The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  Used to earning so little that he didn’t even bother opening letters from the Inland Revenue, the financially illiterate Orwell now had to worry about income tax for the first time in his life. In 1947 he established his own company, George Orwell Productions, Ltd., on the advice of his accountants, Harrison, Son, Hill & Co. (“No one is patriotic about taxes,” he once wrote.) The windfall caused such a tax headache that he called it “fairy gold”—fairy gold for a fairy tale—but he still had enough money to make generous donations to the Freedom Defence Committee and help several writers in less fortunate positions. Prestige in America brought offers of work from publications like The New Yorker, interest from Walt Disney in making a movie of Animal Farm, and even a short profile in Vogue. “Fairly much a leftist, George Orwell is a defender of freedom,” wrote Allene Talmey, “even though most of the time he violently disagrees with the people beside whom he is fighting.” Not a bad capsule description.

  Orwell’s life was thus transformed by a country he had never visited (by the time the opportunity arose in 1948, he was too ill to travel) and regarded with condescension and suspicion. In his writing, he consistently portrayed the USA as a spirited but crude and unruly teenager, liable to break things. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Comstock says, “The Americans always go one better on any kinds of beastliness, whether it is ice-cream soda, racketeering, or theosophy,” and Orwell showed few signs of moderating that opinion over the following decade.

  America was Orwell’s biggest blind spot. Cyril Connolly thought he was “anti-American, except for the Trotskyites of Partisan Review.” Although he could write sensitively about British popular culture—seaside postcards, boys’ comics, murder mysteries, music hall—Orwell had no interest in jazz, blues, Broadway or Tin Pan Alley, maintained a puritanical disgust for pulp fiction and American comic books, and had a low opinion of Hollywood. He paid scarce attention to the achievements of Roosevelt’s New Deal. As for the country’s impact on the English language, “It ought to be realised that on the whole American is a bad influence and has already had a debasing effect.”

  Although he loved Mark Twain, and had even pitched a biography of the author in 1934, Orwell rarely engaged with living American writers, with the exception of Henry Miller and Richard Wright, whose Native Son he called “a truly remarkable book, which ought to be read by anyone who wants to understand the nature of colour-hatred.” While having no illusions about slavery or the slaughter of Native Americans, he felt that the nineteenth-century America of Whitman and Twain represented, in the imagination at least, a world of democracy, opportunity, adventure and innocence, made possible by ample untapped resources, that was a long time gone. “The world of the American novelist is a chaos, moral as well as physical,” he wrote in 1940. “No one has a trace of public spirit, or at bottom, any standard except success, usually masquerading as ‘self expression’ . . . There is no emotional depth. Everything is permitted, and therefore nothing matters.” He could only make such ridiculous generalisations because he knew so few Americans. Meeting some didn’t seem to help. A 1943 “As I Please” was so hostile towards US troops stationed in Britain (“It is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory”) that several readers complained. “This anglophile was rather shocked to find that George Orwell is still no closer to knowing the Americans than before,” wrote one.

  Most American reviewers of Nineteen Eighty-Four would fail to see their own country’s reflection in Oceania, despite the use of dollars and the name of the national anthem, “Oceania, ’Tis for Thee.” The posters and slogans of Airstrip One (i.e., Occupied Territory) owe a great deal to American advertising, as, in reality, did totalitarian propaganda. “The Nazis, without admitting it, learned as much from American gangster organisations as their propaganda, admittedly, learned from American business publicity,” wrote Hannah Arendt.

  After the war, however, Orwell seemed to move towards an intellectual détente with the US, just as most of the British left was becoming more hostile. “It is clear that on the matters that most affect Britain today,” claimed The New Statesman, “the United States is nearly as hostile to the aspirations of Socialist Britain as to the Soviet Union.” Swimming against the tide as usual, Orwell bemoaned Tribune ’s growing antagonism (“To be anti-American nowadays is to shout with the mob”), and accused the socialist historian Douglas Goldring of “Americophobia.” He considered it hypocritical to demonise the country on which Britain’s economic recovery depended, and thought that the cold war enforced a binary decision. “I don’t, God knows, want a war to break out,” he wrote to Victor Gollancz, “but if one were compelled to choose between Russia and America—and I suppose that is the choice one might have to make—I would always choose America.”

