Recollections of George Orwell

Imagine Don Quixote without his horse and his drooping whiskers, and you will get a fair idea of what George Orwell looked like.

Imagine Don Quixote without his horse and his drooping whiskers, and you will get a fair idea of what George Orwell looked like. He was a tall and angular man, with a worn Gothic face that was elongated by vertical furrows at the corners of the mouth. His rather narrow upper lip was adorned by a thin line of moustache, and the general gauntness of his looks was accentuated by the deep sockets from which his eyes looked out sadly.

I first met Orwell during the early years of the last war, when he was working at the Indian Department of the B.B.C. in London. He had sent me an invitation to take part in a discussion panel on poetry which he was organizing, and, since we had recently indulged in a rather violent dispute in the Partisan Review, I was a little surprised at such an approach. But I agreed, mostly, I think, to show that I bore as few ill feelings as Orwell himself evidently did.

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