The Last Days of George Orwell / Hilary Spurling. In: Lit Hub Daily November 2, 2018

Anthony Powell’s novel was giving him trouble; the agitation he always felt at the prospect of handing over a manuscript was now worse than ever because of the enormity of this particular project, and his own uncertainty about it. He cheered himself up by putting together a parcel of books by Barry Pain, a turn-of-the-century humorist with the dark streak that appealed to Powell in the Edwardians (“a more morbid collection of men could not be named,” he said of the light versifiers he read aloud to Tristram at bedtime).
The book package was for George Orwell, currently struggling to type out his own newly finished manuscript in time to meet a publisher’s deadline on Jura. “I love anything like that,” he wrote happily when he got it, explaining that he was still too weak to sit up at a table for long, or spend more than a few hours out of bed even though he’d left hospital in July. Nineteen Eighty-Four had taken almost more than he had to give: “it’s a ghastly mess now, a good idea ruined, but of course I was seriously ill for 7 or 8 months of the time.”
In the New Year Orwell wrote again from a sanatorium near Stroud in Gloucestershire, where he hoped that nursing and rest might lessen his exhaustion: “How about you? It’s a god awful job trying to get back to writing books again after years of time-wasting.” When Powell asked by return if he could visit, Orwell arranged for a car to meet him at the station, and laid on lunch and tea. In late February Tony came again with Muggeridge, this time walking the seven miles mostly uphill from the station. They found Orwell dreadfully decayed but otherwise entirely himself, still smoking and coughing, with a bottle of rum secreted under the bed which the three of them finished off between them. He said he hoped to live another ten years, long enough to see Richard into his mid-teens and write at least two more books. “I am not sure he will pull this off,” Muggeridge wrote in his diary. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-last-days-of-george-orwell/