The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  If that is what the world is going to be like, we might as well put our heads in the gas ovens now.

  —Viewer complaint to the BBC, December 1954

  The evening of Sunday, December 12, 1954, was rough going for George Orwell, a shipping company employee from south London. At 8:30 p.m., just after the popular quiz show What’s My Line?, more than seven million Britons sat down to watch the BBC’s two-hour adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. This was the largest television audience since the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II the previous June. Indeed, Prince Philip later let slip that he and the Queen had watched it and admired “the production and message.” With twenty-two actors, twenty-eight sets and innovative pre-recorded inserts, Nineteen Eighty-Four was Britain’s most ambitious and expensive television play to date. It was also, in the words of The New York Times, “the subject of the sharpest controversy in the annals of British television.” Consequently, the only George Orwell in the telephone directory spent the evening fielding calls from viewers infuriated by this “horrible play.” His wife, Elizabeth, asked The Daily Mirror to set the record straight: “PLEASE tell people my husband did NOT write that TV play.”

  Screenwriter Nigel Kneale and director Rudolph Cartier had previously collaborated on the sci-fi chiller The Quatermass Experiment. Their confident, intelligent take on Orwell, starring Peter Cushing as Winston Smith, was even harder on the nerves, with its atmosphere of creeping dread and its horrific climax in the Ministry of Love. Cartier thought it was the combination of television and telescreen that made it uniquely potent. When the viewer saw Big Brother, he said, “cold eyes stared from the small screen straight at him, casting into the viewer’s heart the same chill that the characters in the play experienced whenever they heard his voice coming from their watching TV screens.”

  Hundreds of viewers complained to the BBC and newspapers about the play’s unusual amount of violence and sexuality. “It was so awful that I felt like putting a hammer through my TV set,” raged one. “Never has anything more vile and repulsive ever been shown on TV,” claimed another, “or any other screen.” Some newspaper critics agreed, branding it “a nauseating story which held out no hope for the future” and “a picture of a world I never want to see again.” The Daily Express headlined its coverage “A Million NIGHTMARES.”

  The plan to broadcast a second performance the following Thursday kept the controversy rolling. The BBC assigned a bodyguard to Cartier after he received a death threat, while Cushing disconnected his telephone to avoid abusive calls. On the current-affairs show Panorama, Malcolm Muggeridge debated an alderman from Tunbridge Wells who claimed such broadcasts would inspire a crime wave. When the controversy reached Parliament on Wednesday, one group of Conservative MPs, capitalising on the current moral panic about horror comic books, put forward a motion condemning the BBC’s tendency to “pander to sexual and sadistic tastes,” while another countered that the play offered valuable insight into totalitarian methods.

  The broadcast made both novel and author nationally famous. For most of that year, Secker & Warburg had been selling 150 hardbacks a week. The week after the broadcast, that leaped to one thousand, while the new Penguin paperback edition sold a remarkable eighteen thousand. The story was suddenly so well-known that the comedians of The Goon Show recorded a parody called Nineteen Eighty-Five, in which Harry Secombe’s Winston Seagoon toiled in the Big Brother Corporation, i.e., the BBC. “Listeners!” announced Secombe, mocking the uproar. “You are warned. This programme is not to be listened to!” Orwell might have appreciated the jokes about his former workplace’s maddening bureaucracy and wretched catering.

  Many viewers came away from the BBC play with a distorted impression of Orwell’s output, leading one critic to predict that he would “probably acquire an undeserved reputation as the first of a new generation of literary horror-mongers.” But as Cartier told the Express, “if someone had written a novel in 1910 and called it ‘1954’ and forecast the existence of totalitarian Governments, ‘brainwashing,’ extermination camps, slave labour, the horrors of atomic and hydrogen bombs, he would probably have been accused of wild exaggeration and morbid, crooked thinking.”26

