1985 (6 page)

You mean for the past. A vague and irrecoverable English past. Dickensian. That vitiated his Socialism. Socialism ought to reject the past as evil. Its eyes ought to be wholly on the future
.

You're right. Orwell imagines a kind of impossibly cosy past – the past as a sort of farmhouse kitchen with hams hanging from the rafters, a smell of old dog. As a Socialist he should have been wary of the past. Once you start to yearn for kindly policemen, clean air, noisy free speech in pubs, families sticking together, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, the fug of the old music hall you end up by touching your forelock to the squire. You oppose to that past a present full of political dogma, policemen with guns, adulterated beer, fear of being overheard, fish sausages. You remember the hero of
Coming Up for Air
. He bites into one of these horrors and says it's like biting into the modern world. There's a part of Orwell which fears the future. Even when it's Socialist, progressive, just, egalitarian. He wants to oppose the past to it, as though the past were a real world of solid objects.

It's the future that's supposed to be subversive. Yet Winston Smith has his subversiveness all in the past
.

Well, the past
is
subversive in the sense that it opposes pragmatic values to doctrinaire ones. The human and not the abstract. Take even the least considerable and most neutral-seeming areas – like, for instance, weights and measures.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is genuinely prophetic in presenting a Britain that's yielded to the metric system. At the end of the war there hadn't as yet been any official proposal to replace the traditional units with the Cartesian abstractions of France, but everybody felt sure the change was on its way. Inches and feet and yards were top much based on thumbs and limbs to be acceptable in a truly rational world. A prole beer-drinker whom Winston Smith encounters complains of having to drink in litres or half-litres: he wants the traditional pint. But despite the protests of traditionalists, Britain had to be given a decimal coinage. Orwell knew this was going to happen: he puts dollars and cents into Winston's pocket. As the British know, the reality is the heavy dollar still called the pound, with a hundred new pence or
p
in it – shameful liquidation – but the dehumanization remains. Americans have a monetary system that carries an aura of revolutionary necessity, and they'll never understand how the loss of the old shillings and half-crowns and guineas wounded British hearts. For the whole point of the traditional system was that it sprang out of empirical common sense, not abstract rationality. You could divide by any number – 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. If you try to divide by 3 now you get a recurring decimal.

7
and 9?

Yes. You added a shilling to a pound and that gave you a guinea. A seventh of a guinea was three shillings. A ninth of a guinea was two shillings and fourpence, or a Malayan dollar. So long as there were seven days in a week, four weeks in a month, twelve months in a year, and an hour divisible by 3 and its multiples, the old system made sense. But it had to go: it was too reasonable, too human. It also committed the grave error of keeping ancient folk traditions alive. ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's. You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martin's.' This old song is a mysterious link between Big Brother's London and the ancient buried one of churches and chimes and liberty of conscience. But in 1984 nobody knows what a farthing is. Everybody began to cease to know in 1960. ‘Sing a song of sixpence' – it means nothing. Nor does
Falstaff's reckoning at the Boar's Head – a capon, 2s 2d; sauce, 4d; sack, two gallons, 5s 8d; anchovies and sack after supper, 2s 6d; bread ½d.

Why does Orwell make Winston Smith wake up with the name Shakespeare on his lips?

Shakespeare, though still not proscribed by the Party, is subversive. God knows what the Newspeak version of him is like, but the Oldspeak Shakespeare is full of private lives and individual decisions. Shakespeare means the past. But note that Winston Smith evokes the past in a far more dangerous way. He buys, for 2 dollars 50, a beautiful book full of blank paper of a creamy smoothness unknown to his modern world – or, for that matter, to present-day Soviet Russia. He also buys an archaic writing instrument – a pen with a real nib. He is going to keep a diary. He feels able to do this with a modicum of safety because his writingtable is in a small alcove out of range of the telescreen. He first writes at random, and then lets his thoughts wander. He looks down at the page and finds that he's written over and over again, in total automatism, the words
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
. Mrs Parsons, the woman with the blocked-up drain, knocks on the door but, for all Winston knows, it may already be the Thought Police. Going to the door he sees that he's left the book open. ‘It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.' The subversive act and the materials with which it's been performed – these have become one thing. The past is an enemy of the Party. Hence the past is real. After dealing with Mrs Parsons's problem, he comes back and writes:

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:

From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!

We can talk to the past as we can talk to the future – the time that is dead and the time that has not yet been born. Both acts are absurd, but the absurdity is necessary to freedom.

Conversely, freedom itself is thus proved to be absurd
.

Yes yes. Freedom was certainly an archaic absurdity to some of Orwell's contemporaries. Britain and her allies had been fighting fascism,
which was dedicated to the liquidation of personal liberty, but one of those allies was herself as repressive of freedom as the enemy. When Soviet Russia became a friend of the democracies –

A brief friend
.

Yes. That was when those of tender conscience believed the war had lost its meaning. That was when it was in order for Englishmen to love Stalin and praise the Soviet system. There were certain British intellectuals, especially those associated with the left-wing magazine the
New Statesman
, who even preached totalitarianism on the Stalinist model. Kingsley Martin, its editor, for instance. Orwell summed up Martin's view of the Soviet leader something like this: Stalin has done ghastly things, but on balance they've served the cause of progress, and a few million liquidations must not be allowed to obscure that fact. Means justify the end. That's very much the modern view. It was Orwell's belief that most British intellectuals were given to totalitarianism.

He went too far
.

