The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  The new authority and clarity that Orwell’s prose achieved from 1943 onwards was also evident in his book reviews and essays. His quarrelsome mind was attracted to writers he thought were worth arguing with: H. G. Wells, Henry Miller, and now James Burnham.

  Quiet and urbane in person but unyielding on the page, Burnham was a professor of philosophy who had been one of America’s leading Trotskyists until the Nazi-Soviet Pact and a bitter public row with Trotsky precipitated the complete collapse of his tottering faith in Marxism. Burnham’s methodical brain demanded an overarching system to explain the world, so he was forced to build a replacement. Despite being turned down by a dozen publishers and savaged by critics, Burnham’s 1941 jeremiad The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World became a surprise best seller, described by Fortune as “by all odds the most debated book published so far this year.” It was based on two assumptions: capitalist democracy could not survive the war, and socialism could not replace it. Instead, the future was a huge, centralised state run by a class of “managers”: technicians, bureaucrats, executives, and so on. Burnham’s thesis was not entirely original—Orwell compared it to Hilaire Belloc’s “very prescient” 1912 polemic The Servile State—but it struck a chord.

  Burnham wrote as if everyone else’s analysis was clouded by emotion and only he could clearly see reality. “The theory of the managerial revolution is not merely predicting what may happen in a hypothetical future,” he wrote in his pedantic, somewhat exasperated prose. “The theory is, to begin with, an interpretation of what already has happened and is now happening.” Anyone who believed otherwise was “living in a world of fantastic dreams, not on the earth.” H. G. Wells personally warned Burnham against making overconfident prophecies (and he, after all, was an expert), but Burnham wasn’t the kind of man to take advice.

  By the time Orwell first wrote about Burnham, in January 1944, The Managerial Revolution’s most important short-term prediction—Germany would first conquer Britain and then crush Russia—had been blown to bits. Orwell thought that Burnham had blundered because he overrated the durability of totalitarianism while underrating the strength of democracy due to his “contempt for the common man”: if Hitler had been obliged to heed public opinion, for example, he would never have invaded Russia. Orwell accused Burnham of “trying to spread the idea that totalitarianism is unavoidable, and that we must therefore do nothing to oppose it.” Burnham fired off a haughty complaint to Tribune, foreshadowing the defence that Orwell would later make of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Nor have I ever stated that ‘totalitarianism is unavoidable.’ I have stated, and I do believe, that totalitarianism is, in all major nations, probable. Does Mr. Orwell understand the difference between these two judgements?” But he was being disingenuous, and Orwell had the quotes to prove it. “We could all be true prophets if we were allowed to alter our prophecies after the event,” Orwell tartly replied. Big Brother can order his old speeches to be altered “in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened,” but Burnham couldn’t erase the evidence of his bad calls.

  Orwell remained a thorn in Burnham’s side for the next three years, leading the American to complain that the “Orwell business has become something of an international plague as far as I’m concerned,” but he would not have bothered writing thousands of words about Burnham’s ideas, in Tribune, Polemic, The New Leader and the Manchester Evening News, if he hadn’t found them fascinating. It was just hard to unpick the praise from the insults. According to Orwell, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom was a “piece of shallow naughtiness”; the Partisan Review essay “Lenin’s Heir” betrayed “a sort of fascinated admiration for Stalin”; and Burnham was repeatedly led astray by power worship. “Burnham sees the trend and assumes that it is irresistible,” Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” “rather as a rabbit fascinated by a boa constrictor might assume that a boa constrictor is the strongest thing in the world.”

  Yet Burnham’s ideas seized Orwell’s imagination even as his intellect rejected them, which is why he related The Managerial Revolution to the fictional nightmares of We, The Sleeper Awakes, The Iron Heel and Brave New World. Burnham’s vision of a tripolar world (“three great super-States . . . which divide the world between them, make ceaseless war upon one another, and keep the working class in permanent subjection,” in Orwell’s précis) is a clear blueprint for Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Orwell may have thought that Burnham’s “huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire” was a chimera, as was the claim that politics was nothing more than the struggle for power, but surely this is Oceania. The “primal traitor” Goldstein may have been modelled on Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein), but his “Chapter III: War Is Peace” owes more to Burnham than it does to Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. Orwell thought that, among revolutionaries, “the longing for a just society has always been fatally mixed up with the intention to secure power for themselves.” But in the “what-if?” world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the longing for a just society has been eliminated: “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” Orwell did not agree with Burnham, but he ensured that O’Brien did. In places, the writer (“No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of good will, no religion will restrain power”) and the character (“We are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power”) are almost interchangeable.

  Orwell made a crucial connection between Burnham’s super-state hypothesis and his own long-standing obsession with organised lying. What better environment in which to rewrite reality than a sealed state whose only relationship with its neighbours is combat? In Nineteen Eighty-Four, “each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised.” In May 1944, a Tribune reader called Noel Willmett wrote to Orwell to ask him if he thought totalitarianism could take hold in Britain. Under the influence of Burnham, Orwell’s thoughtful response was Nineteen Eighty-Four in embryo: “If the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it . . . though, of course, the process is reversible.” Hence the importance of describing the worst-case scenario: “If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.” This is not all that far from Burnham’s angry letter to Tribune: “only through absolute clarity about the probability of totalitarianism, and about the direction of its advance . . . will we be able, precisely, to have a chance to overcome or avoid it.”

