The Last Man in Europe

by Dennis Glover

  He wrote to the publisher, but days drifted by without anyone picking up the telephone. Frustrated, Orwell turned to his literary agent, Leonard Moore, who had persuaded Gollancz to publish Down and Out in Paris and London all those years before and had never let him down. Moore immediately found him someone with good references: Miss E. Keddie of 47 Barkston Gardens, Kensington, SW5. She was willing to travel to Jura for seven pounds a week plus expenses, typewriter supplied. Then Warburg’s editor Roger Senhouse insisted Miss Keddie wouldn’t be needed, as his niece, who had contacts in the secretarial world, assured him she knew typists who would jump at the chance to work with the famous author of Animal Farm. Orwell instructed Moore that his girl would not be needed.

  He was unable to get out of bed for some days, so Ricky began delivering his mail to his room. Finally, a letter arrived from Senhouse.

  It is excellent news that you have found time to revise the novel. The tinge of disappointment is apparent in your letter when you state that the stress and uncertainty of the threat of your wretched disease comes through in the writing, and perhaps cannot be expunged to your liking. The astonishing feat of putting ‘finis’ to the work is surely a triumph. On the matter of the typist, give me three more days and you will know the result. Certainly we won’t let you down, whatever happens.

  A triumph? Not if you could see the state it’s in, he thought. There was something about Senhouse’s letter – a familiar inexactness and evasion – that told him he would have to type it himself, and do it quickly, or he would miss his chance to get off the island before the winter.

  *

  27 November. He was right – Senhouse had failed to follow through – and so he had taken on the grisly task. He had reached the end of his capacity for sitting at his desk – usually an hour, sometimes more, depending on his tolerance for the pain – but found he could string the working day out through the trick he had taught himself in the sanatorium years before: typing in bed. It sounded more difficult than it was. First the machine had to be balanced on a tray on the lap, which until you got used to it made the process rather like typing in a lifeboat on a choppy sea. Then the papers – four sheets and three carbons – had to be threaded through the platen for each page, so as to provide copies for himself, Warburg, Moore and the American publisher, Harcourt Brace. It was a job that had to be repeated some four hundred times.

  He’d been at it now for a fortnight or so, every day the same grim mathematical task: four thousand words, twenty-four thousand type-strokes or spaces, two hundred carriage returns, ten changes of paper, all made more difficult by the decrepit nature of his typewriter, which was now close to the end of its life.

  Working in bed had some advantages: pillows, for instance, could be arranged so as to position the manuscript for convenient reading; one easily kept warm; and it was a simple thing to doze off when one got tired. He tried to block from his mind Dick’s warnings about the effects on his respiration of all the bending, stooping, sitting up, shifting of pillows and moving of arms. Each change of paper and each line of type must have required an additional cubic foot of oxygen – enough, all up, he suspected, to fill a blimp. It was deadly fuel for the bacteria multiplying in his lungs – but then again, hadn’t Dick told him the drugs had wiped them out? Pleurisy, influenza, a bad cold – all were equally possible culprits.

  He picked up the typing where he’d last left off: O’Brien’s words entrapping Winston to join the Brotherhood. He looked at the draft and decided to alter it.

  ‘You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see.’

  He worked for another three hours, almost without pausing, surprising himself with his stamina and progress, both of which were now varying from day to day but were perceptibly declining. It was only when he was totally overwhelmed by fatigue, his body suddenly taking on the weakness and translucency of jelly, that he collapsed into the pillow to endure the broken, painful sleep of the permanently ill.

  *

  In the days that followed, he started working downstairs. As the icy winter storms began to howl and smash into the farmhouse, the temperature plunged; by now he had run out of paraffin for his portable heater, and his breath had started condensing inside his bedroom. The only necessities now not in short supply at Barnhill were brandy and gin, and he doubled his ration. He continued on the couch in the living room, swaddled in blankets next to the fireplace, whose damp, oozing peat gave off a feeble warmth. The house seemed bleak and empty, the only other occupants now being Ricky along with Avril and the new farm manager, Bill Dunn. Dunn, a veteran who had lost a leg in the war but had mastered his artificial one, had come to the island to learn agriculture, and though some years younger than her, had taken up romantically with Orwell’s sister.

