Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 12 Feb 2026
Dante Called You Beatrice by Paul Potts
It’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that the life of the minor poet, Paul Potts (1911 – 1990) was rather a sad one. It’s undeniably true that he desperately wanted to be famous for his poetry but never got the sort of recognition he thought he deserved. His love life wasn’t much better and he found himself in love with a woman with long term mental health issues and who was married to someone else.
Potts spent his childhood in British Columbia, Canada, but moved to London in the early 1930s and hung-out around the literary circles that became known as Fitzrovia trying to sell his poetry in broadsheet form as he drifted from pub to pub. He made enough friends and contacts to get the occasional article published in a literary periodical or two but it was always a precarious income.
This quotation from Potts’ Wikipedia entry seems to capture the forlorn nature of his later life:
“In late middle-age, Potts was ‘…balding’ with ‘a stutter that he mixed with rapid blinking and an amused chuckle as he started a sentence’, eventually becoming a dissolute figure ‘barred from Soho pubs’”
By 1990 he was effectively housebound and a bedroom fire caused his death from smoke inhalation.
It seems more than likely he would have passed into the netherworld invisibility of minor literary figures had it not been for the fact that he could call himself a pretty good friend of George Orwell and wrote an article entitled ‘Don Quixote on a Bicycle’ that gives us a unique glimpse into the time he spent with the author.
Originally published in The London Magazine, ‘Don Quixote’ is then incorporated in its entirety into his episodic memoir, Dante Called You Beatrice. It is this book, if anything, Potts will be remembered for.
Structured as a series of virtually free-standing essays, to call this a ‘memoir’ rather gives the wrong impression of what you will encounter. Essentially the content divides into two: one set of essays about himself, his failures as a poet and as man in love; the other set, a series of literary critiques and appreciations.
The former of these – the ones about his failed life – are, in all honesty, best skipped over. The predominant theme is a crushing self-pity and a simmering passive-aggressive fury that his poetic genius was never recognised.
But the sections that might be taken as literary appreciation and biography – Orwell, Ignazio Silone, George Barker – are genuinely interesting and often perceptive. He also has a rather interesting relationship with religion in that, whilst being a confessed atheist, he has great admiration for the values of Christianity and for the character of Jesus.
Ultimately however my interest in this book hinges on the portrait of George Orwell that comes out of the book. I can’t think of any other writer I’ve read on the topic of Orwell who comes across as so devoted and so warm about his friend – and clearly the two men did have a very relaxed and well-established friendship:
“The happiest years of my life were those during which I was a friend of his. Nobody who ever knew him at all well will ever forget the shy excited warmth of his welcome, if one dropped in on him unexpectedly.”
The Orwell that emerges out of Potts’ essay is a real flesh-and-blood human not just a ‘writer’. There are valuable insights here on the creation of books like Animal Farm and a rather sad section dealing with Orwell’s death but the sense of a man writing about a loved and valued friend never wavers.
“I suppose what made Orwell so permanently attractive as a person and so readable as a writer, was that he was so ordinary really, normal if not average. He had none of the extravagances of an artist, none of the irresponsibilities of a Bohemian and none of the selfishness of an intellectual.”
The book isn’t easy to find – although the book club edition I have and is pictured here can be found for around £20, you can read Don Quixote on a Bicycle on line if that’s your main interest.
Terry Potter
February 2026
There’s plenty more Orwell related reviews and commentary on this website and to make locating them easier we’ve done some of the hard work for you: