The Last Man in Europe

by Dennis Glover

  There were swings and slides in the beer garden, and after their meal Susan took Richard to play on them before they went home for his afternoon nap. Alone, he ordered another pint and then went out into the sunshine to watch them and have a smoke. Sitting around little green tables under the shade of plane trees, whole families – some with three generations present – were making the most of the weather, delighting in the joyful squeals of the children playing in the sandpit. He watched as young mothers, girls of eighteen or nineteen, handed their babies over to other girls just thirteen or fourteen, who played with them as if they were dolls. Another set, sixteen or seventeen and heavily made-up, were drinking pop and making eyes over the fence at a group of tough-looking boys in the street. That was their life, he thought: to be born, to blossom in a brief period of beauty and sexual desire, to reach middle age at thirty, and then to end up bloated grandmothers in their mid-forties, obsessed with gossip and gambling.

  It struck him, though, that for all that, they didn’t need Laski or Von Hayek to tell them how to live. They didn’t need books from Gollancz to make them miserable in order to bring the revolution and its day of eternal happiness closer. Their love for each other, the enjoyment they took in life’s simple pleasures, their natural wariness of authority – all the things the revolutionaries had been promising, but dressed up in catchwords like brotherhood and equality and democracy – came to them naturally. They pursued happiness the way a flower pushed towards the light, and a miner sought the surface at the end of each shift.

  In Wigan he’d seen this as weakness, as a cause of political inertia. If only they could be made conscious, he thought. Only now did he grasp how wrong he had been. Only now did he see what they represented. It was the workers – not the managers or the intellectuals – who carried the true human spirit in their bones. They had merely to survive, just as they were, to pass that spirit on to a better time. If there was hope for the future, here it was.

  He downed his pint, stood and called out to Susan. They had packing to do. His island was waiting.

  1

  Jura, May, 1946. The journey was nearly over. It had taken almost two full days: tube from Islington to Paddington, loaded with luggage and rations; sleeper to Glasgow; that ancient Scottish Airways Rapide from Prestwick to Islay; car and ferry to Craighouse; then twenty miles bouncing over the boggy, unsealed roads in the mail van, which also served as Jura’s taxi service. Getting out of the vehicle proved far more difficult than getting in. By turns he had to tilt his head downwards, twist sideways, plant his left foot followed by his right onto the puddled gravel of the Fletchers’ farmyard, then use his elbows to lever himself free, like a contortionist escaping from a box. Resting to fill his lungs with the island’s clean air, he heard the crunching of footsteps on the ground, and turned to find his new landlady, Margaret Fletcher, standing close behind him.

  The woman made an involuntary half-step backwards, and, as if instinctively, covered her mouth with her hand. ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘someone told you the situation here?’

  He looked at her blankly, noticing that her accent was English, not Scottish. She was tall and rather too fine to be living in such a remote place, even for a laird’s wife.

  ‘The nearest doctor is on Islay,’ she continued. ‘We don’t even have a telephone.’

  ‘Mrs Fletcher? Eric Blair. How do you do?’ His voice came feebly. ‘I’ve had a terrible case of the ’flu, which I’m just over.’ He could see she didn’t believe him.

  ‘A difficult trip for someone who is unwell.’

  ‘At least I’m almost there.’

  ‘Well, you’ve made it to Ardlussa. Barnhill is still seven more miles down that track, I’m afraid,’ she said, pointing to the bleak, treeless hills beyond. ‘Come and have tea and we’ll sort it out. One of the farmhands can give you a lift.’

  ‘I’d prefer not to be of trouble to anyone.’

  ‘It’s not possible to live here, Mr Blair, without troubling one’s neighbours.’

  A misty rain began to fall. By the time they’d collected his possessions from the rear of the van, paid the driver and made it inside, the rain had become heavier and was slanting into the house almost horizontally.

  *

  Late July. His plan had been to complete a rough draft of the book by the end of autumn, but once he arrived on the island he knew it was impossible. The war, Eileen’s death, Ricky’s care and the debauch of journalism into which he had dived to drown the pain of 1945 had left him capable of little more than absorbing energy and keeping himself alive, like a jellyfish. When his strength did return, the delights of the perfect summer and the company of the many guests he had invited consumed him in what seemed like a second, glorious childhood. He felt like Gulliver on his island, fishing, planting crops, shooting rabbits, cutting peat and spending hours a day reading to and playing games with Ricky. He dreamt it would go on forever. Then, one morning over breakfast, the radio announced that Wells was dead.

  In a purely intellectual way, it was like losing a father. At his actual father’s funeral, he had placed pennies over the old man’s eyes, later throwing the coins into the sea. He hadn’t really known why; it was pointless but something about the tradition of it appealed to him. It was only when he wrote the obituary for Wells that he realised what the custom meant: the old man’s vision was spent.

  He had been asked to write the obituary in advance the previous November – ‘something to have on file, just in case’. He had bashed it out at speed, giving it little thought, the clichés queuing up obediently like bowler hats at a bus stop. He could now barely recall the thrust of what he had said. From memory, it was something about every writer being at the height of his creative powers for just fifteen years, which for H.G. meant 1895 to 1910, and that only once in that time – in The Sleeper Awakes, with its picture of a totalitarian society based on slave labour – had the old man got it nearly right.

