The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  There’s no doubt that Orwell genuinely hated the school, but old schoolmates found “Such, Such Were the Joys” overblown and unfair. It feels as if Nineteen Eighty-Four leaked into Orwell’s memories and twisted an averagely unpleasant prep school into a totalitarian nightmare of cruelty and injustice. O’Brien is repeatedly compared to a schoolmaster, and in a deleted line from Orwell’s rough draft, Parsons in the Ministry of Love looks “exactly like a fat, overgrown schoolboy awaiting a caning.” Conversely, when Orwell describes being caned for wetting his bed, he sounds like Parsons, arrested for shouting out a heresy in his sleep: “It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to avoid it.”

  So the possibility of the novel infecting the memory makes sense; the reverse leads to some appalling armchair psychology. Anthony West (the son of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West) wrote an influential article in The New Yorker after Orwell’s death which argued, “Whether he knew it or not, what he did in 1984 was to send everybody in England to an enormous Crossgates to be as miserable as he had been.” This is far too tidy. Orwell was by no means the only writer to describe boarding school as a miniature tyranny. The convent-educated Sonia Brownell, for example, branded Catholic priests “totalitarians” who want to “control, utterly, every thought and feeling.” Orwell would not have been much of a writer if his final novel had been merely a vengeful satire of his prep school.

  Orwell was discharged from Hairmyres on July 28. Avril thought he could have made a full recovery if he had moved to a sanatorium, but the siren song of the novel was too powerful. He returned to Jura and rewrote it line by line between August and November, in the company of Rees, Avril and Bill. His neighbours were glad to see him back home, getting the garden back into shape. “What surprised me mostly was the first time I read 1984,” remembered one lobster fisherman. “I couldn’t think that it was the same man that was doing this writing was the Eric Blair that I knew. I just couldn’t place them together at all.”

  As far as Orwell was concerned, “a book doesn’t exist until it is finished.” He would neither share his drafts with friends nor discuss the contents in anything but the vaguest terms. In case he died in hospital, he instructed Rees to destroy the rough draft of what was still called The Last Man in Europe. It would either be finished or it would be shoved down the memory hole and reduced to ashes.

  Given Orwell’s fear of anyone seeing his work in progress, it’s remarkable that early versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four survived at all. Pages from four drafts, amounting to 44 per cent of the novel, ended up in the hands of Daniel G. Siegel, a collector from Massachusetts, who agreed to publish a facsimile in 1984. Even this collage of fragments gives a decent impression of Orwell’s process and priorities. He was a ruthless self-editor, rewriting paragraphs several times over, on pages almost unreadably dense with amendments, to eliminate flabby phrasing and reinforce key ideas. The novel’s famously disorienting first line, for example, originally read: “It was a cold, blowy day in early April, and a million radios were striking thirteen.” This was the sixth of his books to open with the time of day.

  The detailed notes Orwell made at Hairmyres laid out his priorities: clarify the role of the proles, the falsification of history and the suppression of sex in Oceania, and write the final chapter. Little was lost. The visit to O’Brien’s apartment was abbreviated, minimising the role of his sinister manservant Martin, and a subsequent encounter with Julia was dropped. Orwell drastically reduced allusions to real-world geography, references to race (including the lynching scene), and ironies that felt excessive. There is bone-dry humour in the novel, in the planned “spontaneous demonstrations” and compulsory “voluntary subscriptions,” but Orwell presumably considered the “Christian Pacifists” who call for twenty thousand Eurasian prisoners to be buried alive too heavy-handed. None of these amendments fundamentally altered the book’s narrative or agenda. To the contrary, the early drafts reveal just how consistent and focused Orwell was during those three years.

  Orwell’s recovery faded with the summer. His health spiralled down so dramatically that by October he was sure he needed to go to a sanatorium, but still he kept working instead. He even managed to find time to write short pieces on Jean-Paul Sartre and T. S. Eliot, and a substantial article which made clear what his novel was not about.

  In hindsight, Orwell might have regretted the name he chose for his totalitarian regime. As the ugly Newspeak contraction implied, Ingsoc was no more socialist than National Socialism. In a book where the Ministries of Truth, Love, Peace and Plenty are dedicated to the opposite values, it would be bizarre to interpret it literally, as English socialism. The Labour Party no longer exists and Goldstein’s book spells out the lie embedded in Ingsoc’s name: “Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism.” Still, many American fans, as we shall see, were to assume that he was satirising the Attlee government. The way he used the physical furniture of post-war London to give Airstrip One a lived authenticity compounded this false impression. Even Warburg, before realising his error, initially interpreted the book as “a deliberate and sadistic attack on Socialism and socialist parties generally.” In his publisher’s report, he suggested it would delight Churchill and the right-wing press and be “worth a cool million votes to the Conservative Party.” And he knew Orwell personally. Why wouldn’t readers who knew nothing of the man and his beliefs make the same mistake?

  To American eyes, Britain under Labour may well have appeared nightmarish. The New York Times’s London correspondent Anthony Bower described its citizens as “slightly underfed, very tired, rationed, restricted, and struggling desperately for economic recovery.” An opinion poll in the spring of 1948 found that 42 per cent of Britons had considered emigrating. Orwell, however, remained a supporter of the Labour government until the end, albeit a demanding one. Annoyed by Labour’s failure to immediately do away with the House of Lords, the honours system and private education—the three great symbols of class privilege—and bored by more bureaucratic reforms, he had previously offered to write a piece for Tosco Fyvel at Tribune, complaining that Bevan had become distracted by house-building and the National Health Service, thus dismissing what would become two of the government’s greatest achievements. Fortunately, Fyvel turned it down.

  “The Labour Government After Three Years,” written for Commentary in 1948, painted a picture of a government struggling to solve tremendous problems, not a dictatorship-in-waiting. “So far, in spite of the cries of agony from the Beaverbrook press, the government has encroached very little upon individual liberty,” Orwell emphasised. “It has barely used its powers, and has not indulged in anything that could reasonably be called political persecution.” He did wonder if Labour might eventually take an authoritarian turn if, after several years, the economy was still on its knees, but he didn’t detect any totalitarian leanings in Attlee’s government of practical men. If anything, he thought them too cautious, especially when it came to messaging. Austerity and Polish immigration, he wrote, had “caused more resentment than they need have done if the underlying facts had been properly explained.” Orwell was appalled by the public’s hostility towards Polish and Jewish refugees and argued that “it is doubtful whether we can solve our problems without encouraging immigration from Europe.”23 But he still hoped for the best, regarding a successful democratic socialist government the best possible antidote to Stalinism.

  Orwell’s final substantial essay was “Reflections on Gandhi,” a complex assessment of the man who had been assassinated earlier that year, just a few months into the life of the independent India that he had done so much to bring about. Orwell greatly admired Gandhi’s courage, openness and intellectual honesty but recoiled from his abstinence and religiosity. A life without sex, meat, alcohol and tobacco seemed to Orwell vaguely inhuman. Who would w
ant to be a saint? “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection,” he wrote, “that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.” It was certainly the essence of being Orwell.

  Did Orwell wreck his health beyond repair for want of a typist? Fredric Warburg thought so. When Orwell finished the final draft in November, he asked his publisher to find him someone who could come to Barnhill to retype the manuscript, which was such a mess of scribbles that he thought nobody could make sense of it unless he was right there with them. But Christen had returned to the Far East, no typist who was willing to travel to Jura could be found in a hurry, and Orwell was impatient. He typed it himself at the punishing rate of around four thousand words a day, seven days a week, propped up in bed for as long as he could bear in between bouts of fever and bloody coughing fits. In the first week of December, he typed the final words, came downstairs, shared the last bottle of wine in the house with Avril and Bill, then went back to bed, demolished by his efforts.

  On January 2, 1949, Orwell left Barnhill for the last time to make the long journey to the Cotswold Sanatorium in Cranham, Gloucestershire. It pained him to leave somewhere so full of life. As he glumly told Astor, “Everything is flourishing here except me.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The Clocks Strike Thirteen

  Orwell 1949–1950

  My new book is a Utopia in the form of a novel. I ballsed it up rather, partly owing to being so ill while I was writing it, but I think some of the ideas in it might interest you. We haven’t definitively fixed the title, but I think it will be called “Nineteen Eighty-four.”

  —George Orwell, letter to Julian Symons, February 4, 1949

  So, why 1984?

  There’s a very popular theory—so popular that many people don’t realise that it is just a theory—that Orwell’s title was simply a satirical inversion of 1948, but there is no evidence for this whatsoever. This idea, first suggested by Orwell’s US publisher, seems far too cute for such a serious book, not to mention restricting: a one-dimensional joke. Scholars have raised other possibilities. Eileen wrote a poem for her old school’s centenary called “End of the Century: 1984.” G. K. Chesterton’s 1904 political satire The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which mocks the art of prophecy, opens in 1984. The year is also a significant date in The Iron Heel. But all of these connections are exposed as no more than coincidences by the early drafts of the novel that Orwell was still calling The Last Man in Europe. First he wrote 1980, then 1982, and only later 1984. The most fateful date in literature was a late amendment.

  The important thing is that it’s the not-so-near future. Dystopian novels tended to be set either at least a century hence or just around the corner. Close enough to 1949 to be palpable yet far away enough to be credible, Orwell’s chosen date had the same purpose as his London location—to say that it could happen here, and soon. Thirty-nine when the novel opens, Winston knows that he was born in either 1944 or 1945, making him a close contemporary of Richard Blair, so perhaps Orwell was imagining the world in which his son would enter middle age. A lot can happen in thirty-five years. Thirty-five years before the novel’s publication was the glorious summer of 1914. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was still alive, Orwell was about to turn eleven, and death camps and atom bombs were science fiction.

  One of the novel’s dark jokes is that it may not even be 1984. When Winston comes to write his diary, he realises he isn’t sure, because “it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.” So the very first line he writes may be untrue. Orwell is telling the reader early on that this is a book in which you can trust nobody and nothing, not even the calendar.

  During the months leading up to publication Orwell talked down the novel. In letters to friends, he called it a “beastly book,” “an awful book really,” and “a good idea ruined.” He wrote to Warburg: “I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied . . . I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB.” Worried about his inability to earn money (he wryly referred to tuberculosis as “an expensive hobby”), he anticipated that it would bring in around £500: “it isn’t a book I would gamble on for a big sale.”24

  How seriously should we take Orwell’s claim that he “ballsed it up”? He always undersold his novels, owing to a tangle of modesty, expectation management and genuine self-doubt: Burmese Days “made me spew”; A Clerg yman’s Daughter “was a good idea, but I am afraid I have made a muck of it”; Coming Up for Air was “a mess.” The man who maintained that every book, like every revolution, is a failure also wrote that “any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” In his hospital notebook, he looked back on twenty-one years of wasted time and unfulfilled promise. Even when he was busy, which he usually was, he fretted that his energy and talent were running out, “that I was idling, that I was behind with the current job, & that my total output was miserably small.” For Orwell, the writer’s life was a neurotic treadmill. In reality, nobody considered Orwell a failure except for the voice in his head, without which perhaps he wouldn’t have achieved what he did.

  As he was laid up in bed after an exhausting three-year struggle to write the book, it’s not surprising that he thought Nineteen Eighty-Four could have been better. But apart from some confusion about the time frame of Winston’s arrest, Secker & Warburg’s Roger Senhouse identified no significant errors at the proof stage. Orwell’s only acknowledged regret concerned the Room 101 scene, telling Julian Symons that he was right to accuse it of “schoolboyish sensationalism.” Indeed, that scene has the lurid flavour of M. R. James and Edgar Allan Poe, writers he had loved as a schoolboy. The novel may not be perfect, but it has no flaws serious enough to be attributed to sickness or haste. Its pessimism is energetic and intense, not weary.

  Warburg was knocked flat by the manuscript. His reader’s report, designed to guide his team in marketing the book, was full of shocked praise: “This is amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read . . . Orwell has no hope, or at least he allows his reader no hope, no tiny flickering candlelight of hope. Here is a study in pessimism unrelieved, except perhaps by the thought that, if a man can conceive ‘1984,’ he can also will to avoid it.” The novel’s first reader was also its first misreader, because Warburg made two faulty assumptions that would be echoed by many subsequent readers. One, as we’ve seen, was to conclude that Orwell had given up on socialism. The second was to determine that the novel’s desolate conclusion stemmed directly from Orwell’s illness: “I cannot but think that this book could have been written only by a man who himself, however temporarily, had lost hope.” Still, Warburg’s enthusiasm was undiluted and his publicist colleague David Farrer concurred: “Orwell has done what Wells never did, created a fantasy world which yet is horribly real so that you mind what happens to the characters which inhabit it.” He was sure it had best-seller potential, and that if they couldn’t sell at least fifteen thousand copies, then they “ought to be shot.”

  Secker & Warburg moved fast. Even before Orwell left Jura, he was able to reject Senhouse’s proposed blurb, which made the novel sound “as though it were a thriller mixed up with a love story,” instead of a serious attempt “to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism.” Of course, it was all of those things at once—and more. It’s fortunate that the manuscript didn’t require rewriting, because Orwell was incapable of such work. It was all he could do to examine the proofs that arrived during February and March, and draw up lists of friends and contemporaries who should receive advance copies, including Aldous Huxley and Henry Miller. He suggested to Warburg that Bertrand Russell might be willing to write a blurb, which indeed he
was. It’s unlikely he would have approved had he known that his American publishers Harcourt, Brace had sought a back-cover endorsement from J. Edgar Hoover, the red-baiting director of the FBI: “We hope you might be interested in helping to call this book to the attention of the American public—and thus, perhaps, helping to halt totalitarianism.” Always a creature of paranoia, Hoover declined the request and instead opened a file on Orwell.

  Orwell resisted any attempt to have the book “mucked about.” He flatly refused to let the US Book-of-the-Month-Club publish an edition minus the appendix and Goldstein’s book, even at the risk of losing, Warburg estimated, around £40,000 in sales. Anyone who thought these essayistic sections were disposable because they didn’t advance the story didn’t grasp Orwell’s purpose at all. Even before Nineteen Eighty-Four was out, people seemed determined to misunderstand it.

  Cranham, a private sanatorium high up in the Cotswold hills, was a considerably more privileged environment than Hairmyres. In Orwell’s chalet, the greatest aural nuisance was not the constant burble of the radio but the fatuous braying of upper-class patients in neighbouring chalets: “No wonder everyone hates us so.” His greatest sadness was missing Richard; terrified of infecting his son, he kept the boy away for long stretches. Orwell was beginning, reluctantly, to accept that this hospitalisation was different—he would not be patched up in time for another summer on Jura. Still, he hoped to stay alive for another five to ten years and asked Warburg to arrange a second opinion that would tell him honestly how much time he had left: “Don’t think I am making up my mind to peg out. On the contrary, I have the strongest reasons for wanting to stay alive.”