before we talk about the books you have chosen, could you tell us a bit about who was george orwell, whose birth name was eric arthur blair?
somehow, it was a very mainstream product of its time. he was born in 1903 into what he with characteristic accuracy called “the upper-lower-middle classes” of British life. his father was a colonial official working in the east. his definition of himself was that most of his experience was theoretical. I mean, in theory, the Blair family were the kind of people who hunted and shot, had servants, and dressed for dinner. But in practice, since his father was a fairly low-ranking civil servant, as he rightly said, they didn’t have enough money to do that.
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And although Orwell went to Eton, England’s largest public school, he was only able to do so because he was smart enough to win a scholarship. in a sense, he was paying his way by surviving on his youthful brilliance. but when he got to this great public school, most of his life was gone. he slacked off, he didn’t do particularly well and he ended up having a career working in the burma police force. therefore, his early life until he began writing books was relatively dark and rather unremarkable.
then he leaves the burma police to become a writer, which could lead us to his first choice, the book down and out in paris and london (1933), an account of the time orwell worked as an impoverished dishwasher in kitchens Parisians and in London hostels.
Orwell took a long time to become a writer. he came back from burma at the end of 1927. now there are several myths behind this. it was always thought that due to his later radicalism and anti-imperialist stance of his as a writer, he returned home after serving in the colonial police force in a furious rage, determined to throw off all the trappings of the British raj and imperialism . but in fact he came home from burma with a medical certificate. he had been sick with dengue fever. He still hadn’t decided if he was going to leave, so he had a six-month leave of absence in England at the end of 1927. In the end, he decided that he didn’t want to go back to Burma, he wanted to become a writer. it is a sign of the way he felt that the implementation of this decision took more or less five years. He published the first articles of his and then embarked on what these days we would call the research tour that occurred in Paris and London.
“it took Orwell a long time to become a writer”
the fascination of going back and forth in paris and london is that it is his first book. In it, you can see Orwell stumbling, moving toward the kind of writer he wants to be, choosing the kind of subject he thinks will be appropriate. He spent time in Paris, humbly working in hotels and restaurants as what the French call a plongeur, someone who basically washes dishes. He then returned to England and embarked on what he called his “wandering adventures,” posing as depressed. He left and stayed in what were known as “informal pavilions” in the south of England, and walked through Kent, Essex and the London counties, amassing prints for what became his first book.
again, these are often thought to be the first indications of orwell’s pronounced social conscience; that he was already in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. which of course he was, but we must also remember that, on another level, he was a writer in search of copy. he was a journalist looking for experiences that he could turn into books. it is very interesting that one of the english passages in down and out in paris and london is obviously based on a book called the autobiography of a supervagabond by a writer named wh davies, which had appeared a quarter of a century earlier. obviously he was using literary models.
Apart from the brilliance of the reporting (he stays in these awful places and talks to homeless people and homeless people and men and women of the street), the interesting thing about homeless people in paris and london is that it was the non-fiction book on the internet. who becomes george orwell, having been born eric arthur blair. it is well known that he did not like being called ‘eric’. one or two critics in the past have suggested that this was an almost mythological transformation, in which a certain type of person becomes another type of person through a change of name. but actually calling himself ‘george orwell’ happened almost by accident. he decided that he wanted down and out in paris and london to be published under a pseudonym, because he thought his very respectable parents might take a bit of offense at some of the more colorful issues, especially the paris part. He wrote down a list of possible pseudonyms, one of which was “H Lewis Forever”. Imagine if 1984 had always been written by H Lewis!
in the end, he stayed in suffolk at his parents’ house. He went on a day trip to Ipswich, the county town, and came back and said to his then-girlfriend, “I’ll call myself George Orwell.” it’s the name of the king, ‘george’, a good solid english name, and ‘orwell’ is the name of the local river that flows through suffolk’. So, George Orwell. a very simple process, in the end.
