The battle for George Orwell’s soul

Nineteen Eighty-Four at 75

No writer’s legacy and approval is so fought over as George Orwell, whose final – and most celebrated - work Nineteen-Eighty-Four was published seventy five years ago this month.

The most influential piece of political fiction in history, such is the success of the dystopian novel that its themes have been recited to death by columnists, often by people I imagine he would have loathed (including me). 

Orwell’s nightmare became a particular focus of conservative commentators from the 1990s with the rise of ‘political correctness’, which might be seen as both a form of politeness and at the same time a way of policing opinions by changing the language. As Orwell’s Newspeak was described, it was to ensure that dissent cannot be voiced because ‘the necessary words were not available’. Newspeak, along with thought police and doublethink, has become a part of our political vocabulary, while even the proles have Big Brother to entertain them. No one can doubt that Orwell has won the final victory, and the struggle for the writer’s soul forms part of Dorian Lynskey’s entertaining and informative The Ministry of Truth, a biography of Nineteen-Eighty-Four which was published at the time of the last significant anniversary. 

Lynskey, a hugely gifted writer who specialises in the relationship between arts and politics, is very much on the Left and sees the modern parallels with the Trumpian disdain for truth, although the great man himself is now often more cited by the Right. Indeed the anniversary was recently celebrated by the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs with a new edition and an introduction by my friend Christopher Snowdon.

Orwell was a paradoxical man, contradictory, sometimes hypocritical (aren’t we all?). In the preface to his book, publisher Victor Gollancz wrote that ‘The truth is that he is at one and the same time an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual. Similarly he is a frightful snob – still (he must forgive me for saying this), and a genuine hater of every form of snobbery.’

As Lynskey writes: ‘Until the end of his life, Orwell acknowledged that microbes of everything he criticised existed in himself. In fact, it was this awareness of his own flaws that inoculated him against utopian delusions of human perfectibility.’

Such awareness is surprisingly rare among intelligent journalists and commentators, especially when ideology takes a grip - and Orwell was introduced to this reality in quite brutal form.

The background to both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm was Orwell’s disillusionment during the Spanish Civil War. The conflict between Nationalists and Republican galvanised western intellectuals and marked the turning point when the intelligentsia became firmly wedded to the Left. Over a thousand writers went to fight in Spain, and while few entirely understood the political situation they did grasp, as Malcolm Muggeridge said, that ‘it seemed certain that in Spain Good and Evil were at last joined in bloody combat.’

In reality it was a conflict in which both sides committed appalling atrocities, although Franco’s forces certainly outdid their enemies in murderous scale. That ruthlessness partly explains their victory, but the Republicans were not helped by the seemingly endless factionalism that saw various squabbling leftist acronyms fight each other, and which makes the war hard to follow. There was the socialist UGT, the Russian-backed PSUC, the anarchist FAI and anarcho-syndacalist CNT, and also the POUM, Workers Party of Marxist Unification, which rather belied its name by falling out with both Stalin and Trotsky.

Spain was an education for Orwell. Witnessing in Barcelona a Russian known only as ’Charlie Chan’, allegedly an agent of NKVD, he wrote: ‘I watched him with some interest for it was the first time I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies - unless one counts journalists.’

He recorded how, with the honourable exception of the Manchester Guardian, ‘One of the dreariest effects of this has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right’. Welcome to the Intellectual Dark Web, George Orwell.

He was not the only one. Stephen Spender also grew sickened with the lies of the communists and left the party, concluding ‘that nearly all human beings have an extremely intermittent grasp on reality. Only a few things, which illustrate their own interests and ideas, are real to them; other things, which are in fact equally real, appear to them as abstractions.’

Orwell had an especially bad time in the trenches because he was so tall but still liked to stand up to enjoy his first cigarette of the day. He shrugged off warnings by claiming that ‘they couldn’t hit a bull in a passage’ - then a well-aimed bullet did indeed hit him in the throat beneath his larynx. The Englishman assumed he was dying and felt a ‘violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well.’

