by Peter Huber
wildness of spirit: “Review, Herman Melville, by Lewis Mumford” (1930), CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 21.
a buoyant, carefree feeling: “Riding Down from Bangor,” p. 406.
may not be again for centuries: “Mark Twain—The Licensed jester,” p. 325.
irresponsible, ungenteel ways: “Review, Herman Melville, by Lewis Mumford,” p. 21. See also “Riding Down from Bangor,” p. 407: “There was room for everybody, and if you worked hard you could be certain of a living.”
had hardly come into being: Thus, “nineteenth-century America was capitalist civilisation at its best.” “Riding Down from Bangor,” p. 407.
Chapter 7
servant in a white jacket: 1984, p. 169.
the soundless carpet: 1984, p. 169.
towered over the smaller man: 1984, p. 170.
seconds marched past: 1984, p. 170.
cringing love at the first smile: “Such, Such Were the Joys” (1947), Essays, I, p. 25.
his somersault when there was no whip: “As I Please” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 181.
the vagueness of his own motives: 1984, p. 170.
elimination of Blytheism: 1984, p. 54.
a line of type cast solid: 1984, p. 54.
two blank discs instead of eyes: 1984, p. 54; see also “Politics and the English Language” (1946), Essays, I, p. 166.
The lessons . . .: 1984, p. 47.
assumed personality even for a moment: 1984, p. 171.
glasses on his nose: 1984, p. 170.
the Polynesian islander swam: Wigan Pier, p. 206.
The Ministry
in a planned centralised society: “Review, A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays, by Herbert Read” (1945), CEJL, Vol. 4, pp. 4849.
could be enormously accelerated: Wigan Pier, p. 207.
is in decay: “No, Not One” (1941), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 171.
dissolving: The blurb on the 1941 dust jacket of The Lion and the Unicorn stated: “This original book is a study of England and of England’s special problems in an age when private capitalism is dissolving into a classless, ownerless society” This was written by Orwell himself. See Lion, p. 30.
disappearing: “The Proletarian Writer: Discussion between George Orwell and Desmond Hawkins” (BBC broadcast, 1940), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 41; “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” (1946), Essays, II, p. 335.
doomed: “London Letter to Partisan Review” (1942), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 235 (“obviously doomed”); “Literature and Totalitarianism” (1941), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 135 (“the period of free capitalism is coming to an end”).
and dead: “London Letter to Partisan Review” (1941), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 117; Lion, p. 118: “Laissez-faire capitalism is dead.”
and it will not return: “London Letter to Partisan Review,” p. 117.
monopoly spreads year by year: “The British Empire,” one of Orwell’s characters declares, “is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English rather than to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.” Burmese Days, p. 40. Orwell’s own father, Richard Blair, spent a lifteime dutifully maintaining the monopoly opium trade in colonial Bengal and China. Shelden, p. 14.
Orwell writes in 1928: ‘A Farthing Newspaper” (1928), CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 13. In his 1945 essay on antisemitism, the first thing Orwell does is defend Jews against the charge that they have monopolized British business: “The Jews seem, on the contrary, to have failed to keep up with the modem tendency towards big amalgamations and to have remained fixed in those trades which are necessarily carried out on a small scale and by old-fashioned methods.” “Anti-Semitism in Britain” (1945), Essays, III, p. 285.
the milkman out of existence: “Bookshop Memories” (1936), Essays, III, p. 34.
It cannot deliver the goods: Lion, p. 73.