  In 1944, there was a bull market in dire warnings. “Only if we recognize the danger in time can we hope to avert it,” wrote the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, another unexpected sensation which was to become a sacred text for free-market conservatives. Hayek’s diagnosis of totalitarianism was sometimes uncannily close to Orwell’s own, but Orwell certainly didn’t agree with Hayek’s claim that the Labour Party’s version of central planning was “the source of the mortal danger to everything we most value.”15 Orwell reviewed The Road to Serfdom alongside The Mirror of the Past, Lest It Reflect the Future by the pro-communist Labour MP Konni Zilliacus: “Each writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right.” The dangers of collectivism had been amply demonstrated but Hayek’s free-market fundamentalism, he decided, would mean “a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State.” Worse? From the author of Animal Farm, that was really saying something.

  Contractually obliged to give Victor Gollancz first refusal on his novels, Orwell warned that Animal Farm was “completely unacceptable politically from your point of view (it is anti-Stalin).” Gollancz asked to read it anyway before conceding the point. Stubbornl
y using the author’s birth name, the publisher told Orwell’s agent Leonard Moore: “I am highly critical of many aspects of internal and external Soviet policy; but I could not possibly publish (as Blair anticipated) a general attack of this nature.” The firm of Nicholson & Watson also considered it bad taste to attack an ally. The publisher Jonathan Cape loved the book but felt compelled to run it past a friend who worked for the Ministry of Information in case its skewering of Stalin might damage the war effort. The official decided it certainly would and Cape performed a weaselly U-turn. He hadn’t realised, you see, that Animal Farm was specifically about Russia. And did they really have to be pigs? “I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.” Orwell found the rejection laughable. He told Inez Holden, “Imagine old Joe (who doesn’t know one word of any European language), sitting in the Kremlin reading Animal Farm and saying ‘I don’t like this.’ ”

  The next recipient of the somewhat bedraggled manuscript was T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber. Eliot favourably compared it to Gulliver’s Travels, but he and Geoffrey Faber did not consider “that this is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at the present time.” George Woodcock brought it to his anarchist colleagues at the Freedom Press but they hadn’t forgiven Orwell for his earlier attacks on pacifism. In the US, it was rejected by a dozen publishers, including Angus Cameron, the pro-communist editor-in-chief of Little, Brown. Amid the multifarious political objections, Dial Press’s logic was refreshingly simple: they said there was no market for animal stories.

  By now fairly demoralised, Orwell considered publishing Animal Farm himself as a two-shilling pamphlet via the Whitman Press, an anarchist cottage industry run by his friend the poet Paul Potts. He even wrote a powerful preface, “The Freedom of the Press,” about the stealthy power of unofficial censorship: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.” But the preface would be mothballed until 1972, because Fredric Warburg, who had previously rescued Homage to Catalonia, stepped in with a £100 advance, provided he could find enough paper to print it on. Overriding objections from his wife and some colleagues, Warburg’s bold decision convinced Orwell to stick with the publisher going forward because “I knew that anyone who would risk this book would risk anything.”

  In his memoir, Warburg wondered melodramatically what would have happened if he hadn’t taken the plunge. “Perhaps even Orwell’s morale might have cracked, had Animal Farm failed. And then . . . ? Then there might never have been a novel called 1984.”

  Animal Farm’s publication was delayed for several reasons, one of which was an air raid that destroyed Warburg’s premises that summer. In June, the Luftwaffe began pummelling London with winged V-1 rockets, known as “doodlebugs,” in retaliation for the RAF’s raids on Germany. H. G. Wells called them “robot bombs.” Inez Holden overheard a scared woman claiming that the rockets were the ghosts of Luftwaffe pilots killed in the Battle of Britain. A V-1 struck the Orwells’ flat while they were out, forcing them to move into Holden’s empty house in Marylebone, before settling into their final London home at 27b Canonbury Square, Islington. Orwell retrieved dozens of books and the “blitzed” manuscript of Animal Farm from the rubble.

  He had recently become a father. Orwell believed he was sterile (on what basis is unclear) and turned to Eileen’s sister-in-law Gwen O’Shaughnessy, who ran a medical practice in Newcastle, to arrange an adoption. Starting a family had been more of a priority for Orwell than for Eileen but they both became doting parents to three-week-old Richard Horatio Blair, named after Orwell’s late father. As soon as the war was over, they planned to move to the countryside. “I hate London,” Orwell told the crime writer Julian Symons. “I really would like to get out of it, but of course you can’t leave while people are being bombed to bits all around you.”

  With the war entering its terminal stage, Orwell’s mind was turning to the “after-war,” but first he had to come clean about his errors: his latest “London Letter” was a masochistically thorough confession of his incompetence as a prophet. Quoting a dozen faulty predictions, he explained how he had been “grossly wrong” about the survival of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the fall of Churchill, and the likelihood of the war driving Britain towards either fascism or socialism. He had come to realise that he hadn’t worked hard enough to identify and overcome his biases, and vowed to redouble his efforts. “It seems to me very important to realize that we have been wrong, and say so. Most people nowadays, when their predictions are falsified, just impudently claim that they have been justified, and squeeze the facts accordingly . . . I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one’s own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them.”

