The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  The anecdote gives the impression that Orwell was the doomiest man in London, but he held no monopoly on pessimism. In his introduction to the 1946 edition of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley predicted a worldwide epidemic of totalitarianism, lulling populations into servitude with drugs, sexual promiscuity and genetic engineering. He decided that his novel’s six-hundred-year countdown to dystopia had been far too rosy: “To-day it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century. That is, if we refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens in the interval.” That same year, Albert Camus wrote: “Our twentieth century is the century of fear.”

  This is to say that Orwell was magnifying a widespread sense of bomb-haunted unease rather than projecting onto the world some freakish private torment. As he wrote in a 1946 “London Letter,” “No thoughtful person whom I know has any hopeful picture of the future.” For all that, he remained excellent company. One lunch companion, Michael Meyer, called him “the best informed and most illuminating talker about politics whom I have ever met. His conversation was like his writing, unaffected, lucid, witty and humane.” Another writer, Christopher Sykes, remembered that whenever they met, “we talked of melancholy subjects—and he made my day.”

  There was a manic quality to Orwell’s activity after the war. Perhaps this was his last hurrah as a full-time journalist and Londoner, or perhaps he was filling his days to the brim so as to leave no space for grief. He worked like a Stakhanovite and socialised like never before: high tea at Canonbury Square with old friends like Fyvel and Potts, and lunches in Fleet Street with literary acquaintances like Malcolm Muggeridge, Julian Symons and Anthony Powell—the first cohort of friends to know him only as George and never Eric. Although he lionised the common man, he spent most of his time with uncommon men. Muggeridge remembered a lively lunch with Orwell, Symons and another writer: “We were all anti-Communist, but for different reasons, and it was interesting how we disagreed about our agreement.”

  Despite his aversion to groups and committees, Orwell agreed to become vice-chair of George Woodcock’s Freedom Defence Committee, whose politically diverse supporters, including E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell and Victor Gollancz, campaigned for an amnesty for anyone convicted under draconian wartime legislation, whether they be anarchists, communists or fascists. One Tribune reader accused Orwell of “an irresistible attraction towards unpopular causes for their unpopularity’s sake,” but he had maintained for years that behaviour is right or wrong regardless of who’s doing it. If you suppress the rights of your political enemies, he thought, then you can be sure that one day they will suppress yours. He was therefore proud to say that during the war he had defended the rights of both Oswald Mosley (once he was no longer dangerous) and The Daily Worker, despite his intense dislike for both. As he told Woodcock: “no one should be persecuted for expressing his opinions, however anti-social, & no political organisation suppressed, unless it can be shown that there is a substantial threat to the stability of the state.”21

  Orwell also tried to fill the emotional hole left by Eileen’s death with a series of desperately inept marriage proposals to younger women: Celia Paget, twin sister of Koestler’s partner Mamaine and cousin of Inez Holden; Sonia Brownell, Cyril Connolly’s famously desirable Horizon protégé; and Anne Popham, the art historian who lived downstairs. “It is only that I feel so desperately alone sometimes,” he told Popham when he apologised for putting her on the spot. “I have hundreds of friends, but no woman who takes an interest in me and can encourage me.” If this seems to lack romance, then it’s hearts and flowers compared to the gloomily pragmatic marriage proposal in his next letter: “What I am really asking is whether you would like to be the widow of a literary man.” Needless to say, Popham was not swept off her feet.

  So, back to work. Orwell was averaging two or three pieces a week, for more than half a dozen publications. It took coughing up blood from an undiagnosed tubercular haemorrhage to make him take a week off in February. Most of his letters contained some complaint about his workload (“smothered under journalism”) and a vow to drop everything to concentrate on his book. “It will probably be an awful job to start, but I think with six clear months I could break the back of it,” he told Popham.

  Reading everything that Orwell wrote between October 1945 and May 1946, two thoughts recur. One is that his style had matured to such a degree that very little of his work betrays signs of strain or haste. The other is that almost everything, in retrospect, seems in some way pertinent to Nineteen Eighty-Four, right down to specific phrases and images; he had no qualms about using a good line twice. The book had taken up permanent residence in his head. “At various dinners and high teas and lunches and quick drinks in saloon bars, I heard expounded almost every idea expressed in Nineteen Eighty-Four,” George Woodcock remembered, “though I had no inkling of the plot until the book appeared.”

  Orwell couldn’t help unpacking the sinister implications of any new development. He worried that the much-needed housing estates springing up across the country would become “labour-saving colonies where [people] will lose much of their privacy,” and described holiday camps such as Butlin’s as if they were police states, offering the kind of enforced communal recreation and regimented exercises that plague Winston in Airstrip One. “One is never alone,” complained the man who saw privacy and solitude as fundamental human rights. In “The Prevention of Literature,” a brilliant distillation of his thoughts on art, politics, and totalitarianism’s fundamental need for lies, he used Disney animation to illustrate the “conveyor-belt process” by which masscult entertainment might be mechanically produced in the future. The example may have been unfair to animators, but it led him to the fiction department in the Ministry of Truth.

