GEORGE ORWELL AND THE ROAD TO 1984
This Essay is Based Upon a Talk Given on 7th May 2015 to
CFC Seniors At Chelsea Football Ground
1.
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| George Orwell |
So who was George Orwell? Well, firstly he was no secular
saint as some, on the right of the spectrum have sought to make him –in part in an
attempt to claim him posthumously as one of their own.
Orwell’s reality though not exactly involving destitution,
was one of being constantly hard up, eking an existence out of journalism and
writing book reviews. It is a reality satirized here by Orwell himself.
‘In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room
littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten
dressing-grown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter
among the piles of dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers
away because the wastepaper basket is already overflowing, and besides,
somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills it is possible that
there is a cheque for two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay
into the bank. There are also letters with addresses which ought to be entered
in his address book. He has lost this address book, and the thought of looking
for it, or indeed of looking for anything, afflicts him with acute suicidal
impulses.
He is a man of thirty-five, but looks
fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them
if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him he
will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak
he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the
morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours
ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been
frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of
the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy
boots of his creditors clumping up and down the stairs. The most recent
interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two
circulars and an income-tax demand printed in red.’
Thus the lonely wordsmith hammering away on a typewriter
conforms to our somewhat romantic and idealised notions of ‘the writer.’
However this picture only partially reveals Orwell to us,- although the portrait painted above does place
him centrally in ‘the devils decade,’ the 1930’s.
2.
But to understand who Orwell was we need to place him firmly
within the class structure of Edwardian England. Though to begin with he was not in fact George Orwell, but was born in 1903 and christened Eric Arthur
Blair – Orwell came later.[1] In the
highly stratified Edwardian class system, Orwell came from what I can only call
the lower upper middle class. His family had neither the wealth nor social
status to gain automatic access to a range of privileges, like automatic access
to Harrow or Eton – though Orwell [Blair] did go to the latter on a
scholarship. No, Orwell’s family came from that strata of the middle class that
built the Empire. Deprived of the kind of aristocratic status they craved at
home, abroad they could live as absolute lords and masters, petty tyrants who
exercised near absolute power over the natives; a power they could employ either
benignly or otherwise, for there were few checks to the exercise of their authority. And
it this service that Orwell’s father served as an official in the Opium
Department of the Indian Civil Service.[2] It was a
service which his son Eric, who never it seems considered university, also chose
to serve. After leaving Eton he joined the imperial police force in Burma,
(now Myanmar).
 |
Burmese Provincial Police Training School in Mandalay
(1923).
Orwell is third from the left in the back row.
|
In Burma Orwell witnessed the brutality of empire at first hand and it disgusted him, disgusted and to some extent frightened him.[3] Could he become just another sadistic and blinkered official, drinking himself to death whilst lording it over the natives and using the local women as little more than sex slaves? It is this ability, as Christopher Hitchens points out, that separates Orwell from so many other left wing intellectuals, to look into himself and identify the raw material out of which the fascist thug and bullying commissar are made. These elements, to some extent, exist in all of us, though it is a rare individual who openly recognizes the fact.*
How his position as a colonial policeman might have eventually transformed Blair/Orwell he didn't wait around
to find out. He resigned his post and, in one of the most remarkable
transformations of modern literature, Eric Blair became George Orwell; a
transformation that saw him become a tramp, a down-and-out, a dishwasher in Paris and London and inhabiting the very margins of society. Orwell was completely rejecting his class background and, in revulsion to the authority he had exercised in Burma, adopted the lifestyle of the powerless and marginalized.
After these experiences he went on to document the conditions of the unemployed and working poor in the industrial heartland of northern England at the very height of the great depression. By the middle years of the 1930’s Eric Blair had transformed himself into George Orwell, a writer clearly identifying himself as being on the left.
3.
After these experiences he went on to document the conditions of the unemployed and working poor in the industrial heartland of northern England at the very height of the great depression. By the middle years of the 1930’s Eric Blair had transformed himself into George Orwell, a writer clearly identifying himself as being on the left.
3.
Then in the summer of 1936 The Spanish Civil War
broke out, a war that framed the divisions that split Europe wide open in
the 1930’s. Unhappy semi-feudal Spain became the battleground between the two
great Totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, Fascism/Nazism and Communism. Valiantly opposed by those, like Orwell fighting for democracy and socialism.
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| A State of Affairs Worth Fighting For |
Orwell, as soon as he could, made his way to Spain, planning
to report on the war from the Republican side. Though as soon as he had arrived in Barcelona he identified that, in his own words, he had found ‘a state of affairs
worth fighting for.’ He immediately enlisted, more by accident than design
in the POUM militia, a small Trotskyist outfit fighting in Catalonia.
