The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  Orwell thought that Cantril’s book shed useful light on totalitarian methods. For one thing, the incident demonstrated the power of radio to manipulate public opinion, even when it wasn’t trying. Newspapers, he wrote, “cannot tell lies of more than a certain magnitude.” The trade gazette Editor & Publisher warned, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove that it is competent to perform the news job.”

  Cantril’s research also shed light on the public’s irrationality and failure to check facts. “The evident connection between personal unhappiness and readiness to believe the incredible is its most interesting discovery,” Orwell wrote. “It is a similar frame of mind that has induced whole nations to fling themselves into the arms of a Saviour.” It’s ironic, then, that Hitler, the master of the Big Lie, pounced on the War of the Worlds affair as proof of the decadence of democracy. The columnist Dorothy Thompson thought that the incident was “the perfect demonstration that the danger is not from Mars but from the theatrical demagogue.”

  If Welles could deceive so many people without even trying, what might a calculating liar do to the human mind? That was the theme of Patrick Hamilton’s play Gas Light, which opened at London’s Richmond Theatre on December 5, 1938. In Hamilton’s hit Victorian melodrama, a bullying husband called Manningham attempts to convince his wife, Bella, that she is losing her mind, so that he can send her to an asylum, by fabricating evidence and telling her to disbelieve her own senses. “You are not going out of your mind, Mrs. Manningham, you are slowly, methodically, systematically being driven out of your mind,” a police detective tells Bella. Orwell often compared the effects of organised lying to mental illness: Barcelona during the communist purge, for example, was “a lunatic asylum.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston fights to affirm his own sanity in the face of O’Brien’s insistence that he is “mentally deranged.” In The Woman Who Could Not Die, a memoir of two years in the hands of Stalin’s secret police which Orwell owned but did not review, the Russian writer and diplomat’s wife Iulia de Beausobre summarised the psychological effect of captivity in a totalitarian regime like so: “Am I really mad? Are they all mad? Is the whole world mad?” Mental disintegration was, of course, the desired effect.

  The word gaslighting later made its way into clinical literature and, eventually, political discourse. Far too late to describe Hitler and Stalin, both of whom could gaslight a nation.

  Orwell and Eileen returned to London on March 30, 1939, two days before the last of the Spanish Republicans surrendered to Franco. They dropped off the manuscript of Coming Up for Air with Victor Gollancz, spent three weeks with Laurence O’Shaughnessy in Greenwich, and visited Orwell’s ailing father in Southwold, a small town near the River Orwell in Suffolk. Richard Blair died of cancer in June, aged eighty-two. Hours before he passed away, Orwell’s sister Avril read their father a positive review of Coming Up for Air ; he died knowing that his son had amounted to something after all. The couple moved back to Wallington to wait for the coming war, which Orwell saw as both a grand catastrophe and a personal affront. He had things he wanted to do, chiefly a three-part family saga called The Quick and the Dead, and “the idea that I’ve got to abandon them and either be bumped off or depart to some filthy concentration camp just infuriates me,” he told Jack Common. “Eileen and I have decided that if war does come the best thing will be to just stay alive and thus add to the number of sane people.”

  The impression one gets from reading Orwell’s work during this period is of a man urgently trying to clarify the relationship between fascism, communism and capitalism. He clearly preferred a fourth option—democratic socialism—but that didn’t seem to be on the table. Just before he went to Spain, he had scorned “the vulgar lie, now so popular, that ‘Communism and Fascism are the same thing.’ ” But when he read Assignment in Utopia, he felt that Stalinism, as described by Lyons, “does not seem to be so very different from Fascism.”

