THE POLITICS OF A CLASSIC

Nineteen Eighty-Four went on sale in Britain on 8 June 1949; it was launched in the United States five days later. The book was an instant success. Within a year, almost 50,000 copies were sold in Britain and 170,000 in the United States. The Book-of-the-Month Club distributed another 190,000. This was only the beginning: Nineteen Eighty-Four has been a best-seller throughout the world ever since its initial printing. Between 20 and 40 million copies have been sold, with annual distribution of about 500,000 copies per year in English alone. According to the National Council of Teachers of English, it is likely that more than half of U.S. high school and college students have read the book by the time they graduate.

It isn't a book I would gamble on for a big sale, but I suppose one could be sure of 10,000 anyway.

(George Orwell, letter to Fredric Warburg, 21 December 1948, in CEJL, Vol. 4: 459)

Sales alone cannot capture the book's impact. Its very publication was a significant political intervention. The “Western” powers, in a show of unity, had just formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; the Soviet Union, after eleven months, had lifted the Berlin Blockade and admitted they could not disrupt the U.S.-backed economic bloc in Western Europe; the Communist Party was advancing towards Peking and final victory in the Chinese Civil War; Britain was facing an insurgency in Malaya; and there were stories of resistance to French domination to the “puppet” regime in a little-known place called Vietnam. Domestically, Britain was in crisis with the difficult task of reviving production after the war, supporting a rise in living standards following years of consumer sacrifices, and introducing the welfare state. In 1949, the Government reluctantly devalued the pound sterling, a powerful symbol of imperial influence, to avoid depletion of foreign reserves and what was, effectively, bankruptcy.

Nineteen Eighty-Four powerfully captured, reflected, and reinforced a mood of fear, pessimism, and even resignation. At the same time, the example of its publication in a “free” society was a reassurance that at least “we” were better than “they” were, be “they” the totalitarians of Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union.

When Warburg visited Orwell in the sanatorium on 15 June, only two days after the American publication, the author dictated a statement which Warburg turned into a lengthy press release. Orwell tried to move beyond the Communist/Socialist issue by stating that “danger lies … in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colours.” He even issued a warning to “good” British and American citizens:

George Orwell assumes that if such societies as he describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four come into being there will be several super states. … Two of the principal super states will obviously be the Anglo-American world and Eurasia. … [The Anglo-Americans] will have to find a new name for themselves. The name suggested in Nineteen Eighty-Four is of course Ingsoc, but in practice a wide range of choices is open. In the USA the phrase “Americanism” or “hundred per cent Americanism” is suitable and the qualifying adjective is as totalitarian as anyone could wish.

As for the present, Orwell assured readers that “the present British government … will never sell the pass to the enemy.” Yet, unable to resist one more slap at his intellectual and political peers, he undid all his words against the wild labelling of Communist and Socialist enemies: “The younger generation is suspect and the seeds of totalitarian thought are probably widespread among them. It is invidious to mention names, but everyone could without difficulty think for himself of prominent English and American personalities whom the cap would fit.”¹

Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four were not passive victims of Cold War fighters, for the book, to some extent, was another assault in the author's ongoing war against intellectuals on the “Left.” Just months before the novel's publication, Orwell had mentioned names of the “suspect” not only to close friends but to British intelligence officers. In March 1949 Celia Kirwan, whom Orwell had tried to marry three years earlier, paid a friendly visit to the Cranham sanatorium. Kirwan told Orwell that she was working for the Information Research Department, a top-secret unit formed the previous year to spread anti-Communist propaganda in Britain and abroad. Orwell enthusiastically received the news and volunteered a notebook filled with 105 names of those he considered of dubious politics and character. (The list was annotated with comments by Arthur Koestler, who was Kirwan's brother-in-law.) Eventually the names of thirty-six individuals were handed over to IRD.

Harcourt Brace, the American publishers of Nineteen Eighty-Four, were also eager to use the Cold War to market the book. In April 1949, they approached J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for an endorsement: “We hope you might be interested in helping to call this book to the attention of the American public—and thus, perhaps, helping to halt totalitarianism.” Hoover declined and ordered that a file be kept on Orwell; however, the FBI later declared the film version of Animal Farm “hit the jackpot.”²

Orwell would continue protesting to correspondents from the U.S. that “my recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour 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.” His early death, however, removed any possibility of correcting the record; to the contrary, Western governments leapt at the chance to use Nineteen Eighty-Four as a cultural weapon. MI6, the British intelligence service, subsidized the production and distribution of cheap copies abroad. The CIA sought the film rights for the book from Orwell's widow, who had already provided the rights to Animal Farm in exchange for a meeting with Clark Gable.

