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My Own Private Orwell
Why the high priest of dystopia still matters Why the high priest of dystopia still matters
- June 19, 2003
Had he lived to be an old man and not died a young one, George Orwell would have been 100 years old on June 25. Many events are planned throughout the year to commemorate the centennial of one of the most influential writers of the past several generations. In October 1949, as George Orwell lay dying of lung disease in a London hospital, he received a letter from Aldous Huxley. Huxley had just read Orwell's recently published 1984 . To get a letter from the older, more eminent Huxley was a big deal for any writer, but for Orwell it held special meaning because Huxley was the author of Brave New World (1932), the visionary novel with which 1984 was being roundly compared. Huxley had also been one of Orwell's teachers at Eton. Huxley was overwhelmed by 1984 , telling Orwell "how fine and how profoundly important the book is." But while he agreed that the future would be dominated by totalitarian regimes ruling sheep-like subjects, Huxley did not share Orwell's violent vision of torture, "boot-on-the-face," sex repression and endless war. "My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World ... . Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience." But here's the kicker, tacked on as an afterthought, Huxley added: "Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large-scale biological and atomic war -- in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds." Huxley was more accurate in his letter's despairing postscript than he could have "scarcely imagined." His Brave New World , 71 years old this year, is nonetheless still startling in its presentiment of our present age, in fact, much more accurate than Orwell's book in describing the world we live in now. Brave New World is set in the 26th century, the sixth after the coming of "Our Ford." Economic stability is the only ruling ethic and people are born in hatching factories, where they've been preordained from the embryo to be Alpha-Plus directors, Beta technicians, Epsilon elevator operators, and so forth. Throughout their childhood, these docile people are further conditioned by sleep-teaching and endless upbeat propaganda not unlike modern ad campaigns. They willingly embrace "correct" thoughts and the tastes and consuming habits that are suitable to their preordained station in life. Worldwide contentment is carried along by the ultimate Club Med/ Fantasy Island wish: mandatory promiscuity, no relationships allowed. Movie theaters are "Feelies," where tactile sensations are enhanced, as they are with Scent Organs and Centrifugal Bumple-puppy rides. Anything to block out troubling thoughts. If all else fails, there is soma, the ultimate Prozac ("all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol, none of their defects"). The supreme being is the World Controller, a sort of wizard of Oz cross-pollinated with Jack Welch, the ultimate CEO/emperor. Doesn't this seem reminiscent of pre-9/11 America? Since that red-letter date, however, Orwell's vision of "boot-in-the-face" and "endless war," as embodied by 1984 's Big Brother, "Hate Week," Thought Police, Room 101, Newspeak ("War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength"), Ministry of Truth, etc., has begun to supplant Huxley's more "benign" prognostication. Perhaps Huxley recoiled from giving Orwell's novel an unqualified endorsement because he could not accept the prospect of living in a world of the sort that Orwell was forecasting. With the USA Patriot Act (Parts I and II), the Homeland Security Department, Bush's carte blanche war resolution, the consolidation of all media in the hands of five like-minded corporations (the easier to whip up fear and patriotism) and common horrors like metal detector prods rammed between the legs of old women in wheelchairs (as I saw during a recent layover at O'Hare Airport), we all have a bit of Winston Smith in us, whether we like it or not. Smith, Orwell's tormented protagonist, longed for the simpler, more solid things of the past, even as he was cowed by unspecified fears and ached for honest relationships. As familiar as we are with 1984 's fictional landscape, however, the novel was colored by Orwell's own personal struggles and experiences. While writing the book, he was battling pulmonary tuberculosis, dealing with the death of his wife and his fears of not being able to take care of their adopted infant son, as well as his prospect of being a middle-aged invalid (he died at 46). In many ways, Orwell is Winston Smith. Indeed, Winston