The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  Conservative utopias dreamed of less regulation, weaker unions, a stronger police force and military, and more imperialism: manifest destiny on steroids. John Jacob Astor, one of the richest men in the world, set A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future in 2000, when the United States, having dominated half the planet, sets out to colonise the solar system and renames Jupiter Kentucky. Many of these novels now make for terrifying reading. In Addison Peale Russell’s Sub-Coelum: A Sky-Built Human World, the “unfit” are sterilised while “unchaste” women are jailed for such crimes as drinking, whistling and bad grammar. In A.D. 2050: Electrical Development at Atlantis by John Bachelder, refugees from Bellamy’s failing Nationalist society flee to Atlantis, which they turn into a proto-Orwellian police state under constant surveillance. William Harben came to a comparable scenario from the left in The Land of the Changing Sun: in the underwater society of Alpha a government of eugenicists uses television scanning devices to identify dissidents, and psychological torture to crush them.

  There was even a foretaste of Orwell’s Oceania in Bellamy’s own work. In his 1880 novella Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process the eponymous scientist has discovered how to wipe painful memories and erase guilt: “Memory is the principle of moral degeneracy. Remembered sin is the most utterly diabolical influence in the universe.” The happy race of mind readers in his 1889 short story “To Whom This May Come,” whose telepathy has eliminated crime and deceit by “rending the veil of self, and leaving no spot in darkness in the mind for lies to hide in,” make Orwell’s Thought Police look like amateurs.

  It is a mark of Bellamy’s unwavering faith in human nature and common sense that he failed to see the dystopian implications of unanimous obedience to a one-party state that will last forever, nor the possibility that his not-self would eliminate what Orwell called ownlife. The late-nineteenth-century idealist had a thoroughly pre-totalitarian mind. Orwell was to skewer that generation’s naivety in the voice of O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined.”

  Orwell critiqued and mocked utopian writing on numerous occasions. By the late 1940s, however, he had developed a pitying fondness for nineteenth-century visions of a better world, however bland or naive they may have been. Writing about Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” in 1948, he found that Wilde’s rosy predictions of a populace liberated by technology and the abolition of private property to enjoy a life of individual fulfilment under the benevolent eye of a minimal state made “rather painful reading.” Wilde was, it seemed to him, extraordinarily wrong. And yet Orwell also saw great value in being reminded that socialism did not have to mean labour camps, food queues and secret police. The nineteenth-century utopias, he wrote, “may demand the impossible, and they may—since a Utopia necessarily reflects the aesthetic ideas of its own period—sometimes seem ‘dated’ and ridiculous; but they do at least . . . remind the Socialist movement of its original, half-forgotten objective of human brotherhood.”

  Orwell had seen too much to be an idealist but he was not above feeling tenderness, and perhaps a little envy, towards those dreamers who had lived in more hopeful times.

  CHAPTER 3

  The World We’re Going Down Into

  Orwell 1938–1940

  The future, at any rate the immediate future, is not with the “sensible” men. The future is with the fanatics.

  —George Orwell, Time & Tide, June 8, 1940

  On May 22, 1938, Orwell wrote to his friend Jack Common to say he was planning to start his fourth novel, although the historical circumstances were less than ideal. “As it is if I start in August I daresay I’ll have to finish it in the concentration camp,” he joked darkly.5

  He was writing from Preston Hall, a sanatorium in Aylesford, Kent, because two months earlier he had begun coughing up blood. Eileen’s beloved older brother Laurence “Eric” O’Shaughnessy, one of Britain’s leading experts on tuberculosis, diagnosed a lesion on Orwell’s left lung and recommended the sanatorium, where O’Shaughnessy was a consultant surgeon. During his three-month stay, Orwell received visitors from all corners of his unusual, class-hopping life. Nurses could hear the fluting voices of literary friends such as Richard Rees and Cyril Connolly one day and the working-class accents of his ILP comrades from Spain the next. Henry Miller sent him a friendly letter advising him to “stop thinking and worrying about the external pattern,” which was rather like Orwell telling Miller to stop thinking about himself.

  Once a fortnight, Eileen travelled from their home in Wallington, where they kept a grey poodle. “We called him Marx to remind us that we had never read Marx,” she told a friend, with typically dry humour, “and now we have read a little and taken so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can’t look the dog in the face when we speak to him.” The couple could tell a lot about a visitor from whether they assumed the animal was named after Karl, Groucho or the Marks & Spencer department store.

  The doctors at Preston Hall advised Orwell to spend the winter in a more congenial climate. Funded by an anonymous £300 donation from the novelist L. H. Myers, the Orwells decided on Morocco, arriving in Marrakech on September 11. Despite his best efforts to fill a diary with typically precise observations about local customs, Orwell found Morocco “rather a dull country.” It was, therefore, a good place to write a novel.