  Towards the end of “The Principles of Newspeak,” the passage of Oldspeak chosen to illustrate the most elegant language and the most noble ideals that the pre-totalitarian age had to offer is the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

  The winter of 1946–1947 was an onslaught. Starting in January, Britain was terrorised by heavy snow and Siberian temperatures. Coal supplies iced over in the pits or languished in depots because so many roads and railways were snowed in, leading to fuel rationing and shuttered factories. Food rations dipped below wartime levels, as vegetables froze in the ground and thousands of chickens died of cold, and bread was restricted for the first time ever. Unemployment exploded from 400,000 people to 1.7 million in just four weeks. Fuel and paper shortages forced publishers, including Tribune, to halt the presses. Television broadcasts were suspended. During February, the worst month, electricity supplies were halted for five hours a day. The government, too, was frostbitten. The Financial Times called the fuel crisis the domestic equivalent of the events that brought down Chamberlain in 1940. “Everybody in England was shivering,” observed the expatriate British novelist Christopher Isherwood, visiting from his home in Hollywood. Some of his friends in London told him that it was worse than the war.

  Orwell later traced his final period of ill-health back to that winter’s assault on his lungs. Apart from a brief New Year’s return to Barnhill to plant trees and bulbs, he spent November to April in London, which was actually colder and more fuel-deprived than Jura. You get a flavour of his last “unendurable” winter in broken-backed, bombed-out London in the opening chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four: the power cuts, the economy drives, the patchwork buildings, the blunt razor blades, the bad food, the clothing coupons, the cairns of rubble, the grit in the air. Orwell had to climb six flights of stairs to get to 27b Canonbury Square; Winston coughs his way up seven in Victory Mansions. The prole district, “to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station,” is Islington.

  Orwell resumed “As I Please” (his typically eclectic first column covered fashion magazines, jury service, bread rationing and road safety) and wrote two of his last great essays, “How the Poor Die” and “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool.” He also attended to his literary career, which was finally up and running. He consulted with Warburg on plans to reprint the best of his earlier books in a uniform edition, and convinced Gollancz to relinquish his contractual right to publish Nineteen Eighty-Four. Animal Farm was doing brisk business in translation—in Japan, an astonishing forty-eight publishers competed for it—and made its radio debut on the BBC’s new Third Programme, with a script by Orwell edited by his old flatmate Rayner Heppenstall. “I had the feeling that they had spoilt it,” he told Mamaine Paget, “but one nearly always does with anything one writes for the air.”

  In March 1947, Orwell checked in on James Burnham, whose journey to the right was continuing apace. In The Struggle for Power, the three managerial super-states had predictably dwindled to two, representing communism and democracy. While the new Truman Doctrine established a policy of containing Soviet communism, Burnham believed that the Third World War had already begun and that America should be prepared to make a prevent
ive strike before the Russians could develop their own atom bomb—a suggestion which led one congressman to compare the book to Mein Kampf. “He is too fond of apocalyptic visions, too ready to believe that the muddled processes of history will happen suddenly and logically,” Orwell wrote. Voraciously well-read about Russia (in a 1947 letter to Dwight Macdonald he recommended almost twenty books), he thought that Burnham’s call to suppress communist parties in the West was also based on a hyperbolic fantasy: “a huge secret army of fanatical warriors, completely devoid of fear or scruples and having no thought except to live and die for the Workers’ Fatherland.”

