George Orwell (né Eric Blair) left England for Burma at age 19, a freshly minted graduate of Eton College, the poshest school in the British Empire. The year was 1922, and Orwell/Blair would remain in Burma until 1927, a member of the imperial police force. What little we know of his time there can be learned from his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), and two essays, "A Hanging" (1931) and "Shooting an Elephant" (1936). His Burmese days have always carried with them an air of mystery and an absence of detail, which drove Paul Theroux—travel writer, essayist, novelist, sage—to set himself the task of imagining the young man's years in this eastern edge of the Raj. The result is Burma Sahib, a novel published earlier this year, that brings to life Orwell/Blair's time in Burma.
Mr. Theroux sat down for an interview with Tunku Varadarajan, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a writer with the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. The interview was conducted by email, in one single sitting that lasted 90 minutes of back-and-forth.
TUNKU VARADARAJAN: You use a line from George Orwell's Burmese Days as the epigraph of your latest novel: "There is a short period in everyone's life when his character is fixed forever." It's a striking thought. What exactly does it mean?
PAUL THEROUX: I was struck by this line, because it described the effect of Eric Blair's life as a policeman in Burma, his experience at the sharp end of the Raj doing (as he said) "the dirty work of empire." Those five years changed him utterly—he was 19 when he joined the Indian Imperial Police, he was 25 when he resigned, and after this period when he had power, a uniform, servants, and a good salary, he dropped out, became a dishwasher in Paris and a tramp in London, and changed his name to George Orwell and was ever after an eloquent critic of colonialism—and did not make any money until the end of his life, with 1984. I should add that I had a similar experience, becoming a teacher in the British territory of Nyasaland in 1963 and staying in Africa for six years, realizing that I did not want to be a medical doctor (I was a pre-med student) or a teacher, but a rather a writer. So I could relate to Blair in Burma.
VARADARAJAN: Tell me a little bit more about your youthful sojourn in Nyasaland. What would Eric Blair have made of the place?
THEROUX: Blair would have liked it much more than his policing in Burma. I taught at a bush school and seven months later the country became independent Malawi. Many of the Africans I knew had been involved in the struggle, and my headmaster became ambassador to the U.N., so I took his place. I was 22. I had a small house, a cook, a gardener, and excellent students—barefoot but intelligent and ambitious. And, like Blair in Burma, I was awakened to the freedom of living my life, finding friends—women! And in 1963 there were old men and women who remembered Central Africa in the 1890s—Blair would have been fascinated by their stories, as I was. But given the fact that Blair did not seem to have made any Burmese friends, and had a dim view of Indians, he might have felt more isolated in Africa than I was. Blair hated Burmese monks, called Gandhi "a Rasputin," and didn't think India or Burma were ready for independence.
VARADARAJAN: Your own accounts of your time in Nyasaland feature a lot of sex. You were quite active, if you'll permit the observation. Did you extrapolate from your own experience in your giving to Eric Blair such a sex-filled time as a young man in Burma? Or was colonialism, more broadly, a time and project imbued with sexuality?
THEROUX: Yes, I was young and active in a country with a relaxed view of such matters. I didn't need to extrapolate my experience, because by his own admission Blair—who had very little sexual experience as an Etonian—found himself in colonial Burma with its available brothels. He never wrote directly about this but he alluded to his fascination with Burmese beauties—there are lots of hints in Burmese Days—and he apparently had an affair with an older woman (I call her Mrs. Jellicoe). When he married his first wife Eileen, he was often unfaithful, and it could have been described as an "open marriage." In Morocco in the 1930s he told Eileen that he fancied Moroccan women. She did not object to his having a dalliance, which he acted upon. He felt he was unattractive and yet he pursued women throughout his (rather short) life. In Burma the British were overlords and did pretty much what they wished. There was no stigma attached to dalliances with natives—but marrying one meant the end of your career. I have an example of that in my novel, Blair's friend Seeley marrying a Bengali—absolutely true and well-documented. She was pretty, intelligent, and her father a judge in the high court. Blair pronounced it "Folly."
