The Last Man in Europe

by Dennis Glover

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.’ He paused. ‘That’s it, Fred. I want it put out in England and the United States. Will you see to it for me?’

  Orwell sank back into his pillows and closed his eyes, utterly exhausted. Finally, he had the feeling the job was done.

  *

  University College Hospital, London, late October. A woman had finally said yes to him: Sonia Brownell, who had begun visiting him while he was at Cranham. The idea had originally been his, but the event had been harried to its conclusion by her – at the encouragement, he suspected, of Warburg, who probably thought being married might keep him alive for longer. From Sonia’s point of view, he could see, marriage to him had a lot going for it. Sex wouldn’t be required – probably not even kissing, given his TB – which solved the problem of his current physical repulsiveness. Anyway, whatever duties being his wife entailed, she wouldn’t be encumbered by them for long. Richard would be looked after by Avril; Sonia didn’t have a natural affinity for children. He, or at least his estate, was going to be wealthy, meaning she would finally have the literary name and the independent income she craved.

  At Warburg’s suggestion, he had been moved to University College Hospital, which was the TB specialist Morland’s beat. Sonia was allowed to see him for an hour a day; everyone else got only twenty minutes. This was his only contact with the world. He had become too weak to write anything but the shakiest scrawl; his energy was coming to an end, and, along with it, his words. Room 65 was little more than a cubicle, with a single armchair, a telephone, a basin and a commode, but it was private, and she fussed about, tidying his usual mess.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said brightly. ‘You look positively gloom-making.’

  ‘I’ve finally got all this money, and you … And now …’

  ‘Well, you’re to stop that at once,’ she said in her bustling manner. ‘People get over TB all the time.’

  She went to the shelf, selected two teacups, wiped them with a cloth, then poured them both a brandy. As he took his first sip, she closed the door, pulled across the curtain of the door’s glass window – UCH was the sort of place where they made allowances – and took off her cardigan. She then unbuttoned her blouse almost totally, exposing her lack of a bra. She came close and allowed him to slip his hand onto her bosom. It was as far as anything could possibly go, and along with the sudden shot of alcohol it cheered him up. ‘Anyway,’ she smiled, ‘what an easy life you’ve had, darling. Think of me, giving up my best years as a coolie to that horrid little beast Cyril Connolly.’

  For her sake, he momentarily accepted the fantasy that he might live. ‘How do you think you’ll spend your time now?’ He moved his hand across to her other breast.

  ‘As your slavey, of course, when they let you out of here.’ She gulped down her brandy.

  ‘I mean apart from that. You know I don’t expect you to be any sort of stay-at-home. You must still have a career. A life. I’ll insist upon it.’

  ‘I can be your secretary and typist, to start with. I imagine that will keep me busy enough.’

  ‘How I could have used you a year ago.’

  ‘And your manager. You don’t want to be wrangling with publishers. You want to be writing.’

  ‘Will you promise me one thing? In case …’

  ‘Depends on what it is.’ She stepped back and buttoned up.

  ‘Don’t let them say Nineteen Eighty-Four was too dark. I was unhappy with all my books, really, except Animal Farm. You see, I was running out of time. There were changes I contemplated but wasn’t able to fully consider.’

  ‘What changes?’

  ‘To the ending.’

  ‘You would have altered the ending?’ The literary editor in her was awakened.

  ‘I would have written it better. I don’t mean have Winston and Julia freed to live happily ever after or anything of that sort. Something understated, to get my meaning across.’

  ‘What meaning?’ She refilled both their glasses, giving herself more than him; there was only so much he could stand. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s hard to say exactly. One feels so tired.’

  She shifted the chair closer. ‘You must try, darling.’

  While he thought – even thinking now required an effort – the alcohol reached his mind and suddenly made the world look more cheerful. ‘I wanted everyone to understand that I believe freedom will eventually win. That man can hold out against anything. That it doesn’t all have to happen again.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I probably shouldn’t have made Winston submit so completely at the very end.’