  For roughly two years, between fighting in one war and attempting to fight in another, Orwell was a pacifist. The British establishment’s version of anti-fascism struck him as “a thin disguise for jingo imperialism.” Furthermore, he was convinced that war would have a “fascising” effect on the British people: “wage-reductions, suppression of free speech, brutalities in the colonies, etc.”6 One of his favourite quotations around this time was Nietzsche’s argument that those who fight dragons risk becoming dragons themselves. “Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism when the pinch comes,” he wrote to his friend Geoffrey Gorer in 1937. He put it more bluntly in a letter to a reader: “Fascism and so-called democracy are Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” So he signed an anti-war manifesto in the New Leader, officially joined the ILP, and was writing ferocious anti-war essays as late as July 1939. He even planned to organise illegal protests. He told Richard Rees and his agent Leonard Moore in 1938 that he was writing an anti-war pamphlet called “Socialism and War,” but it was never published, so the clearest public expression of Orwell’s pacifism, and the reasons behind it, was the novel he wrote in Morocco.

  Coming Up for Air was about the very thing Orwell thought might prevent him from finishing it. The Munich Agreement was signed shortly after he arrived in Morocco, but that was merely to postpone the inevitable. Orwell later claimed that he had known since 1931 that “the future must be catastrophic” and since 1936 that England would go to war with Germany. Later, he remembered “the feeling of futility and impermanence, of hanging about in a draughty room and waiting for the guns to begin to shoot.” His pessimism amused Eileen, who wrote to Orwell’s sister Marjorie about his plans to build a bomb shelter at Wallington when he got home. “But the dugout has generally been by way of light relief; his specialities are concentration camps & the famine.”

  Some of Orwell’s friends later attributed the despondency of Nineteen Eighty-Four to his failing health, but the ghastly sensation of individual helplessness was in his novels all along. Orwell was as merciless in his fiction as he was compassionate in his journalism. His typical protagonist is a plain, mediocre individual who finds their role in society intolerable, attempts to resist or escape, and ends up back where they began, minus the hope that a better life is possible. All of his plots have this baleful circularity. In Burmese Days, A Clerg yman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air, his characters are not only defeated but broken and alienated, and by forces less ex
treme than electric shocks and Room 101.

  In 1934’s Burmese Days, for example, the teak merchant John Flory is a tormented imperialist, who lives in “a stifling, stultifying world . . . in which every word and every thought is censored . . . Free speech is unthinkable.” The lie the colonisers tell themselves, that their role is to elevate Burma rather than to exploit it, poisons them, while Flory’s hidden dissent condemns him to a lonely, sterile life: “It is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret.” In Keep the Aspidistra Flying , everything is dismal, tasteless and grey, except when it is lurid and hellish. Its protagonist Gordon Comstock’s poem (which Orwell had already published in The Adelphi) turns 1930s London into a sketch for Airstrip One, with its torn posters fluttering in a cruel wind, and the malign authority “Who spies with jealous, watchful care, / Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways, / Who picks our words and cuts our clothes, / And maps the pattern of our days.” This tyrant is “the money-god,” his “money-priesthood” is the Party, and his “thousand million slaves” are the proles. Where Winston is oppressed by propaganda posters, Comstock is tormented by advertising hoardings: his Big Brother is Roland Butta, the character who promotes a hot drink called Bovex. The name of the ad agency where Comstock “packs a world of lies into a hundred words” even sounds like a fascist movement: New Albion.

  As a writer of fiction, Orwell had both a limited imagination and a hoarder’s impulse. His first four novels were junk shops piled to the rafters with miscellaneous preoccupations for which he couldn’t find a more suitable home. In 1946, the writer Julian Symons told Orwell that, while it was fine as a veiled autobiography, Coming Up for Air barely qualified as a novel. Orwell did not put up a fight. “Of course you are perfectly right about my own character constantly intruding on that of the narrator,” he wrote back. “I am not a real novelist anyway.” He considered A Clerg yman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying “silly potboilers which I ought not to have published in the first place.” What makes his early novels worth reading is not plot or character but voice: the lively flow of opinions, observations, anecdotes and jokes; the persuasive expression of a world view; the sense of a writer getting something off his chest.

  Coming Up for Air is equal parts nostalgia and dread, each emotion sharpening the flavour of the other. Its narrator is George Bowling, a chubby, middlebrow suburbanite with a family and a solid job in the insurance business. Walking through London one day, Bowling is so haunted by premonitions of war that he decides to visit Lower Binfield, his idyllic childhood home in the Thames Valley, and go fishing. His long, rhapsodic reminiscences of a rural paradise simultaneously anticipate Winston Smith’s “Golden Country” and constitute a stock clearance of Orwell’s childhood memories, giving weight to Cyril Connolly’s pointed quip that Orwell was “a revolutionary in love with 1910.” But nostalgia, which is not necessarily reactionary, feels justified here. If ever there was a time when one could fairly claim that the past was looking better than the future, then it was 1938. And memory matters; in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s both sword and shield. Bowling admits that society was harsher and more unequal in his youth but “people then had something that we haven’t got now. What? It was simply that they didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of.”

