That Year Is Almost Here

By Paul Gray

But George Orwell's message for 1984 is bigger than Big Brother

He thought it was "a good idea ruined," that futuristic fable he had planned on calling The Last Man in Europe. But he was always pessimistic about his own writing. This time the gloom was deepened by illness. His tuberculosis had worsened. The task of typing and revising the manuscript had broken him physically. He lay in a sanatorium bed when his book was published, in June 1949; the name that appeared on its cover was Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Come Jan. 1, the fictional date of George Orwell's final and most famous book becomes fact at last. It is a looking-glass anniversary, a remembrance of things future, and an accidental one at that. Orwell's manuscript, which has just resurfaced after years in a private collection, reveals that the author had considered both 1980 and 1982 for the time of his story. So what is about to happen might have occurred two or four years earlier, or not at all; had he stuck to The Last Man in Europe, there would have been no occasion to commemorate.

Tens of millions have read it, in 62 languages: the story of Winston Smith, a minor bureaucrat in the totalitarian state of Oceania. War with the world's two other superpowers, Eurasia and Eastasia, is constant, although the pattern of hostilities and alliances keeps changing. Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old newspaper stories to conform to current Party ideology. He uses the official language, Newspeak, a version of English being pared down to make unorthodox opinions impossible to conceive. Privacy has vanished. Waking and sleeping, Smith and all Party members are observed by two-way telescreens; posters everywhere proclaim BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. Suddenly, Smith commits a thoughtcrime: "Down with Big Brother." He also begins a love affair with Julia, a co-worker at his office, another heinous offense. The Junior Anti-Sex League indoctrinates the virtue of celibacy; procreation will soon be carried on solely through artificial insemination ("artsem," in Newspeak). All personal loyalty belongs to the Party. Winston and Julia are caught by the Thought Police and hauled off to the Ministry of Love. He is relentlessly tortured, then taken to Room 101, where his worst fear has been readied by interrogators. As a cage bearing a rat is being pushed toward his face, he begs that this punishment be inflicted on Julia instead. This betrayal eliminates the last trace of his integrity. He has become a good Party Member.

For all its readers, for the countless millions who have heard of Big Brother and the estimated year of his arrival, this New Year's Day offers some unsettling moments: that glimpse of the new calendar, the first chance to write 1984 in a diary or on a letter or check. Orwell spelled his title out, a practice followed in the first editions: the book had a name, like Utopia or Leviathan, not a date. But the shorthand 1984 also gained wide currency. And those four neutral integers, fused so long in the public consciousness, have acquired the shimmering, brutal power of the hieroglyph.

What does it stand for? That question and the imminence of the Orwellian year have galvanized a small army of professors, critics and writers, journalists, pundits, social scientists, politicians and professional doomsters; hardly anyone paid for thinking out loud seems able to resist the temptation to play with Orwell's numbers. The game began in earnest last January and could, thanks to crowded conditions, easily extend into 1985. The action takes different forms: an apparently endless round of academic seminars and symposiums, coast to coast, from Manhattan College to Stanford; a swelling stream of magazine articles ("On the Brink of 1984") and books (1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century); a CBS documentary last June anchored by Walter Cronkite, plus some six hours of TV programming to be shown in England.

A new 17-volume edition of Orwell's complete works will be published next year in the U.S. and England. A wax figure of the author is to be installed at Madame Tussaud's in London at the end of December. Science-fiction buffs discussed the father of Big Brother in Antwerp this fall. Futurists look forward to gathering for the same purpose in Washington next June, well after the separate Orwell festivities planned by the Smithsonian Institution and Library of Congress. By then hearings scheduled by a House Judiciary subcommittee on "1984: Civil Liberties and the National Security State" will be completed.

Orwell experts jetting from one gala to another can keep track of the time through "The 1984 Calendar" ($10.95), the inspiration of two Michigan State graduates. Billed as "a day-by-day history of the increasing erosion of civil liberties in the U.S.," it measures 17 in. by 34 in. and features black-and-white photographs of U.S. Government buildings (the IRS, FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs) and of police riot squads and jail cells. Each date is annotated with one or more reminders, trivial as well as grim, of the loss of freedom; few may recall that on Aug. 1, 1973, the Washington Post reported a private investigation launched by the Nixon White House on the Smothers brothers. Can Doublethink T shirts and Big Brother barbecue aprons be far behind?

