Second World War and Animal Farm
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Orwell's wife Eileen started working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in central London, staying during the week with her family in Greenwich. Orwell submitted his name to the Central Register for war work, but nothing transpired. He returned to Wallington, and in late 1939, he wrote material for his first collection of essays, Inside the Whale. For the next year, he was occupied writing reviews for plays, films and books for The Listener, Time and Tide and New Adelphi. On 29 March 1940 his long association with Tribune began with a review of a sergeant's account of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. At the beginning of 1940, the first edition of Connolly's Horizon appeared, and this provided a new outlet for Orwell's work and new literary contacts. In May the Orwells took lease of a flat in London at Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, Marylebone. It was the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, and the death in Flanders of Eileen's brother Laurence O'Shaughnessy caused her considerable grief and long-term depression.
Orwell was declared "unfit for any kind of military service" by the Medical Board in June, but soon joined the Home Guard. He shared Tom Wintringham's socialist vision for the Home Guard as a revolutionary People's Militia. His lecture notes for instructing platoon members include advice on street fighting, field fortifications, and the use of mortars. Sergeant Orwell recruited Fredric Warburg to his unit. During the Battle of Britain he spent weekends with Warburg and his new Zionist friend, Tosco Fyvel, at Warburg's house at Twyford, Berkshire. At Wallington, he worked on "England Your England" and in London wrote reviews for periodicals. Visiting Eileen's family in Greenwich brought him face-to-face with the effects of the German Blitz bombings. In 1940, he first worked for the BBC as a producer on their Indian Section, while the broadcaster and writer Venu Chitale was his secretary. In mid-1940, Warburg, Fyvel and Orwell planned Searchlight Books. Eleven volumes eventually appeared, of which Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, published in February 1941, was the first.
Early in 1941, he began to write for the American Partisan Review which linked Orwell with the New York Intellectuals who were also anti-Stalinist, and contributed to the Gollancz anthology The Betrayal of the Left, written in the light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. He applied unsuccessfully for a job at the Air Ministry. Meanwhile, he was still writing reviews of books and plays and met the novelist Anthony Powell. He took part in radio broadcasts for the Eastern Service of the BBC. In March the Orwells moved to a seventh-floor flat at Langford Court, St John's Wood, while at Wallington Orwell was "digging for victory" by planting potatoes.
One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten.
In August 1941, Orwell finally obtained "war work" when he was taken on full-time by the BBC's Eastern Service. He supervised cultural broadcasts to India, to counter propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine imperial links.
At the end of August he had a dinner with H. G. Wells which degenerated into a row because Wells had taken offence at observations Orwell made about him in a Horizon article. This meeting was dramatised in the BBC2 series Encounters in 1992. In October Orwell had a bout of bronchitis; the illness recurred frequently. David Astor was looking for a provocative contributor for The Observer Sunday newspaper, and invited Orwell to write for him; the first article appeared in March 1942. In early 1942 Eileen changed jobs to work at the Ministry of Food, and in mid-1942 the Orwells moved to a larger flat, 10a Mortimer Crescent in Maida Vale/Kilburn.
At the BBC, Orwell introduced Voice, a literary programme for his Indian broadcasts, and by now was leading an active social life with literary friends, particularly on the political left. Late in 1942 he started writing regularly for the left-wing weekly Tribune directed by Labour MPs Aneurin Bevan and George Strauss. In March 1943, Orwell's mother died, and around this time he told Moore he was starting work on a book, which turned out to be Animal Farm.
In September 1943, Orwell resigned from the BBC following a report confirming his fears that few Indians listened to the broadcasts, but he was also keen to concentrate on writing Animal Farm. On 24 November 1943, six days before his last day of service, his adaptation of the fairy tale, Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes was broadcast. It was a genre in which he was greatly interested and which appeared on Animal Farm's title page. He resigned from the Home Guard on medical grounds.
In November 1943, Orwell was appointed literary editor at Tribune, where his assistant was his friend Jon Kimche. Orwell was on the staff until early 1945, writing over 80 book reviews, and on 3 December 1943 started his regular personal column "As I Please". He was still writing reviews for other magazines, including Partisan Review, Horizon, and the New York Nation. By April 1944 Animal Farm was ready for publication. Gollancz refused to publish it, considering it an attack on the regime of the Soviet Union, a crucial ally in the war. A similar fate was met from other publishers, including T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, until Jonathan Cape agreed to take it.
Orwell and Eileen wanted children, but he was sterile and she may also have been infertile due to uterine cancer. In May the Orwells had the opportunity to adopt a child, thanks to the contacts of Eileen's sister-in-law Gwen O'Shaughnessy, then a doctor in Newcastle upon Tyne. In June a V-1 flying bomb struck Mortimer Crescent and the Orwells had to find somewhere else to live. Orwell had to scrabble around in the rubble for his books, which he had finally managed to transfer from Wallington, carting them away in a wheelbarrow. Another blow was Cape's reversal of his plan to publish Animal Farm. The decision followed his visit to Peter Smollett, an official at the Ministry of Information, who was later identified as a Soviet agent.
The Orwells spent time in the North East, near Carlton, County Durham, dealing with the adoption of a boy whom they named Richard Horatio Blair. By September 1944 they had set up home in Islington, at 27b Canonbury Square. Baby Richard joined them there, and Eileen gave up her work at the Ministry of Food to look after her family. Secker & Warburg had agreed to publish Animal Farm, planned for the following March, although it did not appear in print until August 1945. By February 1945 David Astor had invited Orwell to become a war correspondent for The Observer. He went to liberated Paris, then to Germany and Austria, to cities including Cologne and Stuttgart. He was never in the front line, under fire, but followed the troops closely, "sometimes entering a captured town within a day of its fall while dead bodies lay in the streets". Some of his reports were published in the Manchester Evening News.
While he was there, Eileen went into hospital for a hysterectomy. She had not given Orwell much notice about the operation because of worries about the cost, and because she expected to make a speedy recovery; however she died on 29 March 1945 of an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic she was given. It was expected that he would give up his nine-month-old adopted son, but he did not. Orwell returned home and then went back to Europe. He returned to London to cover the 1945 general election at the beginning of July. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story was published in Britain on 17 August 1945, and in America on 26 August 1946.