Smith, like George Orwell, is a brilliantly designed fiction. Both names are seamless, common and yet regal. Smith is the most common name in the UK, while Orwell was taken from a river in northern England. Winston, on the other hand, evokes Winston Churchill, while George calls up the kings. He was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, northern India, where his father was a colonial civil servant whose job title was "assistant sub-deputy opium agent, 1st grade." It was his lot to make sure the British Crown's poppies got to factories in Calcutta, where they were processed into opium that was then exported to China. In this way, the British fed the habits of Chinese dope fiends and undermined the fabric of Chinese society, at the same time that they raised revenue to run the crown jewel of the British Empire, the Indian subcontinent. In 1880, when Blair started his job, there were 15 million confirmed opium addicts in China. The Chinese Empire collapsed, from within, in 1912. Though he never explicitly addressed this -- he barely mentioned his father in his writings -- the fact that his dad was, essentially, a drug dealer for the Crown could not have had a salutary effect on a sensitive lad like Eric. At age one, his mother took Eric and his sister to England. The absent, dubiously employed dad and the doting mom turned Eric into a dreamy, lonely, gawky child, prone to bed-wetting and stubborn impulses. Among the bitter memories that crop up on Orwell's work are his days at St. Cyprian's, a private boys' school to which he was admitted at "reduced rates," a fact that he was never allowed to forget by the Dickensian school directors. He excelled in his studies and extracted some revenge by getting a scholarship to Eton, the venerable prep school of which the Duke of Wellington said, "The battle of Waterloo was won in the playing fields of Eton." Eric did not excel at Eton, but then these were dark times in England (1917-1921). The entire generation ahead of his had been, and were still being, slaughtered, maimed and mentally damaged in the trenches of France. Though he made lifelong friends with fellow students (and later writers) Cyril Connolly, John Lehmann and Anthony Powell, Eric spent most of his time at Eton reading books that were not on the syllabus, wandering among the surrounding meadows and woods, and nursing his muse and his grudges. After a mediocre final showing, he joined the Indian Imperial Police Force, and was sent to Burma. In retrospect, this seems a strange path -- essentially a repeat of his dreaded dad's career -- for someone who would later be called, by V.S. Pritchett, "the wintry conscience of his generation." He was still, however, Eric Blair, the impossibly tall and thin dreamer he'd been since childhood. But five years in Burma broke all of his dreams, dashed all of his fantasies and instilled in him a sort of slow-burning rage. His novel Burmese Days (1934) -- written in retrospect after his transformation into George Orwell -- scathingly captures the moral bankruptcy of the "white man's burden" even as it offers a brilliant snapshot of a fascinating country (Burma is now Myanmar, a completely closed military dictatorship, like North Korea). Two of his finest essays, "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant," are also written from this wellspring of memory. The experience in Burma, as perverse and self-punishing as it was, did at least put meat on his bones and money in his pocket. More importantly, it gave him a reservoir of firsthand knowledge of how empire-building worked. Thus, he always had a leg up on the armchair intellectuals who held court back in England. In fact, it was while on leave in England that he, at age 24, impulsively resigned from the Imperial Police, despite much pleading from his parents. He'd had enough. He would, as biographer Bernard Crick put it, "go native" in Europe. He began tramping around England, living with hop pickers and hoboes, and then he went to Paris, where he ostensibly went to visit relatives (his mother had French roots, thus explaining Orwell's thin, weirdly Francophile moustache). When he ran out of money, he slept in "casual wards" (homeless shelters), where he began to hone his eccentric political vision. He was, in effect, paying penance for his imperialist sins and taking a vow of poverty. His poor health dates from this period, too; he sometimes slept outside, always walked around without a coat (even in winter) and smoked the raunchiest tobacco in hand-rolled cigarettes. But he savored his misery in Paris, so much so that he went back to London to replicate it in the working