  He was almost finished, which meant that confronting the novel’s biggest conceptual problem could be put off no longer. The products of his fevered mind on the island and in the hospital – the painful injections, Winston’s physical deterioration, the torture scenes, the rats – had, as he’d suspected, given the novel a bleakness that bordered on the Gothic. Had he avoided sounding like H.G. Wells only to end up sounding like Edgar Allan Poe?

  A thought, which he knew was a false thought, now entered his mind. He could change the ending. Winston could confound them, live on while still harbouring his secret hatred of Big Brother, return to his old job, perhaps even be reunited with Julia, have his appearance altered through plastic surgery and live on as a happy prole – the things, he rationalised, the Hollywood movie moguls would insist upon in the unlikely event the novel became a bestseller. He dropped the crazy thought after just a few seconds. He’d tried it before, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and it hadn’t paid off. Even Waugh had stopped writing like that. One could have nostalgia for the past, but not for the future.

  He confronted the manuscript again and resumed typing. He was just a page or two from the end, having reached the scene where Winston was alone with his thoughts at the Chestnut Tree Café.

  Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table:

  The line that followed in his manuscript was ‘2 + 2 = 5’. He centred the next line and typed on. His Remington being one of the portable versions, it lacked the ‘+’ and ‘=’ keys, which meant the symbols would have to be added by hand. He typed ‘2’ and hit the space bar three times, then another ‘2’. He paused, then picked up his pen and made the additions straight onto the page in the platen.

  2 + 2 =

  It was the decisive moment. If two and two make five, there is no hope. Winston has been brainwashed completely, resistance has been proved futile, the party will always win, stamping on the human face forever. But make it equal four and Winston wins! As the bullet is entering his brain, he is still capable of logic – and therefore of thoughtcrime, of opposing Big Brother. ‘To die hating them, that was freedom,’ Winston had thought.

  Now the power of deciding the future lay in his hands. Until that moment it was as if the book had somehow been controlling him, and that his fate lay in its hands. His right index finger hovered over the keyboard. But hitting ‘4’ would mean something else, too. It was a saccharine tablet whose chemical sweetness would rob the novel of its integrity. Hit ‘4’ and you would descend into worthless sentimentality – the idea that purity of mind is all that counts; that freedom is possible even when jackboots walk the streets, when loudspeakers still screech out commands and posters of the leader hang on every wall. Hit ‘4’, it occurred to him, and the lessons of Spain and the recent war would be forgotten.

  You couldn’t deliver a warning about the future by offering it up as a utopia; that was Wells’ mistake. No, it was too late for backtracking. To get people to alter the future, he had to terrify them. With a resolve born as much of mental tiredness as of certainty, he pressed down decisively on the ke
yboard.

  2 + 2 = 5

  *

  The next day, he typed the last line.

  He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

  Should I? he thought. Why not – he had always done it. He advanced the paper by three carriage returns and locked caps.

  THE END

  *

  4 December 1948. Four copies of the completed typescript were lying face-down on his desk. He got out a roll of white ribbon and, with a knife, cut four equal lengths, which he used to bind them up. He placed three copies into envelopes and addressed two of them to Moore, who was dealing with the Americans (two in case one was lost in the post), and one to Warburg. The fourth was his copy. A shower enveloped the farmhouse, but passed quickly. Peering through the upper-storey window, he noticed there were not one but two rainbows, parallel to each other. One rainbow, with its pot of gold, was obviously a good omen. But what might two rainbows herald? His mind started working on his next book.

