The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  Note that Brave New World was the only recent novel Orwell considered. As an ambitious but unsuccessful novelist, Orwell tended to caricature his peers as either irrelevant or tediously doctrinaire. In doing so, he overlooked a slew of speculative fiction from the British left. Novels written during the early 1930s, such as Between Two Men by Frederick le Gros Clark and Purple Plague by ILP leader Fenner Brockway, had an anti-capitalist emphasis. (It’s worth noting that To Tell the Truth, a witty double-edged satire by John Strachey’s sister Amabel Williams-Ellis, included minor characters called Big Brother and Julia.) As the decade darkened, the focus turned to home-grown strains of fascism in books including London’s Burning: A Novel for the Decline and Fall of the Liberal Age by Barbara Wootton, Minimum Man: or, Time to Be Gone by Andrew Marvell, and In the Second Year by Margaret Storm Jameson.8 “I could imagine an English Fascism,” Storm Jameson explained, “the brutality half-masked and devious with streaks of Methodist virtue.” When her book was accused of defeatism, the Left Review came to her defence: “The novel does not set out to be a prophecy, but a warning to liberals.”

  None of these novels was as gripping or persuasive as Sinclair Lewis’s vision of American fascism in It Can’t Happen Here, but there were enough of them to make Orwell’s silence surprising. He never wrote about the most remarkable example, Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night, but it’s unlikely that he missed it, considering that it was published by Gollancz in 1937 and reissued as a Left Book Club selection three years later. In his review of Mein Kampf that year, his vision of Nazism in 2040 as “a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder” is almost a précis of Constantine’s novel.

  In the “year of the Lord Hitler 720,” the world is divided between the German and Japanese empires. The German Empire is rigidly stratified, with the “Knights” playing the role of the Inner Party and the Nazis the Outer Party. Below them are women, and lowest of all are the savages who persist in practising Christianity. The truth about Hitler and the “Twenty Year War” has been wiped out by a war on memory. According to the Hitler Bible—the only book, apart from technical manuals, that anyone is permitted to read—Hitler was a Thor-like blond god, seven feet tall, and Nazism his religion.

  Decades later, the critic Daphne Patai discovered that Murray Constantine was a pseudonym for the feminist novelist Katharine Burdekin. 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. But the German Empire has grown stagnant and sterile because men are committing suicide and girls, for some mysterious reason, are not being born. Unable to conquer one another, the Germans and Japanese are locked in a paralysing peace that proves toxic to societies founded on military glory: the inverse of Nineteen Eighty-Four ’s endlessly warring superstates. “We can create nothing,” complains the disillusioned Knight Friedrich Von Hess, “we can invent nothing—we have no use for creation, we do not need to invent. We are Germans. We are holy. We are perfect, and we are dead.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell gives Winston a variety of arguments against the endurance of dictatorships in order for O’Brien to knock them down, and one of them is essentially Von Hess’s. A society founded on fear, hatred and cruelty, Winston says, “would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.”

  The engine of the plot also points to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Von Hess tells Burdekin’s hero, an English aviation engineer named Alfred, about an explosive family secret. His forbidden book, in which his ancestor wrote down the true history of Nazism, is as destabilising as Goldstein’s. And just as Winston is shaken by finding the photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, Alfred is rocked by a snapshot which shows that Hitler was no Aryan deity but “a little soft dark fat smiling thing,” and that women were once confident, attractive and fully human. “There is not the whole width of the Empire between the falsification of history and its destruction,” says Von Hess. Burdekin’s secret resistance movement, like Orwell’s, is called the Brotherhood.

  We don’t know what Orwell made of Swastika Night, but he did engage with at least one story about fascism in England. On August 24, 1940, he saw Take Back Your Freedom, a new play that he found “remarkable in its insight.” Winifred Holtby, a feminist writer and ILP member, began writing the play (under the title Dictator) in 1934 but died of kidney disease before she could make the changes requested by her theatrical producer, so playwright Norman Ginsbury finished the job. Between them, Holtby and Ginsbury demonstrated a keen understanding of the appeal of populist demagogues. The play’s main character, Arnold Clayton, is a junior minister, young, clever, charismatic, who resigns from the government and forms the British Planning Party, with a platform of “Action. Isolation. Order.” Orwell interpreted him as “a more gentlemanly Hitler or a more intelligent Mosley.” Clayton wins a shock victory by tapping into the irrational impulses of the public he despises. “We must have emotion,” he tells his mother. “Reason divides men into a thousand parties, but passion unites them.” As Muggeridge said of Hitler, “Many who had found thinking with their minds unprofitable were ready to follow him in thinking with their blood.” Once in office, Clayton becomes a tyrant who conscripts men, bans women from the workplace, purges his rivals and imprisons his opponents in concentration camps.

  Orwell admired the play for its depiction of Clayton as a “prisoner of power,” who has gradually sacrificed his integrity to the Plan, the Plan to the Party, the Party to his friends, and his friends to himself. Perhaps he also enjoyed the play’s most Orwellian exchange. During the election campaign, four of Clayton’s Gestapo-like Grey Guards kill a Jewish protester and he defuses the scandal by claiming that the killers are agents provocateurs working for his enemies. His mother, initially supportive but increasingly horrified, is doubtful.