  The play reinforced the novel’s political importance. The Express began serialising an abridged version, while The Daily Mail praised its exposure of “the beastliness of Communism.” Applause from the right mingled with catcalls from the left, some of which began suspiciously early. A BBC source told the press that telephone calls had started coming in just minutes into the broadcast, indicating that they “probably arose from political prejudice.” The letters page of The Manchester Guardian turned into a running battle between Orwell fans and British Communist Party hardliner R. Palme Dutt. Dutt claimed that Nineteen Eighty-Four was “the lowest essence of commonplace Tory anti-Socialist propaganda by an ex-Etonian former Colonial policeman” and he relished the backlash: “Authority has tried to force Orwell down the throats of the public, and the public has spewed him up.” The following week’s correspondents unanimously disagreed, with one suggesting that the play’s impact was confirmed by “a typical brain-washing letter from Britain’s ‘Big Brother’ himself—Mr. R. Palme Dutt.”

  This contretemps epitomised the fate of Nineteen Eighty-Four during the decade of Korea, Hungary, Mao and McCarthy. In such a febrile context, liberals and socialists struggled to stand up for Orwell’s more complex intentions, while the right and the hard left respectively cheered and denounced the novel as cold war propaganda. For the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been turned into “an ideological superweapon,” whether Orwell would have liked it or not.

  The London Times described the cultural impact of Nineteen Eighty-Four prior to the BBC play as “marginal.” That may hold true when measured against seven million viewers, but by any other standard the book was already an emphatic success. The Secker & Warburg hardback sold 50,000 copies in its first two years and the Penguin paperback quickly dwarfed that figure. In the US, where it remained on The New York Times best-seller list for twenty weeks, it sold 170,000 in hardback, 190,000 through the Book-of-the-Month Club, 596,000 in a Reader’s Digest Condensed Books edition, and 1,210,000 as a New American Library paperback. Not that marginal, then.

  One of the keys to the novel’s popularity was Orwell’s genius for snappy neologisms. He wrote in 1942 that “Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language,” but by now he would have been justified in adding himself. Journalists love finding new words to play with, especially ones which simplify complicated phenomena. As Nigel Kneale wrote in Radio Times, “Some of the words he coined in the process—‘thoughtcrime,’ ‘doublethink,’ ‘unperson,’ ‘facecrime,’ ‘Newspeak’ and others—have passed warningly into the language of the fifties.”

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Newspeak first appeared independently of the novel in 1950; Big Brother and double-think in 1953; thoughtcrime and unperson in 1954. Orwellian was coined by Mary McCarthy in a 1950 essay about, of all things, fashion magazines.27 In 1950, Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Gaitskell accused the Conservative opposition of “what the late George Orwell, in his book, which honourable members may or may not have read, entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four, called doublespeak.” That word does not, in fact, appear in the novel, but it has since entered the vocabulary of politics. Winston Churchill himself decreed Nineteen Eighty-Four “a very remarkable book.”

  Big Brother proved especially popular. During the 1950s, the name was applied in Parliament to targets as diverse as the Conservative government, the Labour left, President Eisenhower, Lord Beaverbrook, Mao’s China, the caliphate of Oman, the House of Lords, the trade union leadership, the Coal Board and the Post Office. Not everybody caught the reference. When, during a 1956 debate about fuel policy, one MP objected to being labelled Big Brother, the speaker of the House of Commons was nonplussed: “I thought it was a term of affection.”28

  To quote Orwel
l was to assume, deservingly or not, some of his moral prestige. The writer who didn’t merit an entry in Who’s Who until the year of his death and won only one award (a $1,000 literary prize from Partisan Review) quickly became a byword for honesty and decency. Whenever one of his books was republished, reviewers admitted his limitations as a novelist, critic and political thinker but acclaimed him as a moral genius who emerged from a dirty time with clean hands. “Orwell was really what hundreds of others only pretend to be,” claimed Stephen Spender in a special issue of World Review. “He was really classless, really a Socialist, really truthful.” In his influential introduction to the 1952 US edition of Homage to Catalonia, Lionel Trilling established Orwell in the minds of many American readers as a role model in the tradition of Twain, Whitman and Thoreau: “the man who tells the truth.”