  2

  University College Hospital, 20 January 1950. It took a while for the nurse to find a vein, or at least enough meat in which to pump the syringe. He reckoned he had reached the lowest weight a man of his stature could be without being dead. They were giving him something. He thought it might be a sedative, but then again, maybe it was a new treatment. Such great advances were being made in America …

  He pushed the idea from his mind and thought of his approaching trip to Switzerland. It was Morland’s idea, although he hadn’t been giving him much in the way of treatment recently. No doctor had seen to him for some weeks now, which he took as a judgement. He couldn’t stand mountains, even spectacular ones, but had finally relented and agreed to go. There was no point in dying without exhausting every possibility, especially when you had another book in you – and today he was sure he had at least another five. Anyway, he’d heard there were fantastic trout in the mountain streams near the Swiss sanatorium, and a new fishing rod lay at the foot of his bed. The chartered flight was to leave in five days.

  Sonia wasn’t there, reporting a bad cold – the last thing a man in his condition needed. She hadn’t been to see him for a couple of days, since the solicitor had visited them to finalise the will.

  It wasn’t the prospect of being dead that disturbed him; it was the act of dying, which he expected was going to be painful. But they were letting him make the journey to Switzerland, so he must be alright for the moment. He even felt better. Perhaps, at last, his lungs were healing; maybe that clean, high-altitude air would work its magic. The prospect of the trout made him look down to the fishing rod with special longing, and then up at his typewriter, ready in its carry case. There was that essay about Conrad, and that smoking-room story that he’d made notes for, and a big novel about the end of the war that he’d plotted out in his mind.

  His eyes closed. It must have been a sedative.

  Yes, his lungs were getting stronger. He was no longer in the hospital but on the bank of the stream, near Shiplake, with the warmth of the sun on his back and the springy turf beneath his feet. It was the Golden Country. He looked around to see the dace cruising beneath the surface, and, further along, a great carthorse of advanced years meditating peacefully in the pasture. He knew that in a clearing close by, surrounded by elms, which were swaying in the gentle summer breeze, Jacintha – or was it Eileen? – lay naked on the bed of bluebells, waiting for him. The world, life itself, had been awakened from the dark slumber of winter to be as it should be once again: eternal summer. There were no dictators screeching lies in front of the spotlights, no truncheon-wielding guards in their jackboots, no loudspeakers babbling out lies, no cork-lined prison cells where the lights burned all night, no endless war with its destruction and poverty, no mass graves to be argued about, and no hidden microphones recording his every movement. People like him could write again, freely, not having to hide themselves away in attics, waiting for the secret police to kick in the door in the middle of the night and deliver a bullet to the back of the neck. They could love whom they liked and not have to live alone. The truth of their lives would not be altered or erased from memory. His torment was at an end. Everything felt smoothed out, his story was laid bare, all was forgiven.

  The
n he was looking at himself, from a distance, and he could see himself smiling. A thought gripped him: this man he could see, living free and happy – was it really him? Or was it …?

  Then he realised with a shock: it wasn’t him with the sun of freedom on his back; it was his son. It wasn’t the present or the past he was gazing upon; it was the future. He cried out in his feeble voice: ‘Richard! Richard! Richard! Richard!’ Once more: ‘Richard!’ He woke with his lungs unable to fill, and the feeling of sliding down, down, fifty fathoms deep.

  *

  London, 21 January. It was a bright cold day in January, and a million radios were striking thirteen. The BBC news let the bells of Big Ben ring thirteen times, before the reader began the bulletin: ‘The death occurred in London today of Mr George Orwell, the author, at the age of forty-six.’

  EPILOGUE

  The Alcuin Press, Welwyn Garden City, December 1949. With a sigh, the compositor, wearing his ink-stained blue overalls, looked at the order that had come from upstairs. If there was one thing he hated, it was publishers who requested changes to the text after the formes had been stereotyped. That’s what the galleys were for, wasn’t it, picking up final corrections? Well, he was damned if he was going to reset any of this. And anyway, with the cost, it was out of the question – the boss would never allow it.

  What he was about to do was crude, but doing it well required a degree of skill and brought a certain satisfaction. The essence of the task was to alter the existing metal type without letting the reader see that any change had been made. It had to look as if what was there before had never existed, and what was there afterwards had been intended all along.