Orwell announces in 1940: “Notes on the Way” (1940), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 16.
and in fact cannot happen: “Notes on the Way,” p. 16.
much appeal any longer, he writes elsewhere: “London Letter to Partisan Review,” p. 120.
in a BBC broadcast: “Literature and Totalitarianism,” p. 137. See also “London Letter to Partisan Review,” pp. 117-118: “Centralised ownership and planned production are bound to come.”
waste and obstruction, is obvious: Lion, pp. 74-76.
embraces a form of socialism: “Either we turn this war into a revolutionary war . . . or we lose it. . . . [I]t is certain that with our present social structure we cannot win. Our real forces, physical, moral or intellectual, cannot be mobilized.” Lion, p. 114. See also “London Letter to Partisan Review,” p. 113: “Nearly the whole of the press is now ‘left’ compared with what it was before Dunkirk—even The Times mumbles about the need for centralised ownership and greater social equality”
stronger than a planless one: Lion, p. 74. See also “The British Crisis” (1942), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 209: “It means that our military weakness goes beyond the inherent weakness of a capitalist state”; p. 214: “We can’t win the war with our present social and economic structure”; “London Letter to Partisan Review,” p. 236: “[E]ither we introduce Socialism, or we lose the war”; Lion, p. 79: “[W]hile England in the moment of disaster proved to be short of every war material except ships, it is not recorded that there was any shortage of motor cars, fur coats, gramophones, lipstick, chocolates or silk stockings.”
British capitalism does not work: Lion, p. 77.
quite so ghastly again: Lion, pp. 79-80.
established a collectivist economy: “London Letter to Partisan Review” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 294.
towards a planned economy: “London Letter to Partisan Review,” p. 294. See also “London Letter to Partisan Review” (1946), CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 186: “[T]he drift is towards Socialism, or at least towards state ownership. Transport, for example, is being nationalised.”
to laissez-faire capitalism: “Review, The Democrat at the Supper Table, by Colm Brogan” (1946), CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 97.
revert to a past phase: “Letter to the Reverend Herbert Rogers” (1946), CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 103.
to what they had before: “London Letter to Partisan Review” (1945), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 384.
he writes in 1948: “The Soul of Man under Socialism by Oscar Wilde” (1948), CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 427.
Chapter 8
the atmosphere of a dream: 1984, p. 161.
came for you at night: See 1984, p. 20.
as the masters of the world: “Notes on the Way” (1940), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 15.
a summer evening after rain: 1984, p. 161.1 quote this passage for a reason. The most important metaphor in 1984 is the metaphor of light. And as with almost everything else in the book, it is a subject of doublethink. On the one hand, the “place where there is no darkness” is the most evil, privacy-destroying, self-destroying room in all London, a place of torture, confession, and brainwashing. But Orwell’s heaven, his Golden Country, is also suffused with light; it is vast, open, luminous, place where one can see “interminable distances” (p. 161).
a flowering chestnut tree: Orwell develops this metaphor throughout the book too. See 1984, pp. 56, 76, 290, 295 (Chestnut Tree Cafe); 77, 296 (“Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me”). Here again, the imagery is wonderfully apt. A chestnut tree in flower is a vast, subdividing network, almost like a fractal drawing, with each flower on the tree a tiny replica of the entire tree.
growing ever finer and more intricate: This is another recurring image in 1984. Visually, the coral is like the chestnut tree, an intricate, subdivided, interconnecting system, a network of networks. See pp. 95, 148, 224.
see into interminable distances: 1984, p. 161.
the cold had descended: Aspidistra, pp. 69-70.
for a bottle of gin: See 1984, p. 65.
wrote letters any more: 1984, p. 112.
the ones that were inapplicable: 1984, p. 112.
flanks showed supple and turn: Aspidistra, p. 103.
to make them brighter: 1984, p. 143.
&nbs
p; She was a prole: In 1984, Julia and Winston are members of the same class. Both are middle-class snobs. Julia, for example, sleeps with everybody but “always with Party members” (not proles) and never with “those swine” from the Inner Party (p. 126). Winston despises the smell of Parson’s working-class sweat. As Orwell writes in “Charles Dickens”: “One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist’s real feelings on the class question is the attitude he takes up when class collides with sex. This is a thing too painful to be lied about, and consequently it is one of the points at which the ‘I’m-not-a-snob’ pose tends to break down.” “Charles Dickens” (1939), Essays, I, p. 76.
