The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  Such an elaborate retort was proof of Wells’s cultural impact. A Modern Utopia puffed him up with enough confidence to attempt a coup that would transform the gradualist Fabian Society into a revolutionary order of Samurai: a “confused, tedious, ill-conceived and ineffectual campaign” that he would come to consider the most embarrassing episode of his career. Working with other people was a skill Wells would never learn. Webb remarked, “He has neither the patience nor the good manners needed for cooperative effort—and just at present his conceit is possibly disabling.” Like Bellamy and Orwell, Wells did not accept the prevailing version of socialism (he considered Marxism “an enfeebling mental epidemic of spite”), so he had to design his own “plan for the reconstruction of human life, for the replacement of a disorder by order, for the making of a state in which mankind shall live bravely and beautifully beyond our present imagining.”

  Wells’s arrogance and impatience immunised him against the twin viruses of fascism and communism which infected so many of his contemporaries between the wars. Nobody else’s ideology could compete with the wonderful plans in his head.

  It is commonplace to wonder what Orwell’s reputation would now be had he lived past forty-six, but it’s just as interesting to ask what would have happened if Wells hadn’t. “Many writers, perhaps most, ought simply to stop writing when they reach middle age,” Orwell wrote. “Unfortunately our society will not let him stop.” He thought that even the best writers only enjoy fifteen years of brilliance, and presented Wells’s career as Exhibit A. Between The Time Machine in 1895 and The Sleeper Awakes in 1910, Wells wrote all of his lasting fiction: the scientific romances, the most persuasive utopias, the comic novels of middle-class frustration such as Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly, and the book he considered his masterpiece, Tono-Bungay.9 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.

  Wells had predicted world wars, including one initiated by Germany, in both The War in the Air and The World Set Free. Indeed when Ford Madox Ford joined the army and arrived at the Western Front, he had been so forewarned by Wells that he felt strangely underwhelmed. But on a fundamental level Wells did not believe that governments were imbecilic enough to actually let it happen. Once it did, he could not accept that such a disaster wouldn’t shock humanity to its senses. On the evening of August 4, 1914, the day Britain declared war on Germany, he sat down to write an essay with the unfortunately memorable title “The War That Will End War.”

  The war unravelled Wells, physically (his hair began falling out) and mentally. “The return to complete sanity took the greater part of two years,” he wrote. He became such a fierce jingo that some of his pacifist friends never forgave him. He then outraged his secularist admirers by undergoing a bizarre and short-lived religious conversion. He liked to claim he had invented the tank in his 1903 story “The Land Ironclads” (until he was eventually sued by the man who had), and was aggrieved that the army declined to make full use of his brilliance. Not until 1918 did Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail and the new director of propaganda, draw Wells into the war effort, hiring him to write fake newspapers that would rain down on German soldiers to sap their morale. He lasted a few weeks.

  Wells could predict machines but not how they would interact with human nature. He thought air war, for example, by obliterating the difference between combatant and civilian, would be so horrific that nobody would dare engage in it. In fact, nations proved to be remarkably comfortable with slaughtering the innocent from a great height. He then believed that such a cataclysmic war would surely lead to “a wave of sanity” that would bring down militarism, imperialism and aristocracy and lead to a worldwide confederation of socialist states. He therefore threw himself into the movement to form a post-war League of Nations, but grew predictably impatient with its poverty of vision. Once again, he felt like a giant surrounded by pygmies, and now he could feel his power and reputation waning. In a devastating essay called “The Late Mr. Wells,” the critic H. L. Mencken concluded, “he suffers from a messianic delusion—and once a man begins to suffer from a messianic delusion his days as a serious artist are ended.”

  The war changed everything. In 1918, Orwell later remembered, “there was, among the young, a curious cult of hatred of ‘old men.’ The dominance of ‘old men’ was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity.” Wells, at fifty-two, qualified as an “old man.” “My boom is over,” he told Arnold Bennett. “I’ve had my boom. I’m yesterday.”

  Yet Wells always believed he could begin again, and he chose to wrench himself out of his post-war funk by writing nothing less than the entire history of the human race. What his 1920 epic The Outline of History lacked in historical rigour it made up for in vigour, propelling the reader, as Winston Churchill said, all the way “from nebula to the Third International.” To Wells, history had a rhythm, a cycle. Nations were elevated by the creative energy of a Samurai-like caste, stagnated under the stewardship of an oppressive bureaucracy, and finally succumbed to barbarians. He thought that the world was now deep into the second phase and required a new generation of Samurai to start again.

  The Outline sold two million copies in the UK and US alone. With both his bank account and his ego bulging anew, Wells was ready to take on the world again. He accepted an invitation from the Russian novelist Maxim Gorky, whom he had met in New York in 1906, to visit post-Revolutionary Russia, a trip which included a conversation with Lenin himself. To his surprise, he found Lenin to be an “amazing little man” whose pragmatism was “very refreshing”—for a Marxist. Alas, the admiration wasn’t mutual. According to Trotsky, the Russian leader snorted, “What a narrow petty bourgeois! Ugh! What a Philistine!”

