Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in London on Wednesday June 8, 1949 and in
New York five days later. The world was eager for it. Within 12 months it
had sold around 50,000 hardbacks in the UK; in the US sales were more than
one-third of a million. It became a phenomenon.
Sixty years later no one can say how many millions of copies are in print,
both in legitimate editions and samizdat versions. It has been adapted for
radio, stage, television and cinema, has been studied, copied and parodied
and, above all, ransacked for its ideas and images.
As I write, the Daily Mail is reporting that “town halls are routinely using
controversial ‘Big Brother’ surveillance laws to spy on their own
employees”; the Los Angeles Times is describing a Republican party
consultant as “a master of the black art of political newspeak”; The Village
Voice is citing “a ripe example of doublethink”; and The Guardian is
profiling a community leader “attacked as part of the PC thought police”.
I could cite hundreds more examples. Nineteen Eighty-Four may not be the
greatest novel ever written but it is certainly the most influential. Even
at the time, people knew that something remarkable had occurred: “momentous”
was how Lionel Trilling in The New Yorker hailed its arrival.
Nevertheless, publication day seems to have gone unmarked by any kind of
celebration – not surprisingly as its author was that day cooped up alone in
a stuffy wooden hut, 15ft by 12ft, in a TB sanatorium near Stroud in
Gloucestershire, in the throes of being killed by his own creation.
“I began to relapse about the end of September,” he wrote to a friend. “I
could have done something about it then, but I had to finish that wretched
book, which, thanks to illness, I had been messing about with for 18 months
and which the publishers were harrying me for.”
Working on the Scottish island of Jura in the cold and damp, the worst
possible climate for tuberculosis, Orwell had produced a manuscript
illegible to anyone save its author. There was no point in sending it to
London as no one could decipher it. Unable to find a local secretary, barely
able to walk, sensing that his time was running out, he was therefore
obliged to type it himself – 4,000 words a day, seven days a week – mostly
done propped up in bed. The effort produced excruciating pain and high
temperatures.
“It’s a ghastly mess now,” he moaned to another friend, “a good idea ruined.”
A week before he finished typing he was still unsure what to put on the title
page: “I am hesitating between Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Last Man in
Europe.” Would the novel have achieved such fame if had been called The Last
Man in Europe? Somehow one doubts it. On such toss-of-the-coin decisions
does literary immortality depend. ONE is supposed to separate a work of art
from the circumstances of its creation, the protagonist of a book from the
character of its author. In the case of Nineteen Eighty-Four this is futile.
Winston Smith – grey, thin, unable to climb the stairs without stopping to
rest, doubled up every morning by “a violent coughing fit” that leaves him
lying breathless on the floor – is plainly Orwell. And the
often-remarked-upon “nightmarish” atmosphere of the novel, in which the
figures and landscape seem distorted, as if through a fish-eye lens, and the
prose jangles with fragments of half-forgotten childhood tunes and nursery
rhymes – all this plainly owes much to the hallucinatory fevers that
accompany the ravages of tuberculosis.
Orwell never recovered from the effort of composition. He died six months
after publication, aged 46. “The tragedy of Orwell’s life,” wrote his friend
Cyril Connolly in The Sunday Times in 1961, “is that when at last he
achieved fame and success he was a dying man and knew it. He had fame and
was too ill to leave his room, money and nothing to spend it on . . . he
tasted the bitterness of dying.”
As a consequence a heroic, almost mythic quality quickly came to surround
Nineteen Eighty-Four. Imagine if Orwell had recovered from TB and had gone
on to become a famous figure on television in the 1950s and 1960s – as he
easily might have done, given his talent as a broadcaster – delivering
trenchant opinions in his high-pitched Etonian accent (of which, perhaps
mercifully, no recording survives).
Nineteen Eighty-Four would still have been the same book. But would it have
had the same aura of unassailable posthumous integrity that Orwell’s early
death bestowed upon it? As it is, it remains perfectly crys-tallised in
time: safely immune to any subsequent second thoughts or revisions that
might have occurred to Orwell during the controversies of the cold war.
This is important, I think, both to the reputation of Orwell and to the status
of his greatest work. Because Orwell was so deeply involved in contemporary
politics it is hard to see how he could have avoided becoming drawn into a
rolling controversy about what he meant to say, or not say, in his fiction
and the answering of such questions invariably diminishes the power of a
work of art.
Indeed, one week after publication Orwell’s publisher, Fred-eric Warburg,
travelled to his author’s bedside to take down a statement on precisely this
issue. Orwell wished to counter the impression, already especially prevalent
in America, that Nineteen Eighty-Four, coming four years after Animal Farm,
was intended as an attack on the left in general and the British Labour
party in particular. The United Automobile Workers of America asked Orwell
for a statement of his intentions and Orwell obliged, in what was to be his
last public utterance: “My novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is not intended as an
attack on socialism, or on the British Labour party . . . I do not believe
that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe
(allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something
resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have
taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to
draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.”
Clearly much of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a satire on Stalinism, from the
physical description of Big Brother’s face (“black-haired,
black-mous-tachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm”) to the split in the
party led by the Trotsky figure, Emmanuel Goldstein. And if that were the
limit of Orwell’s ambition – to describe England as a Stalinist state – the
novel would be regarded today as a brilliant period piece about the horrors
of communism, comparable perhaps to his friend Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at
Noon: an important work, still read but confined to a limited audience.