This snowballing imprecision has been in progress for almost a decade. Author Anthony Burgess recalls teaching in the U.S. at various times in the 1970s. "American college students have said, 'Like 1984, man,' when asked not to smoke pot in the classroom or advised gently to do a little reading." Now merely mentioning the date can convey muzzy criticism of whatever the speaker happens to dislike: advertising, computers, beeper phones, freeways and domed stadiums.

Such verbal knee jerks might be dismissed as harmless. But they never were by Orwell. "The slovenliness of our language," he wrote in 1946, "makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." And it is a surpassing irony that the title Orwell made famous has become a symptom of the very sloppiness he deplored: what he called a "Meaningless Word," a ramshackle abstraction inviting everyone to come in and stop thinking for a while.

"Happy 1984." This concludes a New York Times editorial criticizing the U.S. invasion of Grenada and the "Orwellian arguments" for it given by the Reagan Administration. The implication is clumsy but clear: Nineteen Eighty-Four and its author stand behind the Times's position. But a week or so earlier, the same newspaper's Op-Ed page ran a defense of the Grenada action by Neo-Conservative Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary. And Podhoretz had by then firmly claimed Orwell for his camp of disillusioned liberals: "I believe he [Orwell] would have been a neo-conservative if he were alive today."

The impulse to hold Orwell's coat while sending his ghost out to battle now seems pandemic. A writer in the liberal Roman Catholic journal Commonweal proclaims: "Orwell, if he were alive today, would make a worthy opponent for the multinational corporation. He could have made an idea and a book on 'organization man' stand up and sing." The conservative National Review concludes an essay on Orwell with cosmic theatrics: "The forces of darkness have huge armies, a bigger and better arsenal, liberation movements, and the whores' allegiance. The forces of light have Orwell on their side and draw strength from it." On the other side of the barricades, the radlib Village Voice waves a special issue devoted to Orwell and his year. One headline: CHRONICLES OF A DECENT MAN.

Before Orwell's name becomes as muddled and mythologized as Nineteen Eighty-Four, the testimony of personal friends who would not have dreamed of predicting his views, on any subject, might be heeded. "I understood him up to a point," says Author V.S. Pritchett. "It was hard to define him because just when you had fixed on a view, he would contradict it." Novelist Julian Symons remembers "a quality of perversity" in Orwell: "He had a characteristic directness which upset people and made him a lot of enemies." Malcolm Muggeridge recalls a man "who utterly despised intellectuals and people he used to refer to, scornfully, as wearing sandals. And yet he was an intellectual."

He was also many other things: an astute critic of literature and popular culture, a journalist who turned political writing into an art form, the finest English essayist of his century. Those who know of him only as a grand bogey, a synonym for some terror that may go bump in the Western night, hardly know him at all. He made it his business to tell the truth at a time when many contemporaries believed that history had ordained the lie. Yet the very name that is now so often invoked, vaguely and in vain, is a fiction.

Eric Arthur Blair was born in 1903 in India, where his father Richard worked as a civil servant for the British Empire. Not long afterward, Eric's mother took him and his older sister Marjorie back to England, a common domestic arrangement at the time; India was fine as a place for husbands to work, but children were to be brought up in the homeland. Richard Blair joined his family during his infrequent leaves. A younger sister Avril was born when Eric was five.

Orwell looked back harshly on the "shabby genteel" class inhabited by his parents and their friends: "Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances." Unlike most who rebel from the worlds of their childhood, Eric became hypercritical of himself as well; his behavior during his early years, his adult memories of this period, both convey the peculiar sense that he considered himself not good enough for a style of life he disliked. The Blairs kept up appearances by enrolling their son, at reduced tuition, in St. Cyprian's, an institution that rigorously prepared boys for the great public schools. Eric, 8, was caned for bed wetting: the place encouraged him to feel unworthy. "I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt, I was an unattractive boy."

