1948: an old man interviewed
Orwell's book is essentially a comic book.
A WHAT?
Consider. My bookshelves are disorganized. Wishing to reread Nineteen EightyFour, I could find at first only the Italian edition. This, for the moment, would have to do. But there was something wrong with that first sentence. 'Era una bella e fredda mattina d'aprile e gli orologi batterono l'una.' It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks struck one. It ought to be 'battevano tredici colpi': they were striking thirteen. Latin logic, you see. The translator couldn't believe that clocks would strike thirteen, even in 1984, since no reasonable ear could ever take in more than twelve. So Italian readers were forced to miss a signal of the comic. Here's the original: 'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.' You laugh, or smile.
Or shudder?
Or shudder pleasurably. As at the beginning of the best kind of ogre story - one in which strange and terrible and unbelievable things are imposed on a familiar world. The world of English April weather, to begin with. A liverish wind mocking the sun. Swirls of dust at street corners. Grit in your eye. A run-down weary city at the end of a long war. Apartment blocks collapsing, a smell of boiled cabbage and old rag mats in the hallway.
COMIC, for God's sake?
Comic in the way of the old music halls. The comedy of the all-toorecognizable. You have to remember what it was like in 1948 to appreciate Nineteen EightyFour. Somebody in 1949 told me - that was the year the book came out - that Orwell had wanted to call it Nineteen Forty-Eight. But they wouldn't let him.
You remember the first reviews?
Yes. For the most part, tepidly laudatory. Only Bertrand Russell saw that this was that rare thing, a philosophical novel. The others said that Mr Orwell was more convincing with his boiled cabbage and rag mats than with his totalitarianism. Some truth there. Orwell was known as a kind of comic poet of the run-down and seedy. Down and Out in Paris and London. The Road to Wigan Pier. Wigan Pier - that was always a great music-hall joke. Orwell was good at things like working-class kitchens, nice cups of tea so strong as to be mahogany coloured, the latest murder in the News of the World, fish and chips, stopped-up drains. He got the feel of 1948 all right. Physical grittiness. Weariness and privation. Those weren't tragic. All the tragedy then was reserved for the Nazi deathcamps. And the Russian ones too, but you weren't supposed to think of those. Ergo, our own troubles were comic.
You mean: if a thing isn't tragic it has to be comic?
In art, if not in real life. Let me tell you more about 1949, when I was reading Orwell's book about 1948. The war had been over four years, and we missed the dangers - buzz-bombs, for instance. You can put up with privations when you have the luxury of danger. But now we had worse privations than during the war, and they seemed to get worse every week. The meat ration was down to a couple of slices of fatty corned beef. One egg a month, and the egg was usually bad. I seem to remember you could get cabbages easily enough. Boiled cabbage was a redolent staple of the British diet. You couldn't get cigarettes. Razor blades had disappeared from the market. I remember a short story that began, 'It was the fifty-fourth day of the new razor blade' - there's comedy for you. You saw the effects of German bombing everywhere, with London pride and loosestrife growing brilliantly in the craters. It's all in Orwell.
What you seem to be saying is that Nineteen EightyFour is no more than a comic transcription of the London of the end of the Second World War.
Well, yes. Big Brother, for instance. We all knew about Big Brother. The advertisements of the Bennett Correspondence College were a feature of the pre-war press. You had a picture of Bennett pere, a nice old man, shrewd but benevolent, saying, 'Let me be your father.' Then Bennett fils came along, taking over the business, a very brutal-looking individual, saying: 'LET ME BE YOUR BIG BROTHER.' Then you get this business of the Hate Week. The hero of the book, Winston Smith, can't take the lift to his flat because the electricity's been cut off - we were all used to that. But the 1984 juice has been cut as part of an economy drive in preparation for Hate Week - typical government non sequitur. Now we knew all about organized hate. When I was in the army I was sent on a course at a Hate School. It was run by a suspiciously young lieutenant-colonel - boy friend of which influential sadist, eh? We were taught Hatred of the Enemy. 'Come on, you chaps, hate, for God's sake. Look at those pictures of Hun atrocities. Surely you want to slit the throats of the bastards. Spit on the swine, put the boot in.' A lot of damned nonsense.
And I suppose the contradiction of that section of the book is meant to be comic too?
Contradiction?
The electricity has been cut off, but the telescreen is braying statistics to an empty apartment. It's hard to accept the notion of two distinct power supplies.
I hadn't thought of that. I don't think anybody thinks of it. But there you are - a necessary suspension of disbelief, appropriate to a kind of comic fairy tale. And the television screen that looks at you - Orwell had lifted that from Chaplin's Modern Times. But it's prophetic, too. We're in the supermarket age already, with a notice saying, 'Smile - you're on TV!'
Did England have television in those days?
