Orwell's Revenge

by Peter Huber

  There is, Orwell suggests, a distinct (and clearly inferior) “American language” (“Raffles and Miss Blandish” (1941), Essays, I, pp. 138, 140). Orwell excoriates the “enormous literature” in America “plainly aimed at sadists and masochists” (“Raffles,” p. 140). He regrets the “great numbers of English people who are partly Americanised in language and, one ought to add, in moral, outlook” (“Raffles,” p. 141). See also “Decline of the English Murder” (1946), Essays, IV, p. 13: “The most talked-of English murder of recent years should have been committed by an American and an English girl who had become partly Americanized”; “As I Please” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 169: “In America even the pretence that hack reviewers read the books they are paid to criticise has been partially abandoned”; “As I Please” (1946), CEJL, Vol. 4, pp. 234-235: “[T]o a casual glance he looks as though he were kissing the hem of the woman’s garment—not a bad symbolical picture of American civilisation, or at least of one important side of it.”

  Ironically but quite predictably, Orwell becomes somewhat more favorably disposed toward America when English public opinion grows more hostile—which is to say, during the war years, when boisterous American troops are stationed in large numbers in England. See, e.g., “London Letter to Partisan Review” (1945) CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 298: “I would like to add, without flattery, that judging from such American periodicals as I see, the mental atmosphere in the USA is still a good deal more breathable than it is in England.” “In Defence of Comrade Zilliacus” (1948), CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 397: “Tribunes anti-Americanism is not sincere but is an attempt to keep in with fashionable opinion. To be anti-American nowadays is to shout with the mob. Of course it is only a minor mob. . . . I do not believe the mass of the people in this country are anti-American politically, and certainly they are not so culturally.” “In Defence of Comrade Zilliacus,” p. 398: “[W]e shall be obliged, in the long run, to subordinate our policy to that of one Great Power or the other. . . . And in spite of all the fashionable chatter of the moment, everyone knows in his heart that we should choose America.”

  and English-killing new-speaker: In a 1944 criticism of American English, Orwell supplies a clear preview of the Newspeak Appendix to J984, complete with the promise of “a huge loss of vocabulary” if American habits are adopted. Americans form verbs “by adding ise to a noun,” they ignore the differences between transitive and intransitive verbs, they “replace strong primary words by feeble euphemisms.” American English is “terribly poor in names for natural objects and localities.” The American tendency is “to lump the lady-bird, the daddy-longlegs, the saw-fly, the water-boatman, the cockchafer, the cricket, the death-watch beetle and scores of other insects all together under the inexpressive name of bug.” “The English People” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, pp. 28-29. Cf. 1984, p. 51: “We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day,” Syme happily informs Winston Smith in 1984.

  exploiting of cheap immigrant labour: “Inside the Whale,” pp. 217218.

  or perhaps a musician: 1984, pp. 93-94.

  you don’t feel the same: 1984, p. 294.

  to be dismembered by the wind: 1984, p. 293.

  fastening ones love upon other human individuals: “Reflections on Gandhi” (1949), Essays, I, p. 176.

  among children richer than itself: 1984, p. 41.

  made Gordon shudder: 1984, p. 42.

  It is George Orwell: “Charles Dickens” (1939), Essays, I, p. 54.

  two decades after his death: “Such, Such Were the Joys” (1947), Essays, I, p. 1.

  before going on to Eton: The school’s real name was St. Cyprian’s, see Shelden, p. 23. Clergyman’s Daughter develops the same theme at length.

  but to have no money: Wigan Pier, p. 137.

  elevated into a religion: Aspidistra, p. 43.

  the Crossgates money-culture: Cf. Lion, p. 107: “We could start by abolishing the autonomy of the public (for American readers ‘private’) schools and the older universities and flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability.”

