by Peter Huber
Orwell’s third piece of evidence, and for a while his trump card, is— of all people—Hitler. Orwell sets out this argument for the efficiency of central planning in a strange little book published in 1941, The Lion and the Unicorn. Orwell loves socialism and hates fascism, but he believes—in 1941, at least—that fascism “borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient.” Hitler’s conquest of Europe, says Orwell, “was a physical debunking of capitalism.” A fascist state, like a socialist one, “can solve the problems of production and consumption. . . . The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them. . . . The mere efficiency of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious.” This isn’t sarcasm. Orwell really believes it.
“Shopkeepers at War,” the second chapter of The Lion and the Unicorn, argues that England is certainly going to lose World War II unless it, like Hitler, embraces a form of socialism. The fields of Norway and Flanders have proved “once and for all . . . that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one.” Orwell concludes this argument with the following astonishing passage:
However horrible [fascism] may seem to us, it works. . . . British capitalism does not work. . . . Hitler will at any rate go down in history as the man who made the City of London laugh on the wrong side of its face. . . . [T]he ghastly job of trying to convince artificially stupefied people that a planned economy might be better than a free-for-all in which the worst man wins—that job will never be quite so ghastly again.
The only trouble (for Orwell) is that a few years later it’s clear that fascism doesn’t work after all. Hitler goes down in history as the symbol of collectivist efficiency only in matters of mass murder, whereas the City of London survives pretty much unchanged, laughing as it always did—all the way to the bank. In a 1944 essay Orwell confesses how wrong his predictions were, most notably his “very great error” in believing that England would certainly lose the war unless it too established a collectivist economy A year later, with the embers on Hitler’s funeral pyre scarcely cool, one might have supposed that Orwell’s faith in the “efficiency” of collectivism would have been shattered forever.
But it hasn’t been. Orwell has not revised his basic views about collectivism, only his timetable. Britain is still “moving towards a planned economy.” “[T]here will be no return to laissez-faire capitalism.” Civilization will not “revert again towards economic chaos and individualism. Whether we like it or not, the trend is towards centralism and planning and it is more useful to try to humanise the collectivist society that is certainly coming than to pretend . . . that we could revert to a past phase.” The ordinary people “have become entirely habituated to a planned, regimented sort of life” and actually “prefer it to what they had before.” History hasn’t unfolded as fast as Orwell expected, but it’s still unfolding. “Socialism, in the sense of economic collectivism, is conquering the earth at a speed that would hardly have seemed possible sixty years ago,” he writes in 1948.
And by 1984? By 1984, four huge Ministries will govern all of England.
CHAPTER 8
Blair woke up to the shrill whistle of the telescreen. Groggy with sleep, still sodden in the atmosphere of a dream, he stumbled out of bed and began his Physical Jerks before he remembered.
He had not bothered to get undressed the night before. They always came for you at night, and there was no sense in trying to flee. So he had stretched out on the bed, fully dressed, and resolved to wait for them calmly. It was as though England had slid back into the Stone Age, he thought. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries—the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor—had reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world. And now they were coming after him.
Quite unexpectedly, he had fallen into a deep sleep, and had dreamed vividly, as though his brain was determined to anesthetize itself against what lay ahead. He had dreamed a vast, luminous dream, in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain. He was floating in space, under the glass dome of the sky He saw his mother gesture, as if to surround him in her embrace. He was with a beautiful naked woman again, the one he had once dreamed of flogging with a truncheon. Now they were sitting together under the spreading branches of a flowering chestnut tree, and every touch was of unconditional love. He was floating in an ocean of strange, pink, convoluted coral, as delicate as a sea anemone, dividing and subdividing again, each arm joined to two others, growing ever finer and more intricate. Everything was flooded with clear, soft light in which one could see into interminable distances. Everything was connected. He was overwhelmed with a sense of perfect unity. His life had become whole.
And then he had woken. They had apparently decided not to arrest him quite yet. He wondered why, as he flapped his arms up and down in time with the bossy woman on the telescreen. It suddenly struck him that he had no reason to submit to this nonsense any more. He walked resolutely to the door of his apartment, and stepped out.
By pure instinct he turned in the direction of the Ministry. Halfway there he wondered whether he shouldn’t just spend whatever time he had left in the spring air, strolling through the proles’ market once again. But habit proved too strong—habit and a tiny glimmer of hope that somehow, for some convoluted reason, they had decided to leave him alone. He spent his day at work in a daze, moving mechanically from one task to the next, waiting for the inevitable. By evening they still hadn’t arrived.
When he left work he turned away from the bus stop once again. He had intended at first to return to the stallkeeper and seek his help, but then changed his mind. He moved roughly southward—through the wastes of Camden Town, down Tottenham Court Road. It grew dark. He crossed Oxford Street, threaded through Covent Garden, found himself in the Strand, and crossed the river by Waterloo Bridge. With night the cold had descended.
