The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  By 1941, though, the BBC needed Orwell’s talent more than it feared his views. “The British Government started the present war,” he later wrote, “with the more or less openly declared intention of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of it; yet after three years of war almost every writer, however undesirable his political history or opinions, has been sucked into the various ministries or the BBC.” The political risk of hiring Orwell was minimal because every broadcast was censored twice: once for security, once for policy. Z. A. Bokhari, who ran the Indian Section, had already tested him out by commissioning four talks on literary criticism. In “Literature and Totalitarianism,” broadcast that May, Orwell argued that literature derives from emotional truth and therefore cannot survive under a system that relies on mutilating truth.

  The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it does not fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but cannot avoid the changes, which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It declares itself infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth.

  Orwell joined the Indian Section as Empire talks assistant on August 18, on a generous starting salary of £640 a year, which dwarfed his freelance income. He spent two weeks at Bedford College in Regent’s Park on an induction course with other new recruits, including William Empson, who called it “the Liars’ School.” While there, Orwell concluded his war diary for the time being, vowing not to resume it until something significant changed: “There is no victory in sight at present. We are in for a long, dreary, exhausting war, with everyone growing poorer all the time.” On September 23, he arrived at Portland Place, the BBC’s central London headquarters, to start work for Bokhari under the overall control of the director of talks, Guy Burgess. For a free agent like Orwell, working for a large bureaucracy in wartime was an invaluable education in the machinery of the state.

  In recent years, the BBC has exploited its Orwell connection in ways that might have amused the man himself. To mark Orwell’s centenary in 2003, it commissioned the artist Rachel Whiteread to produce a plaster cast of Room 101 in 55 Portland Place, revealing only how unremarkable and irrelevant to the novel it was. In 2017, it erected a bronze statue of Orwell outside its headquarters at Broadcasting House, beside an engraved line from the unpublished preface to Animal Farm—“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”—which is a good description of what Orwell’s job in the Indian Section wasn’t.

  Empson described the early chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four as practically a “farce” about the corporation. That’s a serious overstatement, although Orwell used images, words, sounds and smells from his time there to give Winston’s workplace a pungent authenticity. In June 1942, the Indian Section relocated from Portland Place to a requisitioned department store at 200 Oxford Street, where the staff worked in cubicles like the ones in the Ministry of Truth’s Records Department. The subterranean staff canteen, with its distinctive aroma of boiled cabbage, resurfaced in the novel, as did the cleaners who sang to themselves every morning as they swept the corridors. The Ministry of Truth’s building—“an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete”—was a Wellsian exaggeration of the Ministry of Information’s HQ at the University of London’s Senate House, where Eileen worked. Though one-fifth the size of the fictional Ministry, this sixty-four-metre-tall art deco tower was then the second highest building in London; the Orwells could see it from the windows of Langford Court. The Ministry’s telegraphic address was MINIFORM, hence Minitrue in the novel. Other connections are far more tenuous. Room 101 was just one of the rooms that hosted meetings of the Eastern Service and not an especially unpleasant one. Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s fearsome minister of information, was an enthusiastic supporter of C. K. Ogden’s Basic English, a heavily simplified vocabulary of just 850 core words which H. G. Wells made the universal language of the twenty-first century in The Shape of Things to Come. Basic has often been called the model for Newspeak’s even narrower lexicon (“to diminish the range of thought”), but the idea of a purer, clearer English didn’t strike Orwell as necessarily malign. In fact, he thought that it might be beneficial. In 1944, he defended Basic from its myriad critics because in Ogden’s language “you cannot make a meaningless statement without its being apparent that it is meaningless.” As late as 1947 he wrote, “There are areas where a lingua franca of some kind is indispensable, and the perversions actually in use make one see what a lot there is to be said of Basic.”

