13. THE EVOLUTION OF NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
1. See Irving Howe, “Orwell: History as Nightmare,” Politics and the Novel (New York, 1957), pp. 235–251; Langdon Elsbree, “The Structured Nightmare of 1984,” Twentieth Century Literature 5 (1959), 135–151; Toshiko Shibata, “The Road to Nightmare: An Essay on George Orwell,” Studies in English Language and Literature (Kyushu University, Fukuoka) 11 (1962), 41–53. Others who make the “nightmare vision” comparison are: Wyndham Lewis, “Orwell, or Two and Two Make Four,” The Writer and the Absolute (London, 1952), p. 154; Deutscher, “1984—the Mysticism of Cruelty,” p. 252; Philip Rieff, “George Orwell and the Post-Liberal Imagination,” Kenyon Review 16 (1954), 54; Max Lerner, “Introduction” to Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York, 1957), p. vii; Samuel Yorks, “George Orwell: Seer Over His Shoulder,” Bucknell Review 9 (1960), 33; Frederick Karl, “George Orwell: The White Man's Burden,” A Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel (New York, 1962), p. 164; Thomas, Orwell, p. 78; and Woodcock, Crystal Spirit, pp. 67, 218.
2. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4:329–330 502.
3. Howe, “History as Nightmare,” p. 250.
4. A historical event, the 1943 Teheran Conference, gave Orwell the idea of three totalitarian super-states. He writes that what Nineteen Eighty-Four “really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into ‘Zones of influence’” (4:460). See Deutscher, Stalin, p. 514: “in the months that followed the Teheran Conference, the plans for the division of Europe into Zones were becoming more and more explicit…. Politicians and journalists in the allied countries had discussed a condominium of the three great allied powers, each of whom was to wield paramount influence within its own orbit.”
5. Orwell is indebted to his earlier description of a hanging in Burma for the details used in his last work: “‘I have known cases where the doctor was obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner's legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable.’ ‘Wriggling about, eh? That's bad’” (1:47).
“‘It was a good hanging,’ said Syme reminiscently. ‘I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking’” (Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 50).
6. Swift, Gulliver's Travels, p. 146.
7. Orwell, “Review of Home Guard For Victory! by Hugh Slater,” Horizon 3 (March 1941), 219.
8. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York, 1953), p. 42.
9. Orwell's concept of Thoughtcrime is as old as Matthew 5.28: “Whoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”
10. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, pp. 100, 162.
11. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 373.
12. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, p. 87.
13. Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, p. 95.
14. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 189, 149.
15. Orwell, Coming Up For Air, p. 149.
16. Orwell quoted this sentence in hisessay on Gulliver's Travels (4:208).
17. London, The Iron Heel, p. 150.
18. Orwell, Coming Up For Air, p. 148.
19. Orwell, “General de Gaulle,” Manchester Evening News, May 5, 1944, p. 2.
20. Swift, Gulliver's Travels, p. 68.
21. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 132.
22. Orwell, Coming Up For Air, p. 218.
23. Orwell, Animal Farm, pp. 9, 66.
24. Wain, “The Last of George Orwell,” p. 72.
25. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, p. 5.
26. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 45.
27. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, pp. 308–309.
28. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, pp. 314, 318. See Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 265.
29. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (Glencoe, Illinois, 1960), pp. 109, 242.
30. The Letters of Anton Chekhov, trans. and ed. Constance Garnett (London, 1920), p. 120.
31. Brombert, The Intellectual Hero, p. 137.
32. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York, 1965), p. 270.
14. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR: A NOVEL OF THE 1930S
1. Quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London, 1980), p. 286.
2. Irving Howe, Celebrations and Attacks (London, 1979), pp. 208–209.
3. From 1948 to 1984 wars have been fought in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya, Indonesia, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, the Congo, Kenya, Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Chad, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador and the Falkland Islands.
4. I have examined a microfilm copy of the typescript of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the Orwell Archive at University College, London University.
5. The standard works on this period are Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation (London, 1976) and Bernard Bergonzi, Reading the Thirties (London, 1978).
6. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 35.
7. Letter from George Seldes to Jeffrey Meyers, April 2, 1983.
8. Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York, 1932), p. 191.
9. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929; New York, 1969), pp. 184–185.
10. John Macrae, “In Flanders Fields,” The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (Toronto, 1960), p. 110.
11. Wyndham Lewis, “Ernest Hemingway: ‘The Dumb Ox,’” Men Without Art (London, 1934), p. 29.
12. W. H. Auden, “Gresham's School, Holt,” The Old School, ed. Graham Greene (London, 1934), p. 14.
13. Anthony West, “George Orwell,” Principles and Persuasions (London 1958), pp. 156, 158.
14. Malcolm Muggeridge, “Langham Diary,” Listener, October 6, 1983, p. 18.
15. Malcolm Muggeridge, “A Knight of the Woeful Countenance,” The World of George Orwell, ed. Miriam Gross (London, 1971), p. 172.
