By the summer of 1946, George Orwell needed to get out of London. Having only just entered his forties, the author, BBC radio presenter, and prolific freelance journalist was already beginning to feel the effects of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him.
“I must try and stay alive for a while because apart from other considerations I have a good idea for a novel,” he wrote to David Astor, editor of the Observer newspaper. Astor had a suggestion, namely that Orwell should head to the remote Scottish island of Jura to stay in a farmhouse called Barnhill that the Fletcher family, Astor’s neighboring estate owners, held there. Orwell agreed with Astor’s proposition; this was a dwelling where he could get the clean air, time, and refuge from war-ravaged London that he so desperately needed.
Jura wasn’t easy to reach back then (even today, it’s a bit of journey by boat or air), and its blanket bog and trio of conical quartzite mountains, known to locals as the “Paps,” were home to only a few hundred people and a tremendous number of red deer in the 1940s (today, resident deer outnumber resident humans by thirty-to-one).
The remote peatland landscape wasn’t entirely peaceful, despite its isolation, however. Jura was, and still is, the location of the Corryvreckan, an exceptionally perilous natural whirlpool. It’s long been a source of danger to fisherman and an object of fascination for artists, as Monika Szuba explains in her 2019 book on contemporary Scottish poetry.
“The word corryvreckan in Gaelic means ‘cauldron of the speckled seas’ or ‘cauldron of the plaid,’” she writes,
and is the name of a strait between the islands of Jura and Scarba off the west coast of Scotland. The gulf features in Scottish mythology as the Goddess of Winter, Cailleach (creator, weather deity), a powerful weather kelpie who washes her plait in the waters there, which marks the moment when autumn turns into winter.
Located at the end of a six-mile dirt track which traversed the all-but-uninhabited northern half of the thirty-mile-long island, Barnhill, even with its lack of modern facilities, didn’t seem to faze Orwell. This was a man who had lengthy experience in surviving far from luxuriant conditions, firstly from his time living with the destitute of Paris and London as part of his first successful non-fiction volume and secondly as a fighter for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
Venturing to Barnhill in 1994, the Canadian writer and Orwell scholar Sylvia Topp, described her observations and those of Orwell’s hardy few friends who travelled to visit him, concluding that
[i]naccessibility is a great way to weed out the unwanted. Another constant complaint of his contemporaries concerned the discomfort and general dreariness of his, “gloomy looking fortress of a home” and its surroundings. His nearest neighbour said, “Even by the end of his time on Jura the house never looked comfortable… it was fairly bleak.” Others decried the lack of electricity and other amenities, accusing him of being unable to enjoy a “comfortable holiday.”
Growing vegetables and seemingly delighted with the ascetic life, Orwell based himself in a bedroom of Barnhill to consider his life’s purpose and to write the most powerful and disturbing novel of the twentieth century, 1984.
A particularly succinct explanation of 1984 is provided by Douwe Fokkema in his 2011 book, Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West. The novel “is an extrapolation from the political situation under totalitarian regimes, such as in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany,” he writes. Orwell’s fictional world
remains close to the familiar reality of World War II in England and avoids the trappings of science fiction, with the exception of the installation in every household of a telescreen that works both as a receiver and an emitter of messages. Winston Smith, the main character, only vaguely remembers the days before Big Brother assumed dictatorial power, when Airstrip One was still called England or Britain.
For Orwell, writing the book was a race against time as his health continued to deteriorate. Yet the testimonies of some of his friends, including Georges Kopp, describe a man determined not to let his maladies get the better of him.
Kopp was a Belgian engineer who left his life to join the Spanish Republican cause and subsequently became a friend of fellow volunteer Orwell. Kopp’s biographer, Marc Wildemeersch, in his 2013 book, George Orwell’s Commander in Spain: The Enigma of Georges Kopp, reports that Kopp’s oldest son, Michel, visited George in the summer of 1947. Michel’s notes on the visit make for fascinating reading when it comes to the day-to-day life led on Jura.
“I spent a week as a guest in Barnhill,” Michel writes. He found himself in
a rather dilapidated farm house lent to Orwell by the local Lord (or Laird as they say in Scotland), a friend of Etonian days. [Orwell’s] maiden sister was keeping house for him. She was a poor cook […] At the time Orwell was writing the book later published as “1984” […] Unfortunately I saw very little of the great man: he was working day and night at his book with perhaps the premonition it would be the last one and that death was lurking in the background. I used to see him mainly at supper time. He was looking in poor health, eating little, chain smoking and drinking a lot of coffee. His conversation was most fascinating although some parts of it dealing with political and philosophical topics passed over my head. Today I wish I could remember them.
Orwell’s health deteriorated still further after a sailing trip, during which he, along with his adopted son Richard, nearly died after being accidentally sucked into the Corryvreckan. After receiving medical care in East Kilbride on the Scottish mainland, Orwell was forced to leave Jura for London in 1949. He would die less than a year later, aged just forty-six, in January 1950.
It had been a close call, but Orwell had completed 1984, a novel that distills everything he feared about totalitarianism. The book introduced concepts such as “Big Brother” and the “Thought Police,” which have become mainstays of the political and cultural lexicon worldwide. Discussions about the significance and meaning of the novel will likely continue as long as there are writers and readers who aren’t subject to the tyranny of thought, behavior, and action described in its pages.
Yet the book’s legacy troubled Orwell even in its earliest days. As John Newsinger writes, even while Orwell was in the hospital,
effectively fighting for his life, he was already worried by the way that the novel had been received, indeed positively welcomed as an attack on the left, especially in the US. He had expected the Communists to portray it as such, but the response was more general with people on the right praising the book as anti-socialist as well.
Orwell attempted to demonstrate that 1984 was to be read as a denouncement of totalitarian ideas, not democratic socialism, but, Newsinger writes, his campaign to clarify his message “was cut short by his untimely death.”
Eight decades on from the sound of a typewriter’s keys echoing around a farmhouse on a distant Scottish island, both 1984 and Corryvreckan continue to churn and continue to frighten those who venture near.
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