He passed a cluster of prostitutes, shivering in their skimpy clothes. London was full of these women. Many of them, he knew, could be bought for a bottle of gin. He walked along aimlessly, inhaling the chilly air of the evening. It had been like this for several days now—warm spring afternoons, followed by near freezing nights. He thrust his hands in his pockets. After a time, he found himself in front of the junk shop he had passed twice before in search of razor blades.
It was then that he heard the girl singing from down the alley. The thin sound filled the air like the song of a bird, and brightened the drab walls of the gray street. It was a strange thing to hear singing, especially by a woman—like smelling scent. Party women never sang. It wasn’t exactly forbidden; it was just unthinkable that any member of the Party would ever sing, except in unison, in crowds. This girl sang alone. The sound floated up the alley, the words belied by an incongruous note of defiance:
As I write this letter
Send my love to you
Re-mem-ber that I’ll always
Be in love with you.
The girl sang the same words again, and then again, with undiminished conviction each time. Once she inserted an “Oh-oh-oh” at the end of a line.
The song obviously hadn’t been composed by the versificators at the Ministry of Truth. None of the machines there would ever have included a line about writing letters; no one wrote letters any more. By a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit. For the few messages still needed, there were preprinted postcards, bearing either canned sentiments or long lists of phrases, so you could strike out the ones that were inapplicable. No one remembered anything much either, least of all love.
He saw her as she stepped out of the doorway under the street lamp just a few yards down at the end of the short alley. She was a bold-looking girl of about twenty-seven, with a wildrose face and long thick hair, the color of autumn leaves. Beneath the thin silky raincoat, belted at the waist, her youthful flanks showed supple and trim. Her freckled face was partly turned. She hadn’t seen
him.
For a moment Blair’s gaze lingered on the shapeliness of her hips.
As I write this letter
Send my love—
She gave him a quick sidelong glance and stopped. Was she another one of them, Blair wondered, another prole, running another stall, with her merchandise between her legs? He couldn’t quite tell, but it didn’t matter. In a flash of wild inspiration, he finished the line for her.
“To me?” he said.
She tossed her head and made no reply.
“What song is that?” he asked.
“Dunno,” she said. “Mum used to sing it years ago.” A small smile brushed across her face. She moved up the alley toward him. Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skillfully done, but Blair’s standards in such matters were not high. He had never seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face, and the girl seemed intensely feminine. A wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen and a woman’s cavernous, toothless mouth. It was the very same scent that she had used; but at the moment he didn’t care. The young woman paused, as if about to say something to him, but didn’t. Then she tossed her head again, and turned back into the doorway.
Blair felt a pang of sadness. She had sung the song—perhaps she had been singing it just for him. He wondered how he might have drawn out the conversation. Was she selling her body, like so much smooth chocolate on a stall? It didn’t matter, he thought again. She was a prole, she was pretty, he wanted her, and that thought alone filled him with an unexpected contentment. The Party of course taught that sex was a despicable appetite for men, a frigid duty for women. But a man who was not entirely dead inside could still feel desire and not be ashamed of it.
“Cripes, it ain’t ’alf fucking cold out ’ere,” said a short, powerful, jolly man with a grin as he passed. Blair walked aimlessly on down the street, thoughts of the girl’s face and body filling his mind. He would not let his desire for her be dirtied by the Party. Sex was part of the human condition, and coupling was connection. In a world of unfathomable loneliness, connection of any kind was good. Proles like her still understood. A prostitute might sell what should not be sold, but it was the selling that was wrong, not the sex. Among the proles—even among their prostitutes—men and women tangled and strove, lusted and loved, all fleeing from solitude, all searching for something larger—searching for desire certainly, but mostly searching to sate a hunger that rose from their loins to fill their hearts. It didn’t matter if the freckle-faced girl was a prostitute. She was beautiful, and he wanted her, and he wanted her to want him; he wanted to see desire rising in her eyes and melting in her face; he wanted her to unfold her thighs beneath his touch and become a part of him.
Two men were standing in an alley talking loudly but amiably.
“Scrumping’s what yer want,” one of them said. “All them rows of turkeys in the winders, like rows of fucking soldiers with no clothes on—don’t it make yer fucking mouth water to look at ’em. Bet yer a tanner I ’ave one of ’em afore tonight.”
“I know where I can flog it for a keypad,” the second replied.
Blair thought again of the song the girl had been singing. It struck him that a song, like an idea, like thought itself, could take on a life of its own after it had been composed. The words might change, the composer might be forgotten, the tune might be used to celebrate different things in different cultures, yet the song continued to live. It went through the ages remaining the same in itself but getting into very different company.
He had walked a long way, now, five or seven miles perhaps. His feet were swollen from the pavements. He was in a slummy quarter where the narrow, puddled streets plunged into blackness at fifty yards’ distance. The few lamps, ringed in a frosty mist, hung like isolated stars illuminating nothing save themselves. He went under some echoing railway arches and up the alley on to Hungerford Bridge. On the miry water, lit by the glare of skysigns, the muck of East London was racing inland. Corks, lemons, barrel-staves, a dead dog, hunks of bread. He walked along the Embankment to Westminster. The wind made the plane trees rattle. Up Tottenham Court Road and Camden Road it was a dreary drudge. He slowed, dragging his feet a little. There was a penetrating chill in the air.