Jacintha Buddicom, now 82, who met and became friends with Eric Blair during his school vacations, disputes this self-portrait: "The business about how unpopular he was was a lot of nonsense, a fairy story." He fished and hunted, kept pet guinea pigs and roamed the Oxfordshire countryside. But Jacintha did not see him at St. Cyprian's. Critic Cyril Connolly, who was his classmate, would later remember that Eric "felt bitterly that he was taken on at reduced fees because he might win the school a scholarship; he saw this as a humiliation, but it was really a compliment." The prickly youth did, in fact, earn a scholarship to Eton, winning praise for himself and his school. Yet his account of leaving St. Cyprian's hardly reflects a sense of triumph: "Failure, failure, failure--failure behind me, failure ahead of me--that was by far the deepest conviction that I carried away."

He may not have felt like this at the time; an older man wrote these words in an essay, in a world drastically altered. But Eric's conduct at Eton did not resemble the courtship of success. He idled his way through 4 1/2 years at the apex of English secondary education, growing tall (6 ft. 3 in.) and awkward in the process. He read widely in his favorite authors (Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling, H.G. Wells), contributed some poems to school publications and took part grudgingly in athletics. His father could not afford to send him to Oxford or Cambridge without a scholarship, and Eric's academic performance ensured that no scholarship would be offered.

The lack of university training left him at a dead end in England. The professions, even the higher reaches of the civil service, were closed. It also made Eric an outsider to his friends and classmates, those Etonians who were going on to do great things in government and the arts. So he chose the course his father had taken and left the country; he joined the Imperial Indian Police and was dispatched to keep order among the colonial subjects in Burma.

Two of his greatest essays were to be wrenched from the five years he spent there. A Hanging (1931) records both the execution of a Hindu man and the writer's revulsion at the event: "It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide." Shooting an Elephant (1936) portrays "the dirty work of Empire at close quarters." A rampaging elephant in Moulmein has killed a native, and the people expect the policeman to do something: "Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys."

He returned to England after five years and resigned his commission. "He had changed," his friend Jacintha recalls. "He seemed more aloof, an unhappy sort of stranger. Whatever happened to him in Burma must have embittered him very much." Blair described the feeling he brought home as "an intolerable sense of guilt." He had been a petty tyrant in the service of what he saw as a vast system of exploitation. He could recognize in the flogged Burmese troublemakers a likeness to himself as a schoolboy, whipped and cowed by the same imperious forces. A childhood conviction had been confirmed: his place was with the oppressed.

Over the next ten years, he undertook the quixotic journey that would make him famous, under a new name and an altered identity. The first step was to tell his appalled parents that he wanted to be a writer; the next was to become one. That proved harder. He took a cheap room in London and spent hours each day at his typewriter, tapping out the kind of story that began "Inside the park, the crocuses were out . . ." At night, he began "tramping," haunting the slums, occasionally taking a bed in lodginghouses for the destitute, hoping that his Etonian accent would not give him away: "What I profoundly wanted, at that time, was to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether."

Bohemianism did not attract him. He went to Paris in the late 1920s and found it "invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sightseers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists must actually have outnumbered the working population . . ." He took a job as a dishwasher in a Paris hotel, a member of the working population 13 hours a day.

Urgently he kept struggling to become a novelist, but the sketches he wrote about his flophouse experiences became his first book. He knew that the seamy life depicted in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) would unnerve and embarrass his parents, so he told his agent that he did not want the book published under his own name: "As a pseudonym, a name I always use when tramping etc. is P.S. Burton, but if you don't think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, H. Lewis Allways. I rather favor George Orwell." George, the patron saint of England, plus Orwell, a river that Eric Blair had known when young: the choice suggested the buried patriotism of a disaffected subject.

By this time the conviction that something was terribly wrong in his native land had begun to obsess him. Eric Blair had experienced injustice and poverty; George Orwell began to look for their causes. The change was not entirely voluntary. He wrote and published novels, and tried to pursue the kind of literary career that had been traditional in England since the 18th century. But the urge to stand witness to his times nagged him out of seclusion: "In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer."

A publisher asked him to go to the north of England and report on the plight of miners and factory workers unemployed in the drift of the Depression. Orwell spent two months early in 1936 among these people, not drunks and derelicts this time but victims of economic forces beyond their understanding or control. The first half of The Road to Wigan Pier recounts some of their stories. The second half tells Orwell's.