  Only one word could explain the puzzling affinity between two apparent enemies. The concept of totalitarianism was developed by its supporters in Italy during the 1920s—Mussolini defined it as “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”—but it translated into English with purely negative connotations. Borkenau’s 1940 book The Totalitarian Enemy presented Nazism and Stalinism as two faces of the same monster: “Brown Bolshevism” and “Red Fascism.” This radically contradicted the older theory, popularised by John Strachey’s 1932 book The Coming Struggle for Power, that fascism was “simply the bludgeon of the capitalist class” and communism the only defence. “The two regimes, having started from opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system—a form of oligarchical collectivism,” Orwell wrote in his review of Borkenau, anticipating the title of Emmanuel Goldstein’s book in Nineteen Eighty-Four : The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. “The sin of nearly all leftwingers from 1933 onwards,” he later wrote, “is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.”

  History couldn’t explain what was happening; this was something quite new. “This book is subtitled ‘Back to the Middle Ages,’ which is unfair to the Middle Ages,” Orwell wrote in a review of a book about Franco. “There were no machine-guns in those days, and the Inquisition was a very amateurish business. After all, even Torquemada only burnt two thousand people in ten years. In modern Russia or Germany they’d say he wasn’t trying.”

  At 11:15 a.m. on September 3, 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that the United Kingdom was at war with Germany. London’s first air-raid drill took place minutes later. The evacuation of children to the countryside began. Gas masks were distributed. The skies over London filled with barrage balloons, the pavements with sandbags. The lights went out. “Groping along darkened streets,” wrote journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, “dimly it was felt that a way of life was failing, its comfortable familiarity passing away never to reappear . . . Difficult to project any existing thing into the future, difficult to imagine its continuance.”

  Orwell was no longer a pacifist. A couple of weeks into the war, the novelist Ethel Mannin, who still was, wrote to Orwell praising the anti-war message of Coming Up for Air. She was “bitched buggered and bewildered” when he wrote back to say that he was now eager to sign up and do his bit. “I thought you thought it all crazy, this smashing in of Nazi faces,” she protested.

  It was the shock of the Nazi-Soviet Pact that changed his mind. On August 23, Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was greeted at the Moscow airport by a fluttering swastika and the Red Army Band playing the “Horst Wessel Song.” For Orwell, even an imperialist England was better than a totalitarian alliance. Unusually for such a rational man, he attributed his epiphany not to the pact itself but to a dream he had had the night before the news broke: “It taught me two things, first, that I should be simply relieved when the long-dreaded war started, secondly, that I was patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against my own side, would support the war, would fight in it if possible.” He immediately quit the ILP and described pacifism as a form of appeasement—even “objectively pro-Fascist” (an allegation he later described as “dishonest”). “The intellectuals who are at present pointing out that democracy and fascism are the same thing etc. depress me horribly,” he told Gollancz. So much for Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  The British government had made plans for mass graves and cardboard coffins in anticipation of up to twenty thousand casualties from massive air raids. But the bombers did not come. Instead, September 3 marked the beginning of eight months of “phony war,” which Orwell described, in a phrase he would later reuse with greater success, as a “cold war.” It reminded him too much of the long, empty months on the Aragón front; Orwell hated the sensation of nothing happening. Reading a report by the social research body Mass Observation six months later, he found that most Britons were “bored, bewildered and a litt
le irritated, but at the same time buoyed up by a completely false idea that winning the war is going to be an easy business.”

  Eileen immediately took a job at the Ministry of Information’s censorship department and moved to London, while Orwell stayed in Wallington, feeling useless. He wanted to fight in “this bloody war,” but his lungs put paid to that. Largely out of the swim of freelance journalism, he spent his phony war contemplating the world’s plunge into the abyss.

  It is hard to disentangle the true extent of Orwell’s pessimism from his love of negative hyperbole. “I find that anything outrageously strange generally ends by fascinating me even when I abominate it,” he wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier. From Down and Out in Paris and London to Nineteen Eighty-Four, his prose quickens its pulse whenever it veers towards catastrophe. It’s therefore no surprise that Orwell enjoyed Malcolm Muggeridge’s “brilliant and depressing” book The Thirties. Muggeridge, the former Moscow correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, was a flamboyant phrase-maker, and The Thirties was a bracingly harsh and witty account of a shameful decade. “He is looking only on the black side, but it is doubtful whether there is any bright side to look on,” Orwell wrote in his review. “What a decade! A riot of appalling folly that suddenly becomes a nightmare, a scenic railway ending in a torture-chamber.”

