1985 (2 page)

There are a number of points of comparison between Orwell and Burgess, and the key facts of their biographies are worth considering. The most obvious similarity is that both of them discarded their original names and created new identities: Eric Arthur Blair became ‘George Orwell' (borrowing the name of a minor Elizabethan playwright); and John Burgess Wilson, known to his Manchester family as Jack or Jackie, took on the twin disguises of ‘Anthony Burgess' and ‘Joseph Kell' when he began to publish fiction in 1956. Both of them were English outsiders who consciously remade themselves after travelling abroad. In 1922, at the age of just nineteen, Orwell joined the Imperial Indian Police in Burma, which at that time was part of the British Empire. His experience of working as an agent of colonial justice (or ‘a cog in the wheels of despotism', as he put it) led eventually to a political awakening and a passionate hatred of imperialism. Having returned to Europe after five long years in Burma and established himself as a novelist and political journalist, Orwell set off on a famous journey to Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield in 1936. His non-fiction account of unemployment in industrial Lancashire,
The Road to Wigan Pier
, memorably describes the background of Burgess's own boyhood in the north-west of England. As a literary critic, Orwell took particular interest in the publications of Mass Observation, an anthropological and documentary movement founded in the 1930s, which studied the social and economic conditions of working-class communities in Bolton and Blackpool. By coincidence, Burgess and his extended family were on holiday in Blackpool at the very time when the Mass Observers were there, diligently compiling reports about their drinking habits and leisure activities. ‘Mass Observation,' Burgess wrote in
Homage to Qwert Yuiop
, ‘was part of my youth.' In complicated and indirect ways, Orwell's writing about the industrial working class may be thought of as a series of encounters with the young Burgess and his early life in and around Manchester.

If Orwell's guilt about his privileged upbringing had made him want to move downwards in society – he spent time living in working-class doss-houses and deliberately modified his accent to disguise his Etonian origins – Burgess had always aimed to make the opposite journey, from the poverty and deprivation of Moss Side to a life of middle-class respectability. (It is no accident that he ended up, after his second marriage in 1968, living a life of comfortable expatriation in Malta and
Monaco.) Orwell's curious desire to become a member of the working class, or at least to be accepted by working people, is called into question by Burgess's anxiousness to leave that same class as quickly as he could. Perhaps this establishes one of the reasons why he decided to set up a series of critical confrontations with Orwell in the first half of
1985
, using the philosophical dialogue as his instrument of investigation and analysis.

Whereas Orwell came to despise his involvement with colonialism in Burma, Burgess was rather pleased to become an employee of the British Colonial Service in 1954, when he went to Malaya as an education officer and taught English literature at the prestigious Malay College in Kuala Kangsar (known as ‘the Eton of the East'). Orwell's earlier novel about the East,
Burmese Days
, though it remains a fascinating document of its time, is ultimately gloomy and self-hating; but Burgess's
Malayan Trilogy
, now regarded as a classic in places such as Malaysia and Singapore, demonstrates his ability as a comedian of culture, who based his analysis on a broad and deep knowledge of the numerous languages of the Malay peninsula, including Malay, Chinese and Arabic. When Burgess returned to the post-colonial state of Malaysia in 1980, he acknowledged that his career as a teacher had been (as he put it) ‘a kind of failure', but he remained grateful that his experience of living in the country had turned him into a writer, because the conflicts between different races and cultures had provided an abundance of material for his earliest published novels. Where Orwell had seen only despair and exploitation in the colonies, Burgess saw large cultural potential and the possibility of successful self-government, which arrived just as he was about to return to England in 1957.

Orwell's earnest non-fiction account of the disappointments and defeats of the Spanish Civil War in
Homage to Catalonia
is miles apart from Burgess's ironic response to the same conflict in
Any Old Iron
, or his presentation of the Second World War as a kind of prolonged farce in
Little Wilson and Big God
. Whereas Orwell, who had volunteered to fight for the Republicans in Spain, was by all accounts an efficient and welldisciplined soldier, Burgess – the reluctant conscript – took pride in his scruffy appearance, disinclination to obey orders, and general defiance of his military superiors. In many respects it would be true to say that the two men were divided not merely by politics, but by the wildly different tones and styles of their writing. If Orwell is often sermonical, politically
engaged and slightly humourless in his non-fiction and journalism, Burgess (as he acknowledged in his autobiographical novel,
The Doctor Is Sick
) can sometimes appear to place too much value on language and play at the expense of politics and social concern. It is difficult to imagine Burgess settling down to produce a work of political allegory, as Orwell did in his anti-Stalinist fable,
Animal Farm
. He was more at home writing a sonata for harmonica and piano, such as the one he composed for Larry Adler (the so-called ‘Goon with the Wind') in November 1980. Classical music, which often has no obvious political meaning, was of very little interest to Orwell, who hardly ever mentions it in his essays on culture.

Whether or not Orwell and Burgess ever met is open to question, and most of the doubt arises from the unreliable nature of Burgess's autobiography. When Burgess was away in Gibraltar between 1943 and 1946, his first wife, Llewela, was working in London, where Orwell was involved in broadcasting propaganda to India for the BBC Eastern Service. Llewela and Orwell drank in the same Soho pubs, and she established a close friendship with Sonia Brownell, who became the second Mrs Orwell in 1949. Burgess claims, in the first volume of his autobiography, that he was on drinking terms with Orwell just after the war, and that he introduced him to Victory cigarettes, which make an appearance in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, but this story deserves to be treated with caution. If it were true, it is likely that Burgess would have mentioned it somewhere in the text of
1985
, and it appears nowhere else in his non-fiction writing about Orwell. What is beyond doubt is that they had a number of friends in common, and it is clear from Burgess's private diary (a more reliable source than his semi-fictional memoirs) that he got to know Sonia Orwell reasonably well in the mid-1960s, when he contributed occasional articles to
Art and Literature
, the cultural magazine of which she was the editor. It may be that Burgess and Orwell occasionally exchanged a nod across a crowded pub, and that their meetings were heavily embellished later on, when Sonia Orwell was no longer around to contradict Burgess's version of events. Sonia died in 1980, and Burgess published his autobiography in 1987.

