Orwellian Pulp Fiction: The Paperbacking of Burmese Days

Paperback copies of Burmese Days by George Orwell

"A Saga of Jungle Hate and Lust," reads the banner above the title. 

The back cover description reveals, "She knew all about love! She was seventeen, she was beautiful and she was for sale to the highest bidder. Ma Hla May was her Burmese name. But in any language she was perfect, and well worth the 200 rupees Flory paid for her."

Ma Hla May is not the only one on the market. The opening page (before the publishing credits) announces, "For sale: One woman. Elizabeth studied her naked body critically. The rarest thing in Burma, she knew, was a white woman. But she mustn't waste it--she must use her body to bargain with ..."

Thus, for the July 1952 Popular Library edition of Burmese Days, Orwell's tragic anticolonial novel was reduced to a messy love triangle, complete with the pulp fiction genre's prerequisite sex-soaked cover art. 

Burmese Days as Pulp Fiction

The Popular Library series, according to the site Books are Everything, started in 1942 as a mystery paperback publisher. Its repertoire later expanded to include westerns and a handful of literary authors. Along with Burmese Days, John Steinbeck's Cup of Gold and Arthur Miller's Focus also received the same pulp treatment at the hands of the publisher. 

The salacious text on the back cover and the opening page are not part of Orwell's original. They appear to be added by the publisher to appeal to pulp readers who might not otherwise give the novel a chance. 

The cover artist for Burmese Days is unidentified. The more flamboyant covers of the series are known to be the works of Rudolph Belarski, Rafael DeSoto, Earle Bergey, and John Erskine, considered collectible in the vintage paperback lovers' circle. 

Bergey died in 1952--the year Burmese Days was released under the Popular Library label. Therefore, the chance of the cover being his is slim. Stylistically, Belarski and DeSoto are good candidates, in my view. 

Whoever the artist was, he seemed to have used a healthy North American girl as the model for Ma Hla May. Other than the obligatory light-brown skin tone, nothing about the girl in the grey hood suggests Burmese.

Popular Library edition of Burmese Days (1952)

An Orwellian Cover Girl

In this miscasting, Popular Library's Burmese Days is not unique. In the 1962 Doubleday (Pocket Book) paperback of F. Van Wyck Mason's Trouble in Burma, the scantily clad femme fatale on the cover is clearly identifiable as a westerner. Only the obligatory sarong loosely connects her to Southeast Asia. 

The back cover reads, "The Purring Tigress Unsheathes Her Claws is an old Burmese saying ..." -- something I've never heard of in conversations or come across in books in Burma. 

The more respectable Penguin Classics 1990 edition uses the photograph of an unknown Burmese girl, courtesy of The India Office Library, London, giving the character Ma Hla May a culturally accurate representation. 

The British Library's online gallery identifies the photo as belonging to "Victor Alexander Bruce (1849-1917), ninth Earl of Elgin and 13th Earl of Kincardine, served as Viceroy of India between 1894 and 1899."

Harcourt (left) and Penguin (right) editions of Burmese Days

Anticolonialism Goes on Sale

In October 1934, copies of Burmese Days went on sale in the U.S., published by Harper's. One early review vexed Orwell, according to his authorized biographer Michael Shelden. 

The title alone was bad enough: "Burmese 'Natives' and White Folks' the headline read in the New York Herald Tribune review of October 28. The reviewer--Margeret Carson Hubbard--makes the novel sound like a cheap guidebook: "You'll see the jungle, the dances, the native mistress, the fat yellow Buddha of a villain." (Orwell: The Authorized Biography, Shelden, HarperPerennial, 1992, PP 236-237)

In the introduction of the Penguin Classics paperback edition, the editor Peter Davison writes, "[Orwell] was ahead of his time in condemning the use of what he called insulting nicknames for those of other races, even in the left-wing press ... He argued that by ensuring the word 'native' was not used in a derogatory sense, that 'Negro' was always given an initial capital letter, and by substituting 'Chinese' for 'Chinaman' and 'Moslem' for 'Mohamedan' it was possible to do 'a little to mitigate the horrors of the color war.' " (Burmese Days, Orwell, Penguin Books, 1990, P viii)

Burmese Days is, in my view, a strong rebuke of colonialism and the priviliged white society that profited from it. How would its author feel about the paperbacking of his novel with imagery that sells the story's setting as "the jungle" and fails to portray the central character fairly and faithfully? 

It's safe to assume Orwell never saw the 1952 Popular Library edition of Burmese Days. He died in January 1950--two years before the book came out. 

Trouble in Burma (Doubleday, 1962)