  Conversely, his elegant little articles about the perfect cup of tea, the ideal pub and the meditative appeal of mating toads expressed values that were worth snatching from the jaws of politics: “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going around the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.” His description of an archetypal junk shop in a column for the Evening Standard reads like a blueprint for Mr. Charrington’s shop, including the coral paperweight that Winston Smith cherishes, like an ink pen, Shakespeare’s name or the song “Oranges and Lemons,” as definitive proof of life before Ingsoc.

  All the strands were coming together. “In Front of Your Nose” saw Orwell mapping out the process of doublethink, or political “schizophrenia”: “the power of holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel each other out. Closely allied to it is the power of ignoring facts which are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later.” Even when people were proved wrong, he noticed, they were liable to twist the facts, or bury their earlier opinions, to suggest that they were right all along. “To see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle.” Orwell was studying the ways in which people already lie to themselves, without needing a totalitarian state to force them. Tyranny needs accomplices.

  Woodcock observed that another of Orwell’s preoccupations was “the way in which the concern for freedom and truth had grown weak in public consciousness.” In “Freedom of the Park,” Orwell drew Tribune readers’ attention to the arrest for obstruction of five people selling pacifist newspapers outside Hyde Park—a minor incident but an ominous reminder of something that citizens of mature democracies tend to forget: “The point is that the relative freedomThe point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends on public opinion. The law is no protection.” The argument that people would only enjoy freedom of speech, or any other liberty, if they cared enough to demand it lies behind the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four, who have immense power but fail to use it.

  If the right to speech was paramount, then the quality of that speech
also mattered. Orwell’s Horizon essay “Politics and the English Language” has been deployed to teach generations of pupils how to write clearly. To be honest, the essay is rather a muddle, jumbling together powerful examples of the “swindles and perversions” of bad prose with an eccentric miscellany of pet peeves. Even the relationship between the degradation of politics and the corruption of language is not as simple as he makes out: you can lie in words of one syllable (War Is Peace) and illuminate a great truth with a cliché. But what is often missed is Orwell’s humility. He admits that his “rules”—really aspirations—aren’t binding and anyway, he contravenes some of them in this very essay. Still, few would disagree that “orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style,” or that thinking hard about the words you use will sharpen your thoughts. Only by clearing away the verbal flotsam can you clearly understand not just what you think but how you think. The aim is to write in such a way that you cannot lie to yourself without being fully aware that you are doing so.

  “Why I Write,” commissioned by the short-lived literary quarterly Gangrel, helpfully crystallised Orwell’s priorities as he prepared to start Nineteen Eighty-Four. He argues that four major motives jostle for supremacy in every author’s mind—ego, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose—and decides that his best work since 1936 has been galvanised by the fourth of these. He writes because “there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” Without some mission to focus his pen, his writing becomes lifeless humbug, and his next novel, he promises, has a mission. “It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.”

  The last journalism Orwell filed before his self-imposed hiatus revealed a hunger for change. Two beautiful pieces about paying close attention to nature contrasted with one darkly hilarious riff on the grinding routine of book-reviewing. In his last “London Letter” he noted that, despite the arrival of spring, London was “as shabby and dirty as ever.” It was time to go.

  Orwell’s journey to Jura was delayed by the unexpected death from kidney disease of his older sister Marjorie on May 3. In a little over three years, he had lost his mother, his wife and a sibling. Accompanied by his younger sister Avril, Orwell finally arrived on the island towards the end of the month.

  Jura is where the myth of Nineteen Eighty-Four takes hold: the compelling image of a sad, sick man who incarcerated himself on a godforsaken rock in a shivering sea and, in a state of agonising despair about his future and the world’s, wrote the book that killed him. Among other things, that cliché does a disservice to Jura, which has a temperate (though damp) climate and a raw, startling beauty. Situated at the north end of an island with fewer than three hundred inhabitants, Barnhill was certainly remote: seven miles of rough road from the nearest village, Ardlussa, and another twenty from the main settlement of Craighouse. The rough-and-ready four-bedroom farmhouse had no telephone or postal service. Supplies of water and fuel were unreliable. The closest hospital was in Glasgow—a taxi, two boats, a bus and a train ride away—which made Jura a reckless choice for a sick man. Nonetheless, Orwell loved it, especially after Susan Watson arrived with Richard. For such an ascetic personality, the adversity was surely part of the appeal. Jura offered the life that Eileen had demanded in her final letters: fresh air, family and fiction.

  Orwell had no desire to become a hermit, and he extended invitations to many of his friends. Among those who made the long journey were the Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand, whom he knew from the BBC, and Inez Holden, fresh from covering the Nuremberg trials. He formed a friendship with his landlord Robin Fletcher, who told him about his experiences in a Japanese concentration camp. Paul Potts, the poet who had been a regular companion in the pubs of Islington, stayed for a few months, before leaving in a huff after Watson accidentally used his latest manuscript for kindling. Another difficult guest was Watson’s boyfriend, a young ex-soldier and communist called David Holbrook, who found Orwell to be a “miserable, hostile old bugger . . . It was disturbing to see this man shrinking away from humanity and pouring out this bitter hopelessness.”