  the sensitive, beauty-loving Flory: Elizabeth’s “whole code of living was summed up in one belief, and that a simple one. It was that the Good (’lovely’ was her name for it) is synonymous with the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic; and the Bad (’beastly’) is the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious.” Burmese Days, p. 90. In Aspidistra, p. 97, Hermione is the perfectly self-centered, rich girlfriend of a rich (but otherwise sensitive) magazine editor whose hobby is socialism. “Of course I know you’re a Socialist,” she tells him. “So am 1.1 mean we’re all Socialists nowadays. But I don’t see why you have to give all your money away and make friends with the lower classes. You can be a Socialist and have a good time, that’s what I say.”

  at the bottom of them all: Aspidistra, p. 78.

  Orwell wants collectivism: Orwell, for example, generally approved of the wartime economy, in which free market commerce had been replaced by central command. Here’s his socialist summary of the change: “Before the war there was every incentive for the general public to be wasteful, at least so far as their means allowed. Everyone was trying to sell something to everyone else, and the successful man, it was imagined, was the man who sold the most goods and got the most money in return. We have learned now, however, that money is valueless in itself, and only goods count.” Broadcast, p. 73.

  native inequalities of talent: 1984, p. 205.

  His Politics and the English Language quotes: “Politics and the English Language” (1946), Essays, I, p. 163.

  biblical texts, which he uses frequently: The front page of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for example, is 1 Corinthians 13: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love . . .” but with the word “money” substituted all the way through for “love.”

  that’s the way to bet it: Quoted in Russell Baker, “Usuality as Usual,” New York Times, March 14, 1992, p. 25.

  material sufficiency and economic equality: “All that the working man demands,” Orwell says in a 1943 essay, is “enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done”— the “indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all.” “Looking back on the Spanish War” (1943), Essays, I, pp. 207-208. 1984, p. 190, contains a very similar passage: “In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared.”

  chosen for you from above: “England, Your England” (1941), Essays, I, p. 256.

  has been told about them is lies: 1984, p. 197.

  Orwell concedes they aren’t: “England, Your England,” p. 252.

  ruled by foreigners: “The English People” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 7.

  superior weapons and political unity: “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” p. 204; “England, Your England,” p. 255.

  a herd of cattle facing a wolf: “England, Your England,” p. 264.

  as the Gadarene swine: “England, Your England,” p. 265.

  foreign phrases from our writing: “Politics and the English Language,” p. 169.

  he excoriates rentier capitalism: “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” p. 191.

  the rentier-professional class: “Inside the Whale,” p. 222.

  and the rentier-intellectual: “Inside the Whale,” p. 230.

  he is a small investor: The New Cassell’s French Dictionary (1971), p. 639. Orwell describes the rentier thus: “A rentier is part of the possessing class, he can and, almost without knowing it, does make other people work for him, but he has very little direct power.” “Charles Dickens,” p. 53. Orwell usually has in mind the “second-generation r
entier” who is “living on inherited money.” “Review, Personal Record, by Julian Green” (1940), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 20. But he has quite as much disdain for the first-generation fortune of the “American millionaire.” See, e.g., “Letter from England to Partisan Review” (1943), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 282: “[T]he dreary world which the American millionaires and their British hangers-on intend to impose upon us begins to take shape”; “Letter to H. J. Willmett” (1944), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 148: “Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuehrers of the type of de Gaulle.” By 1943, Orwell is in fact describing the economic enemy as the “American millionaires and their British hangers-on.” “Letter from England to Partisan Review” (1943), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 282.

  decayed throw-outs: Coming Up for Air, p. 139. Orwell sees colonialism—Britain’s “looting of Asia and Africa”—as just another manifestation of rentier capitalism, a scheme for boosting national income with “interest from foreign investments.” “Writers and Leviathan” (1948), Essays, III, p. 462.

  fleas are to a dog: “England, Your England,” p. 269. They are also “too civilised to work, fight or even reproduce themselves.” “Review, Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, by T. S. Eliot” (1942), CEJL, Vol. 2, p. 238. In his Dickens essay Orwell states: “But in these books [by Dickens] the good rich man has dwindled from a ‘merchant’ to a rentier. This is significant.” “Charles Dickens,” p. 53.