I was struck by Orwell reflecting on his time as a plongeur in Paris, in chapter xxii. he writes that this work, which is basically a modern form of slavery, might be worthwhile if it had some social purpose, but in reality, he sees no real point in restaurants or hotels: you can have better food at home, he says. . it is at once pragmatic, funny and anti-capitalist.
the question of how and when orwell got his political consciousness is fascinating. I would say that he did not really acquire full political consciousness until he went to Spain in 1937, he lived for a time in Barcelona and saw what he considered democratic socialism in action.
interestingly, i discovered a new unpublished letter from this time, written in the autumn of 1931, again to the then bride in suffolk. this was a time when england was in political crisis: we had come off the gold standard and were about to elect a national government, and orwell, who was actually living in london at the time, writes to his friend eleanor and says some words. the effect that “the situation is very disturbed… there will probably be riots in the fall, but I don’t know anything about this because I’m not interested in or knowledgeable about politics”. Which seems like a very strange thing for George Orwell to be writing at the age of 28.
how much down and out is manufactured in london? is it a bit like thoreau in the cockpit: the appearance of isolation while actually being quite close to reinforcements and support?
A good comparison to make is with some of Orwell’s reminiscences of Burma. there is the famous essay ‘A Hanging’ (1931), which is written from the point of view of someone who sees a prisoner being hanged. and then there’s ‘shooting an elephant’ (1936), which is always seen as this big symbolic attack on British imperialism. But it has never been conclusively proven that Orwell saw a man hanged, and it has never been conclusively proven that he shot an elephant. There is an account of a British colonial official shooting an elephant like that in the Rangoon Gazette, the Burmese newspaper of the time. but it’s not orwell, he’s someone else. Earlier I noted that Orwell was very conscious of using literary models when he began writing. much of his work is framed within procedures established by other writers. The essay on Going to See the Hanging in Burma, for example, in terms of its structure and some of the reflections on human rights, sounds more like an essay Thackeray wrote called ‘Going to See a Man Hanged’ (1840).
While I’m sure much of the book is based on his personal experience, I think it’s woven together from several parts, and I suspect a liberties or two are taken. there are some parts that i don’t believe at all, like the conversation he has with his friend charlie about the brothel, and others, that i think is made up. it’s the way many nonfiction writers work. you don’t have to blindly swear that everything absolutely happened; it’s a matter of the ultimate aesthetic effect you’re trying to produce. but while I have my doubts about a certain amount of downstairs and outside construction, it doesn’t detract in the least. one could not say that it was not a faithful and autobiographical description of his life.
Turning to fiction, his next pick is Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935). tell us about this book and why you chose it.
The Daughter of a Cleric is a very strange book. What I mean by this is that it is the only one of Orwell’s novels that actually has a central female character rather than a male. her name is dorothy hare, and she is a spinster in her twenties who lives with her rather tyrannical elderly father in a rural suffolk town called knype hill, a very thinly disguised version of southwold on the suffolk coast, where orwell lived from time to time with their parents.
In the book, Dorothy literally loses her sense of self and wakes up three days later as a homeless woman, walking with a group of homeless people to Kent. she returns to london, spends a night in trafalgar square with the tramps, and then is more or less rescued by one of her father’s relatives, and ends up teaching at some horrible private school in west london, before, at the end , returning to live in his father’s vicarage. it’s a fascinating novel, because what orwell is essentially doing is taking various different parts of his own life: living in suffolk, the adventures of the drifters, teaching in horrible private schools (which is what he did for a living in the early the 1930s)—and ties them all together in a story about someone else.
The great fascination for me about A Clergyman’s Daughter is that, although it was published in the UK in 1935, it is essentially the same plot as 1984, not appearing until fourteen years later. it is about someone who is spied on, eavesdropped on, and oppressed by vast outside forces they can do nothing about. he makes an attempt at rebellion and then has to compromise. The last scene of A Clergyman’s Daughter has Dorothy back in her father’s parsonage in Suffolk, still doing the mundane, routine chores she was doing at the beginning of the novel, having rebelled against the life in which she is still entangled. . Like Winston Smith in 1984, she kind of had to come to terms with that. It’s a very prescient novel in terms of what came next in Orwell’s writing.
