Thanks to Fenner Brockway, Orwell eventually found a publisher for Homage to Catalonia in Secker & Warburg, a fledgling company with an anti-Stalinist reputation and an open mind. “It was my purpose to find and support those writers who wished to put forward a programme for Utopia and outline the road to it,” co-director Fredric Warburg wrote in his memoir. “But which programme and what road were the ones that led to the promised land, I was far from certain, and this should be counted in my favour.”
Homage to Catalonia is Orwell’s finest non-fiction book. Published on April 25, 1938, only a year after The Road to Wigan Pier, it is wiser, calmer, more humble and more generous. “It shows us the heart of innocence that lies in revolution; also the miasma of lying that, far more than the cruelty, takes the heart out of it,” wrote Philip Mairet. Posterity has transformed it into an essential document of the Spanish Civil War, but at the time it was one of a glut of accounts, and sold around half of its print run of fifteen hundred. British communist critics dismissed the book as at best confused, at worst a treacherous gift to Franco. Orwell was phlegmatic about bad reviews, filing even the stinkers under good publicity, and he didn’t deny that his book was a partial account. “I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes,” he wrote. “Still,” he added, “I have done my best to be honest.” Because he felt that the distinction between truth and lies was real and worth preserving, he wrote letters of complaint about reviews which smeared his old comrades. If he exaggerated his pro-POUM sympathies in the book, then it was only because nobody else would stand up for the falsely accused.“If I had not been angry about that,” he later wrote, “I should never have written the book.”
One compliment that meant a great deal was a letter from Borkenau, who was now living in England: “To me your book is a further confirmation of my conviction that it is possible to be perfectly honest with one’s facts quite irrespective of one’s political convictions.” The respect was mutual. Orwell praised The Spanish Cockpit with a typically technophobic metaphor (“It is a most encouraging thing to hear a human voice when fifty thousand gramophones are playing the same tune”) and later called Borkenau’s The Communist International “a book that has taught me more than any other about the general course of the Revolution.” Borkenau had resigned from the German Communist Party in 1929 in opposition to Stalin, funnelled aid to an anti-Nazi party, and developed an early theory of totalitarianism. “Civilisation is bound to perish,” Borkenau wrote, “not simply by the existence of certain restrictions on the expression of freedom of thought . . . but by the wholesale submission of thinking to orders from a party centre.”
Only one person has suggested that Orwell ever approved of communism. While Orwell was slumming in Paris in the late 1920s, he sometimes enjoyed the hospitality of his aunt, Nellie Limouzin, and her partner, Eugene Adam. Adam and his friend Louis Bannier were ex-communists and champions of Esperanto, the idealistic international language that managed to draw the ire of both Hitler and Stalin. Bannier later claimed to remember a fierce argument between Adam and the young Orwell, who “continued to proclaim that the Soviet system was the definitive socialism.” It’s a curious anecdote, 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 Orwell’s favourite writers in the years after Spain were ex-communists: Borkenau and Koestler from Austria; Ignazio Silone from Italy; Victor Serge from Russia; Max Eastman and Eugene Lyons from the US; André Gide, Boris Souvarine and André Malraux from France. They had learned about communism in the same way that he had come to understand imperialism: from inside the belly of the beast. Testimonials such as Gide’s Retour de l’U.R.S.S. and Souvarine’s Cauchemar en U.R.S.S. supplied Orwell’s first insight into the operation of Stalin’s regime. Many of the details and anecdotes he discovered there fed into Nineteen Eighty-Four: the cult of personality; the rewriting of history; the obliteration of freedom of speech; the contempt for objective truth; the echoes of the Spanish Inquisition; the arbitrary arrests, denunciations and forced confessions; above all, the suffocating climate of suspicion, self-censorship and fear.
To take just one example, in Orwell’s novel Winston Smith discovers a photograph which proves that the alleged traitors Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford were actually in New York on the date that they had confessed to being in Eurasia. Orwell had read about such cases, in which scripted confessions were contradicted by hard evidence. One alleged conspirator was photographed at a conference in Brussels on the very same day he had “confessed” to plotting in Moscow. Another was alleged to have met Trotsky in a Copenhagen hotel that, it transpired, had been torn down fifteen years earlier.
Orwell didn’t just respect these writers for the information they provided. Their attacks on Stalin were nourished by personal shame and a visceral need to exorcise their credulity and complicity through what Orwell called a “literature of disillusionment.” Former communists in that terrifying, exhilarating first flush of heresy wrote with compelling urgency. Orwell also found their loneliness heroic. Many were ostracised by old friends and snubbed by publishers. Silone, he wrote approvingly, “is one of those men who are denounced as Communists by Fascists and as Fascists by Communists, a band of men which is still small but steadily growing.”
