Evelyn Waugh, in the last third of his Sword of Honour, reminds us of how Soviet Russia became not merely an exemplar of democratic freedom but a vessel of holiness. The British State ordered that a jewelled sword be forged in honour of the defenders of Stalingrad, and this Excalibur was solemnly exhibited in Westminster Abbey. The Free World, that had loathed Stalin, now called him Uncle Joe and loved him. When the war was over, of course, hatred was in order again. The free swivelling-around of emotions, as in a gun turret, had become one of the regular techniques of the modern age.
Traditionally, we have always hated a thing because it is intrinsically hatable. Christianity, though it enjoins love of people, commands hatred of certain qualities that may inhere in them - cruelty, intolerance, greed and so on. There was a time when we knew what the hatable qualities were; now we are no longer sure. Traditional vices are presented in the popular press as virtues. A man, film star or tycoon, who has been proud, covetous, lustful, envious and gluttonous and achieved a name in the world through the exercise of such vices, is a hero, not a monster. Tolerance is weakness, cowardice is prudence. The notion of intrinsic loathability no longer exists.
It seems to follow that lovability does not exist either. Love comes into Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it is neither the disinterested, generalized love of the Gospels nor the romantic love of nineteenth-century novelists. It is certainly not a love appropriate to marriage vows. Winston receives a note from a girl whose name he does not even know. It says simply, 'I love you.' He at once palpitates with fear and excitement. The love that the girl, whose name turns out to be Julia, claims to feel for him is, we learn, based on a recognition that his political orthodoxy is imperfect, and that his disaffection is ready to be expressed in the only form she knows - a willingness to fornicate. Fornication is forbidden by the State, since it offers a pleasure the State cannot control. To make love physically is an act of rebellion. This imposes on the sexual act a bundle of virtues which it is not, in itself, well able to sustain. But the statement 'I love you' is here as much a mockery of the values traditionally attached to the phrase as is the State's own institution of a Ministry of Love.
The main fictional weakness of Nineteen Eighty-Four lies here. There is an insufficiency of conflict between the individual's view of love and the State's. Winston and Julia do not oppose to Big Brother the strength of a true marital union and, by extension, the values of the family. They have fornicated clandestinely and been caught naked in the act. There is a sad moment when Julia, whose sole notion of freedom is the right to be sexually promiscuous, gives Winston a potted history of her love affairs. Winston rejoices in her corruption, and Orwell seems to abet the false antithesis - oppose to the moral evils of the State the moral evils of the individual. And yet, as we know, the history of Orwell's own love life is one of trust and devotion: he was not extrapolating a frustration in his fiction. He was perhaps merely being prophetic. In 1984, whether Big Brother is there or not, the traditional view of love will have disappeared, and through no fault of the repressive State.
One of the achievements of American civilization is the devaluation of the institution of marriage. This has had much to do with the Puritan condemnation of adultery as a deadly sin; the scarlet letter is burnt into the American soul. Divorce is preferable to adultery, divorce sometimes being a euphemism for serial polygamy. But divorce is rarely presented, in American fiction or American life, as the wholly regrettable, unavoidable, last-resort surgical operation of a less permissive tradition. Love is a sort of car that has to be replaced by a newer model. It is an electric light bulb whose hours of illumination are numbered. It is equated, as in the mind of Orwell's Julia, with sexual desire. Sexual desire does not die, but it requires a change of object. Like hatred, it is a gun.
Love, however, could be defined as a discipline. It is big enough to encompass transient phases of indifference, dislike, even hatred. Its best physical expression is sexual, but the expression should not be confounded with the essence, the word confused with the thing. Both Winston and Julia love in the sense that they form a self-contained community whose main activity is the sexual act, the act and its concomitants begetting fondness, companionship, and other benign essences. They know, however, that there is no permanency in the relationship; their only discipline is directed to not being found out. It is a brief phase of superficial tenderness to be ended by punishment. 'We are the dead,' says Winston, and Julia dutifully echoes him. 'You are the dead,' says the voice from the wall. The relationship had death in it from the start. So do many relationships in our permissive age, and the death is not imposed from without; it is self-induced.
Separate the sexual act from love, and the language of love is devalued. An aspect of our freedom is our right to debase the language totally, so that its syntagms become mere noise. Big Brother, though regretting the promiscuity enjoined by our society and abetted by our films and magazines, will be delighted to see the weakening of marital values. Communism has tried to kill the family - with great difficulty in China - since the family is the original of which the State tries to make a grotesque blown-up copy; it is far better for the family to kill itself.