“Although A Clergyman’s Daughter is published in the UK in 1935, it is essentially the same plot as 1984”
Personally speaking, it’s the novel of his that I first read as a teenager, which is when I first read Orwell. (i wrote a biography of him that came out in 2003; i just wrote a short book, supposedly a biography from 1984, and i also just signed up to write another orwell biography that will come out in 2023, just because there is so much new material in terms of letters, correspondence, and other material.) my mother had a row of paperbacks, and one was the first penguin paperback of a clergyman’s daughter. i read it when i was 12 or 13, and the narrative voice spoke to me in a way no other novel had before, even though it was written about a woman living in suffolk 40 years earlier. ‘He knows everything about me’, I thought, ‘he wrote this especially for me’, which is what orwell himself wrote when he first read the american writer henry miller. That’s why I’ve always loved a clergyman’s daughter, even though it could be argued that it’s a series of structural imperfections.
it reminded me a bit of james joyce in some parts. Is there something in that comparison?
The third chapter of the third part of the novel, which takes place at night when everyone is sitting on benches in Trafalgar Square, is based heavily on the night-time city scene in James Joyce’s Ulysses, as well that you are absolutely right. to detect that influence.
what happened to a clergyman’s daughter after it was printed?
almost disowned him. he didn’t want it to be reprinted in his life. he said the same thing about the aspidistra, the novel he wrote in honor of a clergyman’s daughter, keep flying. although at the time of his there are letters in which he says he sweated blood over it to try to make a work of art, he would later say that he only wrote them for money.
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I think it’s too self-critical. In the context of what was being written in Britain in the 1930s, they are rather old-fashioned novels, almost Edwardian in outlook. they are more like arnold bennett than the modernist grand masters of the 1930s. but to me, they are excellent novels in their own right, and they are also seriously prescient about what orwell is going to write in the 1940s. they work on both levels. you really can’t consider the 1984 genesis without thinking of a clergyman’s daughter and keeping the aspidistra flying.
Let’s move on to continue flying the aspidistra (1936). talk a little about it.
I chose this again for both personal and broader critical reasons. The broader critical reason is that it fits wonderfully into the trajectory of that road to 1984. The plot is pretty much the same as A Cleric’s Daughter: It’s about a frustrated poet and embittered assistant bookseller named Gordon Comstock who works at a bookshop in hampstead north london, is completely disillusioned with the world, and rails against what he calls the ‘god of money’. he is an anti-capitalist without really understanding how political systems work. The novel was written in the 1930s before Orwell had nailed his flag to the political flagpole. Inexplicably, despite the fact that he is erratic and a bit of a curmudgeon, he has a wonderful girlfriend named Romero, who sincerely loves him. he has quit his job at the ad agency just so he can work at this bookstore.
As Dorothy in A Clergyman’s Daughter and as Winston Smith in 1984, he rebels against the system and is eventually sucked into it. at the end of the book, he ends up married to romero (who is expecting a baby) and goes back to work at the ad agency because it’s the only way to face the world. the only way he can provide for his family and get his lives back on track is by going back to what he didn’t want to do at the beginning of the book. Just like Winston Smith, he rebels, the rebellion fails, and he has to come to terms with a world he previously despised.
I read it in my teens and found Gordon Comstock, for all his imperfections, a wonderful figure. he wasn’t necessarily someone I aspired to be, but there are some wonderful themes early in the novel that he works on in the bookstore. Through it, Orwell projects his vision of British literature into the 1930s. At one point, Gordon goes around the shop ranting about the various authors he doesn’t like, actually kicking the spines of the books he doesn’t like. . there’s also a wonderful scene where he returns to his lodgings to find that an immensely haughty highbrow poetry magazine called primrose quarterly has rejected one of his poems, and he just has this terrible tirade: ‘the bastards! the bloody clods!’ the publisher regrets it!’ Why be so bloody cranky about it? Why not just say straight out, “We don’t want your bloody poems? We only take poems from guys we were with in Cambridge. You proletarians keep your distance”? You bloody hypocritical bastards! ”
This is very revealing in Orwellian terms. Comstock presents himself as an outsider, this person on the fringes of the literary world with no connections or strings for him to pull. However, at the same time that Orwell was working in a bookstore, his articles and his poems were being published in a magazine called Adelphi by a friend of his named Richard Rees, who like him was an old Etonian! orwell is much better connected than gordon comstock, but it’s like he’s projecting his resentments through this fictional character. Although Comstock is not Orwell, the similarities between them are very interesting.