  Specifically, it was felt that he told the truth about totalitarianism. Orwell was not a political scientist. Apart from a few days in communist-controlled Barcelona, he had no first-hand experience of totalitarianism. He was simply a working journalist who read a lot. So it is remarkable that the theory he pieced together from memoirs, biographies, essays, novels and reportage was broadly confirmed by such rigorous studies as Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

  Although Arendt was more knowledgeable about Germany and Orwell more interested in Russia, they came to many of the same conclusions: totalitarianism was the unprecedented intersection of ideology, bureaucracy, technology and terror. Arendt argued that totalitarianism aimed to actualise a fantasy, and the gap between myth and reality could only be closed by relentless deceit and unparalleled cruelty.

  It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of complete consistency, that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity . . . What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionising transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself.

  This echoed Orwell’s worst fear, which he expressed as far back as 1939: “In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of ‘human nature’ . . . But we cannot be at all certain that ‘human nature’ is constant.” The two books had the same US editor, Robert Giroux, and have been intertwined ever since.

  Another companion piece was The God That Failed, Labour MP Richard Crossman’s 1949 anthology of essays of disenchantment by former communists Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide and Louis Fischer. The book appealed to many of the same readers as Nineteen Eighty-Four and featured some similar observations. Spender, who explicitly referenced doublethink in his essay, wrote that communists “distorted the meaning of epithets . . . without the slightest realisation that to misuse words produces confusion. ‘Peace’ in their language could mean ‘War’; ‘War’—‘Peace’; ‘Unity’—‘betrayal from within’; ‘Fascism’—‘Socialism.’ ” Orwell, however, knew that they realised exactly what they were doing.

  Another crucial difference between Orwell and the God That Failed group, the difference that gave him exceptional moral authority, was that he had never been fooled. In fact, some admirers refused to accept that he had ever belonged to the left at all. When Orwell wrote that “Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives,” he was unwittingly foreseeing his own fate. The Tory Catholic Christopher Hollis and the right-wing libertarians at The Freeman each claimed Orwell for their camp, while Conservative MP Charles Curran (formerly the Evening Standard journalist who had aggravated Orwell at Cranham) made the ridiculous claim that the novel’s effect on the British public “probably had more to do than any other single factor with the Socialist defeat in the 1951 General Election.” One can imagine Orwell’s reaction to that claim.

  On the far left, meanwhile, the Communist Party historian A. L. Morton concluded his history of utopian literature, The English Utopia, by accusing Orwell of writing a vicious libel on socialism: “no slander is too gross, no device too filthy: Nineteen Eighty-Four is, for this country at least, the last word to date in counter-revolutionary apologetics.” Morton followed this condemnation with fulsome praise for Stalin’s “realisation of Utopia.” On a similarly feverish note, James Walsh in The Marxist Quarterly charged Orwell with running “shrieking into the arms of the capitalist publishers with a couple of horror-comics which bring him fame and fortune.” Walsh and Morton shared the tone of shrill disgust that Orwell had identified in 1944 as “Marxist English, or Pamphletese,” and parodied in Nineteen Eighty-Four in the form of the Speakers’ Corner zealot who denounces Labour politicians as lackeys and hyenas. He would not have been surprised.

  Next to those seething indictments, Isaac Deutscher’s 1955 essay “The Mysticism of Cruelty” was an elegant character assassination, putting a gloss of fair-mindedness on a series of very shaky allegations. Deutscher unjustly accused Orwell of plagiarising Zamyatin and Trotsky, rejecting socialism, and, on the basis of meeting him in Germany in 1945, being a paranoiac whose world view was “a Freudian sublimation of persecution mania.” Deutscher finally charged Orwell with producing a lurid melodrama that encouraged panic, hate, anger and despair:

  1984 is in effect not so much a warning as a piercing shriek announcing the advent of the Black Millennium, the Millennium of damnation . . . 1984 has taught millions to look at the conflict between East and West in terms of black and white, and it has shown them a monster bogy and a monster scapegoat for all the ills that plague mankind.