  MRS. CLAYTON: “Is this true—about the agents provocateurs?”

  CLAYTON: “You heard what I said.”

  MRS. CLAYTON: “I repeat—is it true?”

  CLAYTON: “It is necessary. Therefore it will be true.”

  Orwell did not like London at the best of times, but he bonded with it at the worst of times. The Blitz began on September 7, 1940, and the truth is that Orwell found it rather exciting. The puritan in him appreciated the hardship; the socialist savoured the enforced solidarity; the man of action thrilled to the thunder of bombs, the burning sky, the barrage balloons blushing pink in the flames’ glow, the strangely soothing rhythm of anti-aircraft fire. Cyril Connolly suspected that Orwell “felt enormously at home in the Blitz, among the bombs, the bravery, the rubble, the shortages, the homeless, the signs of rising revolutionary temper.”

  During the flight from Dunkirk, Orwell and Connolly had taken a stroll through the park and observed Londoners playing cricket and pushing prams as if nothing was wrong. “They’ll behave like this until the bombs start dropping, and then they’ll panic,” Connolly predicted. Yet, as Orwell later noted, they didn’t; “they preserved the ordinary pattern of their lives to a surprising extent.” There were times when Orwell could walk through London and observe a stubborn normality, and others when it felt as if life had been broken into pieces and reassembled as an absurd mosaic. A deserted Oxford Street sparkling with shattered glass. A hillock of department store mannequins which looked, from a distance, like a mound of corpses. London Zoo selling off its animals because there was not enough food to feed them. Two dazed young women, their faces masked with dirt, asking Orwell, “Please sir, can you tell us where we are?” A city of fragments. One morning, his close friend Inez Holden found herself staring at a tree in Regent’s Park that was draped with stockings, strands of silk and a brand-new bowler hat—colourful debris from a hotel that had been bombed the night before. She bumped into a friend who was a surrealist painter. “Of course we we
re painting this sort of thing years ago,” he said, “but it has taken some time to get here.”

  Orwell thought Britain required radical transformation of a different kind. The sight of garish advertising posters on the tube just after Dunkirk sparked a flash of apocalyptic disgust worthy of Comstock: “How much rubbish this war will sweep away, if only we can hang on throughout the summer.” Having tried pacifism and made a conflicted case for quietism, Orwell now alighted on revolutionary patriotism. In “My Country Right or Left,” published that autumn, he painted a melodramatic picture of street fighting and socialist militias in the Ritz. In his diary, he was increasingly disgusted by the selfishness of the rich, whom he compared to the Russian aristocracy in 1916: “Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exists.” In two contributions to The Betrayal of the Left, the essay anthology that Victor Gollancz assembled in order to articulate his anguish over the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Orwell echoed the old POUM line: “We cannot beat Hitler without passing through revolution, nor consolidate our revolution without beating Hitler.”

  Orwell expanded on this idea in his remarkable pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. In January, Warburg had introduced Orwell to the German-born Zionist writer Tosco Fyvel to discuss Britain’s war aims. Fyvel raised the idea of commissioning a series of pamphlets “written in simple language without the rubber-stamp political jargon of the past,” under the name Searchlight Books. Stephen Spender, Daily Mirror columnist William Connor (aka “Cassandra”) and the socialist science-fiction writer Olaf Stapledon were among the contributors. So too, after some hesitation, was Orwell. The Lion and the Unicorn is unmistakably the product of a very peculiar year, but it was both his finest writing about England (“a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly,” yet “bound together by an invisible chain”) and his strongest argument for socialism: he proposed the nationalisation of industry, progressive taxation, the abolition of private education, and independence for India. Foreshadowing the horror of Airstrip One’s surveillance state, Orwell celebrated “the privateness of English life . . . The most hateful of all names in an English ear is Nosey Parker.” Fyvel called it “the only really positive, optimistic book he ever wrote.” Eileen’s assessment was typically droll and irreverent. “George has written a little book, explaining how to be a Socialist though Tory,” she told a friend.

  Orwell believed that the collapse in France had changed everything by exposing beyond doubt the weakness of capitalism. For the first time, an English form of socialism—no rallies, no uniforms, no blood in the streets—was not just possible but necessary. As he wrote in a Tribune piece urging readers to join the Home Guard, “We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.” He had come so far from the “fascising” theory behind Coming Up for Air that he derided the “soft-boiled intellectuals” who declared that “if we fight against the Nazis we shall ‘go Nazi’ ourselves,” as if he had never made that claim himself. The pacifist Orwell of 1938 was now an unperson.

