George Orwell

What can be said in four pages about one of the more important writers of the 20^th Century?  So much has been analysed and written, his words dragooned into arguments from every side of politics, his novels bearing the weight of hundreds, if not thousands of explanatory texts, especially as many of his books have been listed as set books in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, and more!  The amount written about Orwell and his life is such that the person has almost disappeared from view.  However, if my blog rules mean I have to comment on an author whose surname begins with ‘O’ how can I avoid him?  While I want to talk about 1984 in particular, some background on the man might be interesting.

As I am sure you know, Eric Blair was born in India, in 1903.  His father, Richard Blair, was a ‘Sub-Deputy Opium Agent’ in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, a department responsible for the production, storage and sale of opium to China.  I know, hard to believe, but the British never missed a trick.  His mother was of French descent and had been brought up in Burma.  When he was a one-year-old, his mother took him and his six-year-old sister to Henley-on-Thames; he didn’t see his father again until he came to England nine years later.  After attending various schools, his final four years were at Eton.  As his parents couldn’t afford to send him to a university, they decided that Blair should join the public service.  In 1922 he left England to take up a position in the Indian Imperial Police, and for the next five years worked in various locations in Burma, which was where his maternal grandmother lived.  In 1927 he went down with dengue fever and returned to England, and in early 1928 he resigned from the police, determined to become a writer.

He wrote both fiction and non-fiction.   Now a teacher, Blair was ready to publish his first major book, Down and Out in Paris and London, in 1932.  Concerned that his life as a ‘down and out’, as a tramp, might be embarrassing for his family, especially given his book would reveal the time he’d spent living with the ‘impoverished lower class’, he decided to publish under a different name.  With help from his literary agent, he finally adopted the pen name George Orwell because it was ‘a good round English name’.  George was inspired by the patron saint of England, and Orwell after the River Orwell, in Suffolk, one of his  favourite haunts.  Abandoning teaching, he started working in a second-hand bookshop, and completed his second book and his first novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in 1936.

However, the work which consolidated his growing reputation was The Road to Wigan Pier.  The first half of the book documents his investigations into the working life of coal miners in northern England.  The book had a rather different second half, comprising an extensive essay on his upbringing and the development of his political conscience, one which included an argument for socialism.  Having said that, it was far from dull, as he balanced the concerns and goals of socialism against the barriers it faced from the movement’s own advocates at the time.  He describes many of them as ‘priggish’ and ‘dull’ socialist intellectuals and others as ‘proletarian socialists’ with little grasp of the actual ideology of the socialist movement.  His publishers, Gollancz, were worried the second half would offend readers and included a disclaimer in the  preface to the book, added when Orwell was already overseas in Spain. Despite this, his research for the book led to him being placed under surveillance by the UK Special Branch in 1936, a situation that only ended in 1948.

Married in June 1936, Orwell had begun to follow the political crisis in Spain and tracked the developments there closely. At the end of the year, worried about the various fascist groups, Orwell decided to go to Spain to join the Spanish Civil War, a choice made on the basis of his views about combating Fascism and defending democracy.  When asked about his desire to get into Spain, he responded “I’ve come to fight against Fascism”, but later he commented that if he had been asked what he was fighting for “I should have answered: ‘Common decency’”.  The war was a mess, and in May 1937 Orwell was wounded, fighting on the front, shot in the throat by a sniper’s bullet. After treatment in Barcelona, he was declared medically unfit for service, and he and his wife, who had joined him in Spain, returned to England in June 1937, and he settled down to a life of managing farm animals and writing a manuscript that was later published as Homage to Catalonia.

Although he was being published, he was doing so with relatively poor sales.  Homage to Catalonia was published by Secker & Warburg and was a commercial flop.  After the Orwells spent time in Morocco, where he wrote Coming up for Air, they returned to England .  The Second World War saw his wife, Eileen, take on a position in the Censorship Department of Ministry of Information in London.  George Orwell also sought war work, but without success.  “They won’t have me in the army, at any rate at present, because of my lungs”, but in 1940 he was able to join the Home Guard.  He continued to write articles, mainly on socialism in England.   Finally, in August 1941, Orwell at last obtained some ‘war work’ when he was taken on full-time by the BBC, working in the propaganda office.

