The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  During his travels, Wells was writing a scenario of The Shape of Things to Come (abbreviated to Things to Come) for film producer Alexander Korda. He liked the possibility of using cinema as a vehicle for his ideas. The cinema of science fiction was still in its infancy, the crowning example to date being Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.11 Although it was based on a Wellsian novel by Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife, Wells was not flattered by the homage. In his New York Times review, he did to Metropolis what his Martians did to Woking: “It gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.” Identifying “decaying fragments” of The Sleeper Awakes, he thought Lang’s vision of a vertical city built on slavery foolishly outdated.

  Yet Things to Come, released in 1936, fell well short of Metropolis, notable more for its designs (including its prophetic image of bombers over London) than for its ideas, which managed to offend communists, fascists, liberals and Christians alike. Wells, blaming Korda, called it “a mess of a film.” Orwell first attacked Wells in the year the film came out, so the chilly self-caricature of Things to Come was most likely what he meant when he complained about the glittering Wells-World.

  Orwell never equated technology with progress. On the contrary, he wrote during the war, “every scientific advance speeds up the trend towards nationalism and dictatorship.” It was in a review of Wells’s scenario for Things to Come that he mocked what he called the author’s false antithesis between the benign scientist and the bellicose reactionary. “It never occurred to Mr. Wells that his categories might have got mixed, that it might be the reactionary who would make the fullest use of the machine and that the scientist might use his brains chiefly on race-theory and poison gas.” That wasn’t fair at all. The creator of the Invisible Man and Doctor Moreau was no stranger to perverted science. But Things to Come did his reputation no favours.

  Judging from The Road to Wigan Pier, if Orwell had written a dystopia in the 1930s it would probably have been an anti-machine satire along the lines of Brave New World, attacking what he envisioned in a 1933 letter as “all-round trustification and Fordification, with the entire population reduced to docile wage-slaves,” mercilessly exploited “in the name of Progress.” But notwithstanding a few futuristic elements, like the supersized Ministry of Truth, sordid, exhausted Airstrip One is a long way from Wells-World. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, white-coated scientists design telescreens and spy helicopters, invent new weapons, defoliants and torture devices, practise radical plastic surgery, and work on abolishing the orgasm, while doing nothing to improve the quality of life. For the most part, science, like history, has stopped. This, writes Goldstein, is “partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago.”

  Orwell had been keeping a close eye on the corruption of science under Stalin, and especially on Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet agronomist whose pseudoscientific Marxist theory of genetic inheritance led to needless famines and a crippling purge of dissenting scientists. One of the last books Orwell ever read was Soviet Genetics and World Science, a demolition of Lysenko’s junk science by Julian Huxley. Science in Oceania owes more to Lysenko than to Wells, who had yet again underrated human imbecility.

  We are coming now to the Wells that Orwell met at Hanover Terrace: rewriting old ideas; searching ever more desperately for candidates to lead his new world order; plagued by ill-health, suicidal thoughts and a sense of ultimate defeat. The New Statesman editor Kingsley Martin speculated, “The failure of mankind in the Second World War he felt as his personal failure.” During an unsuccessful US lecture tour in 1940 to promote his latest big idea, a “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” Wells met the writer Somerset Maugham, who found him “old, tired and shrivelled,” overtaken by events: “The river has flowed on and left him high and dry on the bank.” Wells’s declaration, which he redrafted several times between 1939 and 1944, would come to be seen as a pioneering contribution to the field of human rights, but not in his lifetime. For now he was an ex-prophet, pontificating into the void.

  “I have no gang, I have no party,” Wells had written to a friend as the war approached. “My epitaph will be ‘He was clever, but not clever enough . . .’ I write books, and it is like throwing gold bricks into mud.” But his books weren’t gold; they weren’t even bricks. Most of his final works were slim, hasty volumes that only ended up between hard covers due to his vestigial prestige. He had been writing too long. Wells splashed his pessimism onto a wall at Hanover Terrace in the form of a mural representing evolution. Next to Man he painted three damning words: “Time to Go.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Radio Orwell

  Orwell 1941–1943

  All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.

  —George Orwell, diary entry, March 14, 1942

  In August 1941, Orwell and Eileen invited H. G. Wells to dinner. Several months earlier, Orwell’s friend Inez Holden had lost her home to the Luftwaffe and Wells had offered her the use of his mews flat. A bohemian dropout from the aristocracy, Holden had made a dazzling first impression as a Bright Young Thing in the 1920s. Anthony Powell, whom she introduced to Orwell one night at London’s Café Royal, described her as “excellent company,” fizzing with opinions, gossip and witty impersonations. Now thirty-seven, she was a sharp chronicler of Britain at war in her novels and diaries, and a loyal friend to Orwell throughout the 1940s. Holden was happy to facilitate a proper meeting between two men she liked and admired. Two days before the dinner, however, Wells learned that Orwell had published an essay about him in Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon and procured a copy. “Wells, Hitler and the World State” did not fill him with delight.

