Perhaps O’Brien also has godlike powers. We know that he has read Winston’s diary—hence his weaponisation of 2 + 2 = 5—but he also uses phrases, like “lifted clean out of the stream of history” and “we are the dead,” that Winston never wrote down. He seems to know Winston’s every thought, and to speak to him in dreams. The first time Winston sees him, he feels “as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes.” Later, he has the impression that he is “writing the diary for O’Brien; to O’Brien.” O’Brien is both the only person he instantly and wholly trusts, and the last person he should trust. He is both real and a part of Winston: his shadow self. “There was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that O’Brien had not long ago known, examined and rejected. His mind contained Winston’s mind.”
Once Winston is inside the Ministry of Love, it is impossible to take the novel literally. Even if you believe that O’Brien is an actual telepath (Ingsoc scientists are said to be working on “how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking”), why would he start surveilling an insignificant Outer Party worker seven years before he rebels? And even then, Winston’s revolt consists of nothing more than a few muddled diary entries (which mostly serve to illustrate a mind deformed by propaganda) and some al fresco sex. He only bothers to read one and a half chapters of Goldstein’s book and sets it down midway through the very sentence that promises to explain the Party’s true motive. Some revolutionary he is.
So Winston is not truly “the last man”; he’s just the latest symbolic victim to be broken down and rebuilt. “This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again, generation after generation, always in subtler forms,” O’Brien says. There were Winstons before and there will be Winstons to come. Like Stalin’s regime during the Great Terror, the Party doesn’t fear heretics; it needs them, because its power is renewed by crushing them. Malcolm Muggeridge called this the “continuous performance” of power: “A government based on terrorism requires constantly to demonstrate its might and resolution.”
Orwell criticised Stalinists for saying that the ends justified the means, but in Oceania the means justify themselves. The point is to break eggs without proceeding to make an omelette. The perfect citizen is boring, a closed case; the challenge is to tear a free mind to pieces. Only that way can there be “victory after victory” in the bowels of the Ministry of Love: victory over the past, over the individual, over reality itself. As Orwell wrote in “The Prevention of Literature,” totalitarianism “in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”
Now we come to Orwell’s greatest satirical feat: the logical endgame of totalitarianism’s war on the real. When O’Brien claims that he could rise from the floor like a soap bubble, or snuff out the stars like candles, or prove that the sun travels round the earth, he’s not a madman; he’s a philosopher. In the face of O’Brien’s limitless subjectivity, Winston’s protestations that there are things that are true and things that are false are sandcastles at high tide. “We control matter because we control the mind,” O’Brien says, taking gaslighting to its ultimate extreme. “Reality is inside the skull.” Before he can get Winston to say that two plus two is five, he has to abolish the sense that four and five have any independent reality. It’s five because O’Brien says it’s five. If he said it was √-1, it would be √-1.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six—in all honesty I don’t know.”
“Better,” said O’Brien.
In other words, everything is possible and nothing is true.
A satire without laughter is still a satire, and the whole point is to go too far. O’Brien is not a man; he’s a thought experiment—a modest proposal. Broadly speaking, the first two-thirds of the novel explain through exaggeration what had already happened in Europe, while the last third suggests what could happen if every conceivable limit were removed. Stephen Spender called it “a kind of arithmetic [sic] progression of horror.” O’Brien is the answer to the question “What’s the worst that can happen?” He’s Hitler and Stalin stripped of their self-justifying rhetoric. He’s the boot in the face. “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
Orwell’s motive for making such an extreme scenario at least imaginable was not despair, but not exactly hope either. “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one,” he explained in a press statement after the book came out. “Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
Nineteen Eighty-Four was published by Secker & Warburg on June 8, 1949. In Blackpool, the Labour Party held its annual conference. In Paris, foreign ministers were deadlocked over the future of Germany. In Washington, President Truman reaffirmed US support for South Korea. That morning’s edition of the London Times carried a front-page report of a press conference by General Jan Smuts, the former prime minister of South Africa and a prominent supporter of the United Nations: “Mankind was living in a spiritual twilight, and none knew whether dawn or dusk would follow.”
Orwell certainly delivered the shock treatment he had talked about in his review of Gollancz’s In Darkest Germany. The New York Times Book Review reported that the critical reaction to Nineteen Eighty-Four was overwhelmingly positive, “with cries of terror rising above the applause,” and compared the “state of nerves” to the uproar over Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds. The book was variously compared to an earthquake, a bundle of dynamite, and the label on a bottle of poison. “I read it with such cold shivers I haven’t had since as a child I read Swift about the Yahoos,” John Dos Passos wrote to Orwell, confessing that he’d had nightmares about the telescreen. Several booksellers told Warburg that they were unable to sleep after reading their advance copies. For E. M. Forster, it was “too terrible a novel to be read straight through.”