  Even the success of The Outline could not rid Wells of the sickening sense that he was wasting his time and talent. Dipping his toe back into politics by joining the Labour Party and standing twice (unsuccessfully) for Parliament did nothing to relieve his dissatisfaction. His love life was untenable, as his inability to choose between his long-suffering wife, Jane, and long-standing mistress, Rebecca West, led West to break off their affair in 1923. On a trip to Geneva, Wells fell for a writer named Odette Keun and began spending time with her on the French Riviera, even when, later, Jane was dying of cancer. Boredom, his arch-enemy, had been vanquished yet again.

  Tedium was, however, a growing problem for his readers, as Wells became fixated on the latest incarnation of his heroic elite, the Open Conspiracy. In Men Like Gods, an anxious, overworked journalist is rejuvenated by falling into a perfect parallel-universe Earth where the state has withered away. He returns to the 1920s determined to “never desist nor rest again until old Earth is one city and Utopia set up therein.” In The Dream, a scientist in the year 4000 dreams the entire life of an ordinary man in the “fear-haunted world” of the early twentieth century. Wells remained dedicated to explaining his dreams—always a risky endeavour—but readers preferred his nightmares.

  Orwell took against The Dream and Men Like Gods in The Road to Wigan Pier. He thought that Wells’s comfortable, foolproof utopias, by removing all pain and danger, would diminish many of the human qualities that Wells admired. Wells thought that whether machines were used to liberate or enslave, to elevate or destroy, was a question of leadership. Like Forster, Orwell thought that Wells could not accept that the machine itself might be the problem: “a huge glittering vehicle whirling us we are not certain where, but probably towards the padded Wells-world and the brain in the bottle.” In the same chapter, Orwell praised Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as “a memorable assault on the more fat-bellied type of perfectionism. Allowing for the exaggerations of caricature, it probably expresses what a majority of thinking people feel about machine-civilization.”

  Wells had a complicated relationship with the Huxley family. Thomas changed his life, Thomas’s grandson Julian helped him write the 1929 biology te
xtbook Science of Life, and now Julian’s brother Aldous was making fun of his utopias. Decades later, Huxley told The Paris Review that Brave New World “started out as a parody of H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods but gradually it got out of hand and turned into something quite different from what I’d originally intended.”

  Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are awkward literary twins. Most readers discover them around the same age, in a kind of two-for-one deal on classic dystopias, and therefore see them as rival prophecies, as if both authors were, at the same point in time, given the same brief to predict the future, and now we have to decide which was the more accurate. Pleasure or punishment? Sex or death? A hit of soma or a boot in the face? Who got it right?

  Huxley later attempted to retrofit Brave New World as a serious prophecy, making sure to inform Orwell: “I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.” But he wrote it as a Swiftian satire. While working on it in France during the summer of 1931, he revealed in a letter: “I am writing a novel about the future—on the horror of the Wellsian utopia and a revolt against it. Very difficult. I have hardly enough imagination to deal with such a subject.” So he used someone else’s imagination. Brave New World is full of Wellsian ideas made ludicrous or sinister. Huxley had previously poked fun at Wells’s schemes in Crome Yellow and Point Counter Point, described him privately as “a rather horrid, vulgar little man,” and written a sheaf of essays fretting about technological progress. “Men no longer amuse themselves, creatively, but sit and are passively amused by mechanical devices,” he complained in “Spinoza’s Worm.” Brave New World ’s epigraph is a quote from the Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdiaeff: “Utopias appear much more realizable than we had formerly supposed. And now we find ourselves faced with a question which is painful in quite a new way: How can we avoid their final realization?”

  Huxley was writing in a different world from Orwell. Although Mussolini and Stalin were already in power, the totalitarian era was in its infancy. And Huxley was not really thinking about Europe. In 1926, he had sailed from Asia to California and spent a few weeks stoking the engines of his snobbery by exploring the American scene at the height of the Jazz Age. On the boat, he found a copy of Henry Ford’s My Life and Work, which became the basis for Brave New World ’s mechanised religion, Fordism. He planned to return to America one day, “just to know the worst, as one must do from time to time.”

  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, “sexophones” 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.” Huxley would end up spending the last twenty-six years of his life in California, but his first impression was damning: “It is all movement and noise, like the water gurgling out of a bath—down the waste.” Huxley’s satire didn’t stop at America. He also mocked Freud, Keynes, and, via his imagined “Savage Reservation,” the romantic primitivism of his late friend D. H. Lawrence. By invoking famous industrialists, Marxists, atheists, scientists, psychiatrists and politicians in the names of his characters, Huxley implied that all great men, and all great movements, were tending in the same dire direction.

  The book was further complicated by the fact that Huxley was attracted to some of the ideas he parodied. Like his brother Julian, he was intrigued by eugenics, and the economic crisis that wracked Britain while he was writing the novel led him to think that some loss of freedom might be a price worth paying to preserve order over chaos. As Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller for Western Europe, rather seductively puts it, “What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?”