  He checked the carefully written order slip again, noting its instruction:

  290/39 2 + 2 = 5 SHOULD READ 2 + 2 = [blank]

  It was simple enough. When the type had been set, the compositor must have mistakenly added the character ‘5’ to line 39 on page 290. He could see why it was a mistake – it was an absurdity. The author must have meant ‘4’, but orders were orders; perhaps there was a good reason to leave it blank.

  He scanned the large metal plates spread out before him. By a stroke of luck, it turned out to be an easy job: ‘5’ was the last character on the last line of the page, which meant that, when it had been removed, there would be no tell-tale blank space. He reached into the bag at his feet and pulled out a mallet and a small round iron bar. Carefully lining up the ‘5’, he gave the tool a tap, flattening the character into the soft metal. Next he inked the plate and pressed a sheet of paper to it, using a hand roller.

  Peeling it back, he looked at the altered line. His aim had been slightly off and he’d also removed part of the equals symbol, which now looked rather deformed. It was a bugger but couldn’t be helped. The rectified passage now read:

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

  2 + 2 =

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Last Man in Europe is a work of fiction, but one that attempts to keep as close to the historical facts as is possible without sacrificing the dramatic requirements of the novel form. My main sources are the twenty-volume Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison (Secker & Warburg, 1998), an extraordinary piece of scholarship unlikely to be surpassed for any modern writer any time soon, and the materials in the Orwell Archive at University College London.

  There are many fine biographies of Orwell from which I have learned much, particularly Bernard Crick’s George Orwell: A Life (Penguin, 1980), Gordon Bowker’s George Orwell (Abacus, 2003), which overtakes Crick’s biography as the most comprehensive account of the subject, Michel Meyer’s Orwell: Wintry Conscience of Generation (W.W. Norton & Company 2001), which rescues Orwell from sainthood, and D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: The Life (Chatto & Windus 2003), which sheds the most light on Orwell’s human side. Taylor’s occasional new discoveries of letters, photographs and film are illuminating. The Unknown Orwell by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams (Constable, 1972), although pre-dating the others, remains a valuable insight into Orwell’s early years. Two collections of reminiscences about Orwell provided valuable firsthand accounts of the man: Steven Wadhams’ Remembering Orwell (Penguin, 1984), and Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick’s Orwell Remembered (BBC, 1984). I have supplemented these with considerable research of my own, including by putting on my boots and walking through Orwell’s world, about which I have written elsewhere (‘Big Brother is still watching you across here’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 April 2014).

  Some events and quoted passages have been compressed for the sake of simplicity. Orwell’s letter to his adolescent sweetheart Jacintha Buddicom, for example, is an amalgam of two letters sent to her in February and May 1949 (Complete Works, vol. XX, pp. 42–44 and 119–120). Eileen Blair’s final letters to her husband are shortened and include an element of pathos taken from her final letter to her friend Lettice Cooper (Complete Works, vol. XVII, p. 104). The correspondence between Orwell and Fredric Warburg has been shortened throughout.

  Some of the events of Part I draw on The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia and the semi-autobiographical novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air. Flashbacks to Orwell’s schooldays rely on his 1946 essay ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ and Part II of The Road to Wigan Pier, as well as on Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise (Penguin, 1979) and Jacintha Buddicom’s Eric and Us (Leslie Frewin, 1974).

  Occasionally, scenes have been liberally reimagined or wholly created, but these are based on a reasonable degree of probability and evidence: the ILP rally at the Kingsway Hall, for example, closely follows reports in the party’s newspaper, The New Leader, and while there is no evidence Orwell attended it, he did attend other similar ILP events. There is no conclusive indication that Orwell read the account of the rigged trial and execution of Yagoda, Rykoff and Bukharin in the Times of 16 March 1938, with its manufactured evidence and uncanny resemblance to the Party’s case against Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford, but we do know that he followed the 1938 show trials closely while in the Preston Hall sanatorium in Kent. While my novel’s numerous dream sequences are obviously invented, Orwell’s last literary notebook contains a little-known entry describing his ‘death dreams’, in which he has ‘a peculiar feeling of happiness and of walking in sunlight’, as well as his ‘ever-recurrent fishing dream’ – dreams which became more frequent whenever his health deteriorated and he despaired of recovering (Complete Works, vol. XX, p. 203).