quarter there. The result was Down and Out in Paris and London , his first published book. It was while agonizing over this publication that he donned his new name and persona. The book gives off the unmistakable whiff of someone who has thought and experienced deeply before picking up his pen. And it is also a grand whirlwind true life adventure in the vein of Jack Kerouac's On the Road or Henry Miller's Air-Conditioned Nightmare . After Down and Out , the transformation was complete. This is the eternal mystery of the inscrutable George Orwell; it's also, arguably, the reason that people still fight over him. That is, George Orwell was not simply a pseudonym; Eric Blair really did become someone else. He referred to himself as George in letters and insisted on being called that even by old friends who'd previously known him as Eric Blair. Like everyone not born to wealth in the Great Depression, Orwell struggled for years to make ends meet, taking jobs as a tutor, school teacher and bookstore clerk. All of these detours, of course, provided the experiences that ended up in his brilliant autobiographical essays (like "Bookshop Memories") as well as two novels that are generally ignored but are still worth reading, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and A Clergyman's Daughter (1935). Despite his growing sense of outrage at the exploitation and inequities of the class system, Orwell still held onto his idea of himself as a novelist, toiling anonymously in a garret by dim light and sipping tea out of his plate (a working-class affectation that he enjoyed shocking his cultivated friends with). But, as he put it in a poem he wrote in 1935 (found among his notebooks): "A happy vicar I might have been / Two hundred years ago, / To preach upon eternal doom / And watch my walnuts grow; / But born, alas, in an evil time, I missed that pleasant haven, for the hair has grown on my upper lip/ And the clergy are all clean-shaven. ...I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls, / And woke to find it true; I wasn't born for an age like this; Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?" There's that name. Smith. The rough years of the 1930s, coupled with world events, turned Orwell into the political animal known to millions today. He was shaken by the rise of Hitler in Germany and the deplorable living and working conditions of the working class in England. Hoping to bring the workers' plight to a wider audience, Orwell went to Wigan, in northern England and lived among the coal miners. He went down into the mines and breathed the dust into his already damaged lungs. The result, besides the ultimate penance of his ruined health, was The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a cantankerous, totally personal diatribe that managed to anger everyone (the Left Book Club, which had funded Orwell's trip, refused to publish the book unless he removed what they thought was offensive material). The book, in short, was brilliant. It hewed no ideological line except for the eccentric brand of "democratic Socialism" Orwell was now espousing. But the Spanish Civil War was his real Rubicon. As he put it in his essay, "Why I Write": "In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. ... The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the table and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it." His goal was "to make political writing into an art." He succeeded, beyond even Aldous Huxley's wildest imaginings. His account of his experiences in Spain, ostensibly fighting the Fascists but getting caught in the crossfire between the factions of the left and even taking a nearly-fatal bullet in the throat from a fascist sniper, are recounted in Homage to Catalonia (1938). This was followed by a dizzying number of essays and reviews, produced for publications all over England. He was, as Orwell, a force to be reckoned with. And he was not surprised by the war with Nazi Germany. He stayed in London throughout with his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Once the bombs started falling, he volunteered for military duty but was turned down due to his ill health, so he became a squad leader of the Home Guards and a producer in the BBC's Eastern Service. This latter work -- lost among BBC's files until it was unearthed in the 1980s by W.J. West -- included some fascinating group pieces written in collaboration with the likes of T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster and Stephen Spender. This experience as a benign propagandist was vital to 1984 , providing the uncanny detail for Winston Smith's work in the "Ministry of Truth."