He was relatively lucky. Various comrades fighting with Russian support ended up murdered by the NKVD, the POUM’s Andres Nin so brutally tortured that ‘his face was no more than a formless mass’. The Soviets employed some German comrades to stage a fake rescue so they could claim he was still alive and living in Berlin or Salamanca, like Snowball in Animal Farm. Yan Berzin, the Soviet military adviser who recommended ‘liquidating’ the POUM, was accused of spying and shot in the Lubyanka.

Orwell went back home and published Homage to Catalonia, which sold only half of its print run of 1,500. Oh well.

Stalin’s terror was a crushing blow to many who had placed faith in the Soviet system as a new religion creating a heaven on earth, and Orwell may have been one of them. His aunt Nellie Limouzin said that as a young man in Paris he ‘continued to proclaim that the Soviet system was the definitive socialism’.

‘It’s a curious anecdote,’ the author notes: ‘at odds with everything Orwell wrote, but true or not, his uncle was probably his introduction to the fervour of the former communist’.

Many of his favourite writers were ex-communists or at least anti-Stalinists, intellectuals who often embraced ex-communism with the enthusiasm they had once proclaimed the faith. One of the most influential was Arthur Koestler, who had been jailed by fascists in Spain. He moved to France where in 1939 he was put in an internment camp. When the Germans invaded, Koestler was imprisoned once more but escaped to England and freedom – where he was jailed again, as an illegal alien. On the day Darkness at Noon was published Koestler was in solitary confinement in Pentonville prison. It was a book that fascinated readers, Orwell among them, because of its insights into why people signed confessions so willingly. Michael Foot described being ‘horror-struck, over-powered, enthralled’ at reading it for the first time.

Nineteen-Eighty-Four’s popularity has much to do with the author’s insights into why people both told, and believed, obvious lies. It is a mentality described by Soviet official Gyorgy Pyatakov, who wrote that the true Bolshevik ‘would be ready to believe that black was white, and white was black, if the Party required it… there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party, did not belong to it.’ Pyatakov was executed in 1937.

Another strength of the book is Orwell’s ability to create an especially terrifying vision of a world, advanced in its surveillance technique but also impoverished, materially and culturally. It contained both elements of privation-stoked wartime Britain and the Soviet Union, but also drew on a succession of previous dystopian fiction. 

Perhaps the earliest was Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One, a publishing sensation in ancien regime France, but it was the late Victorian era which saw a great craze for the future, with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000-1987, published in 1888, the most widely-read American book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It does not sound enthralling, and ‘the novel is little more than a series of conversations about policy.’

A key to Orwell’s skill as a dystopian thinker was that he genuinely hated modernity in many ways. ‘I dislike big towns, noise, motor cars, the radio, tinned food, central heating and “modern” furniture,’ he wrote: he disliked words such as streamlined, hygienic, sterile or slick: ‘Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arclamps blazing over your head, radios all playing the same time, no vegetation left, everything cemented over.’

This was one of many differences with HG Wells, gifted with a unique imagination in conjuring up a future - he became known as ‘The Man Who Invented Tomorrow’- but a man lacking in Orwell’s doubts (and humanity).

Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes was especially influential. ‘The genealogy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and indeed all dystopian fiction, starts here. The role of technology is to maintain control. The enslaved masses are uniformed in blue like Orwell’s Outer Party, and kept in line by the Labour Police. Children are raised in state creches. Books are burned, pornography rampant, and the English language crudely reduced, with print replaced by phonographs and “kinetotelephotographs,” Wells’ version of the telescreen. On every street, Babble Machines blurt propaganda, advertisements, and “idiotic slang,” and hypnotists stand ready “to print permanent memories on the mind… conversely memories could be effaced, habits removed, and desires eradicated – a sort of psychic surgery was, in fact, in general use.””

Yet the problem with Wells’ nightmare was that it wasn’t a true nightmare. As Orwell wrote, ‘It suffers from vast contradictions, because of the fact that Wells, as the arch-priest of “progress,” cannot write any conviction against “progress.”’

Wells was certainly a genius but in Lynskey’s view his tragedy was to live too long. ‘Had he lived precisely as long as Orwell, he would have died on April 19, 1913, his reputation impregnable. Instead, he had another thirty-three years in which to be wrong.’ In so many ways: Wells was invited by Gorky to visit Russia and found Lenin an ‘amazing little man’ whose pragmatism was ‘very refreshing’ for a Marxist. Although according to Trotsky, Lenin snorted ‘what a narrow petty bourgeois! Ugh! What a Philistine!’