  As a democratic socialist, Orwell felt like “a doctor treating an all but hopeless case.” The “mental disease” that gripped the world in the 1930s had not yet been diagnosed, let alone cured. Like Attlee, who talked of combining “individual freedom with a planned economy, democracy with social justice,” Orwell was looking for a third way, dominated by neither America nor Russia. He hoped for a socialist United States of Europe: “If one could somewhere present the spectacle of economic security without concentration camps, the pretext for the Russian dictatorship would disappear and Communism would lose much of its appeal.” But the obstacles were immense. The future was “very dark.”

  In hindsight, Orwell was too pessimistic. Within a few years he would have seen that the British economy could recover, thanks in part to the Marshall Plan, even while dismantling the Empire, and that France and Germany could come together to lay the foundations of a united Western Europe, if not the federation of socialist republics he had in mind. But the extreme desolation of Nineteen Eighty-Four was as much a strategy as an expression of his own fears. Reviewing In Darkest Germany, Victor Gollancz’s book of post-war reportage, he worried that accounts of suffering were no longer moving the British public: “As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses.” To generate that irresistible shock, he thought, “a new literary technique will have to be evolved.”

  Orwell, Avril and Richard arrived back on Jura on April 11, just as the snow was melting and spring was nudging through. The garden at Barnhill was buttery with daffodils. By the end of May, he had written about a third of his novel, even if it was “a ghastly mess.” “I don’t like talking about books before they are written,” he wrote to Warburg, “but I will tell you now that this is a novel about the future—that is, it is in a sense a fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel. That is what makes it a difficult job—of course as a book of anticipations it would be comparatively simple to write.” Over the next few months, he mailed everything except the last chapter and the appendix to Miranda Christen, a friend of Anthony Powell who was renting his Canonbury Square flat and volunteered to type up a clean manuscript. Having spent the war in Java under Japanese occupation, Christen was “rivetted from the start. There were analogies with my recent past.” The Japanese invaders who rebranded occupied countries as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere “would have taken to the Ministry of Truth like a duck to water.”

  Barnhill was busy that broiling summer. Richard Rees, Orwell’s literary executor, came to Jura to paint and stayed for several weeks. Inez Holden returned for a long spell. Bill Dunn, an injured exsoldier new to the island, helped to run Barnhill and developed a relationship with Avril that led, after Orwell’s death, to marriage and the adoption of Richard. Marjorie’s widower Humphrey Dakin came with his grown-up children for a holiday that almost ended in tragedy. Orwell’s motor boat, containing Henry and Jane Dakin and Richard, was sucked into the notorious whirlpool in the Gulf of Corryvreckan, one of Britain’s most dangerous stretches of water, and the party made a narrow escape. It was the closest Orwell had come to death since Spain, but Henry noted that he showed not a flicker of panic: “He almost seemed to enjoy it.”

  Was this nonchalance a sign of courage, recklessness or fatalism? Had he grown too used to the possibility of an early death? His health worsened in the autumn, kiboshing an optimistic plan to report on life in the American South, and an Observer commission to spend three months in Kenya and South Africa. He wasn’t going anywhere. He’d been ill all year and losing weight, he told Fyvel, but “like a fool” decided to press on with his novel instead of seeing a doctor who, he suspected, would force him to down tools. He finished the first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four in bed on November 7. Shortly before Christmas, he succumbed to medical advice, travelling to Hairmyres hospital in East Kilbride, near Glasgow, to seek treatment. He would not be able to return to Jura, or his novel, for another seven months. At that point, he later admitted to Celia Paget, “I really felt as though I were finished.”

  Orwell dreamed of death. The nightmares continued for the rest of his life, especially when his lungs felt constricted and he woke gasping for breath, fearing that he would never be well again. In his dreams he was walking by the sea, or between grand, towering buildings, but always in sunshine and always, he wrote in his hospital notebook, “with a peculiar feeling of happiness.” Orwell didn’t fear death itself, only the pain that would precede death. He thought it better to die “violently and not too old,” he wrote in “How the Poor Die.” The alternative would necessarily be “slow, smelly and painful.”