  Orwell and Eileen lived on the fifth floor of Langford Court, an eight-storey 1930s tower block on Abbey Road in northwest London that probably inspired Victory Mansions in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Most nights, the camp bed in their front room hosted one or other of their bombed-out friends. That evening their guests were Wells, Holden and the celebrated young critic William Empson. Wells kept his powder dry until after they had eaten. Only when the dishes had been cleared away did he produce his copy of Horizon from his coat pocket with an ominous flourish. Orwell responded by grabbing his own copy and thwacking it down on the dinner table. The two men joined battle while Empson, who had only known Orwell for a day, sat in silence, drowning his embarrassment in whiskey.

  Orwell separated politically engaged writers into two categories: those who understood the true nature of totalitarianism (none of them British) and those who did not. In the offending essay, he claimed that Wells’s mind—rational, scientific, immune to the allure of blood and soil—was incapable of taking Hitler (“that screaming little defective in Berlin”) seriously. “Wells is too sane to understand the modern world,” he wrote, concluding on a peculiar blend of praise and condemnation: “since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander.”

  Orwell was proud of his “intellectual brutality.” He often befriended people he had previously insulted in print, including Stephen Spender, the crime writer Julian Symons, and the Canadian anarchist writer George Woodcock, who called him “one of those unusual beings who drew closer through disagreement.” Orwell told Spender that as soon as he met somebody they became “a human being & not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas,” but the freedom to express himself without apology on the page was so fundamental that it didn’t occur to him that some people might resent being caricatured and might express that resentment to his face. Kill your idols, yes, but don’t let that stop you from inviting them to dinner.

  The argument at Langford
Court continued for some time before Wells’s rage burned itself out. On the way home he told Holden it had been “an amusing evening.” Seven months later, however, Wells read another Orwell essay, “The Rediscovery of Europe: Literature Between the Wars,” and was infuriated by the claim that he believed that science could “solve all the ills that humanity is heir to.” In a letter to the editor, he challenged Orwell’s “foolish generalizations.” In a private letter he was more direct: “I don’t say that at all. Read my early works, you shit.” And that was the end of that relationship.

  The offending essay was a print version of one of Orwell’s talks for the Indian Section of the BBC’s Eastern Service, where he worked between August 1941 and November 1943. Like Wells in 1918, Orwell was now reluctantly writing for the state. He later described it as “two wasted years,” but we shouldn’t believe him. Day to day, the job introduced him to the mechanics of propaganda, bureaucracy, censorship and mass media, informing Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth. What’s more, his BBC output comprised hours of ruminations on the war, politics, totalitarianism and literature which prepared the ground for his two great works of fiction and his finest essays. For a mind as busy as Orwell’s, there was no such thing as a wasted year.

  For the first half of 1941, Orwell had been purposeless and adrift in the “strange boring nightmare” of wartime London. The year began with a new wave of rumours about a German invasion of Britain, inspiring the Ministry of Information to commission a pamphlet which dramatised the consequences. I, James Blunt, authored by travel writer H. V. Morton, describes German occupation through the eyes of an ordinary old man in an ordinary English village. After explaining how the Nazi regime of censorship, surveillance, indoctrination and persecution has taken hold in England, retired tradesman James Blunt discovers that a bitter former employee has joined the Gestapo and reported him for his earlier anti-fascist rhetoric. Morton dedicated his powerful short story to “all complacent optimists and wishful thinkers.” In 1943, after the threat of invasion had evaporated, the barrister and soldier Robin Maugham used Morton’s template—a diary which ends just before a knock on the door from the secret police—to write The 1946 MS., in which a British war hero seizes power amid post-war turmoil and establishes a fascist state. Published by War Facts Press, which was connected to the MOI, Maugham’s afterword was as explicit as Morton’s: “Lord Murdoch and General Pointer do not exist. This story was written so that they never will exist and so that Britons never will be slaves.”

  Orwell reviewed I, James Blunt (“good flesh-creeper”) and owned a copy of The 1946 MS. in his substantial collection of pamphlets, so he was familiar with didactic “It could happen here” literature, but he felt incapable of producing fiction himself. “Only the mentally dead are capable of sitting down and writing novels while this nightmare is going on,” he wrote in April 1941. According to Cyril Connolly, this was a common paralysis: “We must remember that the life which many of us are now leading is unfriendly to the appreciation of literature; we are living history, which means that we are living from hand to mouth and reading innumerable editions of the evening paper.”

  That was good news, at least, for freelance journalism, which is how Orwell just about paid the bills. He used book reviews as an opportunity to explore the mechanics of totalitarianism from every possible angle. An Epic of the Gestapo, Sir Paul Dukes’s vivid account of his investigation into a disappearance in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, described a society in which, Orwell observed, “the practice of lying becomes so habitual that it is almost impossible to believe that anyone else can ever be speaking the truth.” The vignettes of life under Hitler in Erika Mann’s The Lights Go Down left him wondering how a regime that appeared “so unspeakable that no sane and decent person could possibly accept it” could command popular support. John Mair’s hard-bitten conspiracy thriller Never Come Back appealed to Orwell as evidence that “the horrible political jungle, with its underground parties, tortures, pass-words, denunciations, forged passports, cipher messages, etc., is becoming sufficiently well-known to be suitable material for ‘light’ literature.” Secrecy, deceit and betrayal were key ingredients of both totalitarian reality and page-turning fiction, as Nineteen Eighty-Four would demonstrate. The scenes in which Winston believes he is conspiring with O’Brien and the Brotherhood against the Party feel like fugitive episodes from a spy novel.