Why did Orwell criticise communism so much more energetically than fascism? Because he had seen it up close, and because its appeal was more treacherous. Both ideologies reached the same totalitarian destination but communism began with nobler aims and therefore required more lies to sustain it. It became “a form of Socialism that makes mental honesty impossible,” and its literature “a mechanism for explaining away mistakes.” He didn’t personally know any fascists and had contempt for those in the public realm such as the poet Ezra Pound and Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists whom he had seen speak in Barnsley in 1936: “his speech though delivered with an excellent platform technique was the most unutterable bollox.”3 But he knew plenty of communists. Among the literary intelligentsia, fascism was a mucky vice, while communism “had an almost irresistible fascination for any writer under forty.” He was still angered by their hypocrisy years later, when he wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the atrocities of the 1930s were “tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”
The ex-communists had broken out of the syllogism that bound so much of the left to Stalin: I believe in socialism; the USSR is the only socialist state; therefore I believe in the USSR. Orwell’s rebuttal was twofold: firstly, no ends, however utopian, can be justified by such grotesque means; secondly, Stalin’s Russia was not truly socialist because it denied liberty and justice. But then he had never invested himself, intellectually, emotionally and socially, in the Soviet experiment. Those who had were thrown into an existential crisis.
One of them was Eugene Lyons, a Russian Jewish immigrant who had grown up in the seething tenements of New York’s Lower East Side and become a campaigning journalist for socialist newspapers. In 1922, he became a communist and disowned his more moderate friends. Between 1928 and 1934 he was the United Press’s man in Moscow, explaining the USSR to American readers. At first a staunch defender of Stalin, and the first Western journalist to interview him, he became horrified by the propaganda, persecution and industrial-scale dishonesty in which he had participated. Orwell reviewed Lyons’s epic mea culpa in June 1938, and it’s safe to assume that his attention was grabbed by this account of Stalin’s efforts to complete the first Five Year Plan in just four years:
The formula 2 + 2 = 5 instantly riveted my attention. It seemed to me at once bold and preposterous—the daring and the paradox and the tragic absurdity of the Soviet scene, its mystical simplicity, its defiance of logic, all reduced to nose-thumbing arithmetic . . . 2 + 2 = 5: in electric lights on Moscow housefronts, in foot-high letters on billboards, spelled planned error, hyperbole, perverse optimism; somethi
ng childishly headstrong and stirringly imaginative.
Within a few months, Orwell was using the unreal equation himself. In a generally positive review of Bertrand Russell’s Power: A New Social Analysis, he challenged the assumption that common sense would win out: “The peculiar horror of the present moment is that we cannot be sure that this is so. It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two and two will make five when the Leader says so . . . One has only to think of the sinister possibilities of the radio, State-controlled education and so forth, to realize that ‘the truth is great and will prevail’ is a prayer rather than an axiom.”
Orwell must also have appreciated Lyons’s description of the personal cost of apostasy. When he returned to New York, Lyons agonised over whether to be honest about what he’d seen. Telling the truth was both a moral obligation and social suicide. Having made his choice, Lyons quickly found himself excommunicated and vilified by his old comrades. To the true believers, his exposure of Stalin’s crimes was an almost spiritual affront, and therefore unforgivable. “I was guilty of the most heinous offence: puncturing noble delusions,” he wrote. The gates of their mythical Russia had to be protected at all costs from the barbaric reality. “So many weary or bored or panicky Americans had made their spiritual homes in its wonder-chambers that anyone who threatened to undermine its foundations was treated as a shameless vandal. Perhaps he was.”
The bitterly ironic title of Lyons’s book was Assignment in Utopia.
CHAPTER 2
Utopia Fever
Orwell and the Optimists
What fun it must have been, in those hopeful days back in the ’eighties, working away for the best of all possible causes—and there were so many causes to choose from. Who could have foreseen where it would all end?
—George Orwell, The Adelphi, May 1940
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” “Progress is the realization of Utopias.” Orwell’s response was effectively “Yes, but . . .” He liked the idea of utopia as an inspiring antidote to pessimism and caution but he found any attempt to describe it tedious, and any effort to build it sinister. In the Christmas 1943 issue of Tribune, using the pseudonym John Freeman, Orwell wrote an essay called “Can Socialists Be Happy?,” which contrasted the palpable joy at the end of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with the unconvincing “permanent happiness” of utopias. The reason people argued and fought and died for socialism, he said, was for the idea of brotherhood, not “some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise.” Of course the world could, and should, be improved, but never perfected. “Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”
Historically, utopia preceded dystopia the same way that heaven came before hell. Perhaps it’s a credit to humanity that people were designing the ideal society long before they imagined the opposite. The earliest blueprint was Plato’s Republic, a Socratic dialogue that was an acknowledged precursor to Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia. More’s coinage derived from the Greek ou (not) and topos (place): utopia is a place that doesn’t exist. But ou was easily confused with eu (good) and whether or not More’s word was an intentional pun, utopia acquired a more specific meaning: an earthly paradise. In politics, the latter interpretation took over, but in literature the ambiguity remained, which is how Orwell could describe Nineteen Eighty-Four as “a Utopia.” He made a distinction between “favourable” and “pessimistic” utopias because it would not have occurred to him to call the latter dystopias. Even though the word dystopia (literally “the not-good place”) was used by John Stuart Mill in 1868, it lay dormant for close to a century, eclipsed by Jeremy Bentham’s cacotopia (“the bad place”) or by anti-utopia, until finally catching on in the 1960s. Orwell’s novel has become synonymous with a word he never used.