16. Bergonzi, Reading the Thirties, p. 52.
17. Julian Symons, The Thirties: A Dream Revolved (London, 1960), p. 142.
SOURCES AND JEFFREY MEYERS: OTHER WORKS ON ORWELL
Sources
“Orwell's Painful Childhood,” Ariel, 3 (January 1972), 54–61.
“Orwell's Burma,” Condé Nast Traveler, November 2001, pp. 177–188.
“The Ethics of Responsibility: Orwell's Burmese Days,” University Review, 35 (December 1968), 83–87.
“George Orwell, the Honorary Proletarian,” Philological Quarterly, 48 (October 1969), 526–549.
“Orwell and the Experience of France,” The World and I, 18 (November 2003), 274–291.
“‘An Affirming Flame’: Orwell's Homage to Catalonia,” Arizona Quarterly, 27 (Spring 1971), 5–22.
“Repeating the Old Lies,” New Criterion, 17 (April 1999), 77–80.
“Orwell's Apocalypse: Coming Up For Air,” Modern Fiction Studies, 21 (Spring 1975), 69–80.
“Orwell as Film Critic,” Sight and Sound, 48 (Autumn 1979), 255–256.
“A Reluctant Propagandist,” National Review, 37 (November 29, 1985), 56–57.
“Righteous Lies,” National Review, 39 (March 13, 1987), 52.
“The Wind in the Willows: A New Source for Animal Farm,” Salmagundi, 162–163, (Spring–Summer 2009), 200–208.
“Orwell's Bestiary: The Political Allegory of Animal Farm,” Studies in the 20th Century, 8 (Fall 1971), 65–84.
“The Evolution of Nineteen Eighty–Four,” English Miscellany, 23 (1972), 247–261.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel of the 1930s.” George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ed. John Broderick. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985.Pp. 79–89.
“Miseries and Splendors of Scholarship,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 55 (Fall 1985), 117–121.
“The Complete Works of George Orwell,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 95 (March 2001), 121–124.
“George Orwell: A Voice That Naked Goes,” London Magazine, 40 (Feb-ruary–March 2001), 30–40.
“Geo
rge Orwell and the Art of Writing,” Kenyon Review, 27 (Fall 2005), 92–114.
“Orwell's Satiric Humor,” Common Review, 5 (Summer 2006), 34–41.
“The Well Known Orwell,” Modern Fiction Studies, 19 (Summer 1973), 250–254.
“Wintry Conscience,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 58 (Spring 1982), 353–359.
“Hunting the Essential Orwell,” Boston Globe, October 27, 1991, p. A–16.
“A Life of Loss and Longing,” Times Higher Education Supplement, June 20, 2003, p. 25.
“Writing Orwell's Biography: The Mystery of the Real,” Partisan Review, 68 (Winter 2001), 11–20, 51–52, 44.
Jeffrey Meyers: Other Works on Orwell
Books
A Reader's Guide to George Orwell. London: Thames & Hudson, 1975.
George Orwell: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.
(With Valerie Meyers) George Orwell: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. New York: Garland, 1977.
Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. New York: Norton, 2000.
Other Articles
“Review of Raymond Williams’ George Orwell and Miriam Gross, ed. The World of George Orwell,” Commonweal, 96 (June 2, 1972), 313–314.
“Orwell in Burma,” American Notes and Queries, 11 (December 1972), 52–54.
“George Orwell,” Bulletin of Bibliography, 31 (July–September 1974), 117–121.
“Review of Alex Zwerdling's Orwell and the Left,” London Magazine, 15 (April–May 1975), 104–107.
“George Orwell: Selected Checklist,” Modern Fiction Studies, 21 (Spring 1975) 133–136.
“Review of William Steinhoff's George Orwell and the Origins of ‘1984’,” English Language Notes, 13 (March 1976), 227–230.
“Orwell's Debt to Maugham,” Notes on Contemporary Literature, 33 (January 2003), 8–12.
“Orwell on Writing,” New Criterion, 22 (October 2003), 27–33.
“Review of Christopher Hitchens’ Why Orwell Matters,” Studies in the Novel, 86 (Summer 2004), 277–278.
“Orwell's Burmese Days: A Hindi and Burmese Glossary,” Notes on Contemporary Literature, 35 (May 2005), 2–3.
INDEX
The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Abrahams, William
Acton, Harold
Amis, Kingsley
Angus, Ian
Astor, David
Auden, W. H., “September 1, 1939,” “Spain,”
Aung Maung Htin
Aung San Suu Kyi
Ayer, A. J.
Bernanos, Georges
Blair, Richard
Blake, William
Blunden, Edmund, Cricket Country
Borkenau, Franz, The Spanish Cockpit
Bowker, Gordon
Brockway, Fenner, Inside the Left
Brombert, Victor
Brooke, Rupert, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,”
Burckhardt, Jakob
Burnham, James, The Managerial Revolution
Camus, Albert, The Plague
Cary, Joyce
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, Voyage to the End of Night
Chaplin, Charles, The Great Dictator
Chesterton, G. K.
