The Last Man in Europe

by Dennis Glover

  At the top of his correspondence pile was an angry letter from James Burnham, taking exception to something he had written in Tribune. Burnham had started the war predicting first a Nazi victory, then a Soviet one, and he now believed the postwar world would be dominated by three different power blocs, led by the Soviet Union, Japan and the United States, which would coexist in a kind of stasis maintained by continual low-level war. Each would be totalitarian in its own way, ruled by a self-selecting oligarchy of managers. Burnham, he could see, was nothing but a naked power worshipper, and one of those annoying writers, typical of Marxists and former Marxists, who kept half a dozen directly contradictory ideas active at all times, sustaining the complex trick by means of subtle adjustments of his earlier definitions and prophesies. Dialectics, they called it; but he had coined his own term for it: doublethink. We could all be geniuses, he thought, if we could invent our own logic and adjust our predictions after the fact. He detested Burnham, but had to admit the man had a point about the way the world was heading. He decided he would write that week’s column about this new and sinister theory.

  Scarcely an hour later he was searching for a suitably dismissive conclusion when it occurred to him that for all Burnham’s self-deception and dissimulation, he had done the world a service. He had shed the camouflage and exposed the single objective of modern politics for all to see: power for its own sake. All else was flummery. Whether they were called commissars, gauleiters or capitalist managers, the essential philosophy of Burnham’s rulers was the same: control, manipulation, coordination – the crushing flat of whatever joy life promised, under the guise of efficiency, productivity and rationality. It would be a world in which true human feelings had no value or place. The end of man. Managerialism, Burnham called it, but a subtle form of totalitarianism would be a more accurate description. Here was the real threat to future freedom, the one people had to fight against or succumb to, perhaps forever. Here was the boot stamping on humanity which he’d first witnessed in Spain.

  He started typing, racing to capture the clarity of his thoughts before another argument popped into his mind to cloud them. ‘Where Burnham and his fellow-thinkers are wrong,’ he wrote, ‘is in trying to spread the idea that totalitarianism is unavoidable, and that we must therefore do nothing to oppose it …’

  He pulled the article from his typewriter and passed it to Sally. ‘Give this to Kimche, will you, Sal?’

  She placed another letter in front of him. ‘It’s that genius Walter again.’

  ‘Let’s see what he’s complaining about this time,’ he said eagerly, leaning back in his chair, cigarette in his left hand. He opened the letter to discover a note inside in Sally’s handwriting: This afternoon, my apartment? He shook his head, mouthing, Sorry. He had arranged lunch with Muggeridge and Powell. It could easily be put off, and in the past he would have done so, but now, with Ricky in his life, it didn’t seem right.

  Martin Walter – the self-styled ‘Controller of the British Institute of Fiction-Writing Science Ltd’ – had been laying siege to the letter pages for months, ever since Orwell had started using his As I Please column to ridicule his claim to have ‘solved the problem of fiction writing’.

  ‘Walter, everyone,’ he said loudly, flourishing the letter above his head. He started reading so the rest of the tiny office could hear. ‘“I have established that the nature of the ‘plot’ is strictly scientific, and have evolved a Scientific Plot Formula according to which all successful novels are constructed. By sending one guinea to the Institute, you can obtain the secret to novel and story-writing success. Numerous well-known authors can testify to the soundness of the Institute’s methods.”’

  ‘Do you think we could ask him to name one of these well-known authors?’ Jon Kimche, Tribune’s editor, asked. ‘After all, who’d buy a hair tonic from a bald man?’

  ‘The man’s certifiable!’ yelled out another.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Orwell said. ‘He’s a swindler, of course. But the swindle only has a chance because he’s smart enough to be onto something.’

  ‘Go on, George, give us your theory,’ Kimche laughed. ‘What’s Walter onto?’

  ‘Why, the coordination of the arts by the state. Look at this pile of books on my desk. I’d be willing to bet I could predict, within certain reasonable limits of accuracy, the arguments and evidence in each.’

  ‘Including the fiction?’

  ‘Especially the fiction. The plots, characters, language – all totally predictable.’

  ‘Keep going!’

