PARANOIA

On the Guardian (UK) website, "Observer" columnist Robert McCrum posts the saddening account of the stressful composition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the attendant health problems that killed Orwell, age 46, soon after the book's 1949 publication.

Barnhill [a house on the Scottish island of Jura], overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world. [...]

The typing of the fair copy of "The Last Man in Europe" [the original title of Nineteen Eighty-Four] became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his "unbelievably bad" manuscript, the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. [...] "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied... I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB [tuberculosis]." [...]

By mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter" by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. [...]

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone.