Warburg’s friend Dr. Andrew Morland, a Harley Street specialist, told Orwell that if he wanted to survive, he would have to avoid work for at least a year. That was painful news for this most industrious of writers, leaving him nothing to do but read, solve crossword puzzles and write letters which crackled with the wit, gossip and analysis that had nowhere else to go. His career as a freelance journalist ended with short reviews of Churchill’s autobiography and a biography of Dickens. The latter piece mentioned the theory that the author’s final reading tour “exhausted Dickens disastrously” and, therefore, that he “in effect committed suicide” by working too hard. Could Orwell ever write about Dickens without describing himself ?
Orwell looked to the future. He drew up a new will. He pondered spending winters somewhere nice by the sea, maybe Brighton, and summers on Jura. When he was able to return to work in 1950, he planned to finish a new collection called Essays and Sketches, including an essay about Evelyn Waugh (“about as good a novelist as one can be . . . while holding untenable opinions”) and another about Joseph Conrad, particularly his political novels The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. He thought that Conrad, another writer-adventurer fascinated by the psychology of nationalism, power and idealism gone awry, had “a sort of grown-upness and political understanding which would have been almost impossible to a native English writer at that time.” Like G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, The Secret Agent was animated by the wave of anarchist bomb plots and assassinations that swept Europe at the turn of the century, and traces of both novels can be detected in the parts of Nineteen EightyFour in which Winston is recruited and double-crossed by O’Brien: that tense, secret world of codes, pledges and swapped briefcases. In Orwell’s first draft, Winston and Julia actually fantasise about becoming terrorists: “They would get hold of five kilograms of dynamite & a detonator, make their way in among a crowd of Inner Party members & blow everyone to pieces, themselves included.”
Orwell also had two novels in mind in 1949, both a long way from Oceania. One was to be set in 1945; the other in the 1920s: “a novel of character rather than ideas, with Burma as background,” according to Warburg. Only one short extract, “A Smoking-Room Story,” survives. Lively and playful, it suggests, like his reading diary, that he had finally got totalitarianism out of his system, and that Nineteen EightyFour was meant to conclude one phase of his work, not his entire career.
While Orwell lay in bed, the post-war order took shape. In April, a dozen Western nations formed NATO. In August, Russia successfully detonated its first atom bomb in the Kazakh steppe. In October, Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China.
Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia.
Orwell was rarely short of companionship at Cranham. As well as the usual suspects—Warburg, Muggeridge, Powell, Fyvel, Potts, Holden, Connolly—he was visited by Evelyn Waugh and his untenable opinions, the socialist historian R. H. Tawney, and a rather taxing interviewer from the Evening Standard, Charles Curran, who wore him out by arguing about politics and complaining about his “frightful cigarettes.” His most frequent and exciting well-wisher was twenty-nine-year-old Sonia Brownell, who re-entered his life in May. She was famously good company.
Sonia would end up living with Nineteen Eighty-Four for thirty-one years. A complicated woman, she owes her one-dimensional reputation as a gold-digger, snob and unworthy steward of Orwell’s estate to the numerous biographers, producers and screenwriters whose efforts she obstructed and who therefore had no incentive to be kind. Her neurotic obsession with protecting her late husband’s legacy doomed her to a life of enemies.
Like Orwell, Sonia was born in India, where her father was a merchant, and raised in England. She attended a Catholic boarding school, which she loathed perhaps even more passionately than he hated St. Cyprian’s. One admirer thought her revolt against her upbringing was “an inexhaustible rocket fuel.” After she left school, an otherwise glorious nine months at a college in Switzerland was shattered by a boating accident in which a Swiss friend died. Pushing him away before, in his desperation, he dragged her down left her with a traumatic sense of guilt.
Sonia then threw herself into the bustle and thrum of bohemian London, becoming friend, muse, and, in some cases, lover to the Euston Road School of painters. Stephen Spender remembered “the Venus of Euston Road” this way: “With a round Renoir face, limpid eyes, cupid mouth, fair hair, a bit pale perhaps, she had a look of someone always struggling to go beyond herself—to escape from her social class, the convent where she was educated, into some pagan aesthete world of artists and literary geniuses who would save her.” Men were infatuated by her dazzling, dancing laugh, and the sadness it couldn’t conceal. Though fiercely intelligent, with a sharp and flashing wit, she doubted her own talent while being magnetised to the brilliance of others, especially older men. “My own father had died when I was six months old, my stepfather had gone mad, and there had never been anyone who ‘looked after me’ in my life,” she later wrote.