  ‘Our current methods are too inefficient. Books could quite easily be mass-produced on a production line – a sort of conveyor belt process that follows some algebraic formula. Keep human initiative to a minimum.’

  Everyone in the office was listening now, and chuckling.

  ‘All it would take would be a directive from above and a bit of a touch-up at the end by a squad of tired hacks – like you lot – who’ve been trained to subordinate their own style to the needs of the publisher or party or whoever’s in control. Isn’t that how Disney films are made? And Ford motorcars. Same principle, when you think about it.’

  They waited, amused, for him to go on.

  ‘The parameters would be easy to set. Just dial in the relevant party ideology, the events of the time, the style – romance, mystery or tragedy – pull a lever, and there you have it, a book at least as readable as all this garbage in front of me. Authors? No need of them. We could even automate reviewing. Which of course I’ve been known to do myself, mentally.’

  ‘George, really! What a cynical view for a literary editor to hold.’

  ‘I’m serious. No doubt books are already being produced in Russia like that. That chap Gleb Struve reckons that hardly a single decent piece of literature has been produced there for about twenty years. This explains it.’

  ‘You should write a column on it, George.’

  ‘Oh, I will. Don’t worry.’

  *

  Nye Bevan had an unexpectedly high-pitched voice, which he raised as the buzz of the approaching doodlebug got louder. With perfect timing, he finished outlining the following week’s leader on nationalising coal just as the pulsing noise abruptly stopped – worryingly, before passing overhead. The other members of the Tribune editorial committee sat silent and still, anticipating the explosion. Foolishly, no one ducked under the heavy oak table, which would at least have protected them from flying glass and bricks, but they instinctively braced their hands against it, waiting, waiting … Orwell could see they were all thinking the usual thing: God, please let it fall on someone else. He shuffled a pile of typescripts in front of him, trying to appear unperturbed and looked up, through the facing window, to see the small black flying bomb, resembling a torpedo with wings, plunge inelegantly beneath the near horizon of already blitzed roofs and broken church steeples to land with a crump somewhere across the river. ‘Looked like Stepney,’ he said. ‘East End copping it again.’ The workers, he thought; at least the workers could take it.

  ‘Closer than usual,’ Bevan said. It broke the tension, and they continued. ‘George, what’s the topic of your column this week?’

  ‘In a word, Nye, Warsaw.’ For the past few weeks the Red Army had waited on the eastern bank of the Vistula, watching the Nazis exterminate the Polish Home Army, which Stalin had encouraged to rise up on the supposed eve of their liberation.

  ‘Not exactly a literary theme, George. Clem Attlee’s not going to be happy with me if we reopen that wound. But I suppose there’s no changing your mind. I’m guessing more angry letters and cancelled subscriptions can be expected?’

  ‘Yes, most likely.’

  ‘We’ve covered Warsaw at length already, and rather strongly, I thought.’

  ‘Not strongly enough.’

  ‘So what have you written? Can you give us a taste? Forewarned and all that.’

  ‘Simply the truth. That the response of the press here in Britain has been cowardly.
The brave Poles have taken the fight to Hitler with nothing but pistols and the odd captured rifle, and we’re treating them like naughty schoolchildren who won’t behave themselves.’

  ‘Some of which we have already stated, repeatedly, in our editorials.’

  ‘But not all, Comrade Chairman.’

  ‘No, you’re right, George, not all. Mr Editor, what do you think?’

  Kimche spoke. ‘We’re planning an editorial for the next edition which will outline what we know has unfolded in the past fortnight. In my opinion, it was unwise of the Poles to have acted so precipitously, knowing the Russians’ policy towards the Home Army.’

  ‘Knowing the Russians would allow the Nazis to exterminate them, you mean,’ Orwell said. ‘Why shilly-shally, Jon? Let’s cut out the abstractions and state what will happen.’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting the costs wouldn’t be great.’

  ‘Costs? Sounds like an accounting exercise. What do you think will happen when the uprising is crushed, as it will be without Russian help?’

  He looked around.

  ‘Alright, I’ll tell you. The SS will execute every man they can lay their hands on. The women and children will no doubt be treated in the usual fashion. Resettled, I think, is the term they’re currently using. It’s going to make Lidice two years ago seem like a picnic.’