Whatever else might be said about him -- and plenty is being said, pro and con, about him during his centennial year -- Orwell was a courageous man. And yet Orwell's centennial is also a bit sad, given how he went out: on the brink of international renown for 1984 , the physically exhausting writing of which -- on the bleak Isle of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides -- hastened his death. Animal Farm , the fable he published in 1945, did make him famous but 1984 gave him the stature of an oracle. Before that, his life had been spent in relative obscurity and austerity. At one point, in fact, he and his wife Eileen tried their hand at being shopkeepers. George also raised goats and rabbits and grew vegetables in a ragged plot of land out back. The centennial is sad for another reason, entirely separate from his biography. That is, he has become something of a human shield for the culture wars and, as such, his writings have been treated shabbily by both his admirers and detractors. No writer since perhaps Thomas Jefferson has been so quoted out of context and made to prop up positions that if the living author were to confront them -- as Woody Allen put it about Christ's bodily return in one of his films -- "he would never stop vomiting." Since his death on the eve of the Cold War (a term he coined), Orwell has attracted a veritable army of admirers and debunkers. He has been ill-served by his many biographers, most recently by Jeffrey Meyers in his Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation . Meyers takes delight in reporting the details of Orwell's less-than-faithful marriage, his coarse manners and occasional coldness. (For my money, the best of the biographies is still Michael Shelden's authorized but imperfect Orwell from 1991). Louis Menand, also in the debunking camp, wrote in the New Yorker earlier this year, Orwell's army is one of the most "ideologically mixed up ever to assemble...It has included, over the years, ex-Communists, Socialists, left-wing anarchists, right-wing libertarians, liberals, conservatives, doves, hawks, the Partisan Review editorial board, and the John Birch Society; every group in a different uniform, but with the same button pinned to the lapel -- Orwell Was Right." The most visible of recent books about Orwell (two more have appeared in Britain in recent weeks) is Christopher Hitchens' Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books). This is mostly due to the outsized ego of the author. When I asked Hitchens two years ago about Orwell, he informed me that he was "working on a book now that will rescue Orwell from his admirers." That book would be Why Orwell Matters , which is, unfortunately, colored by all of Hitchens' myriad present-day feuds, though he no doubt thinks it makes him "Orwellian." After 30 or so pages, the effort to hack past Hitchens' ego proved too exhausting. The silver lining to all this, of course, is that it forces us back to Orwell himself. You can open any Orwell book and you will find gems scattered about like wild flowers in a meadow. Read the overlooked Coming Up For Air or Burmese Days and you will swear he was among the greatest novelists of his generation. What is it about Orwell that speaks so clearly to the modern reader? It's my contention that he transcends political ideology or notions of "left" or "right" and zeroes in, like a heat-seeking missile, on what he called "unpleasant truths" in such a way as to make them timeless. In his essay "Writers and Leviathan," for example, he brilliantly ruminates on the role of a creative writer in a political age, where these two things, creativity and politics, work at cross purposes and eventually turn good writers into propagandists. "I often have the feeling that even at the best of the times literary criticism is fraudulent," he writes. "When one praises a book for political reasons one may be emotionally sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but also it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie. Anyone used to reviewing books for political periodicals is well aware of this. At any rate, innumerable controversial books are judged before they are read, and in effect before they are written." This essay was written in 1948, but it reads in its entirety like a description of the contemporary scene. Indeed, everywhere one turns these days there is an echo of Orwell -- in the "doublespeak" of the White House press office and the "newspeak" of the enabling pundits; in the Big Brother madness of "homeland security" with its color-coded terror alerts and invasions of privacy; in a state of perpetual war against an unnamed enemy that conveniently enriches the friends of the emperor; in the confusion and hair-splitting on the left and the megaphoned platitudes on the right. I often find myself thinking, "If only Orwell were here to comment on this," but then I realize that he is here already. Pull out his Collected Essays and see for yourself. And here's another reason Orwell speaks so clearly to us: He was a great writer, a great humanist and yet a lovably eccentric and complicated individual. Written in pencil on the title page of my copy of Such, Such Were the Joys is a tribute to Orwell by a previous owner of the book. I cannot top it for its simplicity and its truthfulness: "I love this man, for his honesty, his hatred of cruelty and oppression, his passion for social justice, his love of men and nature, the flavor of his personality, and I believe that it is very good that he has lived and written and I grieve for his early death as for the death of a friend."