However, what sets Nineteen Eighty-Four apart – the difference in ambition
which means that millions of people who have never read a word of Orwell
nevertheless know what “Orwellian” means – is that it parodies the
totalitarian impulse in general. The original ideology behind this impulse
may be communist or fascist, or nationalist or corporate or institutional,
but the methods by which it proceeds are in each case the same: the stamping
out of the capacity for individual thought and freedom, not merely by
physical force but by a complete denial of privacy and by the control of all
information, even to the extent of policing the language in which thoughts
are expressed.
In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four ideology is irrelevant. The story picks
up where Animal Farm left off. Men and pigs have now become fully
interchangeable. Power, administered by a cadre of technocrats, has become
an end in itself. The planet is divided into three continuously (or
apparently) warring super-states: Oceania, Eurasia and Easta-sia. Given that
only five years previously Churchill, Roosevelt and Sta-lin had divided up
the world into “zones of influence” at the Tehran conference, this vision
did not seem entirely fantastic.
Orwell also drew heavily on the writings of the American Trotskyist turned
conservative, James Burnham, author of The Managerial Revolution and The
Machiavellians. His 1946 summary of Burnham’s theories reads like an outline
for Nineteen Eighty-Four: “All historical changes finally boil down to the
replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy,
liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of
Utopia, or ‘the classless society’, or ‘the Kingdom of Heaven on earth’, are
humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new
class which is elbowing its way to power . . .
“The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small,
independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main
industrial centres in Europe, Asia and America. These super-states will
fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions
of the earth, but will be unable to conquer one another completely.”
Such was the way the world seemed to be heading in the 1940s; such is the
world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. IT is not to detract from Orwell’s
achievement to point out 60 years later that he actually got much of this
profoundly wrong. The surplus-es of production in capitalist countries were
not used up in continuous warfare but were largely diverted to consumer
goods; the same has happened even in formerly communist countries. There are
not three great power blocs any more, but two, or four, or one, or none,
depending on how you choose to look at it. In the internet age, censorship
of images, language and thought has never been harder for governments to
control.
Above all, Orwell failed to predict that religious belief would prove such a
strong force in the future – a blind spot shrewdly noted by Evelyn Waugh,
who lived near Orwell’s sanatorium and who visited him there at least twice
around the time the novel appeared. “What makes your version [of the future]
spurious to me is the disappearance of the church,” Waugh wrote to him after
reading it in July 1948. “Disregard all the supernatural implications if you
like, but you must admit its unique character as a social and historical
institution. I believe it is inextinguishable.”
The possibility that the all-power-ful rulers of Eurasia might one day be
toppled by a Polish pope, or that the oil supplies of Oceania might be
threatened by fundamentalist Islam, lies far outside the materialist logic
of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
But mercifully one does not read a novel with a check list in hand to tick off
the accuracy of its predictions. One reads it for its characters: to
experience the world they inhabit and to discover what will happen to them
next.
Curiously enough, Orwell was probably a better journalist and essayist than he
was a novelist – in fact he is arguably the best journalist and essayist in
the English language. Yet if he had written Nineteen Eighty-Four as a work
of nonfiction it would have been forgotten years ago. It was by using his
creative imagination to transmute his ideas into fiction that Orwell
produced something timeless.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a standing rebuke to all those who think history or
biography can ever be superior to the novel. Big Brother, the Thought
Police, Newspeak, Room 101, telescreens, Doublethink, the Two-Minute Hate,
the Ministry of Love, 2+2=5, Airstrip One, unperson – one has only to list
the words to realise how central Nineteen Eighty-Four has become to our
collective imagination. But what put the ideas there in the first place, and
what keeps them there still, is the story of Winston Smith and his doomed
love affair with Julia, the girl in the oily overalls who works on the
novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department.
The frail, hysterical, cowardly, misogynistic (“he disliked nearly all women
and especially the young and pretty ones”) Winston, with his bad chest and
varicose veins, is one of the most unlikely heroes in modern fiction, and
yet also one of the most compelling, and by making us believe in him Orwell
makes us believe in his fictional landscape.
He does this with the most wonderful economy and clarity (“good prose is like
a windowpane”, he once maintained), most memorably perhaps in the famous
scene in which the lovers are surprised in bed by the Thought Police: “We
are the dead,” he said. “We are the dead,” echoed Julia dutifully.
“You are the dead,” said an iron voice behind them.
No wonder one of the last letters Orwell received was from Sidney Sheldon, the
screenwriter and best-selling novelist, who was anxious to buy the dramatic
rights. From its arresting opening line onwards, Nineteen Eighty-Four
functions as an extremely proficient piece of popular entertainment. It has
tension, surprises and a good plot. Reading it is a pleasure, not a chore.
In an era when so much serious fiction seems designed merely for the author’s
own gratification, or at best for a limited literary coterie, here is a
novel with exactly the opposite intention. Orwell’s painfully tapped-out
typescript (flimsy top copy and two carbons) left his hands, went out into
the world and changed it.
It performed the signal service of nailing for ever certain tricks and
tendencies of the ruling classes. It set us on our guard. Sixty years on,
that is an achievement worth celebrating.
© Robert Harris 2009
This is the introduction to the official 60th anniversary edition of
Nineteen Eighty-Four, to be published by Harvill Secker at £17.99 on July 2.
Copies can be ordered for £16.19, including postage, from The Sunday Times
BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135
