What’s Your Birthmark?

A brief note from Ilona, Gail's webmaster: Gail and I had issues with Wix. Until today, we were unable to access the website.

The fictional John Flory in George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, has a face that isn’t forgotten. “The first thing that one noticed in Flory was a hideous birthmark stretching in a ragged crescent down his left cheek, from the eye to the corner of the mouth.”  Yet at death, the birthmark vanishes when Flory shoots himself through the heart. What it all means is left to the reader, who cannot miss that Flory is estranged, desperately lonely, and deeply humiliated by novel’s end. The setting is Katha, though called Kyauktada in the novel.  Katha was Eric Blair’s last posting in Burma, and a short one due to dengue fever and complications from it. At the end of June in 1927, Blair returned at age 24 to England on medical leave, and he did not return to Burma. Yet he did not forget this country, and his first attempt to write a novel resulted in Burmese Days. It was published in the U.S.A. in 1934 and in Great Britain in 1935. It is significant that in late 1949, before Orwell’s death on January 21st in 1950, he had been working on another novel about Burma.

On a personal note, a long & wide birthmark on my inner left arm, above and below the elbow, has faded. Yet when I played competitive tennis in sunny So Cal, the birthmark was dark brown; and I would be asked about it. Another birthmark on my right inner ankle, the size of a quarter, dark and raised, interested dermatologists through the years. That one is also gone. In childhood and adolescence I disliked being a red head, covered with freckles. But I recall asking myself this question: What if that dark, three-inch long & more than one inch wide birthmark were on my face?  Would I, like John Flory, have kept my face turned to one side, never looking straight ahead at anyone?

In thinking just now about Orwell’s John Flory, and the multitudes of real people everywhere who suffer from desperate loneliness, I hear in my mind the song “Eleanor Rigby.” 

It was written and sung by the Beatles, and who can forget the refrain… “All the lonely people?” And Eleanor “who keeps her face in a jar by the door.”  I have long argued that the boys from Liverpool had read W. H. Auden’s poem “Miss Edith Gee,” and it stuck in their heads and morphed into this poignant and memorable song.  When I taught high school English for over a decade, I used the poem &song with students.  Look both up and you’ll see what I mean.

It is difficult for me to let go of Orwell, especially in these Orwellian times. And next week I want to write about Burma Sahib and why Paul Theroux’s depiction of Eric Blair in Burma disturbs me, as does Orwell, the 2000 biography by Jeffery Meyers.