A sandbag-protected trench used during the Spanish Civil War, in the region of Spain where George Orwell was shot through the neck.
A sandbag-protected trench used during the Spanish Civil War, in the area of Spain where George Orwell was shot through the neck. Spanish Civil War/Shutterstock

In the spring of 1937, George Orwell was fighting with the anarchists in northeastern Spain when he was shot through the neck. "A Fascist sniper got me," he writes in Homage to Catalonia. "Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock—no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning."

His knees crumpled, his head hit the ground "with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt," and an American called out for a knife to cut open Orwell's shirt. Orwell (whose real name was Eric Blair) couldn't speak, but he had a knife on him, and to be helpful he tried to grab it, but "discovered that my right arm was paralyzed. Not being in pain, I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I thought; she had always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me from being killed when the great battle came. It was only now that it occurred to me to wonder where I was hit, and how badly; I could feel nothing."

Turns out he wasn't just hit in the neck—the bullet went straight through his throat.

He learned this after trying to speak and discovering he "had no voice, only a faint squeak." In Homage to Catalonia, he goes on to describe how exactly it felt, and what thoughts drifted through his mind as he waited to die:

As they lifted me up a lot of blood poured out of my mouth, and I heard a Spaniard behind me say that the bullet had gone clean through my neck. I felt the alcohol, which at ordinary times would sting like the devil, splash onto the wound as a pleasant coolness.

They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it... There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting—I mean, it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a moment's carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me—wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting.

That last turn there is so brilliantly imagined—to think not just of his wife, not just the meaningless mischance, not just of the shooter and what the shooter may have thought of his shot, but to think of how, with a few contextual details changed, Orwell would have congratulated the shooter "on his good shooting."

Seriously, read Homage to Catalonia if you haven't.

If you want to buy the neckerchiefs and scarf he was wearing when he got shot, you're a couple years too late. They went on sale in 2013. As The Telegraph points out, they are red, white, and black and "all have anti-fascist images and wording on them."

The Telegraph adds, "It is thought Orwell was shot because he was considerably taller than the Spanish fighters and his head protruded out of the trench." You can see how tall he was here.

George Orwell died 66 years ago today.
George Orwell died 66 years ago today. GongTo / Shutterstock.com

Orwell wrote Homage to Catalonia seven months after his near-death experience, and in the following years wrote a few other books you may have heard of, including Animal Farm and 1984. The Telegraph says (but doesn't elaborate) that "Although he survived the bad neck wound, it ultimately contributed to his early death 13 years later."

Interestingly, The Guardian argued in 2009 that it was the stress of composing 1984 that hastened Orwell's decline. He spent "one of the coldest" winters "of the century" in isolation, writing the first draft of 1984 in a remote estate without running water on a Scottish island, "working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife's premature death." Oh yeah, his wife had recently, unexpectedly, died in surgery.

After his young son and the son's nanny joined Orwell on the remote island, they were all "nearly drowned in the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool," in a small motor boat. "Orwell, whose constant coughing worried his friends, did his lungs no favours. Within two months he was seriously ill." Eventually, he went to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Looking back on it, he regretted those months of writing that passed before he went and got himself checked out. "Like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor—I wanted to get on with the book I was writing," he said, referring to 1984.

More from The Guardian:

As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. "It really is rather important," wrote Warburg to his star author, "from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible."

Man, the publishing industry. They really know how to put the dead in deadline. On the other hand, whatever conditions Orwell wrote 1984 under are the conditions that helped create 1984.

It was a desperate race against time. Orwell's health was deteriorating, the "unbelievably bad" manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming... 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.

(Speaking of coffee, you know how Balzac died, right?)

When the frantically composed typescript of 1984 reached the publisher a month later, the publisher recognized its brilliance right away. They even made jokes about having themselves shot if they couldn't make it sell well.

An in-house memo noted "if we can't sell 15 to 20 thousand copies we ought to be shot."

1984 was published in June of 1949. Orwell, finally succumbing to tuberculosis, whose treatment he put off so he could write, died seven months later. He died today—on January 21—in 1950.

But, hey, that's Capitalism.