It is an astonishing document: a call for socialism to wipe out the inequalities of capitalism and class, coupled with a stinging indictment of contemporary Socialists: "One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw toward them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England." Orwell not only sensed the distaste that unemployed miners would feel for such studied eccentricities, he shared the feeling. He also perceived something that was to reverberate in political writings for half a century: ascendant leftist theories threatened to replace one form of tyranny with another. "The truth is that to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we,' the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them,' the Lower Orders."

He had scarcely written these words when he met their reality headon. A few months after marrying Eileen O'Shaughnessy, 30, an Oxford graduate who was working for an advanced degree in psychology in London, Orwell went to Spain. The attempt by Generalissimo Francisco Franco to topple an elected left-wing government had led to civil war. Orwell could not pass up the chance to see "democracy standing up to Fascism at last." He arrived in Barcelona at the end of 1936 and found a city being run by the underdogs: "It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle."

Orwell was enchanted, "breathing the air of equality." A hotel manager scolded him for offering a tip to an elevator operator; barbers posted anarchist placards by their chairs announcing that they were no longer slaves. The signs of class he so detested in his own country had disappeared: "Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for."

He recounted his odyssey in Homage to Catalonia (1938). He joined a local militia unit and marched into trouble. Franco's troops fired at him, as expected; they were the enemy. But while recuperating from a bullet wound in the throat, Orwell learned that Communists in the Spanish government had outlawed the loose alliance of radicals he had joined in the struggle against Franco. The independent workers' stronghold in Barcelona was not, apparently, what Madrid or Moscow had in mind. Suddenly Orwell and his colleagues-at-arms were being called fascists, Franco's hired killers, by the Communist papers in Spain and Europe. Purges and reprisals began in Barcelona. Released from the hospital, Orwell was forced into hiding and then out of the country. His journey from exhilaration to exile took six months.

Spain left definitive marks on Orwell's character; all the political writing he did after escaping the civil war was sharpened by his keen sense of betrayal. He had seen the future, and it worked far too well; the world was being staked out by mirror-image tyrannies equally ruthless in stamping out the individual. The workers in Barcelona had been punished by the Communists for the crime of being unorthodox; they became, until suppressed, a more important enemy than Franco.

Back home in England, Orwell read accounts of the events in Spain and realized that he was being fed hogwash: "I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories." This phenomenon frightened him, he wrote, "because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world."

Orwell devoted the rest of his life to arresting this process, against formidable odds. He took on not only Nazis and Stalinists and all advocates of the expedient lie but the solipsism of much modern philosophy and literature. Theories that reality is simply the spider web of word spinners left him aghast; that way lay the dictatorship of the speaker and, ultimately, the abstract, ominous slogans of Nineteen Eighty-Four: WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

The first and best defense against such totalitarian gibberish, Orwell argued, is common sense. A person with a basic understanding of what the words freedom and slavery actually mean must reject a sentence that equates them. He wrote: "In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit." The alternative method promises treachery: "When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning."

There was nothing donnish about Orwell's interest in language. He realized that the manipulation of speech could be every bit as deadly as the bearing of arms. He reminded all who would listen that Hitler had risen to power in Germany through persuasion; that Stalin had obscured massive crimes through the smokescreen of invective. He also warned, on the eve of World War II, that matters could deteriorate: "The terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of 'human nature,' which as a matter of course desired liberty. But we cannot be at all certain that 'human nature' is constant . . . The radio, press-censorship, standardized education and the secret police have altered everything. Mass-suggestion is a science of the last twenty years, and we do not yet know how successful it will be."

Still, Orwell never allowed this innate pessimism to overwhelm his talent or his energies. With Europe flaring into war, he took time from his political comments to write essays on Charles Dickens, Henry Miller and the literary and social merits of English boys' magazines. Oddly, these are the pieces that have aged the least. It is as if survival depended on the small things, like childhood pleasures, and not the large things, like war.

During the war, Orwell and his wife lived in London. Cyril Connolly recalled: "He felt enormously at home in the Blitz, among the bombs, the bravery, the rubble, the shortages, the homeless, the signs of rising revolutionary temper." By then Orwell had become something of a celebrated eccentric, that gaunt Etonian who dressed like a working man (corduroy trousers, dark shirt, size-twelve boots), rolled his cigarettes from a pouch of acrid shag and poured his tea into a saucer before drinking it (there he goes, that Socialist who says such terrible things about Mr. Stalin). Eric Blair had totally metamorphosed into George Orwell; the mask had become the man. Money was still scarce; his books had made him well known but not solvent. He turned out columns for Tribune, a weekly organ of the non-Communist British left, and did wartime broadcasts for the BBC's Eastern Service to India and Southeast Asia. He also wrote Animal Farm.