Orwell has already explained how the Outer Party will be handled in Wigan Pier, p. 226: “It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party.”
with a grin as he passed: “Clink” (1932), CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 92.
the second replied: “Clink,” p. 92.
getting into very different company: Paraphrased and quoted in Shelden, p. 145.
made the plane trees rattle: Aspidistra, p. 70.
“I love you,” he would say: 1984, p. 109, Orwell proposed to his first wife the first time he took her out to dinner. Shelden, p. 209.
only two or three hours before: 1984, p. 225. I wonder if Orwell, when writing these pages of 1984, knew that he was putting together two very vivid and painful memories of his own childhood—one of bedwetting, the other of being caned for it by his sadistic headmaster, Vaughan Wilkes. See Shelden, pp. 26, 29, 36.
Chapter 9
one of the seedier parts of town: In 1984, Winston wanders into a pub. This scene is from Aspidistra. The landlady of the Aspidistra pub has “powerful forearms”; the barman in the 1984 pub has “enormous forearms” (1984, p. 87). Both pubs reek of “sour” beer; both have sawdust on the floor; both are filthy; both have an ongoing game of darts; in both the glasses are not washed, just “rinsed in beery water”; in both there is “a moment’s hush” when a member of the upper class enters. In Aspidistra the intruder asks for a pint of ale, but the pub has only half-pint bottles. In 1984, an old man demands a pint but can only get a half-liter. Compare Aspidistra, pp. 86, 89, and 1984, pp. 84, 87, 88. The old man in 1984 in fact demands a pint of “wallop” (p. 88). Orwell had written a little paragraph on how that word suddenly came into fashion in 1940 and had gone out again by 1945. “As I Please” (1945), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 326.
on a corner in a side street: Aspidistra, p. 86. Compare J984, pp. 8693.
smell revolted him: Aspidistra, p. 86.
a game of darts: Aspidistra, pp. 86-87.
reeked of gin: 1984, p. 34.
straightening his shoulders: 1984, p. 88.
presence was forgotten: 1984, p. 88.
set his glass gingerly down: Aspidistra, p. 87.
the wines of Burgundy: Aspidistra, p. 87.
half a dozen times during the night: Down and Out, p. 131.
changes since you were a young man: 1984, p. 88.
He took up his glass: 1984, p. 88.
some guts in it: Coming Up for Air, p. 48.
the lords of the earth: 1984, p. 90.
Chapter 10
Chapter 10: Orwell was very interested in dreams and what they meant. One of the last things he recorded in his diary was a description of one of his own dreams, which he believed portended his death. In this short chapter I illustrate what can be done in generating new prose out of old in the age of the machine. I’ve picked fragments of Orwell’s writing on dreams from a wide range of his books and essays and combined them to craft new Orwell out of the old.
solid light, like snow: Burmese Days, pp. 176-177.
dense masses like women’s hair: 1984, p. 31.
forbidden to dream of such things: “Why I Write” (1946), Essays, I, p. 314.
deepest recesses of his unconsciousness: A Clergyman’s Daughter, p. 109.
talking of peaceful things: 1984, p. 278.
Big Brother had vanished: Animal Farm, p. 22.
private and unalterable: 1984, pp. 31, 166.
a Golden Age: “Arthur Koestler” (1946), Essays, III, p. 277.
thoughts, images, and feelings: “New Words” (1940?), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 4. There is an echo of this same language in 1984 itself: “ ‘I dreamt,’ he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words” (pp. 160-161).
gradually lightening abysses: A Clergyman’s Daughter, p. 96.
uncontrollable chattering of teeth: A Clergyman’s Daughter, p. 185.
and of waking in sunlight: Shelden, p. 442.
overpowering happiness: Cf. 1984, pp. 161, 164 (gestures of Winston’s mother).
a single movement: 1984, p. 32.
drew her arm round him: 1984, p. 164.