When Cyril Connolly and the art collector Peter Watson launched Horizon in April 1940, Sonia soon became an indispensable part of the team, which is how she first crossed paths with Orwell. Bracingly frank and efficient, with little patience for humbug, she knew how to get things done. She spent most of the war at the Ministry of War Transport and returned to Horizon in 1945 an even more formidable character. She got to know Orwell better around this time, during his days of desperate loneliness, and slept with him at least once: an act of charity on her part. They met again in London during the winter of 1946–1947 and she gave him a bottle of brandy to take back to Jura with him. His subsequent letter inviting her to visit the island (she never made it) was coolly pragmatic but for a single note of affection: “meanwhile take care of yourself & be happy.”
Sonia did try to be happy. She was spending time in Paris in the intoxicating, maddening company of the existentialists Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus and the enormously charming, enormously married Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was a Marxist; he unsuccessfully pitched Sonia an essay for Horizon, attacking Orwell’s “so-called humanism.” (Orwell, for his part, regarded Sartre as “a bag of wind.”) Sonia and Merleau-Ponty embarked on a long, turbulent affair, which left her devastated when he broke it off in late 1948. So when they reconnected, Sonia and Orwell were both bruised, vulnerable people who recognised each other’s deep reservoirs of sadness. As Julia says to Winston, “I’m good at spotting people who don’t belong.”
The title of Hilary Spurling’s sympathetic biography, The Girl from the Fiction Department, supports the popular theory that Sonia was the model for Julia: “her youth and prettiness, her toughness, above all her radiant vitality,” Spurling writes. Both women were also brisk, direct and extremely practical. But is that enough to connect the two? Orwell was also close to Inez Holden and Celia Paget, and he saw more of them while writing Nineteen Eighty-Four than he did of Sonia. Sonia and the dark-haired Julia didn’t look alike, and they certainly didn’t think alike.
Outwardly, Julia is a model citizen who cranks out cheap fiction and pornography for the proles, participates noisily in the Anti-Sex League and the Two Minutes Hate, and conveys a puritanical “atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes”—so convincingly that Winston initially assumes she is a spy for the Thought Police and fantasises about smashing her skull with a cobblestone. In private, she’s more hustler than heretic, devoting her considerable cunning to securing black market treats and seducing members of the Party. Ingenious but not intellectual (she doesn’t like to read), she’s “only a rebel from the waist downwards.” She is above all a realist with a genius for survival who has worked out how to play the game without ever questioning the rules. This line from an early draft makes the difference clear: “It was characteristic of the two of them that whereas it was Winston who dreamed of overthrowing the Party by violent insurrection, it was Julia who knew how to buy coffee on the Black Market.”
Totalitarian states depended on the Julias. Not long after the war, during an argument with Orwell in the pages of Polemic, the communist writer Randall Swingler cited the findings of US troops who had interviewed former Nazi supporters in occupied Germany: “The Nazis explained to their people that since all truth was relative, it was impossible to know or understand anything . . . it absolved the ordinary man from the effort to understand and at the same time gave him a consciousness of disillusioned honesty.”
Hannah Arendt confirmed this impression in The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Arendt concluded that Germans were already primed to feel this way by the chaotic uncertainty that preceded Hitler:
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true . . . Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
Now there’s a Party slogan as good as anything Orwell came up with: Everything is possible and nothing is true.
It’s remarkable how much of the outline Orwell wrote in 1943 or 1944 survived in the final manuscript. Ingsoc, Newspeak, “dual standard of thought,” the three super-states, the oxymoronic Party slogans, falsification of history, the Two Minutes Hate, the three traitors, the proles: they’re all there in his notebook. Key plot elements, too. “The writer” (Winston) has a significant conversation with “X” (possibly O’Brien) and a brief affair with “Y” (Julia). The second part of the book was always intended to include arrest, torture, confession and, like all his novels, “the final consciousness of failure.”
Orwell did, however, make some crucial additions. One was the two-way telescreen. Like most of the population, Orwell didn’t own a television set. By June 1948, there were only fifty thousand TV licences in a country of fifty million people (although that number was increasing exponentially), and there was very little to watch.25 For some people, the fear that the new device would watch them back was real. When the Postmaster General Sir Kingsley Wood had announced the arrival of television in 1935 he felt obliged to add, “I would like to reassure any nervous listeners, that, wonderful as television may be, it cannot, fortunately, be used in this way.” But it was logical to assume that the technology would one day catch up with the political desire for a surveillance state. The Nazi official Robert Ley once boasted, “The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.” In Airstrip One, between the telescreen, the Thought Police, the informants, the helicopters, the hidden microphones and the eerie intensity of Big Brother’s eyes, citizens feel that they are being watched “asleep or awake” and act accordingly.