He later visited Moscow again and for three hours tried to convince Stalin that Marxism was a bad idea. He said of Stalin he had ‘never met a man more candid, fair and honest’ although at least he wasn’t as gulled as the Webbs or Shaw. Sadly he eventually felt that ‘Russia had let me down’. 

As the century progressed, its dystopian visions understandably got darker. Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night is set in the ‘year of the Lord Hitler 720’ where only the lowest of savages still practise Christianity, and the truth of the ‘Twenty Year War’ has been eradicated.

Constantine was a pseudonym for feminist novelist Katharine Burdekin, and ‘Reading Swastika Night now, this seems obvious, because its misogynist theocracy makes Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale look half-hearted. Considered less than human, women are used solely for breeding and can be raped with impunity.’ 

The dystopia with which Nineteen Eighty-Four is most associated with, however, is Brave New World, even if the two are ‘awkward literary twins’, in Lynskey’s words. Their ideas of hell were polar opposites: for Orwell, pain would drive this new dystopia, for Huxley it was pleasure.

 

‘Huxley’s World State (the phrase a blatant dig at Wells) is kept in line not by the truncheon and the whip, but by drugs, hypnotism, entertainment, and a genetically engineered caste system, running from the Alpha-Plus elite down to the Epsilon-Minus labourers. With its skyscrapers, zippers, chewing gum, “sexophobes and “feelies” (a tactile version of the talkies), the novel drew heavily on his travels in America, where he called Los Angeles the “City of Dreadful Joy”’.

Orwell had fond memories of being taught by Huxley at Eton in 1918 while still plain Eric Blair, and he admired the book, but was unconvinced of its tyranny of gratification: ‘There is no power-hunger, no sadism, no hardness of any kind. Those at the top have no strong motive for staying at the top, and though everyone is happy in a vacuous way, life has become so pointless that it is difficult to believe that such a society could endure’.

Perhaps it was because Huxley spent 26 years in California while Orwell, having little interest in the United States, didn’t appreciate that pleasure could prove a greater danger than pain. 

A far bigger influence was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, set in a surveillance society of the future under the ‘One State’ ordered on logic, with people only known by numbers. Indeed, Isaac Deutscher claimed that Orwell had plagiarised it, although Lynskey points to the substantial difference, the fact that much of Orwell’s book was written before the Russian’s novel was released, and that Orwell repeatedly tried to get the book published in English and for readers to ‘look out for’ it. ‘Surely not the kind of thing that plagiarists usually do’.

Zamyatin was exactly the sort of free-thinker who was repressed by the old regime and persecuted even more by the revolutionaries. In 1922 he was arrested and found himself in a cell on the very same corridor he had stayed back in 1905. For unknown reasons, since the dictator could be capricious, Stalin allowed him to emigrate rather than become among his statistics.

Independent minds were crushed in the new socialist paradise, while conformist drones flourished. Writers like Leopold Averbakh formed the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), ‘whose third-rate scribes thrived by denouncing the politically unreliable and grinding-out propagandistic dross like Minimus the pig in Animal Farm.’

As Lynskey writes: ‘In the summer of 1928, he and Boris Pilnyak, the novelist who ran the Moscow branch of the VSP, were among several writers dispatched to collective farms to write inspiring fiction about the need to accelerate grain collection. The muse did not strike’.

Orwell was fascinated by the dishonesty which ideology would cause intelligent people to commit to. He ‘enjoyed retelling an anecdote he’d heard about a party member who was in the toilet of a New York café when the news broke and returned to his friends to find that the line had already changed: a possible inspiration for the Inner Party orator in Nineteen Eighty-Four who “switched from one line to the other actually in mid-sentence.”’

The news in question was Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, after which western communist parties switched en masse from a position of neutrality to the Allied cause.