After the initial flourish of Cold War labelling, some authors sought a broader image of Orwell's “Englishness,” but the effect was the same: a focus on Orwell the personality rather than the style and techniques of his writing. John Atkins' 1954 study reduced analysis to the statement, “The common element in all George Orwell's writing was a sense of decency. … The special connotation of this English word is a complex of English living and English attitudes.”³

By the 1960s, Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four were up for grabs. On the one hand, figures of the “Old Left” such as Irving Howe, uncomfortable with the growing protest against social problems and the Vietnam War, held up the author as the virtuous face of dissent. On the other, some New Left groups used Orwell to represent their fight against State repression and propaganda. The FBI monitored George Orwell societies and film clubs at U.S. universities for evidence of “subversive” behavior. Meanwhile, “reviews” in the Communist bloc held up Nineteen Eighty-Four as a satire based on an America “where police surveillance and investigation has surpassed the world and had no equals. … Already today an American lives, so to speak, under a glass cover, and is viewed from all sides.”⁴

Conor Cruise O'Brien, in an incisive review written when The Collected Essays of Orwell were published in 1968, considered Orwell the scourge of the intellectual Left. He predicted that Orwell would have turned against the intellectuals who invoked him in the crusade against Communism in the 1950s:

From the point of view of the “committed socialists and dedicated anti-communists” who took part in the complex and camouflaged manoeuvres of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CIA front which sponsored … intellectual magazines), it was rather fortunate that Orwell died when he died. Had he lived, it might not have been so easy to claim him. As it is, it has been possible to claim him as a patron saint, and to exploit his merits, by a sort of parasitic reversibility, in the service of some dubious activities.

Unfortunately, O'Brien continued, Sonia Orwell's description of her husband as a “dedicated anti-communist” … commends Orwell to people—apologists for the Vietnam War, for example—whose approval would have horrified him. And this imposing, if rather inflated edition will be a welcome acquisition for the book-shelves of such people, at a time when anti-communist writers who are both dedicated and respected are not easy to find.”⁵

Over the next 20 years, O'Brien's prophecy was uncannily accurate. In the backlash against the “liberals” of the 1960s, Orwell was seized by American and Britain “neo-conservatives” who equated freedom with the renewed Cold War against the Soviet Union, suppression of “left” regimes around the world, and assaults against minorities and the poor at home. At the most basic level, the British tabloid The Sun heralded New Year's Day, 1984, with the editorial:

[ORWELL'S NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR] HAS HAPPENED in Poland, where basic human rights are regarded as a crime against the state.

IT HAS HAPPENED in China, under the lunatic Red Guards.

IT HAS HAPPENED everywhere in the third of the world that now lies under the Communist heel. …

As 1984 opens, we have been spared the Orwell nightmare. We have liberty under Margaret Thatcher. We hope of a better tomorrow.

Yet all these things are not automatic.

We have to deserve them. We have to earn them.

We must be vigilant every day in 1984 and beyond to preserve them from any assault.⁶

.....

If Orwell were Alive Today, He'd be a Neo-Conservative.

(Norman Podhoretz, Harper's, January 1983)

There was an emerging division between the “eternal” Orwell, the “crystal spirit” praised by biographers and most literary critics, and the “contingent” Orwell, the writer who happened at the right time to adopt and propagate the “right” political philosophy. Bernard Crick, the foremost keeper of the “Orwell” image, maintained the “eternal” portrayal while showing either ingenuity or feigned surprise at the “contingent” position: “For a man who cultivated the skills and reputation of plain living, plain thinking, and plain writing, this diversity of reception, this propensity to be body-snatched by nearly everyone (except the Communists) is at least curious.”⁷