  London in late 1944 was a glum, crotchety, threadbare city, battered by Hitler’s desperate final assault. The new V-2 ballistic missiles—much like the “rocket bombs” that pummel Airstrip One—were enough to make Londoners nostalgic for the evil whine of the doodlebugs: at least those provided some warning. “Every time one goes off I hear gloomy references to ‘next time,’ ” Orwell wrote in “As I Please.” “But if you ask who will be fighting whom when this universally expected war breaks out, you get no clear answer. It is just war in the abstract—the notion that human beings could ever behave sanely having apparently faded out of many people’s memories.”

  He was struck by a 1943 Mass Observation report which found that 46 per cent of Londoners definitely expected a Third World War and another 19 per cent thought one was possible. Most of them expected it to take place within the next twenty-five years.

  In September 1944, Orwell wrote a brilliant essay for Tribune about his friend Arthur Koestler. If James Burnham supplied Orwell with the geopolitical superstructure for Nineteen Eighty-Four, then Koestler provided him the mental landscape with his 1940 masterpiece Darkness at Noon. The novel was set in a prison, and Koestler certainly knew his way around a cell.

  Born in Budapest in 1905, Koestler was a restless adventurer who was first jailed in February 1937, while reporting on the Spanish Civil War for the News Chronicle. Unbeknown to his employers, he had been a member of the German Communist Party for six years, working for the Comintern propagandist Willi Münzenberg’s network of front organisations. The fascists held Koestler in solitary confinement in Seville for ninety-four days, during which he lived under the constant threat of execution. This proximity to death triggered a spiritual epiphany which fractured his faith in communism. Freed as the result of an international campaign, Koestler resigned from the Communist Party the following year at a meeting in Paris, where he quoted Thomas Mann: “A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.”16 He later compared himself to an alcoholic emerging from a “Lost Week-end in Utopia.” To articulate his disillusionment, he began writing Darkness at Noon (originally called The Vicious Circle), basing the prison scenes on his experiences in Seville, and those of his friend Eva Striker, who had been imprisoned in Moscow on the fictitious charge of plotting to assassinate Stalin. But there were more cells to come.

  Living in Paris when war broke out, Koestler was designated an undesirable alien and placed in Le Vernet internment camp. He was freed for just long enough to finish the novel and send the manuscript to London, before being apprehended yet again when the Wehrmacht invaded France. He escaped to England in November 1940, where he was promptly jailed as an illegal alien again: on the day that Darkness at Noon was published, Koestler was in solitary confinement in Pentonville Prison. In 1931, Orwell had deliberately got himself arrested for drunkenness in order to see a police cell for himself but he was quickly released and the only memory that proved useful while he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four was the stench of a broken toilet. Koestler’s authentic descriptions of incarceration w
ere therefore invaluable source material for the scenes in the Ministry of Love. So, too, were his insights into the mental prison of totalitarianism.

  “Who will ever forget the first moment he read Darkness at Noon?” wrote Michael Foot. “For socialists especially, the experience was indelible. I can recall reading it right through one night, horror-struck, over-powered, enthralled.” Koestler offered a possible solution to the central riddle of the Moscow show trials: why did so many Communist Party members sign confessions of crimes against the state, and thus their death warrants? Either they were all guilty as charged (impossible), or they were broken by torture (inadequate), or, as Koestler argued, their years of unbending loyalty had dissolved their belief in objective truth: if the Party required them to be guilty, then guilty they must be. As Parsons wails in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “Of course I’m guilty! You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?” In Oceania, there are no laws, only crimes, and no distinction between thought and deed. Hence Winston can confess to fabricated charges of espionage, embezzlement, sabotage, murder, sexual perversion and so on, while believing on some level that he is indeed guilty. “All the confessions that are uttered here are true,” says O’Brien. “We make them true.” So, too, in Soviet Russia. Under Stalin, Orwell wrote in his 1941 review of Darkness at Noon, “one is imprisoned not for what one does but for what one is, or, more exactly, for what one is suspected of being.”

  Koestler’s protagonist Rubashov is a senior Soviet official arrested during a purge that forces him to reckon with the times that he diligently dispatched innocent party members to their deaths. He has been transformed overnight from victimiser to victim at the whim of No. 1, the enigmatic, infallible Stalin surrogate whose face adorns every wall. It was not enough for Stalin to have his enemies eliminated; he needed confession and repentance to destroy them morally and thus confirm his victory over reality. “The horror which No. 1 emanated above all consisted in the possibility that he was in the right,” writes Koestler, “and that all those whom he killed had to admit, even with the bullet in the back of their necks, that he conceivably might be in the right.” The Soviet official Gyorgy Pyatakov, executed in 1937, said that the true Bolshevik “would be ready to believe that black was white, and white was black, if the Party required it . . . there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party, did not belong to it.”