Orwell’s wartime experience with the BBC would also shape his final work. He hated the radio, which he viewed as ‘inherently totalitarian’, but was brought in to do service for the broadcaster’s Indian Section. As Lynskey writes, he had a great brain for radio, producing huge numbers of ideas, and with his experience of the sub-continent, he understood that Indians would not appreciate obvious British propaganda and so focussed on more implicit celebrations of democracy.

But he was unsuited to the role, his voice actively put off listeners, and Lynskey writes dryly: ‘His introduction for Voice’s launch episode was less an invitation than an apology: “I suppose during every second that we sit here at least one human being will be dying a violent death.” Still, on with the show. Enjoy Wordsworth.’

He resigned from the Indian Service in 1943, in part because he realised that no one was listening, but also because he wanted to work on Animal Farm. It almost never came to light after a V-1 struck their flat in Canonbury Square and Orwell retrieved a manuscript from the rubble. 

He also secured work a foreign correspondent in Paris, where he had arranged to meet Albert Camus. Sadly, the French writer was sick, ‘thwarting what could have been a remarkable meeting between two natural rebels who put principles before political expediency and turned political writing into an art’.

Orwell’s last few years often seem as miserable as that of his protagonist. Just weeks before the war ended, his first wife Eileen died in surgery. His own health was in decline, although it was not until 1947, while working on Nineteen-Eighty Four on the island of Jura, that the tuberculosis which killed him would be diagnosed.

Animal Farm could not have come at a worse time, and several publishers turned it down for attacking an ally. Cape performed an uncourageous U-turn because they apparently realised it applied to the USSR and the use of pigs might offend the ‘touchy’ Russians. In the United States Angus Cameron, pro-communist editor in chief of Little, Brown, rejected it, while Dial Press said there was no market for ‘animal stories’. Orwell found himself cancelled by Stalin, though not in the way the dictator cancelled his own citizens.

A very small detail says a lot about Orwell’s principles, that even when he hated a system and the people responsible, he tried to avoid being untruthful about it. Before publication he made a last-minute change to Animal Farm to reflect the fact that the autocratic Napoleon was not a coward. ‘I just thought the alteration would be fair to J.S. J.S may have been a murderous tyrant, but that was no reason to call him a coward.’

The book meant that Orwell suddenly had many conservative fans, a disconcerting experience for a writer of the Left, then as now. He was invited to lunch by Lord Beaverbrook, who he had described as ‘looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose.’

Curiously, Ayn Rand wasn’t among these enthusiasts, calling Animal Farm ‘the mushiest and most maudlin preachment of Communism… I have seen in a long time’. Which seems like a unique interpretation. 

Animal Farm also brought Orwell two things he was unaccustomed to as an English writer: fame in America, and money. The writer was financially illiterate - many such cases! - and it was only now that he had to start dealing with the taxman, and as this quintessential socialist patriot put it: ‘No one is patriotic about taxes.’

Now came his final work, and it will perhaps give some comfort to authors that Orwell expected this ‘beastly book’ to bring in £500 in sales and wrote to a friend that ‘it isn’t a book I would gamble on for a big sale’. 

Contrary to what some then believed, Nineteen Eighty-Four was not about the Attlee government even if ‘he used the physical furniture of post-war London to give Airstrip One a lived authenticity’. Yet when his publisher Fredric Warburg first read it, he called it ‘a deliberate and sadistic attack on Socialism and socialist parties generally’. He thought it would be ‘worth a cool million votes to the Conservative Party’.

Orwell was so sick by this point that he could not play a part in the unfolding great debate about his work, which was to take on a life of its own as conservatives, liberals and socialists fought over his legacy.

In 1954, less than five years after his death, a BBC television adaptation came out starring Peter Cushing as Winston Smith, who was to become one of four men to play both Doctor Who and Smith, the other being Patrick Troughton, John Hurt and Christopher Ecclestone (the sort of pub quiz-ready factoid I crave in a book).

It attracted the largest television viewing audience since the Coronation; indeed the Queen herself watched and admired it, although many were less keen. One viewer complained to the BBC that ‘If that is what the world is going to be like, we might as well put our heads in the gas ovens now.’ Questions were asked in Parliament. The Daily Express headlined its coverage A Million NIGHTMARES. The only George Orwell in the telephone directory spent the evening fielding calls from angry viewers.