  So the Ministry of Truth was by no means the BBC in disguise. The BBC was simply the only corporate environment that Orwell knew intimately. His job taught him that Britain was a long way from totalitarianism. “The bigger the machine of government becomes, the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it,” he wrote just before he left. His own employment was proof of that. If he had lived to learn the truth about his boss he would have been even more astonished by the porousness of the British state. In 1951, Guy Burgess defected to Moscow; he had been a Soviet spy since the 1930s.

  Before he knew he would be joining the corporation, Orwell wrote in his April 1941 “London Letter”: “I believe that the B.B.C., in spite of the stupidity of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful.” He soon found himself implicated in both of those failings. However you might define a good voice for radio, it’s safe to say that Orwell didn’t have one. Not a single recording survives, but by all accounts it was thin, flat and, thanks to a Spanish bullet, too weak to be heard above the hubbub of a noisy restaurant. Stephen Spender compared a conversation with Orwell to “going through a London fog.” Much of what he wrote for the BBC was assigned to professional announcers. After hearing one of Orwell’s own talks, J. B. Clark, the controller of Overseas Services, complained in a memo that his voice might actually repel listeners and embarrass the BBC, “for being so ignorant of the essential needs of the microphone and of the audience as to put on so wholly unsuitable a voice.” Nor did Orwell have any love for the medium. He considered radio, as it existed in the 1940s, “inherently totalitarian.”

  Nonetheless, Orwell did have a fantastic brain for radio. Asked by Bokhari to “put on your thinking-cap,” he produced a torrent of ideas which he developed with colleagues over pints of beer at the pubs near Portland Place, or with Spanish Civil War veterans over Rioja and paella at the Barcelona restaurant in Soho, forever haloed by a reeking cloud of Nosegay black shag tobacco smoke, before writing them up “in desperate haste.”

  With great energy, efficiency and good humour, Orwell created for the Indian Section an unprecedented “university of the air.” Knowing that his listenership of educated Indians would switch off overbearing British propaganda, and that a more implicit celebration of democracy was required, Orwell experimented with formats that made him rethink his hostility towards the wireless. “Few people are able to imagine the radio being used for the dissemination of anything except tripe,” he wrote in “Poetry and the Microphone.” But “one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the use it is actually put to.”

  Orwell invited T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and E. M. Forster to give readings; initiated an experimental short story with five authors, including Forster and Inez Holden; adapted stories by Wells, Ignazio Silone, Anatole France and Hans Christian Andersen; wrote essays on Shakespeare, Wilde, Shaw and Jack London; and hosted a poetry magazine show, Voice, featuring guests such as Spender, Stevie Smith and Herbert Read. Some of the formats he pioneered would become radio mainstays, but he was candid about their limited utility. His introduction for Voice’s launch episode was less an invitation than an apology: “I suppose during every second that we sit here at least one human being will be dying a violent death.” Still, on with the show. Enjoy Wordsworth.

  Two of his radio ideas
anticipated Nineteen Eighty-Four’s futurology: one series called “Glimpses of the Future” and another, “A. D. 2000,” in which scientists prognosticated about India at the dawn of the next century. A third celebrated the kind of text that Orwell would soon be writing: “Books That Have Changed the World.”

  On March 14, 1942, Orwell resumed his war diary for the first time in seven months, once again juxtaposing his thoughts on the progress of the conflict with mundane grumbles about the price of tobacco and the scarcity of razor blades—a particular bugbear of Winston Smith’s. The next day, he heard his first air-raid siren since the end of the Blitz. He pretended not to notice, but inside he was terrified. Pleasures were small and precious: “Crocuses now full out. One seems to catch glimpses of them dimly through a haze of war news.”