He thought of turning back, of seeking her out again. “I love you,” he would say. He would say that first, before anything else. He would explain that he had committed thoughtcrime from which there could be no reprieve, that he was now already numbered among the dead, that it was only a matter of time, but that in the time he still had he needed her, he needed her desperately, he couldn’t stand the thought of living for even a moment without her. But he didn’t turn, he kept on walking. He lost track of the time.
Then somehow, without apparent design, Blair was back in the alley where the girl had been. It seemed he had moved in a wide circle. An icy rain had begun to fall, and a stiff wind was blowing. Before him, at the corner of the alley, he recognized the junk shop. Although it was nearly twenty-three hours the shop was still open. With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement in the rain, he stepped through the doorway.
He saw the phreak at once, in a back corner of the room, rummaging through shelves of metal boxes, discarded radios, and dusty electronics. The room was lit by a single flickering oil lamp, which gave off an unclean though friendly smell. By the dim light, Blair could see that most of the room was dominated by ragtag pieces of furniture, china, glass, picture frames. One corner contained the hardware—discarded speakwrites, some ancient computers of no conceivable value, bits and pieces of every description. The phreak was picking through them methodically.
Their eyes met again, but only for an instant. And once again, as had happened before, Blair felt sure that a message had passed, that they had a link of understanding between them, that their two minds had opened and thought had flowed from one into the other. Then the phreak turned back to the shelves. A moment later he seemed to have found what he wanted—a sort of keyboard with twelve or so flatish white buttons. The man picked them up, nodded to the proprietor, and headed for the door. And again as he passed, Blair heard, or thought he heard, him say: We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
There was nothing else of any interest in the shop. For a moment Blair toyed with a lunatic idea of renting a room somewhere in the area, and living there with the girl. Yes, he would do that! He would ask if he could join her. He would become a prole, erect an obscure stall in the market, and simply disappear from the Party rolls. For a moment the pleasure of the daydream filled his thoughts. He didn’t even notice the telescreen mounted on the wall beside the shop.
A moment later they were upon him. Four or perhaps five men in black uniforms. For a moment he thought he recognized his neighbor Wilkes, his tongue protruding slightly from his mouth, grinning sadistically. But before Blair could even make a sound, he was on his knees, and the first kick landed squarely in his testicles. Vomit spewed from his mouth. He felt his ankle crack under another kick as he rolled on the pavement. A truncheon smashed into his two front teeth, and everything exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable—inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain. As he lost consciousness Blair felt himself floating back to a schoolhouse and cowering once again under the lash of a schoolmaster’s cane. He badly wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours before.
CHAPTER 9
Gasping for breath, O’Brien shifted his bulk into the back seat of the car. He was unaccustomed to walking more than a few yards any more, and even the trip down the hall from his apartment had been a challenge. Still, he was glad to be on the move again. Another hour with the network manuals would have been unbearable.
He had left them stacked around his desk, great piles in hopeless disarray. Plow
ing through a dozen of them that afternoon had been the most tedious thing O’Brien had ever done. The manuals seemed to treat him like a six-year-old, with page after page of painfully detailed instruction about things either obvious or trivial. Then, when finally he arrived at something important, the explanations were completely opaque. It was Orwell—Orwell, reaching out to infuriate him even from the grave.
Fortunately, Burgess had already located one of the engineers, an original, who had worked with Orwell in the early days. The man’s cooperation was assured, of course. Sooner or later, everyone cooperated with the Party.
The car moved slowly through the dilapidated streets of London. It was headed to a pub in one of the seedier parts of town. This was unpleasant, but necessary The engineer had served time in a labor camp, and men with that kind of experience simply froze when confronted by official authority. The beer and the casual surroundings of a pub would put him at ease. If that failed, they could always try sterner measures.
The manuals hadn’t been altogether useless. The network itself was almost annoyingly simple. The cables ran through the tunnels, with branches leading off into the apartments and offices. Directly or indirectly, every point on the network was connected to every other. One could say that the cables all connected to the Ministry of Love, but it was equally true that they all connected to any telescreen anywhere on the network. No, they didn’t quite connect. Over the last few hundred yards to the telescreens, the signals often traveled by radio.
Everything important apparently happened in the telescreens themselves. Messages traveled primarily through the rubber-coated glass cables in the tunnels, but up to a point, it seemed, telescreens could communicate directly by radio with each other.
Each telescreen had four principal layers. The front side converted sound and light into electrical signals. The back converted electrical signals into either radio waves, to be transmitted through the air, or intense beams of light, for transport through glass. Ordinary light and sound went in at the front; laser light or radio signals went out the back. It all operated in reverse too, with incoming light or radio waves converted into pictures and sound. The front end was both a camera and screen; the back, both a transmitter and a receiver. All the parts functioned independently and simultaneously.