This slight fable, scarcely longer than a short story, was Orwell's favorite among his works; it led directly back to his first, heady days in Barcelona. The abused, overworked animals rebel against the rule of the exploiting farmer, Mr. Jones; but the workers' paradise is soon commandeered and betrayed by a pig who bears more than a fleeting resemblance to Joseph Stalin. His credo: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Animal Farm was rejected by more than a dozen publishers in England and the U.S. The clear anti-Soviet parody bothered many of them. After all, the U.S.S.R. was an ally in the crusade against Hitler. But the publishers who finally accepted the book were amply rewarded; it has sold dependably for nearly 40 years.

Orwell's wife died in 1945, during surgery for uterine tumors. The widower was 41, tubercular, and left with an infant son, Richard, recently adopted. Loneliness, the responsibility of a child and the prospect of his own death drove him to propose marriage to a series of flabbergasted women. He wrote one, after two meetings, "You are young and healthy, and you deserve somebody better than me: on the other hand if you don't find such a person, and if you think of yourself as essentially a widow, then you might do worse--i.e., supposing I am not actually disgusting to you." Unsurprisingly, she declined the offer.

The success of Animal Farm at last brought Orwell some financial relief; he could afford to cut back on his journalism and devote more time to his next novel. He took a house on Jura, a windy, remote island off the western coast of Scotland. There, growing more ill each day, he completed Nineteen Eighty-Four.

He lived only seven months after its publication, long enough to realize that his book was becoming enormously successful and widely misunderstood. He attempted a note of clarification: "My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labor Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. 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." Few listened, trusting the title and the tale, not the teller.

Orwell did not view Nineteen Eighty-Four as his last will and testament, a Swiftian condemnation of humanity, as some, including Connolly, have claimed ("He was a dying man and he knew it"). Muggeridge remembers his last conversation with Orwell: "He said, 'I have some more books to write.' " Soon afterward, he married Sonia Brownell, a beautiful woman 15 years his junior, in his hospital room. T.O. Fyvel, another friend, recalls Orwell's saying, "When one is married, one has more reason to live." He died three months later, on Jan. 21, 1950.

Where did he stand, finally? He called himself "a man of the left," realizing that most of his allies shied away from or repudiated his maverick views. In fact, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have long been embraced by the right as anti-revolutionary tracts. Yet such terms shift with time; what was left 20 years ago could be mainstream now and reactionary by 2001, or vice versa. Orwell's work has proved itself, with some exceptions, grounded on bedrock.

His four published novels before Animal Farm are readable but minor performances. His women characters are particularly stiff and lifeless. He was not an imposing political theorist; his strength lay in recognizing problems, not in propounding detailed solutions.

His greatest accomplishment was to remind people that they could think for themselves, at a time in this century when humanity seemed to prefer taking marching orders. He steadfastly valued ideals over ideology. He tried to strike a correct socialist attitude toward Dickens, and could not quite pull it off: "His whole 'message' is one that looks at first glance like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent." But the sentiment, he concluded, "is not such a platitude as it sounds." Indeed, for all the pessimism attributed to him posthumously, Orwell had an abiding, almost pious faith in the ability of that fragile, querulous species, humankind, to correct its deficiencies by the most radical process of all: thinking. In The Road to Wigan Pier he expressed the belief that "economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop the method adopted hardly matters." "Political chaos," he continued to stress, "is connected with the decay of language . . . one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end." To that end, Orwell devoted his life. His work endures, as lucid and vigorous as the day it was written. The proper way to remember George Orwell, finally, is not as a man of numbers--1984 will pass, not Nineteen Eighty-Four--but as a man of letters, who wanted to change the world by changing the word. A word that surely requires alteration today has been misused since the '50s. The author's name is not a synonym for totalitarianism. It is in fact the spirit that fights the worst tendencies in politics and society by using a fundamental sense of decency--Orwellian, in the best sense of the word.

--By Paul Gray.

Reported by Anne Hopkins/New York and John Saar/London

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