  mind and money walk hand in hand: He was equally interested in how the economic environment affected the progress of science. While at the BBC he asked one prospective speaker for a talk on the “effects of capitalism on science, the extent to which it has stimulated its development, and the point at which it becomes a retarding influence.” Broadcast, p. 185. Another BBC talk he commissioned was on ‘The Economic Basis of Literature” (p. 31).

  without drifting toward Big Brother: As Orwell acknowledges in his 1946 essay on Burnham, “it has always been obvious that a planned and centralised society is liable to develop into an oligarchy or a dictatorship.” “Second Thoughts on James Bumham” (1946), Essays, II, p. 338.

  boy’s father of course did not own: “Such, Such Were the Joys,” p. 35.

  indifferent to economic justice: “Review, Communism and Man, by F. J. Sheed” (1939), CEJL, Vol. 1, p. 384.

  boyhood face in the mirror: “In Front of Your Nose” (1946), CEJL, Vol. 4, p. 123.

  going to be owned: During the Spanish civil war, Orwell himself even participates in a gunfight for control of the telephone exchange in Barcelona. Homage to Catalonia, p. 121.

  as his own father did: Shelden, p. 312. Eric Blair was born June 25, 1903. His father, Richard, was born January 7, 1857, and died on June 28, 1939, aged 82 years and 5 months.

  as a Tory Anarchist: Shelden, p. 219. See also Bernard Crick’s Introduction to The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 10. Crick explains that Orwell “was an individualist who resented one man or one culture imposing its values on another, and above all resented servants of the state moralizing their power with talk of ‘responsibility.’” But neither Shelden nor Crick notes that Orwell gave the phrase a somewhat more cynical (and pessimistic) definition of his own when applying it to Jonathan Swift.

  while disbelieving in liberty: “Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gullivers Travels,” p. 386.

  people who are not fighting: Homage to Catalonia, p. 65.

  reflecting on that irony: “War-time Diary” (1942), CEJL, Vol. 2, pp. 415-416.

  Orwell learns he has tuberculosis: Shelden, p. 332.

  unavailable in England: Shelden, p. 424.

  shipment sent to Orwell’s hospital: The drug arrives in early 1948 and Orwell is given regular doses of it. Shelden, p. 424. Mean-while, in February 1948, Orwell writes another letter in which he states: “If anything should happen to me I’ve instructed Richard Rees, my literary executor, to destroy the [manuscript of 1984] without showing it to anybody” “Letter to F. J. Warburg,” p. 404.

  completing his last novel: Shelden, p. 425.

  The Machine

  the job 1 would like to have: “As I Please” (1945), CEJL, Vol. 3, p. 357.

  produced individually, as you know:1984, p. 215.

  Or why not five: As a broadcaster for the BBC Orwell himself engineered the writing of a “Story by Five Authors.” They were: Orwell himself, Inez Holden, L.A.G. Strong, Martin Armstrong, and E. M. Forster. Broadcast, p. 41.

  as often as was necessary: 1984, p. 41. Orwell himself is fond of doing this sort of thing to others, particularly to religious texts. See, e.g., Burmese Days, p. 18: “He began to sing aloud, ‘Bloody bloody, bloody, oh, how thou art bloody’ to the tune of the hymn ‘Holy, holy, holy oh how Thou art holy’”; Burmese Days, p. 79: “What shall it profit a man if he save his own soul and lose the whole world?”; Aspidistra (frontpiece): “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money,” etc.; A Clergyman’s Daughter, p. 214: “[I]f you took I Corinthians, chapter thirteen, and in every verse wrote ‘money’ instead of ‘charity’”; “The Prevention of Literature” (1946), Essays, III, p. 336: “To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a ‘Don’t’ at the beginning of each line.”