Is Orwell mapping his own sense of social isolation onto the character’s class position?
exactly. I am convinced that most of Orwell’s work, especially fiction, contains mythological projections of himself, in other words, the person he really wants to be. he conceives of himself as this outsider, this tangential figure in the margins. But in fact, if you look at Orwell’s life in the 1930s and especially in the 1940s, he was very well connected. He had just met his old friend Cyril Connolly at the time, a very influential literary critic. When Connolly started Horizon, probably one of Britain’s best literary magazines at the time in the 1940s, Orwell was one of its star columnists. Orwell is much better connected at this point than you might imagine from some of his writing. he is not on the doormat side of literary mythology as he imagines himself.
he certainly seems very well connected on paper, but I remember some of the reminiscences his peers wrote about him, often tending to comment that there was something odd about his appearance and demeanor, that he always seemed out of place, even among Etonians, and especially when socializing with members who are not of their own class.
You’re absolutely right, but a lot of it is a bit artificial. Orwell’s friend, Anthony Powell, once said that after World War II, when the slightly posh late-night parties with fancy dress codes started again, Orwell would come in a worn old suit. he had obviously made him a really good tailor, so he looked more distinguished the more worn he got. At the door of these parties, he would look around him and say: ‘oh, is it okay for me to come in dressed like this?’
“I am convinced that most of Orwell’s work, especially fiction, contains mythological projections of himself”
there was a kind of artifice about it. he knew the rules. he was an old Etonian. on one occasion, when he invited an old comrade from the Spanish civil war to dinner with him, he wore a tuxedo. i think orwell is being a bit manipulative here and a bit timid, choosing how to behave.
given the publication date of this book, i have to mention a line from orwell’s essay ‘why i write’: “every line of serious work i have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” What catalyzed such a change in the way he wrote and thought?
in terms of orwell’s political consciousness, in early 1936 he made a tour of what was known as the distressed areas of northern england to write what eventually became the road to wigan wharf. this is sometimes seen as the mark of his political awakening. i have my doubts about that, because the reports he does from places like wigan, leeds and sheffield are not so much political as anthropological. when he meets socialists and political activists, he will write something like ‘and I met so-and-so today, who is involved in the labor movement’, giving the idea that he doesn’t really know much about it or what it consists of . there is still the feeling that he is a journalist looking for copies. Although he sympathizes a lot with the people he meets, he has not really decided yet what approach this sympathy will take.
there is a big question to the end as to what shape the road to wigan wharf would take. In fact, I once discovered in the archive a letter from Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, to Orwell’s agent, quite late, asking “What is George doing?” are you writing some essays? is he writing a proper book? What is he working on? so the road to wigan wharf joined quite late as a job. very shortly after finishing, orwell goes to spain to witness the spanish civil war, in which he ends up fighting. and he says that his original goal in going to spain was to write some journalism.
It was when he arrived in Barcelona very early in 1937 that he discovered what he thought was the ideal human community, which is a bunch of people who seemed (although there may be economic differences between them) to be living in conditions that were more or less least equal. instead of a servant in a hotel he would call you ‘sir’, he would call you ‘you’. All the deference and all the class distinctions that he observed in Britain seemed to have disappeared in Barcelona in 1937. I think this had a profound effect on him in terms of thinking about what a society could do if he really took steps to try. and institute conditions of true social equality. that’s the catalyst (1936 and early 1937) when he starts to become the political writer we know him to be in his mature years.
Tell us a bit more about the next title on your list, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), another of Orwell’s reportage books. it is famous for being divided into two very different parts.
That’s right. the first part is this wonderful report. the chapter that always struck me the most was the first, in which he stays in a dreadful boarding house run by a couple called the brookers in wigan, above a hideous guts shop. Orwell’s annoyance, which is one of his greatest traits, was outrage at having to stay in this terrible place. part of the fun of that, for me, is the way each description loads against the people involved. he obviously hates mr. and mrs. brooker, with whom he is staying. But they can’t win on any level: Orwell will describe a room as not only dirty, but also “corrupt.” just a slightly messy room is “freedom”. There is another wonderful occasion when he meets the owner, Mr. Booker, peeling potatoes, and Orwell says, “He sat by the fire with a bucket of dirty water, peeling potatoes at the speed of slow-motion film.” . now if you are peeling potatoes then the water you are peeling them in will be dirty. there is nothing you can do about it. But in Orwell’s eyes, it’s another brick in the wall. whatever the brookers do, they just can’t win. I just think it’s terribly funny, and I just don’t care how unfair it is that all the evidence is loaded against them, because it’s so brilliantly written.