  Of all Muggeridge’s slashing insights, the most striking now is the unintended consequences of the decade’s new obsession with accumulating data, in the form of documentaries, studies and surveys. “With this craving for facts and abundant provision of them, went, ironically, or it may be inevitably, a craving for fantasy and abundant provision of it . . . Never before, it may be assumed, have statistics been so greatly in demand, never before so extravagantly falsified.” A cultural fetish for data incentivises the manufacture of bogus information and thus, far from cementing the truth, ends up producing more resilient lies. It happened in Russia and Germany and it happens in Oceania, where Winston Smith spends his days rewriting back copies of The Times for the Records Department. Facts do not actually matter in the Ministry of Truth, but they must be seen to matter, because vaporous, unreliable memory is no match for “evidence.”

  What should a writer do in such dire times? What is the decent response to the obscene calamity of war? During those lonely months in Wallington, Orwell was struggling for answers. In the title work of Inside the Whale, his first essay collection, he didn’t manage to convince himself, let alone the reader, that the politically apathetic self-absorption of Henry Miller was admirable (he later dismissed it as “nihilistic quietism”), only that he preferred the American’s rude humanity and lack of humbug to the “labels, slogans and evasions” of the pro-communist intelligentsia. “Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.” The bedrock of the essay was despair and an attempt to salvage integrity, if nothing else, from the wreckage of the 1930s. When all the options are bad, when the world is “moving into an age . . . in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction,” one should at least choose to be honest.

  “Inside the Whale” should never be quoted without noting that Orwell wrote it during a period of emotional distress and intellectual flux. For example, “the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics” is an opinion that he spent the rest of his life ignoring. The collection’s second essay was dedicated to a writer who refused to hide inside the whale. Charles Dickens, he wrote, was “always on the side of the underdog, on the side of the weak against the strong,” and “always preaching a sermon . . . Because you can only create if you can care.” His empathy with his subject was so intense that the essay amounted to a flood of self-analysis. As a literary critic, Orwell was less interested in close textual analysis than in individuals and ideas: What sort of people were Dickens, Shakespeare, Miller, et al., and how did they see the world? The essay ends with his famous description of Dickens’s face, or at least the face Orwell imagined: “It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” It is the face of the man, and the writer, that Orwell aspired to be—a man in many ways out of time.

  Orwell had no way of knowing that his points about Dickens’s posthumous ubiquity would one day apply to his own: “I should doubt whether anyone who has actually read Dickens can go a week without remembering him in one context or another. Whether you approve of him or not, he is there like the Nelson Column [sic].” (The column held symbolic power for Orwell: in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the statue of Admiral Nelson has been replaced by one of Big Brother.) In a talk to the Dickens Fellowship in London in May 1940, Orwell went further. According to the fellowship’s report, “To be a lover of Dickens, he felt, it was not necessary to know his work perfectly, as he was one of the very few writers who have a tradition that moves outside the realm of literature.” Orwell mentioned the time he spent in Kent in 1931 working alongside hop-pickers who knew all about Oliver Twist without having read the novel, and felt that Dickens was on their side. Anyone who cites doublethink or Big Brother secondhand is fellow to those hop-pickers.