  In addition to books, Orwell reviewed dozens of films for Time and Tide between October 1940 and August 1941, although it would be generous to call him a film critic. He had no appreciation of cinematic technique or screen acting and no respect for a job in which he was “expected to sell his honour for a glass of inferior sherry.” In fact, he actively disliked American cinema: in his catalogue of contemporary plagues in “Inside the Whale,” Hollywood films fall between aspirins and political murders. Anthony Powell said that Orwell was “easily bored. If a subject came up in conversation that did not appeal to him, he would make no effort to take it in.” Clearly bored by cinema, he served several great movies with either faint praise or blunt contempt. High Sierra, now considered a classic film noir, struck him as merely a celebration of “sadism” and “bully-worship.”

  Orwell’s curiosity was only ignited by films which said something about totalitarianism. He praised, for example, the parts of the forgettable Hollywood war movie Escape that captured “the nightmare atmosphere of a totalitarian country, the utter helplessness of the ordinary person, the complete disappearance of the concepts of justice and objective truth”—in other words, the parts that we would describe as Orwellian. As soon as the hero and heroine escape, he thought the film was nonsense. A plausible movie about Nazi Germany would not have a happy ending. It would not be called Escape. He had warmer things to say about Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Despite being a dogged defender of the Soviet Union in private, on the screen Chaplin stood, Orwell thought, for “a sort of concentrated essence of the common man, for the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people.” Relishing the irony of Chaplin’s physical resemblance to Hitler, Orwell reckoned that the British government would do well to subsidise and distribute the film as anti-fascist propaganda because of Chaplin’s “power to reassert the fact, overlaid by Fascism and, ironically enough, by [Soviet] Socialism, that vox populi is vox Dei and giants are vermin.”

  By 1941, however, vox populi wasn’t in great shape. The window of revolutionary opportunity that Orwell thought had been opened by the humiliation of Dunkirk had firmly closed. The rich cemented their privilege with black market treats, while everyone else dutifully chugged along. Orwell joked to a friend that within a year they would see “Rat Soup” on restaurant menus; a year after that it would be “Mock Rat Soup.” In his war diary and his bimonthly “London Letter” for Partisan Review, an anti-Stalinist left-wing New York magazine run by Philip Rahv and William Phillips, Orwell documented life during wartime with cool precision. The air raids, he told Partisan Review’s readers, were “less terrifying and more of a nuisance than you perhaps imagine.” It wasn’t the prospect of a bomb crashing through the roof that bothered him so much as the kind of daily inconveniences that furnish the first chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four: the power cuts, the shop closures, the dead telephone lines, the bus shortages, the piles of debris, the price of beer. Life became “a constant scramble to catch up lost time.” It was all very aggravating. He filled his fireplace with year-old, pre-Dunkirk newspapers, “getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.”

  The Blitz lasted for eight months, but Orwell wasn’t directly affected until its final hours. On the night of May 10, the Luftwaffe dropped eight hundred tonnes of bombs on the capital; he and Eileen were almost among the hundreds of casualties. At 2 a.m., they were woken by a monstrous crash. Langford Court had been hit; the corridors were filled with the stench of burning rubber and thick, blinding smoke. Their faces black with soot, they grabbed a few belongings and escape
d to a friend’s house, where they recovered with tea and chocolate. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, chocolate is a symbolic commodity: when Julia procures some for Winston, it’s an act of love; when Winston steals some from his sister, it’s a dire betrayal.

  Even though London endured the German onslaught, the news from the Continent was grim. “By the middle of 1941,” Orwell later wrote, “the British people knew what they were up against.” The Wehrmacht took Greece and Yugoslavia, while Rommel’s Afrika Korps pushed back the Allies in North Africa. In the early hours of June 22, Hitler broke the Nazi-Soviet Pact and three million German soldiers crossed the Russian border, forcing anti-war communists into a comically abrupt U-turn. Orwell enjoyed retelling an anecdote he’d heard about a party member who was in the toilet of a New York café when the news broke and returned to his friends to find that the line had already changed: a possible inspiration for the Inner Party orator in Nineteen Eighty-Four who “switched from one line to the other actually in mid-sentence.”

  The events of the summer plunged Orwell into despair: “Within two years we will either be conquered or we shall be a Socialist republic fighting for its life, with a secret police force and half the population starving.”

  Orwell desperately wanted to do something more than attend Home Guard meetings twice a week, but what? He was too unhealthy to fight, or even to be a war correspondent, and his application to work for the director of public relations at the Air Ministry had been rejected. Things had to get desperate before the British government would employ him in any capacity, not least because of his politics. In 1937, the India Office had studied his work and identified “not merely a determined Left Wing, but probably an extremist, outlook.”