  rewrite Orwell’s book beginning to end: I realized this in late 1991. It seemed like a propitious time to undertake the job, as we approached the tenth anniversary of April 4, 1984, the day on which Winston Smith began his seditious diary. If Orwell had stuck with his original plan, his book would in fact have been called 1994 rather than 1984. The title of the book came from reversing two digits in 1948, when Orwell actually finished writing it. But the book was not published until 1949.

  concerned with prostitutes: Cf. Shelden, p. 9.

  a number of his own books and essays: For example: Coming Up for Air, p. 163, includes a capsule summary of A Clergyman s Daughter: “She lives on some kind of tiny fixed income, an annuity or something, and I fancy she’s a left-over from the old society of West Bletchley, when it was a little country town, before the suburb grew up. . . . It’s written all over her that her father was a clergyman and sat on her pretty heavily while he lived.” Down and Out, p. 192, includes a mention of Lower Binfield, which is the center of the story in Coming Up for Air. Burmese Days, p. 58, contains discrete references to “magnified aspidistras” and describes a woman’s frustration at meeting “a veritable artist who was willing to work penniless all his life rather than sell himself to a bank or an insurance company.” This is, of course, a capsule summary of Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

  all literature builds on common experience: As Orwell’s Revenge went into galleys I stumbled across this in the Sunday edition of the New York Times: “There’s nothing scandalous about this sort of borrowing. The history of literature is a history of appropriation. Shelley’s gothic novel, ‘Zastrozzi,’ is a deliberate pastiche of novels and stories by his well-known predecessors Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe, right down to the characters’ names. Joyce plundered the entire canon of English literature, adapting it for his purposes. Literature, like property, is theft.” J. Atlas, “Who Owns a Life? Asks a Poet, When His Is Turned into Fiction,” New York Times, February 20, 1994, p. E14.

  always remain a solitary endeavor: “The Prevention of Literature” (1946), Essays, III, p. 343: “Serious prose, in any case, has to be composed in solitude.”

  Orwell wrote in 1984: 1984, p. 35.

  time to shape what is: For further philosophical reflections on the hyper-intelligent future, see Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 102-109.

  but Thou mayest: John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin Books ed., 1986), pp. 395, 399.

  Loose Ends

  tyranny can perhaps never he complete: “Poetry and the Microphone” (1945), Essays, III, p. 245.

  million employees: At its apogee, just prior to divestiture, the Bell System had annual revenues
of $58 billion and total assets of $138 billion; it employed over 1 million people. By 1986, IBM had 407 employees. “The End of I.B.M.’s Overshadowing Role,” New York Times, December 20, 1992, 3: 2.

  would he considered indispensable: Robert W Garnet, The Telephone Enterprise: The Evolution of the Bell System’s Horizontal Structure, 1876-1909 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 12.

  shifting the unit from mouth to ear: See George David Smith, The Anatomy of a Business Strategy: Bell, Western Electric, and the Origins of the American Telephone Industry (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 20-22.

  directly to each other: Garnet, The Telephone Enterprise, p. 15.

  inexorably back toward monopoly: See Garnet, The Telephone Enterprise, p. 23, for a discussion of these problems and rationale.

  either folded or were acquired: See Robinson, “The Federal Communications Act: An Essay on Origins and Regulatory Purpose,” reprinted in A Legislative History of the Communications Act of 1934 (Paglin ed., 1989), p. 7; Burch, “Common Carrier Communications by Wire and Radio: A Retrospective,” Federal Communications Law Journal 37 (1985): 85, 87; Warren G. Lavey “The Public Policies That Changed the Telephone Industry Into Regulated Monopolies: Lessons from Around 1915,” Federal Communications LawJournal39 (1987): 171.

  cricket game was improving rapidly: Shelden, p. 39.

  name to International Business Machines: Richard Thomas DeLamarter, Big Blue: IBM’s Use and Abuse of Power (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), p. 15.