Huxley: A Life in Contrast
Huxley, unlike Orwell, enjoyed a long and distinguished career, despite moving to Hollywood and being nearly blind during much of his later years. He lived long enough to point to the future in another way, with his book The Doors of Perception . This book, documenting his own experimentations with a precursor to LSD, profoundly shaped a young film student named James Douglas Morrison, who took Huxley's ideas to heart and then communicated them to millions via his seminal band, the Doors. He took the name from Huxley's book, but Huxley himself had lifted it from another visionary named William Blake, who wrote, "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." On his death bed, Huxley tried to blast open his doors of perception, by asking his wife to inject him with liquid LSD. She did, and he "passed over" while tripping his brains out. If he had any expectation of gaining any notoriety by this unique exit strategem, Huxley picked the wrong day to die -- Nov. 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated. Huxley may have left this world with no room in his brain for such beings as Ashcroft, Cheney, Poindexter, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Delay, Rove, Osama, Saddam, Mullah Omar, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Sharon, Arafat and the Saudi princes. But Orwell had "the power of facing unpleasant facts" -- as he once stated in one of his greatest essays "Why I Write" -- and he could, after Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin and Tojo, easily imagine a world where the absolute dregs of our species were calling the shots. -- Alan Bisbort
Brave New Futures -- an OverviewSo, whose dystopian vision is closest to the reality of our moment in the unfiltered-by-ozone sun, 19 years after the actual "futuristic" date 1984? Whose vision speaks most eloquently to readers today? The futurist musings of Orwell and Huxley are fascinating to ponder in 2003, alongside those of Philip K. Dick (whose short story inspired Spielberg's prescient film Minority Report ); Karel Capek, the Czech visionary who coined the term "robot" in his 1922 play R.U.R. and predicted the excesses in the rise of fascism with his 1938 classic, War with the Newts , or the mechanized madness of the Soviet Russian Zamyatin's We , or the totalitarian mind-rot of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1941), the surrealist weirdness of life under Stalin depicted by Mikhal Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita , Ray Bradbury's book-burnings in Fahrenheit 451, or the work of H.G. Wells, whose numerous science fantasies have some resonant staying power ( The War of the Worlds , The Time Machine , The Island of Doctor Moreau , The Shape of Things to Come ), just as have some of Jules Verne's from the 19th century ( From the Earth to the Moon , Journey to the Center of the Earth ). And what about those authors whose "genre" is hard to pin down but whose vision of the future is not sweetness and light, like Kurt Vonnegut ( Player Piano , The Sirens of Titan , Cat's Cradle ), Arthur C. Clarke ( 2001: A Space Odyssey , Childhood's End ) and J.G. Ballard ( Terminal Beach )? Or literary types whose dystopian daydreams have engendered disquieting conclusions about human beings in modern totalitarian societies, like Kafka's The Trial or Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here (wanna make a bet?) and Margaret Atwood's brilliant portrait of the United States driven insane by its Puritanism, The Handmaid's Tale (1986). Then there are those writers, unfairly obscure now, who are known for one visionary book, like Walter M. Miller ( A Canticle for Leibowitz ), David Levy ( The Gods of Foxcroft ), Edward Bellamy ( Looking Backward , in 1880) and even Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 ruminated on a world overwhelmed by people ( On Population ). Or what about the book that coined the term utopia ("nowhere land"), Utopia by Sir Thomas More (1516), an author whose vision was so dangerous to the totalitarian Henry VIII that he had him beheaded in 1535? And on and on: Frank Herbert's Dune chronicles, Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters , Harlan Ellison's series of " Dangerous Visions ," Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human , Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness . Every science fiction fan, it seems, has his or her own list of top-10 and nearly all of the plots occur in some undesignated "future" when the human species either gets it right or horribly, terribly, cataclysmically wrong. Who has come closest to being the post-millennial Nostradamus? -- Alan Bisbort
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