  There was indeed a concerted effort to frame Nineteen Eighty-Four as a book about Russia alone, most urgently in the fledgling nation of West Germany. In his review, Golo Mann had argued that Germans, “perhaps more than any other nation, can feel the merciless probability of Orwell’s utopia.” But by 1949, anti-communism had eclipsed denazification as official policy and converged with Germans’ emotional craving to forget the recent past. This was embodied by Der Monat, a popular new US-funded magazine which valorised Orwell as an anti-Stalinist prophet, serialising both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. German readers therefore mentally scrubbed Nazism from the novel and looked to the East. Yet it was not as if officials and intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain disagreed. According to Polish writer Czesław Miłosz, “Because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is only known to certain members of the Inner Party . . . The fact that there are writers in the West who understand the functioning of the unusually constructed machine of which they themselves are a part astounds them.” When, in 1958, an East German judge sentenced a teenager to three years in prison for reading and discussing the book, he called Orwell “the most hated writer in the Soviet Union and the socialist states.”

  During the war, the UK and US governments had marketed Stalin as “Uncle Joe” and “Our Gallant Ally.” In 1943, Life dedicated an entire issue to Russia, encouraging readers to “make allowances for certain shortcomings, however deplorable,” while Warner Brothers white-washed Stalin in Mission to Moscow, a propaganda film that Orwell attacked for its distortion of history. Orwell himself had been obliged to celebrate Russian military prowess in his news broadcasts for the BBC. Now, as the cold war dawned, the West was extremely keen to dismantle that heroic image. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

  In February 1948, UK Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin formed the Information Research Department, which the historian Frances Stonor Saunders has called “the secret Ministry of Cold War.” Although its methods gradually degenerated into dirty tricks during the 1950s, the IRD’s initial priority was to counteract Soviet propaganda with reports and articles which the department covertly encouraged friendly intellectuals to launder through their own work. It also circulated in European translations of such anti-Soviet bo
oks as Animal Farm, The God That Failed and Darkness at Noon. Two of the IRD’s key advisers were Orwell’s friends Malcolm Muggeridge and Arthur Koestler.

  When Orwell had spent Christmas 1945 with Koestler, the two men had sat by the open fire designing a political movement to promote human rights and free speech. Via the new United Nations, this “League for the Rights of Man” would encourage dialogue between East and West in the form of travel, radio, books and newspapers. As Orwell wrote in “Notes on Nationalism,” “Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another.” This “psychological disarmament” would, he hoped, puncture that bubble. Their plan fizzled out for various reasons, but for Koestler, the idea lived on.

  In 1948, Koestler went on a US lecture tour on behalf of the International Rescue Committee, during which he met almost every American anti-communist who mattered: the ex-Trotskyite hawks James Burnham, Sidney Hook and Max Eastman; liberal intellectuals such as Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy and Lionel Trilling; and the founders of the CIA. As someone who had spent six years in the 1930s working for the Comintern’s Willi Münzenberg, Koestler knew the enemy’s playbook better than any of them.

  Comintern is one of the examples of proto-Newspeak given in the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four: “a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought.” The Comintern’s post-war successor as a forum for European communist parties was Cominform. In 1949, it sponsored conferences of artists, scientists and intellectuals in Paris and New York to promote Russia as a force for peace and frame the Americans as imperialist warmongers. In consultation with Koestler, the US intelligence agencies hatched a plan for a cultural counteroffensive: if the Russians had laid claim to peace, then the West would have freedom. In June 1950, intellectuals from all over the US and Western Europe flocked to Berlin for the inaugural Congress for Cultural Freedom, secretly sponsored by the CIA. The original list of invitees, drawn up months earlier, had included Orwell. After four days of panel discussions, dinners and cocktail parties, the Congress closed with a rally, where Koestler delivered a fourteen-point manifesto based on the ideas he had thrashed out with Orwell in Wales, concluding with a stirring slogan: “Friends, freedom has seized the offensive!”