Well, consider – it's in the nature of an intellectual to be progressive, meaning that he'll tend to support a political system that will bring rapid changes about in the commonalty, meaning a disdain for the lumbering old democratic process with its tolerance of opposition. A state machine that can pulp up the past and create a rational future. A very intellectual idea. There had been intellectuals who seemed ‘fascist' to Orwell, in love with authoritarianism or at least tolerant of it – writers like Eliot, Yeats, Evelyn Waugh, Roy Campbell, even Shaw and Wells – but the intellectuals who were not fascist were usually communist, which – in terms of state power, repression, the one-party system and so on – amounted to the same thing. Terms like fascism and communism represent no true polarity, despite the war. They could both, thought Orwell, be contained in some such name as Oligarchical Collectivism.

And yet any progressive idea is an intellectual creation. Without intellectuals, with their cries for greater social justice, removal of the profit motive, equal incomes, the death of inherited privilege and so on – would there be any progress at all?

But is their talk of progress truly disinterested? Orwell knew enough, as Arthur Koestler did, of the springs of political authority in Europe. No man, it seemed to them, strove for political leadership solely out of altruism. Koestler had been sent to jail by the system he supported. Orwell fought for freedom in Spain, and he had to run for his life when Russian Communism condemned Catalonian Anarchism. Intellectuals
with political ambitions had to be suspect. For, in a free society, intellectuals are among the under-privileged. What they offer – as school-teachers, university lecturers, writers – is not greatly wanted. If they threaten to withdraw their labour, nobody is going to be much disturbed. To refuse to publish a volume of free verse or take a class in structural linguistics – that's not like cutting off the power supplies or stopping the buses. They lack the power of the capitalist boss on the one hand and the power of the syndicalist boss on the other. They get frustrated. They find pure intellectual pleasures inadequate. They become revolutionaries. Revolutions are usually the work of disgruntled intellectuals with the gift of the gab. They go to the barricades in the name of the peasant or the working man. For ‘Intellectuals of the world unite' is not a very inspiring slogan.

But why was Orwell frightened of the intellectuals? The intellectuals were not running the Labour Government in the late 1940s
.

No. The Labour leaders weren't
New Statesman
fanatics. They'd no desire to turn Britain into a miniature Stalinist Russia. But there was a whisper, perhaps more than a whisper, of the danger that comes from more and more State control, a bigger bureaucracy, the devaluation of individuality that inevitably follows a doctrine of equality. Strictly, a Socialist government can only fulfil its ideal of total public ownership if granted a perpetual mandate. The very notion of Socialism is undemocratic, if by democracy we mean opposed parties, a free vote, periodic general elections. Parliament has increasingly the task of pushing through party legislation and ignoring such issues as the rights of the individual, which Members of Parliament are primarily there to protect. Orwell didn't live to see the compromise which English Socialism now represents – a minimum of public ownership, a social-security apparatus that costs too much, a mass of ‘equalizing' laws not easily enforceable, and a necessary thwarting of individual, as opposed to collective, endeavour. But, not even in those first heady days of Socialism, could the concept of Ingsoc have begun to germinate – except in some university lecturer's lodgings.

You think it was purely an onomastic trick?

Yes, the taking over quite cynically of an honourable name and then debasing it. Who, after Hitler, can ever mention National Socialism again without a shudder? The link between the English Socialism of 1948 and that of 1984 is purely nominal. We have to imagine this – that a group
of
New Statesman
intellectuals has taken over not just England but the entire English-speaking world. As England, or Airstrip One, cannot be more than a satellite of America, the assumption must be that the
New Statesman
oligarchs have first prevailed in the United States and then, armed with power, come home again. Nothing could be more absurd, and Orwell knows it. There's been a great atomic war, but it has left much of Victorian London still standing – absurd again. There are vague memories of political purges in the fifties, but Winston Smith's own reminiscences – and indeed those of practically everyone else – are of the indistinctness of a fading dream. Absurdity. Amnesia seems to have hit everyone, even when they're not exercising ‘memory control'. It finds a sort of counterpart in our acceptance that we don't know, nor do we greatly care, how the revolution happened. It's just a necessary device to get the intellectuals into power. Absurd, comic. I'm back where I started.

So you think there's nothing, as it were, nineteeneightyfourish about
Nineteen Eighty-Four?
That it was all there waiting in 1948?

Yes, in a sense. What was merely in the newspapers or the official records – like torture and concentration camps – had to be imported into Britain. The intellectual totalitarianism had to be fictionally realized. But novels are really made out of day-to-day experience, and Winston Smith's frustrations were ours too – dirty streets, decaying buildings, sickening food in factory canteens, the government slogans on the walls –

Slogans? Like
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
and
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
?

Not quite like those. Those are pure Nazi Germany. But I remember when I came home from overseas army service that the first peace-time government poster I saw showed a haggard sorrowing woman in black, with the legend
KEEP DEATH OFF THE ROADS
. Naturally, somebody had crossed that out and substituted
SHE VOTED SOCIALIST
. We were used to posters put out by the Ministry of Information, mostly ham-handed, not subtly ambiguous like the Ingsoc ones,
YOUR FORTITUDE, YOUR PATIENCE, YOUR ENDURANCE WILL BRING US VICTORY
. You and us, you see. No wonder we all became bloody purple,
BE LIKE DAD, KEEP MUM
. That nearly provoked a riot among wage-earning mothers. Slogans had become part of the British way of life. Orwell gave us nothing new.

Wasn't the warning new?

What warning? He was only telling us what Milton told Cromwell's
England – hang on to your liberties. Perhaps not even that. He was playing the intellectual, game of constructing a working model of a Utopia, or cacotopia. How far, he seems to say, can I push things without seeing the careful structure collapse? He'd already made animals play at the Russian Revolution. Another game. He was being the Swift
de nos jours
. Build your own horrible future, enjoy yourself. The thing works, and Orwell has to be pleased. But the pleasure has nothing to do with politics.