Are you mad? We'd had television back in the 1930s. The Baird system, what James Joyce called the 'bairdbombardmentboard' or something. Logie Baird, his name dimly echoing in Yogi Bear. I saw the very first BBC television play - Pirandello, The Man with a Flower in His Mouth. You got vision from your Baird screen and sound from your radio. Aldous Huxley transferred that system to his Brave New World - 1932, as I remember. Mind you, it's never been necessary actually to have television in order to appreciate its potentialities. The Queen in Snow White has a TV screen that puts out just one commercial. In England, Robert Greene has a TV screen or magic mirror for spying in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. That was about 1592. The word existed before the thing. In 1948 the thing was back, I think. It was evident then it was going to be a part of everybody's life. Among the ingenuous there was a feeling that the faces that spoke at you were really looking. The TV was intrusive. The first post-war programmes were more didactic than diverting. The screen was for big faces, not for the tiny figures of old movies. The adjustment of vision we take for granted now wasn't easy at first - I mean the ability to take in a Napoleonic battle on a pocket set. The TV set in the corner of the living-room was an eye, and it might really be looking at you. It was a member of the household, but it was also the agent of a great corporation. I remember a lot of people were shy of undressing in front of it.
You think this is comic? Listen -
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in on your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
No, not comic, but not as frightening as all that. It's the possibility of being caught out by the electronic eye that constitutes the real intrusion. Winston Smith isn't pursued to either the kitchen or the toilet - not, anyway, in Victory Mansions - by Big Brother. (Incidentally, it seems to me all wrong that he should be allowed to live alone in a flat. Wouldn't it be a matter of dormitories with a police thug in the end bed?) There can be plenty of subversive thought in bed, in the dark. The telescreen is perhaps no real menace - any more than bugging is to those who know it is going on. It's a metaphor of the death of privacy. The important thing is that it can't be switched off. It's like muzak, a perpetual reminder of the presence of the big corporation, the State, the anti-self.
But Winston is actually watched. He's rebuked from the screen by the morning physical-jerks instructress.
Yes, but the occasion's comic. We're not far from the Billy Butlin Holiday Camps, s
o popular in the post-war days. You were awakened in the morning with jocular cries from tannoys. You were cajoled into before-breakfast exercises to loud music.
Did Orwell know about these camps?
No, he died before they got going. And they didn't know about him. But the interesting thing is that they were immensely popular for a time, and that was when the term camp and the thought of even harmless regimentation ought to have sickened the average Briton. Of course, they were comparatively cheap. But that wasn't enough to recommend them. Men came out of the army to spend a summer fortnight with wife and family in an ambience which had a great deal of the army about it - reveille, cookhouses, dining-halls, organized diversions, physical jerks (an aspect of army life which most soldiers hated worse than going into battle). There were uniformed camp officers called redcoats - a name uncomfortably close to redcaps, which was what the Military Police were called. And there was always this loud big-brotherly voice from the loudspeakers, exhorting everybody to be happy. Late drinkers-up in the canteen at closing-time were danced off in a cunning conga-line by the female redcoats. The Butlin Holiday Camps proved that the British proletariat was not really averse to discipline. The working man opposed to army life not civilian freedom so much as the infusion of geniality into regimentation. The post-war proletariat accepted the Holiday Camps as readily as they accepted American Army units in English villages, endless shopping lines, the insolence of petty bureaucrats.
And that proves what?
I refuse to draw a moral. The moral that Orwell draws from what he saw of the British working man is terrible and excessive. I insist on looking for comedy.
And for an identification of 1984 with 1948?
Yes, which is part of the comedy, comedy a bit grim at times, positively black. And a touch of pathos. One wants to weep over Winston Smith, so recognizable as an Englishman of the forties bred out of the working class - 'a smallish, frail figure . . . his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended'. Inured to cold weather and privation, undersized through a tradition of poverty and bad feeding. He looks out on London 'with a sort of vague distaste. . . . Were there always those vistas of rotting nineteenthcentury houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?' The answer is - not always. This is the London of war-time or just after. It's certainly not a London of prophetic vision.
It is, surely. How about the Ministry of Love, of Truth and so on?
Well, the Ministry of Truth may certainly be accepted as the Broadcasting House where Orwell worked during the war. Headquarters of the BBC. The other ministries merely have to look like this prototype. In the Ministry of Love there's that terrible room where the worst thing in the world happens - Room 101. Room 101, in the basement of Broadcasting House, was where Orwell used to broadcast propaganda to India. Not far from Broadcasting House was, and still is, a pub called the George, popular with BBC employees. Sir Thomas Beecham christened it the Gluepot, because his musicians got stuck in it. The name itself has stuck. Now, in Nineteen EightyFour you have this place with a bad aura, the Chestnut Tree Cafe, where Winston Smith ends up with his cloveflavoured gin, waiting for the bullet. They're one and the same place, though the Chestnut Tree Cafe has a touch of the Mandrake Club about it, a place where you drank gin of mysterious provenance and played chess. Strangely, the bad aura of the George began after Orwell's death. It was the pub where you had a drink with Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice or Roy Campbell and, on your next visit, learned they were dead. Notice what the song is that Winston hears coming out of the telescreen as he drinks his gin and puzzles over a chess problem:
Underneath the spreading chestnut tree,
I sold you and you sold me. . . .