  Orwell finally joined Eileen in London in May, the month that Winston Churchill replaced Chamberlain as prime minister, and the couple rented a top-floor flat at 18 Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, near Regent’s Park. Needing a regular pay cheque, he reluctantly became the theatre critic for Time and Tide, and his sense of impotence and irrelevance was very quickly brought home to him on the evening of May 29. He was reviewing Audrey Lucas’s Portrait of Helen at the Torch Theatre when, during the interval, an usher announced that the British Expeditionary Force was being evacuated from Dunkirk. Eileen’s brother was on that beach, treating the wounded. Orwell spent June 1 waiting at Victoria and Waterloo stations to see if O’Shaughnessy was among the men returning from the coast, but in vain. He had, the couple soon learned, been killed by shrapnel on the beach in France, just hours before he was due to be evacuated. Eileen, who worshipped her brother, grew thin and careworn. For the next four years, she told her friend Lettice Cooper, she didn’t really care if she lived or died.

  On June 10, Italy entered the war on the side of Germany and rumours of a German invasion became commonplace. In Berlin, SS-Oberführer Walter Schellenberg began compiling the Sonderfahn-dungsliste GB, a list of almost three thousand British nationals and European exiles who should be arrested after a successful occupation. The list, discovered by British soldiers in 1945 and dubbed “the Black Book,” included H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Franz Borkenau, Kingsley Martin and Victor Gollancz but not Orwell. It was a kind of snub that the Nazis did not yet consider him worth arresting.

  “Everything is disintegrating,” Orwell wrote in his diary. “It makes me writhe to be writing book-reviews etc. at such a time, and even angers me that such time-wasting should still be permitted . . . At present I feel as I felt in 1936 when the Fascists were closing in on Madrid, only far worse.”

  At least he now had an opportunity to bear arms, in a manner of speaking. Under pressure from the press and public, the government had recently invited men who couldn’t fight to sign up for the Local Defence Volunteers, later renamed the Home Guard, and prepare for an invasion. Orwell signed up on June 20. As Sergeant Blair, he recruited Fredric Warburg to his section, which included several European refugees. As if to illustrate how a national crisis united different political tribes, his commanding officer was a former member of Mosley’s Blackshirts.

  Far from fearing an invasion, Orwell hoped for one, recklessly banking on Britain’s ability to repel it: “We shall at any rate get rid once and for all of the gang that got us into
this mess.” Quixotically, he saw the Home Guard as a serious potential militia and wrote a letter to Time and Tide with some street-fighting tips that he had picked up in Barcelona, calling for citizens to be armed with hand grenades, shotguns and radio sets. It must have been a jolt for readers to see their theatre critic crying “ARM THE PEOPLE” in the same issue that he reviewed Reginald Beckwith’s play Boys in Brown. Walking through London, Orwell found himself studying windows and wondering which of them would make effective machine-gun nests. Like George Bowling with his X-ray vision, Orwell could see the skull behind London’s face, waiting to be revealed. Warburg saw him as “an Ironside, austere, resolute, implacably determined to destroy his enemies without fear or mercy, if only they came within his reach.” But of course they never did.

  On August 20, Ramón Mercader, a Catalan NKVD agent masquerading as a French Trotskyist, talked his way into Trotsky’s study in Mexico City, removed an ice axe from his raincoat, and plunged it into Trotsky’s skull. The arch-heretic died in hospital the next day. The headline in the Daily Worker was “A Counter-Revolutionary Gangster Passes.”

  “How will the Russian state get on without Trotsky?” Orwell mused. “Or the Communists elsewhere? Probably they will be forced to invent a substitute.”

  That summer, Orwell gestured towards a canon of dystopian literature in a short article for the left-wing weekly Tribune. He took four novels published between 1899 and 1932—H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes, Ernest Bramah’s The Secret of the League, Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—and tested their prophecies against the reality of fascism, coming down in favour of London. Two readers wrote in to suggest that such novels were actually “cultural blue-prints” that gave Hitler and Mussolini dangerous ideas. Orwell wasn’t convinced: “I don’t think anyone need fear that by writing, for instance, a forecast of a British Fascist state he is ‘putting ideas’ into the head of some local Hitler. The ideas will get there of their own accord, so long as the class struggle is a reality.”