As the war progressed the Communists sought to eliminate all non-communist opposition in Spain. In May 1937 fighting broke out in Barcelona between pro-communist Government forces and the Anarchists and Trotskyists of Catalonia. In the aftermath of these ‘May Days,’ in which Orwell had been reluctantly sucked into the fighting, the POUM was purged. Andrés Nin its founder was murdered, whilst Orwell was lucky to escape with his life, just one step ahead of the NKVD. (His Spanish diaries are somewhere in the KGB/FSB archives)
As the war progressed the Communists sought to eliminate all non-communist opposition in Spain. In May 1937 fighting broke out in Barcelona between pro-communist Government forces and the Anarchists and Trotskyists of Catalonia. In the aftermath of these ‘May Days,’ in which Orwell had been reluctantly sucked into the fighting, the POUM was purged. Andrés Nin its founder was murdered, whilst Orwell was lucky to escape with his life, just one step ahead of the NKVD. (His Spanish diaries are somewhere in the KGB/FSB archives)
On emerging from the war he wrote a book, Homage to
Catalonia, which contained his account of the May fighting. An account which directly
contradicted the standard Stalinist line. As a consequence he found it nearly
impossible to get the book published. Orwell’s usual editor refused to publish the book;
and by the time of the writer’s death in 1950, less than 1,000 copies had been
sold. Though it is not possible to fully understand how his two great classic books,
the novella Animal Farm and his dystopian masterpiece 1984 without reading ‘Homage
to Catalonia’ and the essay that Orwell wrote in 1943, 'Looking Back on the
Spanish War,' where Orwell wrote:-
'The Communists churned
out blatant lies and propaganda aimed at making the POUM out to be no more than a gang of disguised Fascists, in the pay of Franco and
Hitler.” [4]
The deliberate obfuscation of the truth surrounding the May 1937 Barcelona riots, during which Orwell held down the rooftop of the POUM headquarters in Plaça Catalunya, as the Anarchists fended off an attack by government forces at the Telephone Exchange, set the stage for the abolition of the POUM. The POUM, the Communists maintained, had abandoned the front in order to spearhead an insurrection with the Anarchists. This lie, along with a host of others cited by Orwell, was taken for truth inside and outside of Spain.
The deliberate obfuscation of the truth surrounding the May 1937 Barcelona riots, during which Orwell held down the rooftop of the POUM headquarters in Plaça Catalunya, as the Anarchists fended off an attack by government forces at the Telephone Exchange, set the stage for the abolition of the POUM. The POUM, the Communists maintained, had abandoned the front in order to spearhead an insurrection with the Anarchists. This lie, along with a host of others cited by Orwell, was taken for truth inside and outside of Spain.
'I remember saying once
to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he nodded in immediate
understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more
particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no
event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first
time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not
even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles
reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds
of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as
cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the
heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these
lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events
that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of
what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party
lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It
concerned secondary issues — namely, the struggle for power between the
Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian
Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad picture of the war
which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The
main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their
backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they
possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy,
and in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise.'[5]
Here we see the birth of The Ministry of Truth, as suddenly
black becomes white and black white and the brain copes with the switch
effortlessly, as the whole concept of objective truth is buried under a
mountain of lies. Orwell felt that he had witnessed the shape and form of a possible future and from
then on set himself the task of both warning against this future and combating the trends that threatened to bring it about. Which with the demise of the Third
Reich, meant opposing Stalinism.
Now in taking on Stalin and the ideology of Communism Orwell
needed a lot of guts; for when Orwell was writing in the late thirties and
early forties active membership of the Communist Party, or some level of fellow
travelling, was the norm among the left. And the Communists were adept at
fighting very dirty.[6] But
Orwell had a weapon in the form of the English language. He had a profound understanding of language and the way in which
language can be used to distort, shape and ultimately change reality. He relentlessly pointed out the dangers of slipping into the language of obfuscation and euphemism. Again it
is not possible to fully understand Orwell' thinking without reading his essay, Politics and
The English Language.
4.
4.
Orwell died age 46 in 1950 believing that 1984 was a failure.[7] He would
have been astonished at his success, appalled by the attempts to turn him into
a secular saint, and even more astonished at his place in the history of the
twentieth century.
Since his death there have been repeated attempts by the
right to take ownership of Orwell, so I will give the last word to Orwell himself. These were the last words
that Orwell wrote, written in a sanatorium in the south of England as he was
dying of tuberculosis. As I have written elsewhere,
does this sound like a man ‘on the verge of putting on carpet slippers and
writing complacent editorials for the Daily Telegraph?’
‘Curious effect, here
in the sanatorium, on Easter Sunday, when the people in this (the most
expensive) block of “chalets” mostly have visitors, of hearing large numbers of
upper-class English voices. I have been almost out of the sound of them for two
years, hearing them at most one or two at a time, my ears growing more &
more used to working-class or lower-middle class Scottish voices. In the
hospital at Hairmyres, for instance, I literally never heard a “cultivated”
accent except when I had a visitor. It is as though I were hearing these voices
for the first time. And what voices! A sort of over-fedness, a fatuous
self-confidence, a constant bah-bahing of laughter about nothing, above all a
sort of heaviness & richness combined with a fundamental ill-will—people
who, one instinctively feels, without even being able to see them, are the enemies
of anything intelligent or sensitive or beautiful. No wonder everyone hates us
so.’
*Least of all the baying mobs of 'anti-Fascists' and 'no-platform' brigade. One is often reminded of the scene in Animal Farm when the animals look from the pigs to the humans and back again, and can no longer see the difference.
[1]
When considering a pen name for himself he did momentarily consider H Lewis
Always. One can only wonder the impact this might have had, would we be talking
about sinister Alwaysian surveillance
[2]
In effect Orwell father was a drug dealer, albeit officially sanctioned, in an
institution that served to force the Chinese to purchase Indian opium.
[3]
I am grateful to Christopher Hitchens for this insight into Orwell.
[5]
Ibid.
[6]
Though never as dirty in England as on the continent, where assassination of
political opponents was, if not commonplace, frequent enough to make some in
the party think twice before breaking ranks.
[7]
For example he thought Room 101 was a crude device, which indeed it is, though
gets the job done in putting across Orwell’s terrible vision of the limits of
human solidarity. There are other weaknesses in the novel, Orwell was never a
great novelist, his most realised piece of fiction is I think the much
neglected ‘Coming Up For Air.’ Still any weaknesses in 1984 are overshadowed by
the sheer power, and horror, of the tale it tells.