The reduction of love to the sexual act, and then to the promiscuous sequence of sexual acts, has the effect of reducing sexual partners to mere objects. It becomes easy then to regard all human beings, in whatever social connection, as objects, on to whom we can spray whatever emotion is expedient. An object has no individual essence; it is a common noun. Generalization follows - women, not this woman and that; workers, the working class. The shocking demotion of millions of individual souls to a generalized class called the proles is perhaps, after the devaluation of love, the most terrible thing in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
If we regard such a bestial corralling as implausible, nevertheless we accept it as the basic condition for the setting up of an oligarchy like that of Ingsoc. If one hundred per cent of the population has to be controlled with Thought Police and telescreens, then the oligarchical State cannot survive: its resources will be insufficient to hold everybody down. It has to assume that the proles are too stupid, cowed, unimaginative ever to represent a danger to stability: if, improbably, a prole demagogue starts preaching revolt, he can easily be picked off. But the whole mystique and technique of Ingsoc accepts without question the inertness of eighty-five per cent of the population. We accept it too; otherwise we would not be frightened of the possibility of the nightmare of Ingsoc's coming true. And by we I do not just mean readers of this kind of book; I mean members of the working class who, drinking a pint in a pub after a television adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, make jokes about Big Brother watching them. The story is founded on a division that is no mere fictional device, something we are as prepared to accept to get the plot moving as the absence of marine insurance in Shylock's Venice. It was Orwell's revenge on the workers of 1948. They had let him down. More than that, it was an inherited acceptance of an immutable social division that he could no more drop than he could drop his aitches.
The idea of writing Animal Farm came to Orwell when he saw a small boy in charge of a Suffolk Punch. What if these great beasts became aware of their power and turned against their puny human masters? The farm animals of the little fable turn against Mr Jones and his family and found the first animal republic. But it was only possible for Orwell to write the book at all by thinking of a revolutionary proletariat as something different from the sort of human being he and his class represented. The common people were different from the middle class, a different sort of animal. They are still a different sort of animal in Nineteen Eighty-Four. There is no real human life in them. Admittedly, Winston Smith cherishes the romantic hope that when change comes it will come from the proles. But it is a vague hope, sentimental and unworthy. If the proles are not to be animals, they are to be a sort of noble savage: they are not permitted to be ordinary human beings, like Winston and his creator. Winston watches a fat prole woman hanging out clothes, singing a popul
ar song turned out by a musicator:
The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan - everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings might one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
The same solid unconquerable figure . . . those mighty loins' - the words are as insulting as the thesis of Animal Farm. And the prospect, as O'Brien is to be eloquent in telling him, is absurd.
Either romanticize the worker through deification, which means dehumanization, or despise the worker -they were the only alternatives to an intellectual like Orwell. He had the real Ingsoc stuff in him; he read the New Statesman while the workers read Blighty and the Daily Mirror. The workers did not buy his books. The workers do not buy my books either, but I do not repine. Nor do I make the mistake of supposing that the life of the imagination is somehow superior to the life of the body. The dock-worker and the novelist belong to the same organism, called society, and society, whatever it thinks, cannot get along without either of us.
Orwell was unfortunate in being born on the edge of the ruling class in late Imperial Britain. The gap between himself and the lower orders, who used bad language and smelt horribly, could only be bridged by condescension, by a kind of ritual identification, by the fictional imagination. At the end of his literary career Orwell dropped all pretence of believing in the working class. This, inevitably, meant loss of belief in all men and women, in the possibility of love as a spark capable of leaping over the immensity - five inches or five million miles - between one human identity and another. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a prophecy so much as a testimony of despair. Not despair of the future of humanity; a personal despair of being able to love. If Orwell had loved men and women, O'Brien would not have been able to torture Winston Smith. The great majority of men and women look on like munching cows while Winston screams and the death of freedom is confirmed. This is a monstrous travesty of human probability.
There is no such thing as the proletariat. There are only men and women of varying degrees of social, religious, intellectual consciousness. To view these in Marxist terms is as degrading as to look down on them from a viceregal carriage. We have no duty to cross the gap of blood, education, accent and smell by contracting a penitential marriage outside our milieu, or even by suffering a wet Monday under Wigan Pier. But we have a duty not to turn abstractions like class and race into banners of intolerance, fear and hatred. We have to try to remember that we are all, alas, much the same, i.e. pretty horrible. Orwell has, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, opened a gap that cannot exist, and in that gap he has built his improbable tyranny. It rests on air, like a castle in Spain. We are so fascinated by it that we will not use the dissolving power of disbelief and send it silently crashing. 1984 is not going to be like that at all.
Part Two
1985
1 The Yuletide fire
It was the week before Christmas, Monday midday, mild and muggy, and the muezzins of West London were yodelling about there being no God but Allah:
'La ilaha illa'lah. La ilaha illa'lah.'
Bev Jones shoved his way through the multiracial shopping crowd past the screaming Diskbutik, the tinselled supermarket, the former pub that was now a travel agency specializing in trips to Mecca but still known as Al-Bulnbush, turned the corner of Tolpuddle Road on to Martyr Street and arrived at Hogarth Highrise. This was where he lived but, he thought glumly, his heart sinking, you would hardly suppose so, not with that gang of aggressive youths barring the way in. Kumina gangs they were called, these terrors of the streets, kumi na being the Swahili prefix that meant teen and, by extension, teenage. Normally they would, at this hour, be terrorizing their school canteens, but there was a teachers' strike on. This was why Bev Jones was not lunching at his own canteen today. His daughter Bessie was home and unattended; his wife Ellen was in hospital. He had to unlock the kitchen and give Bessie a meal. Thirteen years old, physically precocious, she was otherwise young for her age. The National Health doctors blamed it on Yenethlia, a substance prescribed for the easing of childbirth whose side-effects had not been foreseen. 'Nobody's fault,' Dr Zazibu had said. 'Medicine must progress, man.'