Praise reached Cranham from Arthur Koestler in Paris (“a glorious book”), Aldous Huxley in California (“profoundly important”), Margaret Storm Jameson in Pittsburgh (“the novel which should stand for our age”), and Lawrence Durrell in Belgrade (“Reading it in a Communist country is really an experience because one can see it all around one”). Within just a few weeks, it had been mentioned in Parliament by Conservative MP Hugh Fraser, who saw in Eastern Europe “the type of state which Mr. Orwell has just described in his book 1984.” Not every early reader was impressed. Jacintha Buddicom, who had only recently learned that the famous writer George Orwell and her childhood friend Eric Blair were one and the same, was so horrified that she broke off contact. “I thought Nineteen Eighty-Four was a frightful, miserable, defeatist book,” she remembered, “and I couldn’t think why he’d written it, so I didn’t write to him at all.”
The most astute critics were those who understood Orwell’s message that the germs of totalitarianism existed in Us as well as Them. In Goldstein’s book, the supposedly irreconcilable ideologies of the three super-states are “barely distinguishable” and the social structures not at all. “Behind Stalin lurks Big Brother,” Forster wrote, “which seems appropriate, but Big Brother also lurks behind Churchill, Truman, Gandhi, and any leader whom propaganda utilizes or invents.” Golo Mann of the Frankfurter Rundschau summed up Orwell’s theme as “the totalitarian danger that lies within ourselves.” Daniel Bell, in his philosophical New Leader review, observed, “Orwell, actually, is not writing a tract on politics but a treatise on human nature.”
Yet not every critic grasped this essential fact. It was a book that pressed down hard on readers’ political nerves and revealed their biases. Conservative reviewers thought it was an emphatic denunciation of not just the Soviet Union but all forms of socialism, including Attlee’s. Henry Luce’s fiercely anti-communist Life treated it to an eight-page spread with cartoons by
Abner Dean, and wrote: “his book reinforces a growing suspicion that some of the British Labourites revel in austerity and would love to preserve it.” Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard mischievously suggested that it should be “required reading” for delegates en route to the Labour Party conference in Brighton.
Communist critics also read it as a straightforward slur on socialism. Samuel Sillen, the editor of Masses and Mainstream, wrote a hysterical denunciation of Orwell’s “sickness,” motivated largely by his disgust that the book was doing so well. Nineteen Eighty-Four, he wrote, was not just “cynical rot” but free-market propaganda on a par with Hayek. Pravda called it a “filthy book” written “on the orders and instigation of Wall Street.” The novelist and communist Arthur Calder-Marshall’s savage attack on Orwell’s work and character in Reynold’s News prompted the Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt to agree that Orwell’s “blank hopelessness” did not align with “the aims and beliefs of the Labour Party.”
Orwell laughed off Calder-Marshall’s review (“if I was going to smear somebody I would do it better than that”), but he was dismayed by the conservative caricature of himself as a disillusioned ex-leftist waving the flag for untrammelled capitalism. Presumably this is what he meant, in a letter to Rees, by “some very shame-making publicity.” When Warburg visited him at Cranham on June 15, Orwell dictated an emphatic statement explaining the novel’s argument that totalitarianism could arise anywhere and that rival super-states “will pretend to be much more in opposition than in fact they are.”
He drew up a second statement the next day after Francis A. Henson, an official from the United Automobile Workers in Detroit, wrote to seek clarification that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a suitable book to recommend to union members. Orwell responded that it was “NOT intended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter)” but a warning that “totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.” The qualification was essential. “I do not believe that the kind of society which I described necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is satire) that something resembling it could arrive.” To his irritation, the union slipped up while typing up his handwritten letter and replaced could with will, so when Life rang to ask permission to reprint it, he had to insist that the error wasn’t repeated. Even his clarification needed a clarification.
Orwell said so little about Nineteen Eighty-Four before he died that these two statements are priceless evidence of his intentions, but at the time, thought Warburg, they “didn’t do two pennorth of good.” The truth is that ambiguity about Orwell’s politics boosted his sales. Within six months the book had sold over a quarter of a million copies in the UK and US and writers were eager to adapt it for other media. Orwell corresponded with the Oscar-winning screenwriter and playwright Sidney Sheldon about a possible stage version (never completed) that would give it an anti-fascist slant. Orwell’s former colleague Martin Esslin adapted it for the BBC, while Milton Wayne wrote a thoughtful version for the NBC University Theater, with David Niven as Winston Smith and a scholarly intermission from the novelist James Hilton: “Having read Mr. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, you may not feel you’d like to meet any of its characters but you do feel you’d like to meet Mr. Orwell, if only for an argument.”
The rush to adapt Nineteen Eighty-Four may have stemmed from an assumption that this was a book for the current moment, not one for the ages. In The New York Times Book Review, Mark Schorer suggested that its “kinetic” brilliance “may mean that its greatness is only immediate, its power for us alone, now, in this generation, this decade, this year, that it is doomed to be the pawn of time.”
Then again, maybe not.
After his visit to Cranham on June 15, Warburg wrote a sobering report on Orwell’s “shocking” condition. If he had not recovered by the same time next year, Warburg thought, then he never would, yet Orwell’s optimism was infectious.