With this role, his life began to change.  At the BBC, he  introduced the ‘Voices’ literary programme to accompany his Indian war broadcasts.  Now he was leading an active social life with literary friends, especially those on the  left.  By late 1942, he was writing regularly for the left-wing weekly, Tribune.  In early 1943 he started  working on a new book.  In September he resigned from the BBC, following a report which confirmed his worst suspicions:  few Indians listened to his broadcasts!  However, while somewhat disillusioned, the more important motivation was that he wanted to focus on writing.  The book he was trying to complete was Animal Farm, which appeared in 1945.  Within weeks of its release,  Eileen suddenly died in hospital, during anaesthesia for a routine operation.

Animal Farm was a worldwide success.  For the next few years Orwell continued to write as a journalist, mainly in Tribune, The Observer and the Manchester Evening News, and spent much of the rest of his time on the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four (or just 1984, as I will refer to it from now on).  From 1945 to 1949 he alternated between London and Jura, a small island in the Inner Hebrides.  Life on Jura was tough, and following a boating accident, just before Christmas 1947 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.  By January 1949, with 1984 completed, he was placed in a sanatorium in a remote part of the Cotswolds.  His health continued to decline, and he died in January 1950.  I can’t quite explain why, but to me it seems appropriate that his gravestone bears the epitaph: ‘Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th, 1903, died January 21st, 1950’, with no mention made of his books or pen name.  I think I feel that way because it is the books that matter, not the man.

In one of his essays, Politics and the English Language, Orwell wrote about the importance of precise and clear language, arguing that vague writing can be used as a powerful tool of political manipulation because it shapes the way we think. In that essay, Orwell provides six rules for writers:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I can’t think of a better, succinct guide to good writing.

Animal Farm seems a horribly prescient satire.  Initially it was read as a thinly veiled commentary on Stalin and communist oppression, but also as a parable about dictators and would-be liberators everywhere.  Whether it was specifically targeted on Stalin or not, now it appears as fresh as ever, and when we read about the ‘revolutionary’ animals and their slide into totalitarianism, the story is just as relevant to our understanding of the world today as it was seventy years ago – if not more so.  The emergence of dictatorship seems woven into the fabric of even the most idealistic of organisations, and many charismatic leaders seem to harbour an inner tendency to become cruel oppressors, whether in politics or in business.

Orwell was a Revolutionary Socialist in that he hoped that there would be a socialist revolution in England, and, as he said more than once, if violence was necessary, violence there should be. “I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood,” he wrote in an essay in 1940 and a year later added, “It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free. . . . Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place.”  Orwell had decided capitalism had proved to be an unambiguous failure, and he never changed his opinion.  He had little doubt about the superiority of a planned economy.  “It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption … The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them.”  A socialist England, as Orwell described it, would be a classless society with virtually no private property.

After the horrific end to the Second World War, in 1947 Orwell wrote an analysis of emerging geopolitics, which appeared in the Partisan Review,  He explained there were three possible futures in a nuclear world: a pre-emptive nuclear strike by the United States against the Soviet Union; a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, wiping out most of the human race and returning life to the Bronze Age; and a stalemate created by the fear of actually using atomic bombs and other weapons of mass destruction, what we now describe as that uncomfortable balance of power based on the policy of mutually assured destruction. This third possibility, Orwell argued, was the worst of all.  It would mean the division of the world among two or three vast superstates, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion.  Each superstate would be hierarchical, dominated by a small self-perpetuating oligarchy strangling the liberty of the rest of society. Within each superstate, Orwell believed the elite would keep the rest of the world at bay, relying on a continuous phony war against the other rival states.