Connolly, Cyril, Enemies of Promise, The Rock-Pool
Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes
Crick, Bernard
Daily Worker
Dakin, Lucy
Davison, Peter
Deutscher, Isaac
Dickens, Charles, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Nicholas Nickleby
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from Underground
Durrell, Lawrence
Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land
Empson, William
Faulkner, William, The Hamlet
Fen, Elisaveta, A Russian's England
Fenwick, Gillian, Bibliography of George Orwell
Fierz, Adrian
Fierz, Mabel
Fierz, Stefanie
Flaubert, Gustave
Forster, E. M., “Abinger Pageant,” A Passage to India
Frankford, Frank
Freud, Sigmund
Funder, Anna, Stasiland
Gide, André, Return from the USSR
Gissing, George, New Grub Street
Gow, Andrew
Grahame, Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows
Graves, Robert, Good-bye to All That
Green, Julien
Greene, Graham
Harrisson, Tom
Hearsey, May, Land of Chindits and Rubies
Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms
Heppenstall, Rayner
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan
Holbrook, David
Howe, Irving
Huxley, Aldous
Independent Labour Party
Johnson, Samuel
Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Kafka, Franz
Katyn Massacre
Kipling, Rudyard, “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” “The Gardener,” “Mandalay,” Something of Myself, “Tommy,”
Koestler, Arthur, Darkness at Noon
Kopp, Georges
Lawrence, D. H., “The Captain's Doll,” Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Rainbow, “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” Women in Love
le Carré, John
Lesser, Sam
Lewis, Wyndham: The Art of Being Ruled, One-Way Song, Rotting Hill, Time and Western Man
Limouzin, Nellie
London, Jack: The Iron Heel, Love of Life, The People of the Abyss
Macrae, John, “In Flanders Fields,”
Mailer, Norman
Malraux, André, Man's Hope, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg
Marx, Karl, Communist Manifesto
Maugham, W. Somerset
McCarthy, Mary
McNair, John
Meredith, Michael
Meyers, Jeffrey
Miller, Henry, The Colossus of Maroussi
Milosz, Czeslaw
Milton, John, Paradise Lost
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
Muggeridge, Malcolm
Orwell, Eileen O'shaughnessy
ORWELL, GEORGE (Eric Blair, 1903–1950)
LIFE
appearance
biographies of: Gordon Bowker, Bernard Crick, 219; Jeffrey Meyers, Michael Shelden, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, D. J. Taylor
birth
boating accident
Burma
childhood
earnings
education, Eton
family background
friendships
illness, pneumonia, tuberculosis
Jura
list of Communist sympathizers
marriages: Eileen O'shaughnessy, Sonia Brownell
relationship with parents
relationships with women
travel: France, Morocco, Spain
wound
CHARACTER
attitude toward animals
austerity
concern about money
conscientiousness
courage
defense of underdog
disregard of health
guilt
honesty
idealism
kindness
masochism
self-destructiveness
sense of humor
social conscience
violent temper
work ethic
working-class persona
IDEAS
politics, anti-colonialism, anti-Communism, anti-totalitarianism, Socialism
writing
TECHNIQUES
beast-fable
humor
motifs
realism
satire
style, clear, colloquial, plain
WORK
autobiographical
BBC Talks
book reviewing
cultural criticism
cultural influence
film criticism
journalism
letters
literary influences: Camus, Conrad, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, Forster, Gissing, Grahame, Joyce, Kipling, Koestler, Lawrence, London, Maugham, Milton, Swift, Wells, Zola
literary persona,
moralist
propaganda
themes: class exploitation, comradeship, England, loss, the past, poverty, revolution betrayed, telling the truth
WORKS
Collections
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
The Complete Works
Nonfiction
Down and Out in Paris and London
Homage to Catalonia, criticism of, sales
Inside the Whale
The Lion and the Unicorn
The Lost Writings
The Road to Wigan Pier, expiation, poverty; satire, Socialism
The War Commentaries
Novels
Animal Farm, Preface, sources
Burmese Days, colonial critique
A Clergyman's Daughter
Coming Up for Air, George Bowling
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock
Nineteen Eighty-Four, anti-totalitarian theme, Appendix on Newspeak, and the BBC, composition of, edited by Crick, facsimile edition, new words, O’Brien, the past, predictions in, and Sonia, and Teheran Conference, as Thirties novel, Winston Smith
Essays and Diaries
“The Art of Donald McGill,”
“As I Please,”
“Boys’ Weeklies,”
“Charles Dickens,”
“Clink,”
“Confessions of a Book-Reviewer,”
“The Cost of Letters,”
“Decline of the English Murder,”
“Diary,”
“England, Your England,”
“Freedom of the Press,”
“The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda,”
“Funny, But Not Vulgar,”
“Good Bad Books,”
“A Hanging,”
“Hop-Picking,”
“How the Poor Die,”
“Imaginary Interview,”
“Inside the Whale,”
Introduction to British Pamphleteers
“James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution,”
Orwell Page 33
