Beschreibung:

ORWELL, George (pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950). Autograph letter signed (‘George’) to Anthony Powell (‘Dear Tony’), Cranham, 11 May 1949. Two pages, 253 x 201mm. ‘ It looks as if I may have to spend the rest of my life, if not actually in bed, at any rate at the bath-chair level ’ : Orwell laments the restrictions imposed upon him by his failing health, just months before his death from tuberculosis. He opens on the books that have occupied him recently: he has finally got hold of [Powell’s] John Aubrey – ‘I had not realised he was such an all-round chap – had simply thought of him in connection with scandalous anecdotes’ – has read Margarete Neumann’s book – ‘quite good, obviously written by a sincere person’ – and tells Powell to recommend to Malcolm [Muggeridge] Ruth Fischer's Stalin and German Communism . He is sorry to hear about Hugh Kingsmill, whose book on Dickens he has just re-read – ‘it’s a brilliant book, but it’s the case for the prosecution. I wonder why somebody doesn’t reprint “After Puritanism”’ – and wonders about getting [George] Gissing’s New Grub Street reprinted. Ending on a gloomy note, on the subject of his health, he confesses: ‘I have been beastly ill, on & off. I can't make any firm plans. If I'm reasonably well this winter I shall go abroad for some months. If I'm able to walk but can't face the journey I shall stay in somewhere like Brighton. If I have to continue in bed I shall try to move to some sanatorium near London where people can come & see me more easily’. Orwell could stand the bath-chair ‘for say 5 years if only I could work. At present I can do nothing, not even a book review’. The novelist Anthony Powell (1905-2000) had become a close friend of Orwell’s after the two first met at the Café Royal in 1941; when Orwell moved to Islington in 1944, close to Powell, their social lives became more tightly intertwined. Their shared literary circle encompassed writers from Malcom Muggeridge to Cyril Connolly, and Orwell’s letters to Powell are particularly rich in content, whether literary or personal. Orwell’s reflections in the present letter on his plans for the months and years ahead are poignant – he was unaware, being uninformed by his doctors, that he had only months to live.