Crick's protests could not suffice. Some critics of the “Left” shared his immediate reaction to reclaim St. George, such as Crispin Aubrey's insistence that “[Orwell's] unorthodox, libertarian position should appeal in fact to many on the current British left concerned for a broader, more humanitarian socialism.”⁸ However, others recognized that, with his contradictions, problematic constructions, theoretical weaknesses, and antagonism towards fellow intellectuals, Orwell could not be preserved intact. Indeed, their notion of “contingency” extended to a literary analysis which has been eschewed by most over the last 30 years. As Christopher Norris wrote:

The ‘honest George’ style of plain, no-nonsense reportage has to be patiently deconstructed if we want to resist its more insidious rhetorical effects. Otherwise that style will continue to impose its bogus common-sense ‘values’ in the service of every kind of reactionary populist creed.⁹

With the “eternal” Orwell challenged by consideration of specifics such as gender and class and Nineteen Eighty-Four hindered by its conclusion of “dreariness and negativity,”¹⁰ the “contingent” Orwell was rescued from critiques such as Norris's through a return to Cold War stereotypes. Richard Rorty, the political philosopher, summarized: “I do not think there are any plain moral facts out there in the world, nor any truths independent of language, nor any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness are preferable to the other. … In the case of the Communist oligarchs, what Orwell and Solzhenitsyn did was to give us an alternative context, an alternative perspective, from which we liberals, the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do, could describe the political history of our century.”¹¹

Thus Nineteen Eighty-Four was returned to its Cold War reading, albeit one which uses the Communists as a specific warning of the general possibility of “totalitarianism.” In the novel, according to Rorty, “[Orwell] sketched an alternative scenario, one which led in the wrong direction. He convinced us that there was a perfectly good chance that the same developments which had made human equality technically possible … make endless slavery possible.”¹² Jenni Calder skirts about the issue but keeps returning to it:

We should be fully aware of the tremendous impact Nineteen Eighty-Four made when it first came out, and of the fact that it has now entered the imagination of Europe and the United States, and perhaps beyond. …

In 1984 the book was used to trigger discussions of a great many issues that have immediacy today, and for some people in some parts of the world more relevance and more painful truth than when the novel was first published. These are issues that concern the freedom of expression, of political allegiance, of speech, of publication. Hand in hand with these issues goes the insidiousness of authoritarian power. …

It seems to me that Nineteen Eighty-Four is among those books that create their owns rules and set their own standards. … It is a novel that requires an approach that bears in mind the circumstances that created the book as well as the influence it has had over the years since its publication.¹³

What Peter Davison sought, basing his claim on the unique achievement of cataloguing and publishing almost every single scrap of extant paper connected with Orwell,¹⁴ was to fuse the “eternal” personality with the “contingent” author and his political vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell's immediate legacy was in the ongoing fight against “bad” regimes (Davison uses the example of China):

Were we able to hope that such regimes had no place in the modern world, and that they would never arise in Britain, the ‘necessity’ for Nineteen Eighty-Four would disappear and the novel itself could become a footnote, a mere ‘problem in intellectual history.’ Until that happy and unlikely state occurs, it will remain an essential warning.¹⁵

The rationale was becoming worn, however. Part of the problem is that revelations about and further examination of “Orwell” undercut the claim of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a valiant defense against the evils of the State. The release of the British Government's records, in 1996 and 1998, confirming that Orwell had served as informant for intelligence services and that his work had been exploited, overtly and covertly, by U.S. and British authorities, led to a broader consideration of the author's politics from the 1930s until his death. As one critic claimed in the New Statesman (ironically, a bete noire for Orwell during his lifetime), “George Orwell was not a socialist. Let's reiterate that for those advocates who hail Orwell as a good socialist but, in Orwellian doublethink, do so without examination of any of the political or economic tenets of socialism.”¹⁶

More broadly, it was becoming difficult to stretch newer enemies to fit the “totalitarian” image of Cold War foes. As Timothy Garton Ash wrote about “Orwell in Our Time” in May 2001:

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four ended in 1989. Orwellian regimes persisted in a few remote countries, such as North Korea, and communism survived in an attenuated form in China. But the three dragons against which Orwell fought his good fight—European and especially British imperialism; fascism, whether Italian, German or Spanish; and communism, not to be confused with the democratic socialism in which Orwell himself believed—were all either dead or mortally weakened. Forty years after his own painful and early death, Orwell had won.¹⁷

If Orwell had “won,” however, where was the need for the novel, especially when its literary qualities had always been secondary to its political use? In a world where “Big Brother” and “Room 101” had become light entertainment programs, Garton Ash struggled for an answer. Notably, he did not find it in Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Fortunately, there is a more compelling reason why we should read Orwell in the 21st century. This is that he remains an exemplar of political writing. Both meanings of “exemplar” are required. He is a model of how to do it well, but he is also an example—a deliberate, self-conscious and self-critical instance—of how difficult it is.