  Fifteen years, he thought. Down and Out had been published in 1933, and therefore by his own reckoning in just two years he too would be on the downhill slope – at the same age, forty-five, as Wells had been in 1910. No one could foretell when he would die, and, as Wells had shown, it was possible to live too long for one’s own good, but with the old man dead, the task of explaining the future now fell to others. It was time for the holiday to end.

  He turned to Susan and Avril, who were both fussing over Ricky, and said, ‘I have to write.’

  He headed to the stairs. Halfway up, the wheezing began. It wasn’t as severe as when he first arrived on the island, but bad enough to make him pause at the landing and notice how much water from the overnight summer storm had dripped from the ceiling into a rusty bucket. His breath back, he continued up the second flight, along the passage, its walls grubby from human contact, and into his writing room.

  It was small and, like all the rooms in the farmhouse, in desperate need of painting, but it had a view of the sea. He sat at the narrow desk in front of the window and lit a cigarette. Before him was the black case containing his portable typewriter. He put his hand to the brass latch at the front, pulled it up and slid the small sprung lever from right to left. He felt the mechanism click and the lid detach from its base.

  Carefully he set the lid down at his feet, and looked at the shiny black Remington with its worn, glass-topped keys, relieved it had survived the journey. How many words must it have typed? Eight books – all but Animal Farm complete failures. Some seven hundred reviews, mostly of pure tripe for obscure socialist and anarchist journals, but they’d kept him alive. Around two hundred and fifty essays – including a few he could actually feel proud of. And hundreds upon hundreds of letters. Four million words at the very least.

  On the right-hand side of the typewriter was a rounded metal knob; he pulled it out, then guided it along its curved track, raising the typefaces and lowering the keys to their starting positions. He ignored the dull pain in his side – one got used to persistent pain, he had f
ound – and picked out a sheet of paper from a packet on the desk, rolled it onto the platen and pushed the cylinder to the start of its carriage. He then sat there, dumbly.

  I have to write. It was easy to say, but in the process of resting his mind, he’d emptied it almost entirely. His mind sought distraction.

  Hearing a door opening downstairs, he looked out to the yard and saw Susan and her boyfriend, a writer called David Holbrook, who had recently arrived on the island, make for somewhere secluded to do the obvious. He wouldn’t have begrudged her the simple pleasure of making love in the open if it hadn’t involved Holbrook, who was a communist – something he had only discovered after the man’s arrival on the island. A member of the party under his own roof? It was too big a coincidence. He thought of Trotsky, assassinated by a guest at his farmhouse. Surveillance, even on Jura! Fortunately, he had remembered to bring his Luger. It wasn’t as good a weapon as the Colt, but at least you could conceal it on your body, which you couldn’t do with a hunting rifle. As he watched them disappear over the hill, he pulled the gun out, checked that it was properly oiled and loaded, saw that the safety catch was on, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  He had to make a start, if for no other reason than so he could return to London with a settled mind. Starting the novel there, with all the pressures of working and surviving through another winter of rationing, was unthinkable. But apart from his notes of a few years before, he had little to go on. The nuances of plot, the names of characters, even the year in which it would be set – he hadn’t got that far. It was difficult to make serious progress in any novel without these things, but at present such creativity was beyond him. Starting had to involve something more prosaic. He would start with the theory.

  Every political novel needed a theoretical core, but the tricky thing was how to present it in a naturalistic work. Jack London had mucked it up badly in The Iron Heel, with all that clunky philosophical dialogue that made the protagonists sound like Marxist gramophones. Wells – he had been as terrible at that sort of thing as he had been at predicting the future.

  He could put it all in an appendix, but that would be an admission of failure – and who would read it? An inkling of an idea came to him from an unexpected source. Letters had started arriving from Ukrainians and Poles working in displaced-persons camps in the western zone asking for permission to translate Animal Farm. They had hit upon the same idea independently: to smuggle copies of the translated story into the east for underground distribution among enemies of the communist regime. The Ukrainian request came from a man called Szewczenko, whose readings of the story to his homeless countrymen had met with the most extraordinary response.

  He plucked one of Szewczenko’s letters from the pile on his desk. The Ukrainian peasants, it reported, were taking the fate of Manor Farm almost literally – Lenin having given them farms, only for Stalin to take them away again – and Szewczenko’s public readings of the book were creating pathetic, emotional scenes the like of which the man had never before witnessed.

  He had immediately assented to the publication request, refusing any royalties. It was almost too good to be true! He had written his little story to awaken the world to what a betrayed revolution meant, and now it was going to be published in clandestinely printed editions and passed from hand to hand, to be read in attics and secret hiding places, wherever the party’s secret police couldn’t reach. It would be like a depth charge dropped into the totalitarian sea, and it gave him the idea he was looking for. That’s how the rebellion in this new novel would begin – with a secret book, circulated among a dissenting few.