We always associated that - not with those unpleasant words, of course - with King George VI in his scoutmaster capacity. The song was even turned into a dance, like the Lambeth Walk, and was terribly and bucolically innocent. Orwell really poisons the past when he puts in the sneering yellow note. Not funny. Not comic at all.
But, otherwise, you'd say that the book was an exaggerated picture of a bad time, no more?
Oh, much more, but I have to establish that Orwell wasn't really forecasting the future. Novels are made out of sense data, not ideas, and it's the sensuous impact of this novel that counts to me. I mean the gin - giving off 'a sickly oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit' (how could Winston know that? That's the author himself, late of the Burma police, getting in the way.) The shortage of cigarettes, and the only cigarettes on the ration are called Victory, the very brand that was issued to us overseas British troops during the war - sporadically. The cheating of the senses with shoddy food, drink and tobacco, the rough clothes, coarse soap, blunt razor blades, the feeling of being unkempt and unclean - it was all there for fictional transference. It was a bad time for the body. One asked for the bread of minimal comfort and was offered instead the stone of progress.
Progress. That brings us to Ingsoc, doesn't it?
Yes. The torn poster on the street, flapped by the wind, with the single word INGSOC on it. English Socialism. I remember English Socialism coming to power in 1945, a landslide victory for the Left. They sang The Red Flag at the opening session of Parliament. It drowned God Save the King and Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory. Winston Churchill, war leader and head of the Conservative Party, was first astonished that the country should reject him, the man who had led it through the valley of the shadow to the sunlit uplands of a qualified triumph, and later he spoke of betrayal. The justification of his rejection lay in that very astonishment: he just didn't seem to understand what had been going on.
Why is Winston Smith so called?
We'll come to that. We've some tricky waters to navigate now. Is English Socialism the same as Ingsoc? Did Orwell think it was? And yet he wanted Socialism. We all did. They say that English Socialism prevailed in 1945 because of the services vote. An elaborate apparatus was set up in ships and camps all over the world to enable British servicemen to exercise their citizen's right of suffrage. Very few abstained from voting. A great many - even those who, like myself, had been brought up in a Conservative tradition and were later to return to it - voted Labour without hesitation.
Why?
Oh, Winston Churchill himself had something to do with it. The senior officers liked him, but he wasn't all that popular with the troops. He'd many of the qualities that make a people's hero - eccentric colourfulness, a gift for obscenity and coarse wit, a mode of speech that sounded more demotic than that of certain of the Labour leaders - though it was really the aristocratic twang of an earlier age. He had a large capacity for brandy and cigars. But it was unwise of him to smoke these when visiting the troops. Some of us at times would have given our souls for a puff at a Victory cigarette.
What, apart from the cigars, was the matter with him?
He was too fond of war. Many of us, by the time of the 1945 election, had been in uniform for nearly six years. We wanted to get out and resume - or begin, most of us - our real lives. Churchill orated about the dangers of a too-hasty disbanding of the citizen army. An iron curtain had come down in Eastern Europe; the Russian ally had returned to his old role of the Bolshevik menace. We knew nothing, we simple soldiers, of the new processes of international politics - the sudden shifts of policy. We'd thought Russia was our great fellow-fighter against fascist tyranny, and now she'd become the enemy. We were naive enough to imagine that to great statesmen, as to us, war was a necessary but painful interlude. We didn't know that great statesmen consider war to be an aspect of a continuing policy. We'd had enough of Churchill. He wept when we rejected him.
But Orwell obviously admired him. He wouldn't have named his hero for him otherwise.
No, no, no. It seemed to many of the first American readers of Nineteen EightyFour that Winston Smith's name was a symbol of a n
oble free tradition lost for ever. But it was nothing of the kind. It was comedy again. The name Winston Smith is comic: it gets a laugh from British readers. It also suggests something vaguely shameful, a political amateurism that never stood a chance against the new professionals.
The rejection of Churchill must surely have represented a very small part of the reason for turning to Socialism in 1945. Wasn't there compulsory instruction in civics during the war? Didn't that lead servicemen to a wish for a change of government?
To some extent. The greater part of the British population had never been much interested in politics, but there was indeed a measure of compulsory civic education during the war, especially in the army, with weekly discussions led by platoon commanders on topical material supplied by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs - ABCA, a whiff of the new age, the pregnant acronym. There was even a stirring song that nobody sang:
ABCA -
Sing it or say it -
Leading the way
To a brave new world.
Till over Europe, freed from her chains,
Liberty's flag is again unfurled,
We'll keep aflame
Democracy's torchlight,
Scorching the wings
Of this night of shame -
Freedom to all,
To act and to utter:
ABCA is calling
In freedom's name.
God help us. There were also lectures by education officers or sergeants on what was called the British Way and Purpose. There was, in fact, a self-avowed attempt to revive the idea of a well-informed citizen army on the lines of Cromwell's Roundheads, who are said to have known what they were fighting for. There were also frank borrowings from the Soviet Army, with its wall-newspapers and political commissars or polkoms.
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