  While the conversations in my novel have been imagined, many contemporaries commented on Orwell’s habit of rehearsing the contents of his forthcoming writings in discussions with friends and colleagues.

  Every reader will have his or her own interpretation of the meaning of Nineteen Eighty-Four. My story attempts to demonstrate my view that Orwell’s nightmare future was not an imaginative work of science fiction (a genre he often criticised) but an amplification of dangerous political and intellectual trends he witnessed in his own time. The fact that something similar had happened already – in the forms of fascism and communism – gives even more force to Orwell’s warning that they can happen again, if we let them.

  Two other points need mentioning. First, in his introduction to the 2003 Penguin edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Thomas Pynchon suggests the coincidence of the birth years of Winston Smith and Orwell’s adopted son, Richard Blair – 1944 – may have been deliberate, raising the possibility that Winston is at least partly identified with Richard, and that the novel’s message was aimed at Richard’s generation. While this can’t be proved, I have fitted it into my story in a way that allows Orwell to clarify the date of his story – 1984 – and the novel’s purpose: to send a warning to the future.

  And second, in preparing Nineteen Eighty-Four for publication in Orwell’s Complete Works in the 1980s, Peter Davison argued that the last scene of the novel was altered by a printers’ accident during the creation of the second edition of late 1950: that the ‘5’ in the formula 2 +
2 = 5 had ‘dropped out of the printer’s forme’. This mistake, he believed, was reproduced in all subsequent UK editions until 1987, though not in the US editions. In my research for The Last Man in Europe, I discovered that the change occurred far earlier – in the second impression of the first edition, published in March 1950 – and was likely deliberate. Importantly, this printing was almost certainly being prepared while Orwell was still alive. If this alteration to the text was made at Orwell’s request, the meaning of Nineteen Eighty-Four is altered in a significant way: Winston is still capable of thoughtcrime when the longed-for bullet enters his brain. The addition of this subtle strain of optimism is consistent with Orwell’s belief (stated most succinctly in his 1946 essay ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’) that totalitarian governments would eventually be destroyed in the name of freedom (Complete Works, vol. XVII, p. 283). For a full discussion of this point, see my ‘Note on the Text’ in Black Inc.’s new edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, published to coincide with the release of this book.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to Richard Blair and Orwell’s literary agent, Bill Hamilton of A.M. Heath, for taking the time to read my book in uncorrected proof form. My gratitude also to Chris Feik and Julian Welch at Black Inc. for recognising the potential of my idea, guiding its development and ensuring it emerged into the world in the best possible shape. Your astonishing dedication to the editing task is warmly appreciated.

  I have a number of other people to thank for their assistance and encouragement: Carolyn Fraser, for her expert advice on the printing of Nineteen Eighty-Four; the artist Cameron Hehir, for helping me visualise Orwell’s world; Robert Seatter, Head of History at the BBC, for allowing me to visit the site of Room 101; the staff of the Heritage Collection Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, and the staff of Islington Libraries, for trusting me with their precious books and artefacts; Kim Williams, for pulling some strings on my behalf and for his generous and inspirational gift; Zoe McKenzie, for the wonderful use of her writer’s retreat at Sorrento; Matthew Pennycook MP and Vicar Chris Moody, for organising a tour of the crypt of St Alphege in Greenwich, Orwell’s air-raid shelter during the Blitz; Stephen Hepburn of Coventry Books and the team at the Avenue Bookstore, for their superb support of local authors; Chris Barrett and Angela Buckingham, for hosting me during my exploration of Orwell’s Paris; Tim Soutphommasane, for his interest in this project and his kind gift of an important text; and the principal, teachers and children of Albert Park College, for inviting me to speak on my research into Orwell at their 2016 literary festival.