  Two days later, he waved from the same window to Avril and Dunn as they drove up the track in the repaired lorry towards the island’s only post office, at Craighouse, taking with them the packages. He was not well enough to see them off outside.

  The next morning, trying to get up from his bed, he collapsed.

  1

  Secker & Warburg, 13 December 1948. Fred Warburg summoned his secretary for dictation, lit a cigarette, which he attached to his customary long holder, leaned back in his chair and began. ‘Heading: Report on 1984. In numerals. Strictly confidential. Underline that, please. Strictly confidential. First par. This is among the most terrifying books I have ever read. The savagery of Swift has passed to a successor who looks upon life and finds it intolerable …’

  The dictation took a full hour. When he was finished, Warburg requested that copies of the typed report be sent to the author and to everyone involved in the production of the forthcoming book. ‘Give Farrer’s copy to me.’

  Warburg considered his executive David Farrer to be his shrewdest judge of a book’s potential. Some hours later, with the typescript of his own report and Orwell’s new novel in his hands, he went to Farrer’s office and instructed him to drop whatever he was doing and read both immediately. Could he report within two days? The reason for the urgency was left unstated, but there could be only one explanation: Warburg had a winner.

  Two afternoons later, Warburg, his cigarette holder again in his mouth and a whisky glass in his hand, sat with his feet on his desk, reading Farrer’s assessment.

  My reaction to a book which has been highly praised by someone else in this office is liable to be highly critical. It was in a fault-finding mood, in consequence, that I approached the new Orwell, which perhaps lends additional force to my statement that if we can’t sell fifteen to twenty thousand copies of this book, we ought to be shot.

  In emotive power and craftsmanship this novel towers above the average. Orwell has done what Wells never did, created a fantasy world which yet is horribly real so that you mind what happens to the characters which inhabit it. He has also written political passages which will set everyone talking and an extremely exciting story – the arrest is superbly done; the mounting suspense in Part II is perhaps more nerve-racking even than the horrors of Part III; as for those horrors, I believe they are so well written that, far from being put off, the public will gobble them up. In fact, the only people likely to dislike 1984 are a narrow clique of highbrows.

  1984 might do for Orwell what The Heart of the Matter did for Graham Greene (it’s a much better book) – establish him as a real bestseller.

  Warburg pounded his fist on the desk.

  *

  Jura, January 1949. He was lying prone, finding that sitting up constricted his breathing too much. His arms felt weak, but he was able to hold Farrer’s report above his head for long enough to read it. 1984 as a title looked strange; better to spell it out – he must tell Warburg. Splendid to eclipse Wells; Warburg’s top man Farrer seemed to know his stuff, but what, he wondered, was Warburg himself thinking? He picked up and started reading Warburg’s report:

  The political system which prevails is Ingsoc = English Socialism. This I take to be a deliberate and sadistic attack on socialism and socialist parties generally. It seems to indicate a final breach between Orwell and socialism, not the socialism of equality and human brotherhood which clearly Orwell no longer expects from socialist parties, but the socialism of Marxism and the managerial revolution. 1984 is among other things an attack on Burnham’s managerialism; and it is worth a cool million votes to the conservative party; it might well be a choice of the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard; it is imaginable that it might have a preface by Winston Churchill after whom its hero is named …

  I cannot but think that this book could have been written only by a man who himself, however temporarily, has lost hope, and for physical reasons which are sufficiently apparent. These comments, lengthy as they are, give little idea of the giant movement of thought which Orwell has set in motion in 1984. It is a great book, but I pray I may be spared from reading another like it for years to come.

  He was stunned and horrified. So Warburg’s Tory instincts had finally surfaced! How could someone like Warburg, who knew his political positions so intimately, get its message all wrong? Sadistic attack? Final breach with socialism? A preface from Churchill? Loss of all hope? Didn’t Warburg get it? Winston wasn’t Churchill; he was an everyman.