Doublethink
freedom of speech is a Socialist regime: “Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party” (1938), CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 337. See also “As I Please” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 255: “State patronage is a better guarantee against starvation than private patronage, but . . . this implies [censorhip].” Or, as Orwell puts it (only somewhat tongue in cheek) in Lion, pp. 113-114, a democratically socialist England “will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word.” In an essay published not long after, Orwell refers respectfully to “the liberty of the individual.” He then hastens to add: “But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit.” “England, Your England” (1941), Essays, I, p. 256.
free capitalism is coming to an end: “Literature and Totalitarianism” (1941), CEJL, Vol. 2, pp. 134-137. He still expects that “[w]ith that, the economic liberty of the individual, and to a great extent his liberty to do what he likes, to choose his own work, to move to and fro across the surface of the earth, comes to an end.”
admit that these ideas have been falsified: “Literature and Totalitarianism,” p. 135.
the executioner blows your brains out from behind: See also “Notes on the Way” (1940), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 16.
tried out in a western country: “Letter to Victor Gollancz” (1940), CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 409.
would destroy human individuality: “Review, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle, by ‘Palinurus’” (1945), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 320.
centralised economy is liable: “Letter to Francis A. Henson” (1949), CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 502.
without hand, eye, or brain: Wigan Pier, p. 197: “Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them.” The obvious response—that the line between work and play is the same as the line between choice and compulsion—is never considered.
The Cost of Letters, illustrates what I mean: “The Cost of Letters” (1947), CEJL, Vol. 4, pp. 201-203.
Orwell is sure of it: Orwell is still certain, for example, that “totalitarianism, leader worship, etc.” are on the increase; Hitler’s demise will only strengthen “(a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuehrers of the type of de Gaulle.” “Letter to H. J. Willmett” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, pp. 148-149. “The only question is whether [collectivism] is to be founded on willing cooperation or on the machine-gun.” “Notes on the Way,” p. 16. See also Lion, p. 118: “The choice lies between the kind of collective society that Hitler will set up and the kind that can arise if he is defeated”; “London Letter to Partisan Review” (1941), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 117: “The whole question is who is to be in control of the collectively owned machines of production.”
in an economic sense: “Letter to H. J. Willmett,” p.
149.
railways, public utilities, and banks: “London Letter to Partisan Review” (1945), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 396.
class privilege under English capitalism: “Preface to Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm” (1947), CEJL, Vol. 3, pp. 404-405.
the British Labour Party (of which lama supporter): “Letter to Francis A. Henson,” p. 502.
hence of freedom of thought: “The Prevention of Literature” (1946), Essays, III, p. 339.
like Britain’s Ministry of Information: “The Prevention of Literature,” p. 335.
are killing the arts too: “As I Please” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, pp. 229230.
not worth saving anyway: “As I Please” (1946), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 230.
must necessarily disappear with it: “As I Please,” p. 229: “[I]f one thinks of the artist as an Ishmael, an autonomous individual who owes nothing to society,” he writes in the same column, “then the golden age of the artist was the age of capitalism. He had then escaped from the patron and not yet been captured by the bureaucrat” (p. 229).
who cares for literature can cling: “Literature and Totalitarianism,” p. 137. See also “Letter to H. J. Willmett,” p. 148: “I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so.”
frantic struggle to sell things: Coming Up for Air, p. 149.
contrive to keep their decency: Aspidistra, p. 239.
too expensive: 1984, p. 96.
bred out in a couple of generations: “As I Please” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, pp. 189-190.
filled with a wildness of spirit: “Review, Herman Melville, by Lewis Mumford” (1930), CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 21.
there will be room for everybody: “Riding Down from Bangor” (1946), Essays, III, pp. 406-407.
strength [will] change into consciousness: 1984, p. 221.
blow the Party to pieces: 1984, p. 70.
collectivist logic of the Party: 1984, p. 267: “[I]f a man can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.”
Chapter 11