  Bowling doesn’t just fear the world to come; he can actually see it. Strolling through London, “as if I’d got X-rays in my eyes,” he has startling visions of food queues, propaganda posters and machine guns blurting from bedroom windows. Even worse, he imagines the “after-war”:

  The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan world. The coloured shirts. The barbed wire. The rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.

  This grisly premonition of Airstrip One is underlined by the same warning as Nineteen Eighty-Four: “the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries” can happen here.

  Bowling even witnesses a dress rehearsal for the Two Minutes Hate when he attends a meeting of the Left Book Club and hears an anti-fascist speaking in mechanical slogans. “It’s a ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let’s all get together and have a good hate.” It’s not the politics that makes Orwell recoil—he, too, was an anti-fascist—but the language and tone. Even after he rejected pacifism, he never lost his suspicion of brutalising rhetoric. Nineteen Eighty-Four springs a nasty surprise on the reader when O’Brien, an Inner Party official, posing as a member of the underground Brotherhood, asks Winston and his lover Julia if they are prepared to murder, sabotage, plant bombs, and even “throw sulfuric acid in a child’s face” in the cause of defeating Big Brother’s Ingsoc regime. Yes, they say without hesitation. Yes. Later, O’Brien reminds Winston of that moment when he endorsed the idea that the ends justify the means. The fact that the opposition to Big Brother is called the Brotherhood suggests that they are not as different as Winston would like to believe.

  Bowling’s sojourn to Lower Binfield is a washout. His erstwhile childhood paradise is now all noise and concrete. Modernity is a plague in Bowling’s eyes, and his language bridges the gap between democracy and totalitarianism. The “new kind of men from eastern Europe . . . who think in slogans and talk in bullets” are “streamlined,” but then so is modern Britain.7 In Orwell’s 1930s lexicon, streamlined was as pernicious a word as hygienic, sterile or slick. This is capitalism as dystopia: “Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over . . .” It sounds a lot like Orwell’s list of pet hates in Twentieth Century Authors: “I dislike big towns, noise, motor cars, the radio, tinned food, central heating and ‘modern’ furniture.” Orwell’s abstemious, old-fashioned tastes meant that, even as he valorised the common man, he disdained many of the things that the common man of the 1930s enjoyed.

  So there are things that Bowling would not mind seeing succumb to the bombs. Likewise, Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying both fears war and relishes it, as a terrible purge that will sweep away the tawdriest aspects of modern life: “Only a little while before the aeroplanes come. Zoom—bang! A few tons of TNT to send our civilisation back to hell where it belongs.” This is the same petulant apocalyptic instinct that drove H. G. Wells to fantasise about Martians laying waste to Woking, or John Betjeman to invite bombs to rain on Slough: rip it up and start again. All of Orwell’s first four novels, despite their significant differences, share a pungent sense of claustrophobia, corruption, and living death. Above all, there is the ozone smell of fear.

  “We swim in it,” says Bowling. “It’s our element. Everyone that isn’t scared stiff of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something.”

  At 8 p.m. Eastern Time on October 30, 1938, CBS Radio inadvertently conducted a nationwide study in the psychology of fear. The Halloween episode of The Mercury Theatre on the Air was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds by twenty-three-year-old wunderkind Orson Welles and writer Howard Koch. Welles did not mean to fool anybody. “It was our thought that perhaps people might be bored or annoyed at hearing a tale so improbable,” he said later. As if the prospect of Martian death machines making landfall in New Jersey were not implausible enough, he topped and tailed each half of the hour-long broadcast with an announcement clarifying that it was fiction. But the first half was convincingly presented as a series of emergency news bulletins and, so soon after Munich, nerves were frayed.

  Some Americans tuned in to The War of the Worlds at exactly the w
rong time, convinced themselves it was real, and flew into a panic. Reporters harangued a startled Welles with wild rumours of stampedes and suicides. Newspapers, radio stations and police precincts were swamped with phone calls seeking more information. A radio announcer in Cleveland was accused of “covering up the truth” after he told listeners there was no invasion. Such reactions were so extreme and unexpected that the story prompted more than twelve thousand newspaper articles over the next three weeks. Even Howard Koch was affected. Walking through Manhattan the next morning, he overheard talk of an invasion and assumed that Germany had declared war.

  In his 1940 book The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psycholog y of Panic, Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril hugely overestimated the number of people affected, but his intentions were sincere and his case studies revealing. His team found that the people most likely to believe the broadcast without checking other sources were the intensely religious, the anxious and the economically insecure, because it confirmed the fear and lack of control that they already felt. Cantril wrote, “The complexity of modern finance and government, the discrepancies shown in the economic and political proposals of the various ‘experts,’ the felt threats of Fascism, Communism, prolonged unemployment among millions of Americans—these together with a thousand and one other characteristics of modern living—create an environment which the average individual is completely unable to interpret.” One interviewee said that the real news made it easier to believe incredible things, because “so many things we hear are unbelievable.”