Orwell was well-versed in utopian literature. He wrote more than once about Samuel Butler’s 1872 satire Erewhon, William Morris’s 1890 socialist fantasy News from Nowhere, and the many contributions of H. G. Wells, but was rarely convinced that utopian ideas made for satisfying fiction. “Happiness is notoriously difficult to describe,” he wrote in his essay on Gulliver’s Travels, “and pictures of a just and well-ordered society are seldom either attractive or convincing.” As early as Down and Out in Paris and London, he considered the promise of “some dismal Marxist Utopia” an obstacle to socialism. At root, he thought utopias sounded boring and joyless and didn’t believe people really wanted them. “On the whole human beings want to be good,” he wrote in his 1941 essay “The Art of Donald McGill,” “but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
Given Orwell’s interests, the most puzzling lacuna in his writing is any reference to the book that turned the practice of designing ideal societies into a cultural phenomenon that swept the final years of the nineteenth century. In the entirety of his collected works, there is not a single reference to Edward Bellamy.
In August 1887, Edward Bellamy was a little-known author and journalist from Massachusetts. He was an earnest, sensitive thirty-seven-year-old with a doleful expression, a tremendous moustache and a burning sense of moral conviction. The suffragist Frances Willard described him as “quiet, yet observant, modest but perfectly self-poised, with mild and gentle tones, yet full of personality, and vibrating with purposes.” When he looked around at the United States of America in the Gilded Age Bellamy saw a “nervous, dyspeptic, and bilious nation,” wracked by grotesque inequality. Millionaire dynasties controlled the industrial economy, while the labouring classes worked sixty-hour weeks for low pay in unsafe factories and sweatshops, and lived in foul slums. The march of technology produced miracles—the electric lightbulb, the phonograph, the telephone—while poisoning rivers and blackening the sky. The economy staggered under the blows of panics and recessions. An epidemic of labour strikes swept the country from sea to sea.
To Bellamy, the status quo was not just unjust; it was untenable. He believed that he was living in critical times and that a great transformation was surely imminent, for good or ill. The fate of America would decide the fate of the world. “Let us bear in mind that, if it be a failure, it will be a final failure,” he wrote. “There can be no more new worlds to be discovered, no fresh continents to offer virgin fields for new ventures.”
That August Bellamy finished a novel which reframed the turbulence of the 1880s as the painful but necessary precursor to a peaceful socialist utopia. “I am particularly desirous that it should see the light as quickly as possible,” he wrote to his publisher. “Now is the accepted time, it appears to me, for a publication touching on social and industrial questions to obtain a hearing.”
Looking Backward 2000–1887 certainly did that. Published in 1888, it became the most widely read novel in the United States since Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the most imitated since Jane Eyre. Like many surprise bestsellers, Bellamy’s book synthesised extant trends, capitalising on the popularity of utopian visions such as W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age and radical tracts like Henry George’s phenomenally successful Progress and Poverty by merging the two forms. In America, according to the journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd, it was “debated by all down to the boot-blacks on the curbstones.” In Britain, it became such a talking point that it was considered an oversight in intellectual circles not to have read it. “I suppose you have seen or read, or at least tried to read, ‘Looking Backward,’ ” the socialist writer and designer William Morris wrote to a friend in 1889. In Russia, where it sold briskly, it was praised by Chekhov, Gorky and Tolstoy, who called it “an exceedingly remarkable book.” Its American admirers included Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and two future leaders of the Socialist Party. Mark Twain dubbed it “the latest and best of all the Bibles.”
Like the Bible, Looking Backward attracted apostles, compelled to spread the good news about Bellamy’s middle-class, respectable, distinctly American f
orm of socialism, which he called Nationalism. “Bellamy is the Moses of today,” wrote one convert. “He has shown us that the promised land exists.” Bellamy’s admirers formed the first Nationalist Club in Boston in 1888; within three years there were more than 160 across the nation, attracting journalists, artists, lawyers, doctors, businessmen and reformers, among them the crusading attorney Clarence Darrow and the feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In rural areas, travelling salesmen sold the book door to door. The newly formed Populist Party, which won five states in the 1892 presidential election, drew much of its progressive platform from Bellamy’s ideas. Residents of downtown Los Angeles can still see for themselves the life-changing power of Looking Backward. Architect George Wyman based the Bradbury Building, later the location for the final act of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, on Bellamy’s description of the department store of the future.
Just as Orwell was beginning his journalistic career, the Great Depression revived interest in Bellamy’s cheering prophecy. President Roosevelt read and discussed Bellamy, and his New Deal administration included the author’s biographer, Arthur E. Morgan. In 1935, The Atlantic Monthly named Looking Backward the second most important book of the past fifty years, claiming that only Das Kapital had done more to shape the world. The Labour leader Clement Attlee derived his enthusiasm for a “cooperative commonwealth” from Looking Backward and told the writer’s son Paul that his post-war government was “a child of the Bellamy ideal.” The book was still so well-known in America in 1949 that Harry Scherman, president of the Book-of-the-Month Club, described Nineteen Eighty-Four as “Bellamy’s Looking Backward in reverse.”
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