The second half is a polemic about socialism written by someone who hadn’t yet figured out what socialism was. On the one hand, it’s very cunning, but on the other hand, it’s pretty clumsily done, because Orwell is still trying to come to grips with this huge issue that he’s only just begun to think about. In fact, this so offended Victor Gollancz, who published the book under the auspices of the Left Book Club in 1937, that he wrote a preface objecting to part of it. he did not follow party lines and would have offended many of the people who had encountered him.
the road to wigan wharf is a very transitory book. It shows all the attention to detail and street reporting thinking that distinguishes paris and london, but it is moving towards a political position, the political position, which will be the basis of what orwell begins to write in the 1940s, to that now we celebrate.
i realized in this and the other george orwell books you chose (in and out of paris and london and keep the aspidistra flying, for example) how deeply orwell is concerned with smell and dirt. he seems obsessed at all times with noticing how his surroundings (or even individual people) are covered in dirt and grime. what do you do with it? is it fidelity to reality, the malaise of an eton boy, an injection of jonathan swift?
Distinguished literary critic John Sutherland wrote a book called Orwell’s Nose (2016), which he describes as a “pathological biography,” after noting how acute Orwell’s sense of smell is. he obviously he is a very sensitive child. He reads the essay he wrote about his high school, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ (1952), and is practically obsessed with the smell and the noxiousness.
what is most noticeable in orwell is his meticulousness. she is always talking about sweat; he is always talking about smell; he is always talking about dirt. it’s one of several obsessions that he clearly has from a very early stage in his life that then begin to flow in a sort of unfettered tide through the novels. To give you another example, another Orwell obsession that takes root from an early age is rats. rats are everywhere in orwell’s books. there are lots of rats inside and outside; in Burmese days, every time someone is buried, there are already rats digging in the depths of the graves. It reaches its peak in 1984 when O’Brien threatens to drop the cage full of hungry rats in Winston’s face.
“people were picking up rifles and shooting in the dark, all because orwell had gotten so mad at this rat that he blew his head off”
but it flows to the end. Even as a teenager, Orwell writes letters to his friends about going out and hunting rats in the country, and says that one of the things that really annoys him in Spain, lying in his tent, is being run over by a rat in the dark. . In fact, Orwell is once supposed to have virtually started a mini-war in Spain in 1937 when he was particularly annoyed by this rat that kept getting into the trench they put him in, so he pulled out his pistol and shot it. the noise started to reverberate down the line, and I think they really thought there was an attack going on. People were picking up rifles and shooting in the dark, all because Orwell had gotten so mad at this rat that he decided to blow its head off underground.
It’s one of his obsessions: there’s his meticulousness, there’s the rat phobia, and he’s also very paranoid from a young age. he is always complaining that people are listening to him, spying on him, reading his letters. He said that one of the reasons he changed his name is that if you had an enemy, he could remove your name from a newspaper and do black magic on him. he had some very strange mental characteristics, of which I think this was one.
they might seem like mere lovable eccentricities in a novelist. but in a nonfiction writer, aren’t those qualities, a tendency to overly exaggerate dirt and mess, and a possibly exaggerated sense of paranoia, a little more dangerous and less forgivable? especially for an eton man who writes about the working classes.
Despite all the sympathy or empathy you feel, I suppose you will never be able to completely repress your feeling of disgust. It may be interesting to compare him to the Victorian writer who greatly influenced him, George Gissing. there are profound differences between them; Gissing eventually became something of an elitist who thought the working classes were out of the question and could not be saved. but at first, they both have that same immense sympathy, coupled with almost a distaste for the squalor in which people live and the limited scope of their intellectual resources and this sort of thing. I think it’s a very misleading and ambiguous view.
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Without being so reductive as to map our modern standards onto the work of another era and time, how are we supposed to deal with these anti-reader attitudes? I’m loath to ignore it or excuse it entirely, whether it’s out of disgust for the working classes or even Orwell’s anti-Semitism.