  He looked at the typewriter on the desk. It was only a yard away but may as well have been a mile. If only he could reach it from the bed. He pushed away the blankets and made to move, but could barely lift his torso from the mattress.

  *

  Inevitably, leaving the island was a cock-up. The immediate objective was Ardlussa, where he was to lodge overnight before catching the mail van to the ferry at Tarbert. Given the state of the track – normally barely passable, but now treacherous after gales that had brought the sea up over the farming land in places – it would have been sensible to leave early, before the weather and the darkness closed in. But, as Bill Dunn knew all too well, that was not how they did things in the Blair family.

  With the rain thrumming loudly on the roof and the windscreen wipers unable to cope, they sank into the track, where the heavy and underpowered Austin 12 became stuck fast. Bill and Avril couldn’t ask Orwell to get out and help push – and so, soaked through, the couple made the trek two miles back in the gathering darkness with their boots full of water to collect the lorry, while he sat in the rear seat with Ricky, talking and eating boiled sweets. By the time they returned it was dark. They attached tow ropes to pull the Austin out of the mud, but it wouldn’t budge.

  Unless they could get the car unstuck, he would have to either walk two miles in the freezing rain or spend the night in the car, which had sunk to its axles in the mire. The first option was suicidal and the second extremely unwise. To make things even more impossible, the track ran through a peat bog which oozed with sticky black goo, so that it looked like the sands around a ruptured oil well.

  Avril and Dunn appeared to have given up, and he watched as they sat in the front seat of the truck, contemplating what to do. Then Dunn appeared at the window of the Austin. The rain had become heavier, pounding on the cabin roof, making even shouted conversation difficult. ‘There’s nothing for it,’ Dunn mouthed. ‘We’ll have to go around.’

  ‘May as well go ahead and stake all on zero,’ Orwell replied, as cheerfully and loudly as he could.

  Through the fogged, watery windows, he watched as the giant ex-army truck inched its way past the car, almost scraping the paint in an attempt not to drift too far into the bog. Miraculously, it manoeuvred its way around and back onto the stony track. Avril draped an oilskin over her brother’s head and guided him to the truck’s cabin, then went back for Richard. After a bone-jarring ride they reached Ardlussa around ten p.m. He was utterly exhausted but bucked by the belief that civilisation and medical science we
re now less than a day’s journey away.

  *

  Everything seemed to go wrong. Cranham, the sanatorium – twelve guineas a week, operations and medicines extra – was a swindle. Its rows of wooden huts were meant to convey the impression of Swiss vitality and fresh air, but in fact suggested an Arctic labour camp. Dick turned up and advised them to give him more streptomycin, but the terrible side effects returned and they were forced to stop. All that was left was the usual advice: do nothing, see no one, stay completely still.

  He couldn’t do it, because he wasn’t finished with the book yet. There were the proofs to correct – two sets, actually, thanks to Harcourt Brace’s decision to set their version without waiting for the corrected Secker & Warburg proofs. Then the Americans wanted to call it 1984 instead of spelling it out in words, and wanted the metric measurements replaced by imperial ones; they could do the first, but not the second. He was too tired to fight against the many minor stylistic changes they wanted for American readers. ‘Protuberant’ instead of ‘Negroid’ lips, for example, seemed reasonable. But there was only so far he was willing to go. There was no end to the damage the philistines who ran the book trade could do. Giving in to their every request would see the book ruined. He knew what publishers were like and what drove them: money. The way Gollancz had mucked with his early novels … Even Warburg had cut his preface from Animal Farm. Well, he wasn’t having it again.

  *

  Cranham, February. Only the twice-daily mail punctuated the monotony of life, now that he couldn’t do any serious work. Letters streamed in from those who had heard about his condition and wanted to buck him up: his old lunch companions Malcolm Muggeridge, Anthony Powell and Julian Symons, as well as Koestler’s sister-in-law Celia Kirwan and the usuals like Astor, Rees and Moore.