of which he was now a part.
As Kristin Bluemel notes in her wide-ranging George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics (2004), much of the latter part of 1941, shortly after Orwell’s arrival at the BBC, was spent inducting him into her circle of radical and/or bohemian friends. It was through Inez that in November he met Stevie Smith, and in the same month the diary records a dinner attended by Orwell, Eileen and Smith at which “Mulk Raj Anand came by”. Anand, a Spanish Civil War veteran and the author of the highly rated Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936), was exactly the kind of Indian writer Orwell was looking for. Though there were initial difficulties over Anand’s reluctance to dole out propaganda, by January 1942 Inez could report that he was on board, with a remit to “put Orwell in touch with the right kind of Indians for his broadcasts”.
But in some ways Inez’s most revealing intervention in Orwell’s world comes in a multi-part “Story by Five Authors”, unveiled on the Eastern Service in the autumn of 1942. Orwell’s introduction opens with a man named Gilbert Moss taking refuge from a blitz-era bomb blast in a cellar. Here he discovers an unconscious casualty, supine amid the debris and identified by his cigarette lighter as “the Hon. Charles Coburn”. Moss, who knows the man from a previous life, wants revenge on class grounds. L. A. G. Strong’s continuation has Moss interrupted by passers-by before he can strike, but by the time Inez picks up the baton the story has begun to veer off into territory that seems oddly like Orwell’s own.
It is not just that the blitz casualty reflects on his past life and a varied career that takes in service in the Spanish Civil War and time spent in Paris. The clinching detail would seem to be Coburn’s memory – his mind is wandering by this stage – of days spent in “the slovenly French hospital … watching the cockroaches crawling along the floor”. There is also mention of his time at prep school with “little snob-brats”. Presently Coburn comes to and asks Moss to tell his story – the basis of Martin Armstrong’s fourth instalment – but the alert reader will already have divined that Holden has taken several fragments of her commissioning editor’s past life and used them to flesh out the autobiography of the man on the cellar floor. Yet more revealing is the fact that neither of the essays in which Orwell reflects on these experiences – “How the Poor Die” and “Such, Such Were the Joys” – had yet appeared in print. Inez had clearly had their contents communicated to her vis-à-vis.
The stream of reportage flows on into the mid-1940s: Orwell on Home Guard manoeuvres in the guise of a “parashooting [sic] Nazi”; trudging through the streets of northwest London with a wheelbarrow loaded with books rescued from his and Eileen’s bomb-damaged Kilburn maisonette; laughing at Jonathan Cape’s rejection of Animal Farm in 1944 on the grounds that “Stalin wouldn’t like it” (“Imagine old Joe (who doesn’t know a word of any European language) sitting in the Kremlin with a copy of Animal Farm and saying ‘I don’t like this!’”); out reporting canvassing in the 1945 general election. The brief account of the trip to King’s Cross in the aftermath of Eileen’s death is wonderfully atmospheric; a hurdy-gurdy playing mournfully in the background; “time” being called in the station pub a moment or two after they had ordered their drinks.
If Orwell ceases to feature in Inez’s diary after the end of 1945, it is because of his disappearance from the London scene. Apart from a relocation in the harsh winter of 1946–7, the last four years of his life were spent on the Inner Hebridean island of Jura and in hospitals and sanatoria. But the résumé of her holiday on Jura in the late summer of 1948 is a revealing document, both for the incidents it records and the things it omits. Inez conveys the curious sense of detachment of which life on the island seemed to consist – “an atmosphere of timelessness, as if dates and appointments did not matter” – and leaves a vivid pen portrait of Richard, Orwell’s four year-old son, lost in one of his incomprehensible monologues. (“Chalk an engine. No, you do one, you chalk an engine.”) Orwell at this stage had just been discharged from a long stay in a hospital outside Glasgow. Clearly his health was sufficiently recovered here in August for it not to excite remark: it was the struggle to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four in the run-up to Christmas that fatally undermined him.
“Although I thought he would die, the whole thing came as a shock”, Inez wrote when news of Orwell’s death reached her in January 1950. She found herself remembering their time together, her conversations with Eileen and “George’s rather heroic attitude to life”. Searching for her in his work, one finds only possibilities – a small part, perhaps, in the composite portrait that is Julia; a potential contributor, by way of her wartime factory novel Night Shift, to some of the bureaucratic shadings of Nineteen Eighty-Four. “A friend who had also kept a diary had an idea of making a book of the two, but this idea fell through”, Orwell informed his agent in Sept–ember 1942, drawing a line under their failed collaboration. Orwell/Holden: The war diaries remains one of the conflict’s great unrealized books.
D. J. Taylor’s Critic at Large: Essays and reviews 2010–2022 has just been published. His Orwell: The new life will appear at the end of May
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