  The problem with seeing Nineteen Eighty-Four as the anguished last testament of a dying man is that Orwell never really believed he was dying, or at least no more than usual. He had suffered from lung problems since childhood and had been ill, on and off, for so long that he had no reason to think that this time would be the last. At Hairmyres, he was diagnosed with chronic fibrotic tuberculosis in the upper part of both lungs, particularly the left. According to James Williamson, one of his doctors, Orwell had “probably forgotten, almost, what it was like to feel completely well,” but he could still live for a long time.

  Winston Smith similarly dreams of deep water and sunlit ruins and he doesn’t fear death either. What he cannot bear, what will destroy him, is the pain, “because the body swells up until it fills the universe.” Only thirty-nine but already feeling like an old man, Winston embodies Orwell’s horror at his own physical decay. In hospital, Orwell tallied the symptoms of disintegration: tight chest, painful back, weak knees, aching gums, greying hair, watering eyes, and a chill that wouldn’t go away. Thanks to David Astor’s connections, Orwell was able to acquire some streptomycin, the new anti-TB wonder drug from the US, but a severe and unexpected allergic reaction eventually forced the doctors to suspend treatment. He shed clumps of skin, hair and nails. He erupted in rashes, ulcers and blisters. At night the blood from blisters in his throat would bubble up and congeal on his lips so that he would need to wash it away before he could open his mouth. “I suppose with all these drugs,” he wrote to Julian Symons, “it’s rather a case of sinking the ship to get rid of the rats.”

  The crucial difference between Orwell and Winston is that Winston knows, from the moment he first writes in his diary, that he is doomed. But Orwell never gave any indication that he thought he wouldn’t recover. Right up until his final days, he did not lose faith in the future.

  What Orwell really hated about his illness was its effect on his brain. He could think, talk and read normally, but whenever he tried to translate his thoughts to paper, his language was stale, his arguments inchoate. He wondered if there was some medical explanation for this: perhaps there was enough blood to the brain to produce dull, obvious writing but not enough to inspire anything worthwhile? For someone who was not fully himself unless he was writing, it was agony.

  He somehow managed to finish one article of real substance. “Writers and Leviathan” cracked the conundrum that had defeated him in “Inside the Whale”: how can a writer engage with politics without compromising his integrity on the page? Eight years earlier, Orwell had advocated a kind of intellectual quarantine. Now he insisted that it was “impossi
ble and undesirable” to hide inside the whale and that one should be politically active as a citizen as long as one’s writing remains uncontaminated by dishonesty and self-censorship. It was his final argument for the prophylactic power of rigorous self-awareness: in an age when everything one read or wrote was coloured by politics, contradictory thoughts inevitably arose, and it was essential to confront the dissonance openly rather than “to push the question, unanswered, into a corner of one’s mind.” The outline in his notebook captures it in twenty-nine words: “Conclusion: must engage in politics. Must keep issues separate. Must not engage in party politics as a writer. Recognition of own prejudices only way of keeping them in check.”

  By May, Orwell was well enough to get his typewriter back and resume work in earnest. As well as making notes to revise the novel, he wrote short critical pieces on Wilde, Attlee and Graham Greene, and a decent essay on George Gissing, the close friend of H. G. Wells who, like Orwell, died of lung disease at the age of forty-six. In his notes for the essay, Orwell wrote: “Gissing’s novels are among the things that make one feel the world has improved (emphasize gloom).” You would not think that Orwell ever needed to remind himself to emphasise gloom. His debt to Gissing—“a chronicler of vulgarity, squalor and failure”—can be felt in the grubbier passages of description in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  Orwell also managed to finish “Such, Such Were the Joys,” his lacerating memoir of his schooldays at St. Cyprian’s. He’d started pondering (and possibly writing) it ten years earlier, and had sent Warburg a first draft in 1947, but it took him this long to complete it. It was so savagely libellous that it couldn’t be published until after his death, and even then, the school appeared pseudonymously as Crossgates.22 Orwell portrayed St. Cyprian’s/Crossgates as “a world of force and fraud and secrecy” which tormented children with “irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings.”