  Like Animal Farm, it would have to be a caricature of the Stalinist system. Fortunately, Bolshevik theory wasn’t difficult to spoof. He crossed the small room and took a volume from the warped bookshelf. Unlike any book printed after 1940, it was heavy and impressive, expensively made, with a red hardback cover and a dust jacket showing the author’s portrait beneath the bold lettering of the title: Leon Trotsky – My Life. It struck him that, east of the Elbe, the price for being caught with such a book would be death. He looked at Trotsky, with his unruly mane of greying hair, goatee beard and pince-nez; the man certainly looked clever, but had not been clever enough to evade the ruthless manoeuvrings of Stalin. He opened it and flicked through to find a passage he had marked, explaining the logic behind Lenin and Trotsky’s decision to seize power.

  Marxism considers itself the conscious expression of the unconscious historical process. But the ‘unconscious’ process, in the historico-philosophical sense of the term – not in the psychological – coincides with its conscious expression only at its highest point, when the masses, by sheer elemental pressure, break through the social routine and give various expression to the deepest needs of historical development …

  What on earth could it mean? He read on.

  And at such moments the highest theoretical consciousness of the epoch merges with the immediate action of the oppressed masses who are furthest away from theory. The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls ‘inspiration’. Revolution is the inspired frenzy of history.

  As far as he could make out, it was some sort of justification for dictatorship, some flatly contradictory assertion that the proles were simultaneously a revolutionary force and a dumb, inert mass. But who could be sure? Doublethink! Such nonsense could only lead to disaster. He remembered that he’d fallen for a version of it himself, back in 1940. Red militias billeted in the Ritz, the gutters running with capitalist blood, English socialism …

  He put the book down and remembered an interesting term coined by his old friend Franz Borkenau, who’d seen through the whole totalitarian swindle before just about anyone: ‘oligarchical collectivism’. Yes, that’s almost certainly how it would have ended, had Dunkirk led to the revolution he had wanted: with a collective run by an oligarchy, a democracy run by an elite, the workers betrayed by psychopaths. He typed.

  THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM

  by Emmanuel Goldstein

  Chapter 1.

  The Genesis of Ingsoc

  The words began to pour out of him, and within a week he had finished the first draft of Goldstein’s secret book, with its mingling of Marx and Burnham, its world divided into the constantly warring superstates of Eastasia, Eurasia and Oceania, with Airstrip One under the terrible thrall of Ingsoc.

  He was exhilarated by his success in creating this alternative world – which he had decided to set in the year 1980 – but still didn’t feel ready to tackle the story proper. To maintain momentum, he decided to write a series of disconnected scenes, based on experiences plucked from the recesses of his memory and the many diaries he kept. He didn’t yet know how they would fit into the narrative, but he would find a place for them once the story had worked itself out fully in his mind. There was that train journey to Kent with four generations of proles to pick hops for the summer holidays, and the packed prison cell in Bethnal Green, with its revolting toilet that inmates were, disgustingly, forced to use in front of each other.

  There were also other scenes – dark, sometimes shameful episodes from his life that he recalled with embarrassment, like the bitterly cold, moonless night he’d had that prostitute for sixpence on a patch of grass behind the Guards’ parade ground, only to see her afterwards in the light of that all-night café in St Martin’s Lane – toothless, greying, fifty, with make-up plastered so thick on her face that it threatened to crack. Writing such scenes made him feel soiled and humiliated, and he would have torn them up immediately if they hadn’t matched perfectly the squalid atmosphere he wanted to evoke – where people expended their short, timorous lives in foetid tenements with damp walls, peeling wallpaper and broken furniture, crawling like beetles through the filth and grime that invaded their skin and left them feeling polluted and vile.

  By the time he had written himself out, he had a pile of some fifty pages – not enough to meet his promise
to Warburg of completing it by the end of the year, but enough at least to have made the summer on Jura worthwhile. He took some days off and rested.

  *

  Late August. He was reading through the pile of completed pages when he noticed something. It was a hair. It was too short to be either Avril’s or Susan’s, and the wrong colour to be his own. It was lighter, without any grey, belonging to a much younger man. Holbrook! He must have sneaked in while he was away on the other side of the island, fishing with Avril and Ricky.

  He opened the desk, took out the pistol, which in his complacency he had stopped wearing, put it into his jacket pocket and went downstairs, the manuscript pages in his hand. He found Holbrook alone in the kitchen, listening to some political lecture on the radio, despite his request that the batteries be saved for the evening news. He walked over and switched it off. Holbrook didn’t protest, but made to stand up and leave without saying anything.

  He motioned for him to sit down. ‘What have you to say for yourself, Holbrook?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Spying.’

  ‘Spying? Really! You are paranoid. Just as I thought.’

  Orwell held up the wad of papers, then threw it onto the kitchen table. ‘Had a good read, did you?’

  Holbrook said nothing but looked at him contemptuously.

  ‘Going to report back to Comrade Pollitt, are we?’

  ‘Pah!’

  ‘Well?’ Orwell said, letting seconds pass by. ‘I’m waiting.’