  When The Lion and the Unicorn was published in February 1941, it quickly sold more than twelve thousand copies. “Here was somebody who had never been accused of being a super-patriot or pro-imperialist suddenly arguing very cogently and very effectively that this was a war that had to be supported,” remembered his friend Jon Kimche, who was inspired to quit the ILP. “It was a turning point for many people like myself.” Warburg, meanwhile, thought that Orwell’s vision of common-sense radicalism laid the ground for Labour’s election victory in 1945. So Orwell was right to see the war as an agent of social transformation, eventually. He was of course wrong to predict that victory would be impossible without revolution, but he wasn’t the only writer to smell radical change in the air. After Dunkirk, H. G. Wells, the aged colossus of Edwardian literature, declared, “The revolution in England has now begun.”

  While they were trying to get Searchlight Books off the ground, Orwell, Fyvel and Warburg made a pilgrimage to Wells’s home at Hanover Terrace, on the fringes of Regent’s Park. At seventy-four, Wells was a lion in winter, but in his day he had embodied better than anyone the ability to finesse literary success into political influence, so he seemed like a good man to ask for advice. Alas, the Searchlight trio found “a querulous man who was ailing,” said Fyvel. “Orwell and I both felt the loss of a boyhood hero.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Wells-World

  Orwell and H. G.

  In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient—a glittering anti-septic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.

  —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

  H. G. Wells loomed over Orwell’s childhood like a planet— awe-inspiring, oppressive, impossible to ignore—and Orwell never got over it. “I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much,” he wrote in his 1941 essay “Wells, Hitler and the World State.” “The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”

  At Eton, Orwell had shared a dog-eared copy of Wells’s collection The Country of the Blind and Other Stories with Cyril Connolly, who recalled that Orwell enjoyed the stories’ “fearful, moral, morbid questions.” During his summer holidays with the Buddicom family in Oxfordshire, he was a keen reader of A Modern Utopia; Jacintha Buddicom remembered him saying that “he might write that kind of book himself.” In fact, Orwell’s very first published story, when he was at Eton, was “A Peep into the Future,” a Wellsian tale of an uprising against a kind of scientific theocracy. He almost met the great man himself through his well-connected aunt Nellie, a member of the Fabian Society, but it was not to be. He looked, said Buddicom, “so disappointed that I wondered if he would ever smile again.”

  For an ambitious, questioning young man like Orwell, Wells’s books were intellectual gelignite which blew the doors off the dreary, know-your-place conformity of a respectable Edwardian childhood. In the mind of Wells, who transcended origins far humbler than Orwell’s own, there was nothing a writer couldn’t do with enough hard work and willpower. He was a graphomaniac who published in his lifetime more than a hundred works of fiction, non-fiction, and uncategorisable hybrids of the two, as if he could shift the world on its axis through the sheer weight of his words. “I have to overwork, with all the penalties of overworking in loss of grace and finish, to get my work done,” he wrote. And his work was never done. Known as “the Man Who Invented Tomorrow,” Wells predicted space travel, tanks, electric trains, wind and water power, identity cards, poison gas, the Channel tunnel and atom bombs, and popularised in fiction the time machine, Martian invasions, invisibility and genetic engineering. He was the most mesmerising, infuriating writer of his era, occupying the minds of even those who couldn’t stand him. It is no exaggeration to say that the genre of dystopian fiction evolved as it did because so many people wanted to prove H. G. Wells wrong.

  Orwell appears to have read everything that Wells wrote, so there was an Oedipal hue to his irresistible urge to knock down “this wonderful man” who had towered over his youth. He wondered if his attacks constituted “a sort of parricide.” Starting with The Road to Wigan Pier, he turned Wells into a straw man: the errant prophet whose grand schemes for human improvement, propelled by the almighty machine, were at best misguided and at worst repellent.“The Socialist world is to be above all other things an ordered world, an efficient world,” he wrote contemptuously. “But it is precisely from that vision of the future as a sort of glittering Wells-world that sensitive minds recoil.” At any rate Orwell’s mind recoiled, and that is exactly the vision derided in Goldstein’s book. In “Inside the Whale,” Orwell was more woundingly personal, mocking “the ‘progressives,’ th
e yea-sayers, the Shaw-Wells type, always leaping forward to embrace the ego-projections which they mistake for the future.”

  It’s not surprising that Wells met Orwell, because Wells met everybody: several British prime ministers, four US presidents, two Soviet premiers, Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and almost every writer that Orwell admired. Wells’s hunger for life was maddeningly insatiable. If he achieved wealth and acclaim, he craved more. If he had the love of one woman, he needed (at least) one more. If he formed a friendship, more often than not he would stretch it until it snapped. Almost as soon as he joined a political group or alliance, he was desperate to quit. Wherever he was in his life, geographically, intellectually, emotionally, Wells longed to be elsewhere, hence his enthusiasm for utopias. The value of the form, he wrote, “lies in that regard towards human freedom, in the undying interest of the human power of self-escape, the power to resist the causation of the past, and to evade, initiate, endeavour and overcome.” This was the story of Wells’s life.

  Herbert George “Bertie” Wells was a petulant, demanding child and, in some respects, remained one until his death at the age of seventy-nine. But his colossal egotism was tempered by a keen awareness, albeit usually retrospective, of his shortcomings and mistakes.