It’s a very good point, but I think you have to accept that all writers are products of their time. no one, however enlightened or disinterested, ever transcends the pressure of his time. For example, much of Orwell’s writing in the 1930s could now be recognized as anti-Semitic by modern standards. We can say the same about T S Eliot, but that doesn’t invalidate the wasteland. It was just the kind of thing, without thinking and in the days before the holocaust, that people sometimes said about Jews in the 1930s.
we are all creatures of our times and sometimes we realize that and start to make peace, which orwell did. There is a revealing article called “Revenge is Bitter” that he wrote while a war correspondent in occupied Europe in 1945, where he witnesses a confrontation between a captured SS man and a former Jewish prisoner. A Jewish friend of his chided him for his inadequate appreciation of the issues involved, and Orwell admitted that he had not given this enough thought. later in his career you can see him consciously trying not to say anything that might offend the Jews. he realizes that he may have mistakenly had a more casual attitude towards this in the past. So, we can see him trying to fix the previous mistakes, which I think is a very positive thing. but it was a creature of his time.
Finally, we have the ever famous Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). could you start by giving a brief overview of the book? how did orwell come to write it and what is it about?
most studies of orwell and orwell biography in general is an exercise in teleology, where you start with the achievement of 1984 and then work backwards to try to isolate the various factors in orwell’s life and previous writing that would have encouraged him to produce it.
One of the fascinations of 1984 is how long it took Orwell to write it. He came up with the idea in November 1943 after having observed the Tehran conference, which was when the Allied leaders Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. This was like 18 months before World War II ended, but they were already starting to sit down and divide up the post-war world. This gave Orwell his idea of what he calls “zones of influence.” the post-war world he projects in 1984 is divided into three opposing superpowers. In one of them, Oceania (based in London), Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, and he has the job of basically erasing people from history. therefore, if certain politicians fall out of favor, they will be literally erased from the printed record of his previous life.
“one of the fascinations of 1984 is how long it took orwell to write it”
Like all of Orwell’s other heroes, and even like the pigs on the animal farm, the novel written before 1984, Winston rebels against what he sees as a corrupt, intrusive, authoritarian, and autocratic system that is spying and controlling his life. these great strange forces that all of orwell’s heroes and heroines do something about; he rebels by having this love affair with julia, ‘the girl from the fiction department’, as they call her. He gets a copy of a great subversive book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein.
of course, everything goes wrong. his cover is blown; their love nest above mr charrington’s antique shop in a very poorly projected version of post-war london is raided by the thought police and taken away for re-education. Like all of Orwell’s other characters, he is defeated by the institutions and mental landscape he is supposed to be rebelling against. It is the most dramatic version of the kind of rebellion, or attempted rebellion, that I would say is at the heart of all of Orwell’s novels.
1984 gave us many unique coinages (doublethink, “big brother”, “Orwellian”). Could you talk a bit about these concepts and how they appear in the book?
The real horror of 1984, apart from the cage full of rats, is the surveillance. everyone is spied on and watched to the point that there are telescreens on the walls, watching your every move. But also, through Newspeak, the artificial language developed to meet the demands of Ingsoc, Oceania’s leaders are trying to develop a linguistic process that will constrain thought. this is really scary stuff. It’s not so much that they spy on you, it’s that the language is systematically reduced and encoded. the premise is that he will ultimately not be able to think independently because of the way the leaders have manipulated language. the idea is that famous quote, “to make windows in the souls of men”, which means that everyone is limited in ways they may not even know.
In terms of how technology works in our modern surveillance powers, it’s a terribly prescient book in some of its implications for human life in the 21st century. Orwell would deny that it was prophecy; he said it was a warning. But actually, Orwell’s distinguished professor, Peter Davis, once made a list of all the things Orwell did well, and it was a pretty long couple of paragraphs, and it was really scary.
compared to orwell’s other books, it’s a strange novel. it took him a long time to write. And it also has a hallucinogenic quality, a creepiness that some medical experts have suggested has to do with Orwell’s health while he was writing it, because he was dying of tuberculosis as he finished it. it has that ragged, torn quality that makes you wonder what the book might have been like if he hadn’t been so sick when he wrote it. Somehow, despite the number of drafts he’s gone through, it still has a tentative quality: a sense that he’s still working toward what he really thinks. I sometimes wonder if it might have been quite a different book if he had lived longer or been in better health while he was writing it.