  Another recurring theme was his frustration with the BBC: “Its atmosphere is something half way between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless.” Put that on a statue. Then, in June: “The thing that strikes one in the BBC . . . is not so much the moral squalor and the ultimate futility of what we are doing, as the feeling of frustration, the impossibility of getting anything done, even any successful piece of scoundrelism.” Nonetheless, if he had felt that he was no more than a hypocritical hack achieving nothing, then he would have quit considerably earlier. He could confide his doubts in his private diary but if an outsider said something similar, then he would sharply defend his position. According to Lettice Cooper, Orwell’s former editor at Time and Tide and one of Eileen’s closest friends, “He was never quite sure if by being in the BBC he was losing his integrity. I think he felt it was a matter of defending the bad against the worst.”

  One critic was the anarchist George Woodcock, not yet Orwell’s friend, who struck a low blow during a Partisan Review debate about pacifism: “And now Comrade Orwell returns to his old imperialist allegiances and works at the BBC conducting British propaganda to fox the Indian masses!” Orwell testily replied that he had no illusions but believed that he had “kept our propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been.” Only after daily exposure to the other varieties, he said, can one “realize what muck & filth is normally flowing through the air.” His colleague Desmond Hawkins thought that what really shaped the role of propaganda in Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t the BBC but the Nazi broadcasts that its employees were required to study: “We were listening to ‘Germany Calling,’ every kind of distortion of truth and ‘doublethink.’ So we were seeing how the new mass media could be used, and bear in mind that for Orwell, as for me, we were born into a world where there was no radio.” David Astor, the aristocratic Observer editor who was introduced to Orwell by Cyril Connolly, remembered Orwell toying with the idea of re-editing fragments of Churchill’s speeches to make it sound as if he were declaring peace, just to show how easy it was to manipulate recordings. “I think he thought that you could use propaganda machines to invent anything and to make people make speeches they hadn’t ever made,” said Astor.

  Orwell was much more tetchy when Alex Comfort, the physician and pacifist who would find fame in the 1970s as the author of The Joy of Sex, published a long, pseudonymous poem in Tribune which attacked writers who joined the war effort. Orwell shot back with a poem which made plain his defencive ambivalence about his role at the BBC.

  It doesn’t need the eye of a detective

  To look down Portland Place and spot the whores,

  But there are men (I grant, not the most heeded)

  With twice your gifts and courage three times yours

  Who do that dirty work because it’s needed;

  Not blindly, but for reasons they can balance,

  They wear their seats out and lay waste their talents.

  This public defiance masked a great deal of private anguish about the effect of the war on the standard of discourse. “Nowadays,” he wrote in his diary, “whatever is said or done, one looks instantly for hidden motives and assumes that words mean anything except what they appear to mean . . . When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth . . . All power is in the hands of paranoiacs.”

  It was a dull, damp summer. Orwell’s mother, Ida, and sister Avril moved to London, taking jobs at Selfridge’s and a sheet-metal factory respectively, until Ida’s death the following March. Eileen transferred to the Ministry of Food, compiling thrifty recipes for the BBC Home Service. The couple moved from Langford Court to a large, draughty flat in Mortimer Crescent, Maida Vale. “If George and I didn’t smoke so much,” Eileen told a friend, “we’d be able to afford a better flat.”

  The literary criticism that Orwell produced for the Indian Service leaned, due to time constraints and a certain monomania, towards books that he already knew back to front, and which had some relevance to totalitarianism. Macbeth, for example, was now “the typical figure of the terror-haunted tyrant, hated and feared by everyone, surrounded by spies, murderers and sycophants, and living in constant dread of treachery and rebellion . . . a sort of primitive medieval version of the modern Fascist dictator.”

  Another subject was Gulliver’s Travels, a childhood favourite which constituted “probably the most devastating attack on human society that’s ever been written.” Orwell thought that Jonathan Swift’s 1726 series of satirical utopias was remarkably relevant to the modern age. In a subsequent essay he described Part III as “an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted Police-State, with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials.” The writing engine in the Academy of Lagado leads straight to Julia’s job as a machine operator in the fiction department of the Ministry of Truth.