If I had to name a single quality that makes Orwell still essential reading in the 21st century, it would be his insight into the use and abuse of language. If you have time to read only one essay, read “Politics and the English Language.” This brilliantly sums up the central Orwellian argument that the corruption of language is an essential part of oppressive or exploitative politics. “The defence of the indefensible” is sustained by a battery of euphemisms, verbal false limbs, prefabricated phrases, and all the other paraphernalia of deceit that he pinpoints and parodies.¹⁸

To the extent that Nineteen Eighty-Four could be directed “inward” as well as “outward” (Garton Ash cites the Newspeak of U.S. and British propaganda in the Kosovo conflict of 1999 as an example), there might be a renewed strength in Orwell's vision. Unfortunately, the tendency is still to co-opt Orwell as a valiant proponent of a “West” which has turned its back on “democratic socialism,” the socialism that Orwell supposedly espoused but arguably sabotaged.¹⁹ Significantly, Garton Ash never considers this argument; indeed, his own revision of history, on Orwell's transmission of names to British intelligence just before Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, is telling:

[First,] there were Soviet agents and sympathisers about, and they were influential. …

Second, Orwell did not give this notebook to the British secret service. He gave a list of 35 names drawn from it to the Information Research Department, a semi-secret branch of the Foreign Office which specialised in getting writers on the democratic left to counter the then highly organised Soviet communist propaganda offensive.²⁰

The first assertion is questionable at best, the second misleading and arguably false.

Rightly or wrongly, Nineteen Eighty-Four was framed most effectively by Cold War politics as a text directed against the external “enemy.” While most cultural references to the novel in 2001 refer to the issue of domestic surveillance, they do not carry the weight of the criticism of the last 50 years. There is no organized movement, comparable to the anti-Communist literary critics of the 1950s, curbing the expansion of closed-circuit television.

Today the U.S. and the “West” face a new enemy which is not the organized State/Party of the Soviet system but, frustratingly, an enemy called “terrorism” which does not have an orthodox structure or easily-defined ideology. In this new international environment, Nineteen Eighty-Four's place is uncertain.

Notes

1. Quoted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 565-6.

2. David Hencke and Rob Evans, “How Big Brothers Used Orwell to Fight the Cold War,” The Guardian, June 30, www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,338230,00.html.

3. John Atkins, George Orwell (London: Calder and Boyars, 1954), p. 1.

4. Hencke and Evans, “How Big Brothers Used Orwell to Fight the Cold War.”

5. Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Listener, 12 December 1968, pp. 79-8.

6. Quoted in Malcolm Evans, “Text, Theory, Criticism: Twenty Things You Never Knew About George Orwell,” in Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth: Orwell, Views from the Left (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), pp. 15-6.

7. Bernard Crick, “Introduction,” in Robert Mulvihill, Reflections on America, 1984 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).

8. Crispin Aubrey, “The Making of 1984,” in Crispin Aubrey and Paul Chilton (eds.), Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984 (London: Comedia, 1983), p. 13.

9. Norris in Norris (ed.), p. 9.

10. Jenni Calder, Animal Farm & Nineteen Eighty-Four (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1987), p. 83.

11. Richard Rorty, “The Last Intellectual In Europe: Orwell on Cruelty,” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 173.

12. Ibid., p. 175.

13. Calder, pp. 83 and 86-8.

14. Davison's literary criticism of Orwell is thin at best and is secondary to his recording of the literary “history” of Orwell's works.

15. Peter Davison, George Orwell: A Literary Life (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 143-5.

16. Scott Lucas, “The Socialist Fallacy,” New Statesman, 29 May 2000, pp. 47-8.

17. Timothy Garton Ash, “Orwell for Our Time,” The Guardian, 5 May 2001. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4181142,00.html.

18. Ibid.

19. See the reply to Garton Ash by Michael McEvoy, “After Orwell,” The Guardian, 8 May 2001.

20. Garton Ash, “Orwell for Our Time.”