I read all the available Orwell biographies—nine of them. All the books by Orwell's friends and contemporaries. All the books that Orwell read in Burma, mentioned by the biographies and by Orwell himself. All the relevant histories of Burma and colonialism. Finally, the complete works of Orwell. Hundreds of books. I intend to put my bibliography on my website.
VARADARAJAN: You're 83, in the (impressively elegant and energetic) sunset of your life. Eric Blair was 19 when he began the period you write about. How hard was it for you to write about a man in the very dawn of his life, so many years after your own dawn?
THEROUX: You started by asking about "the short period when one's character is fixed." This period is fixed in such a person's mind as powerful and formative. Look at the Conrad story "Youth," on the same theme—he wrote it years after the experience. I found it very easy to recall my first impressions of colonial Nyasaland, and throughout his life, Orwell constantly alluded to his years in Burma—in book reviews, essays, and books, recalling it in The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia in detail. On his deathbed, Orwell was writing a novella he titled A Smoking Room Story—set on shipboard, circa 1927, a young man returning from Burma. As for myself I have never stopped pondering my years in Africa and writing about them, three novels in the 1970s, two travel books, a fairly recent novel The Lower River, and in my new collection of short stories The Vanishing Point (out in January 2025), a story set in Malawi.
VARADARAJAN: Burma Sahib, let it be clear to our readers, is a novel about Orwell's earliest years as a man, years of which he left (by common consent) little by way of personal detail. And yet you write of his life—his inner life, his social life—in considerable detail. How much of this detail is the result of your magpie-gleanings, as it were, from his sparse writings from the period and how much the exercise of your novelistic imagination? I mean, how much did you feel you needed to make up?
THEROUX: There's an immense amount of circumstantial detail relating directly to Blair/Orwell. Take his relationship with Harold Robinson, which is central to his life in Mandalay and Rangoon. Robinson was famously married to a Burmese, he was an opium addict and a friend of Blair—and when he wrote about his experiences (his failed suicide, his dalliances) Orwell reviewed the book in 1943. The old Etonian Seeley's marriage in Rangoon, the visit of the old Etonian Christopher Hollis—Hollis wrote in detail about it. Blair's relatives in Moulmein—the Limouzin family offered a great deal of scope, because Blair was posted there and though he was ashamed (one married to an Indian, another to a Burmese) he would have seen a lot of them covertly. His mother had been born in Moulmein and was proud of her colonial relatives. Lots of associated detail from colonial memoirs and histories. We know Blair/Orwell loved animals and gardening, so I exploited that, along with his reading (Wells, Lawrence, Samuel Butler, Maugham, etc.).
In Burmese Days the main character Flory has a birthmark on his face and felt it made him conspicuous. I think Blair was embarrassed about his height—at 6'2" his "birth mark." I exploited that. As for the crimes and the social detail there are wonderful accounts of such things in the books of Maurice Collis, who was a magistrate in Burma around the same time. And there are Blair's poems—one about a Burmese prostitute, which speaks volumes.
VARADARAJAN: Your book is a reliving in fiction of the life of a Real Person, an icon. Were there other authors you read for inspiration who have done something similar successfully?
THEROUX: I'm sure there are many novelists who've depicted a historical person in fiction, but no notable ones come to mind. When I was a small boy, I read a novel called He Went With Marco Polo [published in 1935 by Louise Andrews Kent]—an eyewitness to Marco Polo's travels that really thrilled me. My novel arose from my lifelong reading of Orwell, and was stimulated by the timidity of biographers in speculating on his life in Burma. Orwell was also full of contradictions—I alluded to his belief that Indians were incapable of ruling themselves. He thought Stalin was diabolical but Hitler a sort of Sad Sack and clown. After Burma he lived a life of atonement, and I always asked: What was he atoning for?—and found many examples and experiences that shamed him. If you read all the works of a particular author, you know that person well.
VARADARAJAN: Did you travel to Burma for spadework or research for the book? I know you've been to Burma before, several times. How has it changed since the first time you went? Does the change depress you? More broadly, does today's world, so different from the world in which you first made your mark as a writer, depress you, piss you off?