  Orwell’s most eccentric piece for the BBC was an imagined dialogue with the ghost of Swift, in which Orwell played the cautious optimist to Swift’s savage misanthrope. His version of Swift was unsurprised by Hitler, Stalin or the Blitz because progress is a con and science merely produces more efficient killing machines. Perhaps Orwell was using Swift to personify his own grimmest impulses, so that he could mount a case against them. However pessimistic he became, he didn’t believe that humans were grubby, worthless, self-defeating creatures. “He couldn’t see what the simplest person sees,” Orwell concluded after his supernatural telephone line to Swift broke down, “that life is worth living and human beings, even if they are dirty and ridiculous, are mostly decent. But after all, if he could have seen that I suppose he couldn’t have written Gulliver’s Travels.” As Arthur Koestler put it, “Orwell never completely lost faith in the knobby-faced yahoos with their bad teeth.”

  Only when Swift tried to imagine an ideal society in Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels did his imagination fail him, Orwell thought, by producing the spotlessly noble and thus “remarkably dreary” Houyhnhnms. As we know, Orwell found positive utopias intolerably tedious. In his 1942 review of Herbert Samuel’s An Unknown Land, he could not resist another dig at Wells: “A certain smugness and a tendency to self-praise are common failings in the inhabitants of Utopias, as a study of Mr. H. G. Wells’ work would show.”

  Orwell also gave a talk about Jack London—one of half a dozen times he wrote about the American author. After Swift and Wells, no book compelled Orwell’s attention as much as London’s 1908 novel The Iron Heel, “a very remarkable prophecy of the rise of Fascism” which found a new European readership during the 1930s. Displaying his usual tendency to disparage the books which most fascinated him, Orwell called it “a very poor book” in many respects, but one he couldn’t forget.

  London, wrote Orwell, was “a Socialist with the instincts of a buccaneer and the education of a nineteenth-century materialist.” Although he joined the Socialist Labor Party of America in 1896, London was a passionate racist and imperialist, guided more by Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” than by Marx. He once shocked a party meeting by yelling, “I
am first of all a white man and only then a socialist!” Before his political conversion, the author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang saw himself as “one of Nietzsche’s blond-beasts, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and strength.” He repurposed that instinct, but he never lost it. In the autumn of 1905, London staged a lecture tour about the inevitability of socialism, during which an audience of wealthy New Yorkers reacted hotly to lines such as “You have mismanaged the world and it shall be taken from you!” Their outrage, the failed Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and a reading of Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes drove him to craft a nightmare about the brutal suppression of socialism in America.

  Subsequent admirers of The Iron Heel included US Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs, British Labour politician Aneurin Bevan and Trotsky but, like Orwell, none claimed that the novel was great literature. Reading it inspires, to misquote Philip Larkin, first boredom, then fear. The boring part describes Ernest Everhard, a virile socialist superman who is clearly based on the author, right down to direct quotes from his lectures. Narrated by Everhard’s lover Avis, the gushing accounts of “his gladiator body and his eagle spirit” therefore amount to an act of self-love on London’s part. The author’s biographer Earle Labor described it as “1984 as it might have been penned by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”

  But if the first half is a lecture, then the second is a bloodbath. When Everhard and his socialist faction win election to Congress, the capitalist Oligarchy retaliates by breaking or buying off the labour unions, subduing the media and political opposition, crushing the middle class, conscripting militias, and using agents provocateurs to stage riots and terrorist outrages that justify the suspension of democracy. As Trotsky wrote in 1937, “In reading it one does not believe his own eyes: it is precisely the picture of fascism, of its economy, of its governmental technique, its political psychology!” He admired London’s determination “to shake those who are lulled by routine, to force them to open their eyes and to see what is and what approaches.” The novel ends abruptly with the off-stage execution of Everhard and the triumph of the Oligarchy, now called the Iron Heel. Orwell thought that London’s account of the Oligarchy’s ruthlessness and quasi-religious belief in its own righteousness was “one of the best statements of . . . the outlook that a ruling class must have if it’s to survive that has ever been written.” In brief: “Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power.”