Despite their obvious points of disagreement, Orwell and Burgess seem closest in their speculative fiction, and in their non-fiction writing about possible futures.
The Wanting Seed
and
A Clockwork Orange
, both published in 1962, are written in full awareness of the canon of dystopian
writing (e.g. Huxley's
Brave New World
and Zamyatin's
We
) identified in Orwell's journalism. In
The Wanting Seed
, Burgess imagines a futuristic over-populated England where homosexuality has become the stateapproved norm. Instead of the clumsy device of having Winston Smith sit down to read long passages from Emmanuel Goldstein's book in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, Burgess makes his protagonist a history teacher, who is capable of understanding his current situation and placing it in a wider context of historical forces. That said, Burgess's theorizing about politics is not as well informed as Orwell's, and all of his dystopias (including his later apocalyptic novel,
The End of the World News
) have a literary and theological flavour which reflects his preoccupations as a reader. Whereas Orwell is transparently a man of the Left, Burgess's politics are so unpredictable and inconsistent that it would be impossible to identify him with any political party. Although he voted Conservative in 1951, this did not prevent him from supporting the Italian Communists when he lived in Rome in the 1970s.

Orwell died before the publication of David Karp's novel,
One
(1953), but it proved influential on Burgess's thinking about the evils of the state. Burgess was much in demand as a futurologist after the publication of
A Clockwork Orange
. He discussed ‘The Future of Anglo-American' in
Harper's
in February 1968, and speculated about ‘The Novel in 2000 AD' in the
New York Times
on 29 March 1970. Given that both Orwell and Burgess were concerned with linguistic and cultural change, it is unsurprising that both
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and
1985
end with descriptions of ‘Newspeak' and ‘Worker's English'. Orwell and Burgess were aware of the Basic English project proposed by I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden, which aimed to reduce English to a vocabulary of no more than 850 words, for the benefit of overseas students who were learning English. The poet William Empson (a friend and BBC colleague of Orwell's) recalled that one of his Chinese students of Basic English had mistranslated ‘out of sight, out of mind' as ‘invisible, insane'. It was a utopian project, and no less doomed to fail than any other utopia, but Orwell's overwhelming instinct was to resist the impoverishment of language. As he writes in ‘Politics and the English Language': ‘When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases –
bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder
– one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy.'
Readers of
A Clockwork Orange
will not be slow to notice that there are teenage gang-members in 1985 who speak an invented language based on Hindi. This is a kind of self-referential joke, and it never amounts to anything more substantial than a joke, but it is more difficult to know what to make of the underground university, in which young people secretly teach themselves Latin and Ancient Greek. Perhaps it is an example of Burgess revealing himself as a former schoolmaster, indulging in a piece of hopeless utopianism. His pedagogic urge was slow to fade.

One fixed point in all of Burgess's writing about the future is his conviction that the Soviet Union would continue to be a major force in world politics for at least 200 years. In fairness to Burgess, there were few political commentators in 1978 who were far-sighted enough to see that the Berlin Wall would fall just eleven years later, and many on the Left (including academic Marxists and prominent trade unionists) were looking forward to the adoption, through revolutionary change if necessary, of Soviet-style politics in Britain. But often Burgess's writing about the future simply leaves us feeling that he should have got a more effective crystal ball. It is hard to take him entirely seriously when he says (in his 1984 essay on Orwell) that New Age religious cults represent a more serious threat to the future of British democracy than political terrorism. By 1984 he had already written about the danger of cults in
Earthly Powers
(1980) and
The End of the World News
(1982).

Despite the loudness of some of its thinking and feeling about ideologies, Burgess's book is redeemed by its close reading of Orwell, and by the inventive ways in which Burgess manages to dramatize his critical material, such as when he sets up a dialogue between a (semiautobiographical?) ‘Old Man' and his interviewer.
1985
is not a work of which Orwell could have been expected to approve, but it succeeds in its aim of setting out an alternative dystopia by drawing on the political tensions which dominated the time of its writing. It is a document which speaks very eloquently about contemporary fears and anxieties, and its value is bound to increase as time passes.

 

2 + 2 = 5

a notice put up in Moscow during the first Five Year Plan, indicating the possibility of getting the job done in four years, if workers put their backs into it

When did the twentieth-century nightmare begin?

In 1945, when, for many people, it seemed to have ended.

How did it begin?

With the first use of atomic bombs, developed with urgency to finish speedily a war that had gone on too long. But with the end of the conflict between the fascist States and the free world (which was not all free, because a great part of it was totalitarian), the stage was cleared for the enactment of the basic encounter of the century. The communist powers faced the capitalist powers, and both sides had unlimited nuclear weapons.

So that –?

So that what had been used to end one war was now employed to start another.

What was the outcome of the Great Nuclear War of the 1950s?

Countless atomic bombs were dropped on the industrial centres of western Europe, the Americas and the Soviet Empire. The devastation was so terrible that the ruling elites of the world came to realize that nuclear warfare, in destroying organized society, destroyed their own capacity for maintaining power.

So that –?

By common consent the nuclear age was brought to an end. Wars henceforth would be waged with conventional weapons of the kind developed during the Second World War. That wars should continue to be fought, and on a global scale, was taken for granted.