THEROUX: I first traveled to Burma in May 1970, when I was a teacher, living in Singapore. Rangoon was a decaying colonial city with all the buildings that Blair knew, as well as the prison at Insein where he was posted. Mandalay was similarly unchanged and on a trip three years later I stayed in Maymyo at a "chummery" (hostel for bachelors) where he had stayed. On a visit in 2010, I found Burma changed—big hotels, Chinese influence, military government, political oppression—awful. Burma, it seems, has never had a stable government—I asked a U.S. ambassador about this and he had no answer. The country has many minorities and language groups but that doesn't really explain it. The people I've met in Burma I've found intelligent, funny, friendly—though the Burmese dislike Indians because Indians were brought in by the British as policemen and soldiers.
Today's world, you ask. Ha! When I was growing up in the 1950s the population of the USA was 150 million. It is much more than twice that now. An immense difference! The same is true all over the world—pressure of population, as well as climate change, greater inequality, persistent malgobierno. But I was thinking the other day about the 1960s in the USA—a decade of assassinations, cities burning, the Civil Rights struggle, the Vietnam war, and seemingly no end to what was real chaos. But it ended in the 1970s, the smoke cleared. The Cultural Revolution in China was worse—that ended in 1976. Nothing I see today can compare to these vastations. Books were banned in the 1950s and '60s—they're still being banned, different books. The New York Times refused to publish a piece about a restaurant I wrote about in Vicksburg, Mississippi, because the menu advertised "plantation cuisine." Plantation is now a forbidden word, but the word fuck is acceptable and so (in rap songs) is that taboo word. Funny old world. I knew the best of it—a golden age. Plenty to write about, but I fear for my grandchildren.
VARADARAJAN: I can't resist asking what Orwell would have made of the world that he died too young to see and live in. The Cold War and its end. The rise of China. Sexual and homosexual liberation. The Internet. And, most piquantly of all, the End of Empire and the shrinking of Britain.
THEROUX: Orwell resisted and mocked modernity, commercialism, technology, and aspects of life that he associated with American notions and innovation. He valued privacy, he abominated dictatorship, he admired what he considered English values of decency and fair play. He would be horrified by the world we've made, which was not his dystopian prediction but a monstrous version of one just as bad in his view—full of fads and gadgets, full of intrusion, no privacy, government overreach, and as someone who often jeered at homosexuals, he would be baffled by what's happened, equality and same-sex marriage, not to mention nonbinary, the whole discussion of identity, much of which has me wondering. Towards the end of his life, he retreated to a farm on a remote Scottish island, Jura. I'm pretty sure that if he had lived into his 80s (that is 1984) he would have lived there permanently as a very crusty commentator.
VARADARAJAN: You established your name, foremost, as a travel writer, a citizen of the world with pen in hand. Is travel writing as a genre now dead, killed off by too-easy travel and our resultant inundation in a sea of glib and mediocre accounts of their travels by people who should really be keeping their thoughts to themselves?
THEROUX: I am out of sympathy and often repelled by what passes for travel writing today—weak, flatulent, unambitious. The world is more widely known than at any time in history, and yet there are human stories—valuable ones, if anyone cares to listen. I still love to travel, especially on the ground—road trips—and intend to keep driving, so in that sense the going is still good.
VARADARAJAN: Let's imagine you're a 21st century pharaoh who'll be buried, when the time comes, with his most precious possessions. Which three, or five, of the books you've written—and you've written many more than 50—would you like to be laid atop you?
THEROUX: My books are not precious. I rarely reread them except when someone sends me a compliment ("I liked this paragraph…") and I'm provoked to look it up. They always seem to me to have been written by someone else, an earlier version of myself that I've grown out of and find faintly embarrassing. My wife is precious, my children are precious, my grandchildren. My books are like breadcrumbs I've dropped along the way, as in the folktale, to chart my course. The ones I remember giving me pleasure at the time of writing are The Mosquito Coast, Mother Land, My Secret History, and Burma Sahib. For travel, I think, Dark Star Safari and Deep South. But in my heart, I don't believe they're mine—they belong to the readers, bless them.