Returning to it for the first time in several years, a couple of things struck me: first, that despite its political symbolism and messages about the dangers of authoritarianism, the characters in 1984 are far from flimsy: it also features a human love story, often very moving. and second, I expected it to look much more dated than it was. I don’t think it’s confined to a Soviet context at all.
the hard left, the extreme left, didn’t like 1984 when it was published because they thought it was an attack on the soviet union. but orwell said it was an attack on totalitarianism per se; it is as anti-fascist as it is anti-communist.
It was always assumed that once the expiration date had passed, that once 1984 had arrived and passed, the novel would lose its relevance. but, in fact, that did not happen at all; if anything, it became even more pertinent to the national situation. this year marks its 70th anniversary, and it seems as relevant to the world of the 21st century as it was to the world of the nascent cold war in the early 1940s.
“it is a terrifyingly prophetic book in some of its implications for human life in the 21st century”
The other underlying theme I’d point out is that it’s often thought of as this great doomed love story of lovers winston and julia rebelling against this terribly prescriptive regime trying to bring them down. but i always thought julia was the honeypot; that she had been put there to mislead him and that she is actually in league with her interrogators. One of the messages of 1984, sadly, is that the people we love are in some cases calculated to betray us.
Very few other women fall within the scope of the novel: there are some women selling on the street, there is Julia, there are dreams of Winston’s dead mother.
is a very sparsely populated novel. It doesn’t have that big kaleidoscopic cast that some of Orwell’s books have. It is a very claustrophobic novel, very introverted. however, it is not entirely hopeless. the message is not 100% pessimistic: if there is hope, it is in the proletarians.
There is also the appendix on Newspeak, which was obviously written sometime in the future, when Newspeak is considered in historical terms. you get the sense that some kind of life has moved on and things have really changed in the 1984 world it takes place in. that ambiguity is not without consolation or hope.
You briefly mentioned the initial reception of Orwell’s novel 1984: how did that book grow from its first publication in 1949 to the phenomenon it is now?
It was a great phenomenon. it was an international bestseller; It was book of the month of the selection of clubs in America; it sold large numbers of copies. he made a lot of money that orwell would never live to see because he was dying. he sat on his hospital bed and when his friends congratulated him on the success of the novel, he said: “ah, but it’s fairy gold”.
even before he died, orwell knew that as he saw it, his message was going to be misunderstood. he anticipated that he was going to be picked up and armed by the American right, which is what happened; The CIA began subscribing to films about him and he was very much a propaganda weapon in the opening waves of the Cold War. One of Orwell’s last acts, actually, before he died was to issue a statement saying that this was not meant to be simply an attack on the Soviet Union, but an attack on any form of authoritarian rule that denied human freedom. but obviously there was nothing he could do about it.
for all this, he survived with an almost universal enthusiasm. there are still people who don’t like it because it attacks the soviet union, one of our great allies in the second world war. as a piece of propaganda, it still tends to unite politicians from almost all sides in its favor.
v s pritchett called orwell the “winter conscience” of our generation. Rounding out our discussion, I wonder if you could talk about why Orwell was such an important writer in the 20th century (and why he’s still such a necessary read now).
I guess we see him as an important figure. . . well, there are many reasons. obviously there is the extraordinary political impact of those two books, animal farm and 1984, which actually brought out of the barrel a series of very unpleasant but necessary truths about the way oligarchy and authoritarianism function in the middle of the 20th century, at a time given. time when many people were determined that such things should not be said. When Orwell was trying to publish Animal Farm in the mid-1940s, it was rejected by at least one English publisher because the Ministry of Information had advised them to reject it on the grounds that it was politically inadvisable, given that the Soviet Union They were our allies. And Peter Smollett, the man who advised the book to be rejected, was actually a Soviet spy. That just goes to show how complicated things were in Britain in the mid-1940s.
There is also the simple fact of the Orwellian style. there is that famous comment of yours: “good prose is like window glass”, something with which, by the way, I do not entirely agree. but as a stylistic influence, orwell is very important. the simplicity, directness and immediacy of his style, the way he catches the reader and places him in the world he is writing about, were enormously influential. If you look at the British writing of the ’50s and ’60s that followed, it’s absolutely drenched in Orwell’s influence. he taught writing to entire generations that succeeded him. It is no exaggeration to say that if a pantheon of great British writers were to be erected as it is currently conceived, we would have Shakespeare, Dickens and Orwell. those would be the three. so much has it come to dominate the literary landscape of its time and after.
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