The “infallible and all-powerful” Big Brother was another late innovation. Oceania’s ubiquitous, intangible ruler is a hybrid of Koestler’s No. 1, Zamyatin’s Benefactor, Hitler and, most of all, “Uncle Joe” Stalin, about whom André Gide wrote, “His portrait is seen everywhere, his name is on everyone’s lips and praise of him occurs in every public speech. Is all this the result of worship, love or fear? Who can say?” Stalin was often called “the insoluble mystery,” “the Enigma” or “the Communist Sphinx,” obscured from the masses by his inner circle. The less like a real, and therefore imperfect, human being he appeared, the more powerful he became. “The chief qualification of a mass leader,” wrote Arendt, “has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error . . . Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.”
Nobody knows where in Oceania Big Brother lives, nor indeed if he lives. “Does he exist in the same way as I exist?” Winston asks O’Brien. “You do not exist,” O’Brien replies, avoiding the question by upending it. Nineteen Eighty-Four is full of such questions. Was Big Brother ever a real person? Was Goldstein? Who wrote “the book”? Does the Brotherhood really exist? Are the rockets that rain on Airstrip One actually being fired from Oceania itself ? Is the old woman in the Ministry of Love Winston’s mother? Is Julia a member of the Thought Police after all? What year is it? How much time is passing? It is no surprise that the novel has a following among the paranoid, because it describes an unstable world in which conspiracy theories are entirely valid. As O’Brien tells Winston, avoiding a question about the Brotherhood, “As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.” Most of what Winston knows about how the world operates comes from Goldstein’s book, which may be a hoax authored by the Party, and what O’Brien tells him during his interrogation, which may be untrue, including the claim that Goldstein’s book is a hoax authored by the Party. There is so little that is definitively true.
This constant ambiguity is what makes Nineteen Eighty-Four a sophisticated work of fiction rather than an essay with a plot bolted on. Orwell’s reputation as a paragon of clarity, with his windowpane prose and love of hard facts, obscures his artistry, tempting people to read the book literally even as the text itself tells them not to. Pitted with dreams, hallucinations, shaky memories, falsified information, and references to mental illness, the novel is a deeply unstable narrative. This was present in Orwell’s original outline: “Fantasmagoric effect, rectification, shifting of dates, etc., doubts of own sanity.” With its absence of control and incomprehensible menace, it is both a true nightmare and a fair approximation of life in a totalitarian state. “Everything melted into mist,” Winston thinks, or “faded away into a shadow-world.”
There is only one thing Winston knows for sure. Nineteen EightyFour may not be a prophecy, but it contains one: a prevision of defeat and death. All of Orwell’s protagonists fail, but only Winston knows he will fail. Seven years earlier, O’Brien told him in a dream that they would meet “in the place where there is no darkness,” which turns out to mean the relentless electric glare of the Ministry of Love. “Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.” This foreknowledge haunts him constantly. The moment he starts his diary, he knows the Thought Police will find him eventually. There are several references to “predestined horror,” “impending death” and “the working-out of a process that had started years ago.” He experiences premonitions of Room 101 and even some of the exact arguments that O’Brien will make. In Winston’s head the boundaries between memory and prophecy, between past, present and future, wobble and blur. “The end was contained in the beginning.”
So the novel’s famous twist, when Charrington and O’Brien reveal their true natures, isn’t really a twist at all. It’s what was always going to happen, one way or another. Orwell writes several times that Winston’s actions “made no
difference.” The whole novel is a chronicle of a death foretold—worse than death: vaporisation, unpersonhood—although it ends just before Winston receives the inevitable bullet. Whether Winston’s determination to press forward displays immense courage or numb fatalism is left open, but he knows and accepts the consequences of his actions. “In this game that we’re playing, we can’t win,” he tells Julia, setting up a quintessential Orwell sentence: “Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.”
O’Brien tells Winston in the Ministry of Love, “Don’t deceive yourself. You did know it—you have always known it.” But how does O’Brien know that Winston knows? Who is O’Brien? Orwell reveals that he is bulky yet graceful, ugly yet charming, with an air of formidable intelligence, subtle irony and mysterious invincibility. As an instrument of state power, he is infinitely more engaging and empathetic than Koestler’s cold-blooded Gletkin, and therefore more dangerous. “He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.”
Inquisitor points towards Catholicism, as does O’Brien’s name and his twisted versions of the catechism and Holy Communion. At O’Brien’s apartment, Winston feels “a wave of admiration, almost worship” towards this “priest of power.” Orwell had a complicated relationship with religion, as an atheist who nonetheless believed that totalitarianism could only have evolved in a spiritual void and felt an emotional attachment to Protestantism. In Airstrip One, a former church is a place to have forbidden sex or exhibit propaganda, or it’s just a name in that strange old song “Oranges and Lemons.” But he was a consistent critic of Catholicism, often comparing it to fascism and communism as a prime example of oppressive dogma. The Confiteor’s conflation of thought, word and deed could even be seen as the logical basis for the concept of thoughtcrime.
The Ministry of Truth Page 22