  ‘There are two sides, George,’ said Bevan. ‘It’s obvious the Polish government in exile wants to liberate Warsaw before the Red Army arrives, as a bargaining chip. They’re playing the power game too.’

  ‘Two sides? Bargaining chips? How can one be even-handed about Stalin?’ He had remained cool but spoke insistently. The room went silent. He continued, slowly and deliberately. ‘Dishonesty and cowardice towards dictators like this have to be paid for eventually. You can’t one day be a boot-licking propagandist for the Soviet regime, or any other murdering regime, and suddenly return to mental decency the next. Once a whore, always a whore.’

  ‘Let me guess who you’re calling a whore, George,’ said Bevan, amused. ‘Kingsley Martin.’

  ‘The News Chronicle and the New Statesman, of course.’

  ‘Kingsley will doubtless be after us again in the courts,’ he said, smiling. ‘This is going to cost me another good bottle of claret at El Vinos to talk him down.’

  ‘I’ll remind you that the Soviet Union has suffered enormously too in this war, and that they are our allies,’ Kimche said.

  ‘And supposedly the allies of the Poles!’ Orwell said. ‘There can be no real future alliance on the basis that Stalin is always right, Jon. The world has to drop its gutless illusions about the communists, just as it eventually had to about the Nazis. And faster this time.’

  ‘The Poles will lose support here if the reactionary elements in their government persist in trying to exploit the suffering of their people.’

  Orwell groaned inside. How mechanical people sound, he thought, when they’re covering up some unpleasant truth. ‘Reactionary? Exploit the suffering of their people? How easy it is to justify killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people just by giving them a label! “You’re a reactionary – here’s a bullet. You’re a Jew – here’s a gas oven.” How can we call ourselves socialists and democrats while excusing a bloodbath?’

  Bevan glanced across the table. ‘I’m not going to take the feeling of the room, George, because I’m not sure it will be with you. I believe we have been strong on the issue already, and probably tested the tolerance of our readers. But I won’t stop you from publishing it.’

  ‘No, you won’t. Because I think you know I’m right. We have to show the world that socialism means more than pyramids of corpses and secret police cells.’

  ‘Yes, comrade, we know.’ They had all heard him on this subject before. ‘Anyway, what other columns are coming up? Any chance we can get back to the usual fare your readers like so much? It would be nice to attract more subscribers instead of scaring them away. You know, about how to make a nice cup of tea or grow roses, and why the price of second-hand alarm clocks is so outrageous?’

  ‘Yes – something you’ll like, Nye. Why people should be nicer to taxi drivers.’

  ‘Ah, good. Anything else – of a slightly literary nature perhaps? It is the literary pages you edit, isn’t it?’

  ‘I do have something, as it happens. How to write a novel using a machine.’

  ‘Splendid.’

  7

  Islington, February 1945. Eileen had somehow managed to find them a permanent flat to replace the one the doodlebug had wrecked. It was just as he liked it – up high, in the roof, where one could at least put out incendiaries – but as others told him, it was vacant precisely because it was in the roof, and therefore a death-trap in a raid. On the way downstairs, through a partly open door he heard his neighbour, a broken-down drudge of just thirty, whose husband had disappeared into some prisoner-of-war camp in the Far East, hard at work at the kitchen sink he last week had helped her unblock. His lungs weren’t feeling strong. Thank God I’m going down instead of up, he thought.

  He reached the ground floor, opened the door and let in a swirl of chilling, late winter air that disturbed the dusty entrance parlour and set his chest off. He wrapped his scarf tighter and did up the top buttons of his greatcoat, which covered the captain’s uniform he was wearing. He had taken up Astor’s offer to become a war correspondent and was on his way to the airport and Paris. It was an indulgence, he knew. The book! He should have been getting on with the book, but how often did a writer get a chance to see the front? Anyway, to see totalitarianism close up, to find out what it was really like – that was the thing.