This is, of course, the path that history took. Mutually assured destruction was the guiding policy of the arms race and the Cold War.  It was Orwell who coined the term ‘Cold War,’ and after his death he became a hero to ‘Cold Warriors’, liberal and conservative alike. But he hated the idea of a Cold War, and made it clear he preferred being bombed back to the Bronze Age.  He never contemplated the United States could or would become a force for liberty and democracy. Published in 1949, 1984 is Orwell’s vision of what the Cold War might be like: a mindless and interminable struggle among totalitarian monsters.

Orwell did not invent this global scenario, but he provided, in 1984, a vocabulary for its deployment, with terms such as ‘Big Brother’, doublethink and thought police.  Once words are used, their meanings become more and more slippery.  Today when a court allows videotape from a hidden camera to be used in a trial, this is evidence of ‘big brother’.  When a politician presents a  proposal to permit logging on national land as an environmentally friendly move, he is charged with ‘doublethink’.  When a critic finds sexism in a poem, she might be accused of being a member of the ‘thought police’, only to be attacked moments later by others for failing to support transsexuals.  Sadly, today we see Orwell’s terms used to discredit virtually any position, making Orwell everyone’s favourite political thinker!

As I am sure you remember, 1984 is an account of the life, or part of the life, of Winston Smith, a worker at the Oceania Ministry of Truth.  His role is to rewrite history, to conform with the state’s changing requirements.  Oceania, one of the three totalitarian states that control the world, is ruled by ‘The Party’, and its mysterious leader, ‘Big Brother’.  Winston dreams of opposing the party’s rule, although he knows if he is discovered the Thought Police’ will apprehend him, and he’ll be cast out of society.  He meets Julia, who works with the novel writing machines in the ministry.  They begin an affair.  Winston Smith begins to get involved with an underground resistance movement, the ‘Brotherhood’.  Just in case you haven’t read the novel, I won’t reveal any more, except to add it is a dark story.

Here we are nearly forty years later, and the novel and reality have become closer and closer.  Do we have three totalitarian superstates?  Well, China certainly fits that bill, as does Russia, and that leaves the marginally less well controlled ‘democratic west’.  Is there constant surveillance through cameras, and hidden microphones?  Surely, but today we would add through the internet as another way.  What happens to those who buck the system?  In China and Russia there are camps for incarceration.  In the West, well, we know how to make life difficult, and many countries are not above throwing dissidents into prison.  In some cases, people effectively disappear.  Hello, or perhaps I should say goodbye, Julian Assange.

Fortunately, I live in Australia.  While it might have an uncomfortable relationship with China, it is part of that democratic alliance centred on the US.  And none of that surveillance stuff happens here except … except email monitoring, phone monitoring, and even, recently, a proposal to give the police access to the private cameras some people instal on their home front doors. We might not have as many cameras monitoring our city streets and railway stations as the UK, but we’re getting there.  If you want to be under constant surveillance, just publish something about communism and revolutions, and you’re guaranteed to be on a list.  As for doublethink, newspapers and news channels have largely abandoned telling us what is going on as much as ‘interpreting’ events for us.  Media companies can reshape, conflate and simplify to the extent that it’s almost impossible to find out what’s actually been happening.

I don’t want to be accused of exaggeration.  Nor do I want to end up on a watch list (here’s hoping I’m too old for them to care about me).  However, I do wish more people would read and debate 1984.  Great novels are said to be ‘timeless’.  While 1984 is extremely well written, it’s not just timeless, it is pressing.  Donald Trump rode to popularity on the basis of alleged malfeasance by ‘them’.  Sadly, we are getting closer to that situation in Australia too.  When people talk about Big Brother, they usually mean a system of covert surveillance and manipulation, oppression in democratic disguise (unlike the system in Orwell’s book, which was so overt that it was publicised).  1984 encouraged us to imagine the government as a conspiracy against liberty.  Here we are in 2022 with the US Republicans advancing just that argument.  Looking forward to 2024 anyone?