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Orwell's Nose: A Pathological Biography

de John Sutherland

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In 2012 writer John Sutherland permanently lost his sense of smell. At about the same time, he embarked on a rereading of George Orwell and--still coping with his recent disability--noticed something peculiar: Orwell was positively obsessed with smell. In this original, irreverent biography, Sutherland offers a fresh account of Orwell's life and works, one that sniffs out a unique, scented trail that wends from Burmese Days through Nineteen Eighty-Four and on to The Road to Wigan Pier.             Sutherland airs out the odors, fetors, stenches, and reeks trapped in the pages of Orwell's books. From Winston Smith's apartment in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which "smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats," to the tantalizing aromas of concubine Ma Hla May's hair in Burmese Days, with its "mingled scent of sandalwood, garlic, coconut oil, and jasmine," Sutherland explores the scent narratives that abound in Orwell's literary world. Along the way, he elucidates questions that have remained unanswered in previous biographies, addressing gaps that have kept the writer elusively from us. In doing so, Sutherland offers an entertaining but enriching look at one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and, moreover, an entirely new and sensuous way to approach literature: nose first.  … (mais)
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There have been many Orwell biographies and memoirs. John Sutherland, a latecomer to the field, explores a dimension neglected by the others. Sutherland calls his book a ‘pathological biography’. Orwell was possessed by an acute sense of how things and people smell. Though Orwell’s pathologies were not confined to his acute sense of smell - ‘hyperosmia’ is the technical name for the condition - it is his hyperosmia that dominates Sutherland’s account of his life. Orwell’s Nose is suffused by smells. There are even, for readers who might have had enough by the end of the main text, two appendices which provide an olfactory obbligato or ‘smell narrative’ for A Clergyman’s Daughter and the ‘long trail of nauseating stink’ that runs through The Road to Wigan Pier.

Sutherland is a retired professor of English literature and a prolific author and editor of standard literary texts, biographies and critical studies. He concedes that this late contribution to the extensive body of his published works may seem a ‘very strange’ project. Three years before publication, in the course of re-reading Orwell, Sutherland suddenly lost his own sense of smell. This late onset of anosmia cast Orwell’s novels, essays and polemical pieces in a new and illuminating light. (It is difficult to avoid visual metaphors when describing the olfactory dimension of Sutherland’s altered view of Orwell’s work.) He offers a biographical approach to his subject ‘from oblique, self-indulgent angles’.

There is a pervasive sense of disgust with his fellow beings that runs, like a polluted stream, through Orwell’s corpus. He felt his own origins to be contemptible. Orwell was born in Bengal as Eric Arthur Blair, the son of a minor British civil servant and reared in England in what he later described with condescending precision as a ‘lower, upper middleclass’ home. The young Blair was elevated to Eton College by scholarships and the sacrifice of their own well-being by his parents and younger sister. Later, under his authorial pseudonym, chosen to commemorate the river Orwell where he enjoyed coarse fishing, he found his subject matter as a participant observer among the dispossessed and unwashed who gave him ample cause for disgust. Sutherland takes from Orwell’s classic study of poverty, The Road to Wigan Pier, an introductory epigraph: ‘four frightful words…the lower classes smell.’ Orwell himself, on the testimony of those who knew him well, stank of sour sweat, black shag tobacco and halitosis which made him turn his head aside in conversation, so as not to afflict others with his breath.

Quite apart from the olfactory dimension, there is much to dislike about Orwell in Sutherland’s account of his life. He was a thankless leech to his family who nurtured his scholastic aptitude and sent him to Eton where he learned contempt for his origins. Though Orwell subsequently described Eton College as a ‘festering centre of snobbishness’ he sent Richard, his adopted son, to be schooled there and throughout his career called on an old boys’ network of wealthy and influential Etonians to rescue him from penury and promote his publications. He was a brutal and perfunctory lover, a persistent groper and grabber, always ready to betray his friends, if he could, by making sexual advances on their wives and girlfriends. He was a faithless husband, twice married, who reduced his wives, who were talented women in their own right, to drudgery and servitude in support of his own work. His fiction and social comment are remarkable for their savagery – a ‘vein of nastiness’, often directed against those closest to him, to whom he owed so much. He was, like DH Lawrence, a great hater. Both, incidentally, were taught by their mothers to despise their fathers. The unfairness and inaccuracy of much of his literary excoriation of family, teachers, lovers and friends brings Sutherland to the point of expressing a visceral dislike for Orwell who perpetrated some of his more pitiless and slanderous attacks, ‘coward that he was’ from hiding, behind his adopted pseudonym. On discovering a depiction of herself in one of the novels his first lover said she felt ‘torn limb from limb’.

None of this detracts from his achievement as a writer. Distanced from others by mutual disgust he sacrificed himself to record, with clarity and sensory acuity, the cruel hypocrisies of what was, in retrospect, a particularly horrible period of human history. What sustained him, it seems, was a persistent fantasy of a lost rural England and bucolic joys of harvest and innocent love among the sheaves. He enjoyed the smell of agriculture and the smell of grazing ungulates but hated the omnivorous pig. The olfactory dimension in pervasive in Animal Farm, his despairing fable of socialism subverted. His enduring fame, says Sutherland, is his dystopian vision of humanity, expressed in prose that has the clarity of a windowpane on reality.

Sutherland is predictably well informed and penetrating in descriptions of Orwell’s intellectual influences and cultural milieu. His account of Orwell’s relationship with William Empson, a poet and the ‘cleverest literary critic of the century’, is particularly illuminating. These two ‘supremely clever men’ engaged in extended and disputatious discussion about the nature of linguistic communication during the war years, when they worked from adjoining cubicles in the BBC. These disputes and discussions helped to crystallize their very different views on the nature of language.

Sutherland suggests that Empson owed a debt to these discussions in his 1951 monograph, The Structure of Complex Words, published in the year following Orwell’s death. Orwell’s famous essay, Politics and the English Language and his subsequent elaboration of Newspeak, the language of totalitarian dominance in 1984, owed a similar debt to the stimulation provided by Empson. In this last and most enduring of Orwell’s books, William Empson appears as Ampleforth, who is employed in the Ministry of Truth to bowdlerize ideologically unacceptable poetry. The intellectual relationship between Empson and Orwell at the BBC had its predictable concomitant. Orwell made a determined effort to seduce Empson’s fiancé who rejected him because of his smell. ( )
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In 2012 writer John Sutherland permanently lost his sense of smell. At about the same time, he embarked on a rereading of George Orwell and--still coping with his recent disability--noticed something peculiar: Orwell was positively obsessed with smell. In this original, irreverent biography, Sutherland offers a fresh account of Orwell's life and works, one that sniffs out a unique, scented trail that wends from Burmese Days through Nineteen Eighty-Four and on to The Road to Wigan Pier.             Sutherland airs out the odors, fetors, stenches, and reeks trapped in the pages of Orwell's books. From Winston Smith's apartment in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which "smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats," to the tantalizing aromas of concubine Ma Hla May's hair in Burmese Days, with its "mingled scent of sandalwood, garlic, coconut oil, and jasmine," Sutherland explores the scent narratives that abound in Orwell's literary world. Along the way, he elucidates questions that have remained unanswered in previous biographies, addressing gaps that have kept the writer elusively from us. In doing so, Sutherland offers an entertaining but enriching look at one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and, moreover, an entirely new and sensuous way to approach literature: nose first.  

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