  He threw his duffel bag over his shoulder and tramped around Canonbury Square, its Georgian terraces once smart but now the borderlands of the East End. The district hadn’t had an easy war – everywhere the pavements and walls were cracked, some held up by large wooden beams, and possibly a quarter of the windows in the street were smashed and boarded up. He walked past Kopp’s flat. Kopp had somehow found his way out of both communist and fascist gaols, ending up uncomfortably – and suspiciously, he sometimes thought – close to Eileen. A moment later he was into the prole quarter of Upper Street.

  Instantly he rounded the corner the street was in upheaval, with people sprinting for cover. He heard a curious double crack, followed by a sudden rushing sound. ‘Gas pipe, bang overhead,’ said a passing workman in filthy overalls, who grabbed his arm and pulled him into a doorway. Immediately there was a wallop, unbelievably loud, which shook the pavement and the remaining windows of the shopfront, even though the rising column of smoke and debris suggested it had landed a mile or more away. ‘Gas pipe’ was the name Londoners had given to the Germans’ new and more deadly rocket bomb, officially known as the V-2.

  ‘Blimey, what’s the next war going to be like?’ the man said.

  Orwell thanked him, noticing how, after hearing his voice, the man seemed to regard him as a sort of exotic species, not often sighted in this part of London. He walked off and turned south towards the Angel, marvelling at how quickly people resumed their normal activities, although not a suburb away some poor souls had likely just been wiped out.

  *

  Paris, March 1945. It was the lonely hour of three p.m. in Closerie des Lilas. He looked around the near-empty room. The afternoon sun was warming him feebly through the front window. It was the same yellow light he recalled here from the ’twenties.

  Back then, the café still had some of the glamour and disreputability of its glory days, when the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald would gather each afternoon to write and to drink themselves into oblivion and insanity. Even by 1929 such men had begun to seem relics, the last great figures from a time before literature had been conscripted into political struggles. It was a more innocent world, he mused, with a buoyant freedom that you could feel in your belly – a spirit almost impossible to conjure up now. Today there were no writers in the café, just a group of chess players silently enga
ged in battle, the waiter quickly refilling their glasses when they were empty.

  He looked up at the clock. In wartime, no one ever managed to arrive on time. The waiter was watching him. ‘Encore du café, s’il vous plait,’ he said.

  As he waited for his coffee, he reached into the pocket of his greatcoat and absentmindedly fingered the loaded pistol – a Colt .32 – which Hemingway, whom he had interviewed the previous day, had chosen for him from the armoury of weapons he kept in his suite at the Ritz. With the Nazis gone, rumour had it, Stalin’s French agents were at large, assassinating the party’s opponents whenever an opportunity presented. Suspected Trotskyists like him were still the enemy. He kept his right hand on the gun. One could never be too certain, especially in a café like this, which seemed for some reason the sort of place they would shoot you. A figure approached and he gripped the gun tighter.

  ‘Monsieur Orwell.’ It was a man perhaps half a dozen years older than himself, tall and thin, with thick blond hair brushed back from a noticeably care-worn face. His faded grey suit, along with his pale features, gave him a ghostly appearance. ‘Józef Czapski.’ The man gave a slight bow.

  ‘Monsieur Czapski. Delighted.’ They conversed in French.

  ‘Koestler tells me you are the one Englishman who can help tell the truth about Poland. He sent me your articles from Tribune.’

  The waiter came over and took Czapski’s order, Orwell noticing the hint of contempt on the man’s face on hearing a Polish accent.

  Czapski outlined his story. A soldier in one of the elite Polish regiments, he had been taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1939, and held first at a prisoner-of-war camp in a place called Starobilsk, but subsequently moved on to another at Gryazovets.

  ‘You have lived in a Soviet concentration camp?’ Orwell desperately wanted to know what it was like.

  ‘For two years, yes.’ When the German invasion of the Soviet Union began in 1941, Czapski continued, he had been freed and sent to find eight thousand officer comrades, who were to be the nucleus of a new anti-Nazi fighting force. ‘I found them eventually: shot in the back of the head and dumped in a mass grave outside the village of Katyn. The graves of even greater numbers of civilians – bureaucrats, lawyers, teachers, the educated – are now being discovered in other places.’