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by Jeffrey Meyers


  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,”

 

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