  Orwell admired Brave New World, up to a point. He had fond memories of being taught by Huxley at Eton in 1918; a classmate claimed Huxley had given Orwell a “taste for words and their accurate and significant use.” But as someone who was fearful of pain and suspicious of pleasure, he was unconvinced by Brave New World ’s tyranny of gratification. “There is no power-hunger, no sadism, no hardness of any kind,” he complained in 1946. “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.” Orwell’s dystopia delivers neither freedom nor happiness. It does not glitter. So both writers found each other’s version of a bleak future implausible. The similarities are negligible, the differences profound, but the two books do overlap in one area: the status of the proles.

  Orwell’s description of the proles is the least persuasive element of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is hardly credible that a regime obsessed with absolute control would allow 85 per cent of the population to live beyond the reach of the Thought Police and telescreens, nor that the proles would be immune to doublethink. As Russia and Germany demonstrated, you can’t have totalitarianism without the masses. What Orwell is doing is satirising two incompatible political systems. While the operation of the Party represents totalitarianism, the world of the proles is a caricature of capitalism which functions, albeit more shabbily, rather like the society in Brave New World.

  In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell dismissed the “bread and circuses” theory that the British government was deliberately anaesthetising the masses with cheap food, mass media and consumer goods. It happened, he wrote, because of “the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer’s need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, it is both a deliberate tactic and an utterly effective one. The proles are lulled into apathy by a steady diet of movies, pulp fiction, pornography, horoscopes, football, beer, gambling and sentimental songs. This is their soma.

  The success of this strategy makes the proles impotent but not contemptible. Orwell did not suffer from the same acerbic snobbishness as Huxley. Winston comes to believe that the proles are, in fact, superior to Party members—not because, as he initially imagines, they are a potential revolutionary army but simply because they “had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside.” They are not the dead. When Winston watches a woman hanging out the washing, she may be singing a banal ditty vomited out by a versificator, but she suffuses it with humanity and a thrush-like purity. “The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing.” And what is this supposedly meaningless song about? Love, dreams, and memories that do not fade. With this simple, human act, the woman unwittingly validates Winston’s belief: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”

  Brave New World was the first bestselling anti-utopia, and its Shakespearean title became famous enough to be widely referenced. Labour MP Hugh Dalton jokingly called an underwhelming 1939 speech by Clement Attlee “Vague New World.” The following year, Malcolm Muggeridge described the clash between Nazism and communism as “a Brave New World and a Brave Old World facing one another and menacingly flourishing the same weapons.” In Keep the Aspidistra Flying , Comstock imagines a socialist society as “some kind of Aldous Huxley Brave New World: only not so amusing.” The novel’s success inspired a fresh vogue for futuristic satires. Even Cyril Connolly weighed in with his playful short story “Year Nine,” set in a totalitarian state where Our Leader’s face looms down from neon signs and military censors roam the streets, eliminating “degenerate art” (like the novels of “Deadwells”) left over from the old regime.

  And what did Wells make of Brave New World ? Huxley had dinner with him on the Riviera just after the book came out and wrote that the older man, “I fear, wasn’t best pleased with it.” Indeed not. Wells later called the novel “a great disappointment to me. A writer of the stand
ing of Aldous Huxley has no right to betray the future as he did in that book.”

  Wells struck back in fiction, describing Brave New World as a “Bible of the impotent genteel” in The New World Order, and Huxley as “one of the most brilliant of the reactionary writers” in The Shape of Things to Come, the last book he wrote before his extravagantly entertaining autobiography. Wells framed his latest history of the future as a textbook from 2106, read in a dream by a diplomat from 1933. The“Age of Frustration,” it transpires, descended into another world war, economic collapse and a virulent plague which brought civilisation to its knees. The world was rescued from chaos by an elite of airmen, who established a “Puritan Tyranny.” Comrade Ogilvy, the war hero invented by Winston Smith, sounds rather like one of Wells’s airmen: celibate, abstinent, obsessively athletic, utterly joyless. After a century of this necessary evil, the Dictatorship of the Air was gently overthrown by a peaceful utopia of middle-class intellectuals—every one an Alpha.

  During the 1920s, Wells had mentally auditioned bankers and industrialists for roles in his Open Conspiracy, but the 1929 crash and subsequent depression had found them sorely wanting. He now considered himself “an ultra-left revolutionary” and, in 1934, set off to visit two of the potential architects of a socialist world state. In Washington, DC, he found President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be “the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order.” In Moscow, he attempted for three hours to convince Stalin that Marxism was hogwash and what he was really building was a version of the New Deal’s state capitalism. Wells is justly criticised for his conviction that he had “never met a man more candid, fair and honest,” but he wasn’t gulled as thoroughly as Beatrice and Sidney Webb or George Bernard Shaw.10 He wrote that Soviet Russia was not the Cosmopolis he had hoped for and he grew tired of people telling him, “Come and see us again in ten years’ time.” They’d said that in 1920 as well. Ultimately, he thought, “Russia had let me down.” The wording typifies Wells’s sense that humanity was personally disappointing him, despite his best efforts to light the way forward. One friend compared him, in this exasperated mode, to “a disgruntled inspector-general of the universe.”