  That’s not at all the impression you get from Orwell’s letters and diaries, in which he relished his new son-of-the-soil routine: planting fruit and vegetables, shooting rabbits, raising geese, and fishing for mackerel, pollock and lobster. He even kept a pig at one point, although it confirmed his low opinion in Animal Farm: “They are most annoying, destructive animals, and hard to keep out of anywhere because they are so strong and cunning.” He told friends that his remote location and nutritional independence would be useful in the event of nuclear war, because Jura was “not worth a bomb.” He did not appear to be joking.

  As for the novel he had been dying to crack on with, well, freed from the treadmill of journalism, Orwell found that he didn’t want to write much at all. Chronic procrastinators will enjoy the series of letters in which Orwell cheerfully explains why he hasn’t started yet and shunts the completion date back to the end of 1947 at the earliest. Not until the end of September, in a letter to Polemic editor Humphrey Slater, did he reveal that he had finally put pen to paper: “I have at last started my novel about the future, but I’ve only done about 50 pages and God knows when it will be finished. However it’s something that it is started.” When he was feeling well and the weather was clement, he worked in the sitting room; otherwise he typed in his study-cum-bedroom in a fog of cigarette smoke and paraffin fumes. Probably the first people to read any of Nineteen Eighty-Four were Watson and Holbrook, who sneaked into his room to read a few pages. “It just seemed depressingly lacking in hope, as he was in everything,” was Holbrook’s jaundiced assessment. Most likely, those first pages included the first draft of Goldstein’s book. Some readers may find it indigestibly long, but it explains the reasons Orwell wrote the novel in the first place. Ideas, not plot, were his way in.

  The only article that Orwell managed to complete on Jura that summer suggested that he was working through issues arising from the novel. The title of “Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels” came from the dissonance between Orwell’s fundamental disagreement with Swift—misanthrope, reactionary, “one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive part of the movement”—and the pleasure he derived from Gulliver. Critical Essays, published in early 1947, was obsessed with that idea. The fact that Kipling was a crude imperialist, Yeats a proto-fascist, and Dalí a maniac, Orwell maintained, did not diminish the quality of their work. But nor were those facts irrelevant: “One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other.” When political or moral values clash with literary judgement, he later wrote, it is tempting to say: “This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.” Conversely, the merits of a book that is not on your side must be played down. Orwell went out of his way to do the opposite. His duty as a critic was to state both his moral and aesthetic judgement with unapologetic candour, and not to confuse the two.

  Orwell concluded that Swift appeals to that dark corner of human nature that really does suspect that humanity is mired in corruption, folly and filth, and is thrilled by exposure to the worst, as long as it’s only temporary. What Swift described was far from the whole truth but it was not a lie. This is what was on Orwell’s mind that first summer on Jura: the satirical technique of “picking out a single hidden truth and then magnifying it and distorting it.” Yes, that could work.

  H. G. Wells died alone at home on August 13, 1946, a few weeks short of his eightieth birthday. In his playful “My Auto-Obituary” a few years earlier, he had imagined himself roughed up by fascists in 1948 and imprisoned by “the brief Communist dictatorship of 1952” before dying in 1963, but yet agai
n history had other ideas.

  The next day the Manchester Evening News ran an obituary that Orwell had filed nine months earlier. Though a disappointingly businesslike retread of his previous judgements (i.e., Wells’s decades of banging the drum for a world state had clouded the brilliance of his early novels), it revealed a tenderness and respect that was undented by his unfortunate relationship with Wells: “He was so big a figure, he has played so great a part in forming our picture of the world, that in agreeing or disagreeing with his ideas we are apt to forget his purely literary achievement.”

  In his comically short preface to the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, Wells had proposed his own epitaph: “I told you so. You damned fools.”

  As Orwell returned to London for the winter, the money-god finally smiled on him from across the Atlantic. “In the United States there is more money, more paper and more spare time,” he later wrote in a survey of American literature, and that was good news for the US edition of Animal Farm. The first print run was 50,000—more than ten times the size of Warburg’s—and the Book-of-the-Month Club, which made it a September 1946 selection, printed a total of 540,000. One of the club’s committee members anonymously called it “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of our time”: a mixed compliment for Orwell, who nominated Stowe’s novel as the quintessential “good bad book” that is at once moving and ludicrous. Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker approvingly compared it to Voltaire and Swift, although George Soule at The New Republic thought Orwell was out of his depth: “the satire deals not with something the author has experienced, but rather with stereotyped ideas about a country which he probably does not know very well . . . He should try again, and this time on something nearer home.” The American public disagreed; Animal Farm spent eight weeks on The New York Times’ best-seller list.