It was good news for the Orwell estate, at least, even if Orwell’s widow - second wife Sonia - was famously protective of his work. Before the BBC adaptation, the book had been selling 150 hardbacks a week; that rose to a thousand and the Penguin paperback sold 18,000. 

Meanwhile the Guardian letter’s page was a ‘running battle’ between Orwell fans and the hard left. Communist R. Palme Dutt called it ‘the lowest essence of commonplace Tory anti-Socialist propaganda by an ex-Etonian former Colonial Policeman’.

Certainly ‘the play reinforced the novel’s political importance’, Lynskey writes, and The Daily Mail praised its exposure of ‘the beastliness of Communism’.

The book, understandably, was not so popular behind the Iron Curtain, which rather proved its point. An East German judge in 1958 sentenced a teenager to three years in jail for having a copy and called Orwell ‘the most hated writer in the Soviet Union and the socialist states’.

As the year itself approached many took to discussing what the book had got wrong and right. A 1978 article by David Goodman in The Futurist identified 137 separate predictions in 1984 and said 100 had come true. By 1984 itself, the experts were saying he was completely wrong. 

More important than whether Orwell was right was whether he would approve. Norman Podhoretz wrote a piece, ‘If Orwell Were Alive Today’ that was typical of the genre. ‘Normally, to speculate on what a dead man might have said about events he never lived to see is a frivolous enterprise’, he acknowledged, ‘before gamely pressing on to insist that an octogenarian Orwell would have said that Norman Podhoretz was right.’

Both Left and Right, the National Review and Christopher Hitchens, claimed him as their own, Hitchens arguing that ‘Orwell was a conservative about many things, but not politics.’  Peregrine Worsthorne and Alfred Sherman said the book was anti-socialist. No it wasn’t, argued Bernard Crick and Tony Benn.

Such was Orwell’s power that by now, and rather bizarrely, even Soviet journals claimed him. Novoye Vremya presented Orwell’s book as ‘a grim warning to bourgeois-democratic society, which, as he pointed out, is rooted in anti-humanism, all-devouring militarism and denial of human rights.’ Literaturnaya Gazeta explained that Reagan was Big Brother and telescreens were the National Security Agency’s spying network. Another Soviet newspaper, Izvestiya, claimed that history had turned Oceania into ‘a fully realistic picture of contemporary Capitalism-Imperialism’.

This was happening at the same time that Latvian translator Gunars Astra was being sentenced to seven years in the gulag for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’ – among his crimes being circulating a samizdat copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It’s hard to know what Orwell would have thought about anything, but it seems at least unlikely he would have approved of the Soviets claiming his legacy. Today he certainly seems more popular with the libertarian-inclined, and it’s hard to disagree with Snowdon that he would have been contemptuous of later communist experiments. 

In his own time Allene Talmey described the author in a Vogue profile: ‘Fairly much a leftist, George Orwell is a defender of freedom, even though most of the time he violently disagrees with the people besides whom he is fighting’.

Today the issue of of freedom is far more used by the Right, in part because libertarians are so hostile to state power but also because the Left is culturally hegemonic. Free speech, a rallying call of students in the 1960s, is now a right-coded subject.

For Lynskey, Trump and Trumpism is the obvious analogy. The American Caesar meets most criteria of Orwell’s definition of fascism: ‘something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class… almost any English person would accept “bully” as a synonym for “Fascist”.’

The greatest threat to truth is the erosion of the idea that there is a truth, for he writes: ‘When some listeners to Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds believed the radio play without checking other sources, they were motivated by excessive faith in the authority of the media. The modern spreaders of disinformation, however, are driven by too little.’

For conservatives like myself the ‘Orwellian’ parallels are elsewhere, even if we overuse the word to death: when we see dictionaries changing the definition of a word literary overnight, or the total distortion of history to suggest it has always been so, when it is ‘normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children’ because they are the greatest fanatics, we can’t help but see the echoes of 20^th century totalitarianism in the modern progressive movement, even if it is a soft totalitarianism and doesn’t come from the state, but from the media, the academy and tech companies.

And what would a 120-year-old George Orwell think? I suspect that he would agree with me on everything.