In July, Orwell proposed to Sonia in his typically self-effacing way. Unlike Celia Paget and Anne Popham, she said yes. Some of his friends found the idea ghoulish. “Orwell was totally unfit to marry anyone,” said David Astor. “He was scarcely alive.” Muggeridge thought the marriage “slightly macabre and incomprehensible.” But Orwell firmly believed that it would give him something to live for. As Winston says of Julia, “Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigour into his.”
Nobody thought that Sonia truly loved him. Some who knew her said that she was a ruthless, selfish woman who married him for the money and prestige because Horizon was running on fumes and she would soon lose her job. Others thought it was an act of chivalrous self-sacrifice, motivated by pity and respect. “He said he would get better if I married him,” she told Hilary Spurling twenty years later, “so, you see, I had no choice.” It is likely that Orwell and Sonia’s motives overlapped: he needed her, and she needed to be needed. Many years earlier, while writing about the love life of Thomas Carlyle, Orwell had ruminated on “the astonishing selfishness that exists in the sincerest love.”
On September 2, Orwell moved from Cranham to a private room at University College Hospital in London. Friends doubted he would ever leave. It’s very possible that he was already beyond repair when, on October 13, he married Sonia in his hospital room, in front of just half a dozen guests. Astor was reminded of Gandhi: “skin and bone.” The wedding lunch took place at the Ritz minus the groom.
Orwell’s health and mood were revitalised by marriage—he said he had five more books in mind and couldn’t die until he’d written them—but not for long. For the many friends who visited him late in the year, including Symons, Spender, Fyvel and Potts, it was likely that each conversation could be their last with him. He still enjoyed talking about books and politics but increasingly he was drawn back into the past, reminiscing about Eton, Burma, Spain and the Home Guard in a way his friends had never heard before. Dropping in on Christmas Day, Muggeridge saw in Orwell’s face no sense of acceptance or peace: “There was a kind of rage in his expression, as though the approach of death made him furious.”
Sonia’s plan was to deal with Orwell’s correspondence and business matters, entertain his friends, and look after him while he wrote, but his condition called for a dramatic change of scene, so the couple made plans to move to a sanatorium at Montana-Vermala in the Swiss Alps. An air ambulance was booked for January 25, 1950, with the painter Lucian Freud, Sonia’s close friend, joining them as a kind of nurse. Seven days before the trip, Orwell revised his will, making Sonia his sole heir and (with Rees) the executor of his literary estate. He had no idea how difficult being “the widow of a literary man,” as he had put it to Anne Popham, would be.
Orwell asked for his fishing rod to be delivered, with a view to fishing in Alpine lakes. It was propped up in the corner of his room in the early hours of January 21 when a blood vessel in his lung ruptured and he rapidly bled to death.
George Woodcock was attending a party in Vancouver when another guest told him that news of Orwell’s death had just been announced on the radio. “A silence fell over the room,” Woodcock remembered, “and I realised that this gentle, modest and angry man had already become a figure of world myth.”
Orwell had eloquent friends and admirers, whose ringing phrases had an enormous and immediate effect on his posthumous reputation, especially for readers who only knew his final two novels. In The New Statesman, the critic and short-story writer V. S. Pritchett crystallised Orwell in a few hundred words: his integrity, his independence, his eccentricity, his rebelliousness, his austerity, his guilt, his “fast, clear, grey prose.” He was “the wintry conscience of his generation . . . a kind of saint.” In The Observer, Koestler claimed that “the greatness and tragedy of Orwell was his total rejection of compromise” and claimed there was “exceptional concordance between the man and his work.” Reading the obituaries, Muggeridge observed “how the legend of a human being is created.” The fable of the rebel s
aint who could not tell a lie was born, but so was the fallacy that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a deathbed howl. None of the reviews had mentioned Orwell’s health, but the fact of his death coloured his final work forever. Sonia thanked Koestler for his obituary because “everyone else—above all Pritchett—wrote such depressing nonsense.”
Sonia’s grief was so raw and explosive that it convinced even the sceptics. According to Stephen Spender’s wife, Natasha, “She had persuaded herself she loved him intellectually, for his writing, but she found she really loved him.” Stephen agreed: “She blamed herself and thought she had done the wrong thing, and so took over the cause of George Orwell for the rest of her life, and she never really recovered from this.”
Muggeridge arranged the funeral at Christ Church on Albany Street in Camden, where the mourners came from every corner of Orwell’s peculiarly compartmentalised life—from Eton, Spain, the ILP, the BBC, the Home Guard, Tribune, literary London, the European diaspora, the streets of Islington, and the social circles of his two wives. Though an atheist, Orwell was enough of a traditionalist to want burial in a country churchyard, and David Astor pulled strings for the last time to secure a plot at the Church of All Saints, Sutton Courtenay, in Berkshire. Only he and Sonia were present when Orwell’s body was lowered into the ground, to lie beneath a typically matter-of-fact headstone, bearing just his name and dates. The name was still Eric Arthur Blair; he never did get around to changing it.
Orwell’s life overlapped with the public life of his final novel by just 227 days.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 10
Black Millennium
Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Cold War
The Ministry of Truth Page 23