Bev grinned ingratiatingly at the seven kumina youths, but his risor muscles responded as though to the massed sucking of lemons. He didn't know any of them; they didn't live here. They were always dangerous, the more dangerous because they were intelligent - more than intelligent, positively learned, some of them. That was the trouble: when the State didn't encourage learning, learning became an anti-social thing. Bev said:
'If you don't mind, gentlemen - I live here.' He was on the second step of the stone stairway; they wouldn't let him get any higher. 'And,' he added, 'I'm in a bit of a hurry.'
'Festina lente,' smiled a cocoa-coloured youth in a sweatshirt that showed a huge-fisted flying-cloaked Shakespeare with the legend WILL POWER. Then they had him pinioned. The Latin-speaking youth went through his pockets, singing Latin: 'Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes lium sumus.' It was a good tenor voice, unforced, resonant. He did not find much in Bev's pockets - an Interbank credit card, a near-empty packet of Hamaki Mild, a disposable lighter, three pound notes, five deckers (or tenpenny pieces). He pocketed all except the lighter. This he flicked and flared at Bev's eyeballs, as if testing his ocular reflexes. Then he yawned, and his belly rumbled. 'All right, tigers,' he said. 'We eat.' Then he set fire to Bev's hair and let his companions beat it out with their fists. Then they all kicked Bev not too hard, gracefully, balletically. It could have been worse. They went off languidly. When Bev got inside the hallway he saw an explanation of the languor. The Irwin boy lay unconcious near the lift door, near-naked, bruised, not too bloody. It had been a multiple pederastic assault, a sevenfold entry. Poor kid. The Irwins lived on the tenth floor and, naturally, the lift was not working. Bev rang the janitor's bell. Mr Withers came out chewing, marmalade on his chin. He chewed still, looking at the bloodied boy.
'You heard nothing?' said Bev. 'Are the Irwins in?'
'No,' said Mr Withers. 'To both.'
'Saw nothing on your screens?'
'The screens is not working. Still waiting for somebody to come round. It's the committee's job to hurry that up. Aren't you on the committee?'
'No longer,' said Bev. 'You'd better call an ambulance.'
'It's a bloody liberty, the whole business.'
Bev climbed to the third floor. It didn't do, these days, to be too compassionate. You could spend all day and night being compassionate to the victims of street, hallway and apartment assault. Compassion began at home. He came to his own apartment, 3B. Home. It was no good ringing, not with little Bessie. Bessie could not manage the complicated multilocks. Bev gave his name to a dim red eye on a wall panel. The device responded to his voice-print and, from a slot, his keybunch came jangling into his hand. It took him forty seconds to open up.
Bessie sat widelegged on the floor in front of the telly. She wore, Bev saw, no garment under her one-piece school frock. He sighed. She'd been masturbating, no doubt, to some beefcake image on the screen. The screen was now flashing, bleating and exploding with a kid's cartoon film - lethal violence but nobody getting really hurt, let alone dying. The six-year old Porson kid on the twelfth floor, having seen Chickweed the Wonder jump from a 120-floor skyscraper roof without damage, had, in smiling confidence, leapt down the stairwell. That had been a year ago; the Porsons had got over it; they had not even got rid of their telly. Bev said carefully:
'Did you telephone the hospital?'
'What?' Her eyes
didn't move from the jerking images.
'The hospital. Where your mother is. Did you telephone?'
'Not working.'
'What is not working?' he asked patiently. 'Our telephone? The hospital exchange?'
'Not working,' she said, and her mouth opened in weak silly joy as a mouse in a hat was crushed with a steam hammer and lived to squeak vengeance. 'I'm hungry,' she added.
Bev went to the telephone in the little hallway. He dialled 359 1111 ('I ill': that was how one remembered the hospital number; the prefix was, of course, a different matter).
A tapevox courteously responded. It said: 'This is Hospital Control. At Brentford General salvage and evacuation are still proceeding. No individual enquiries may be dealt with for at least twenty-four hours. This is Hospital C -'
His heart had hardly settled from its triple agitation. The balletic beating, the Irwin boy, the enforced climb. Now it thumped viciously. He dashed to the telly and began to search the channels. Bessie wailed; she beat his ankles with her fists. He got the news. A man with little chin and much hair was saying, against a background of blown-up flames:
'- is taking a serious view of the matter. It is believed that the fire was started by irresponsible elements who have not yet been identified, though Scotland Yard is already at work on the following up of what are described as significant clues. It is felt that deliberate advantage was taken of the firemen's strike, now in its third week, and of the sympathetic strike that broke out yesterday at army barracks in the London area. In the absence of professional anti-pyro services, said Mr Halifax, Minister of Public Safety, citizens must be on the look out for further acts of wanton incendiarism and, at the same time, should acquaint themselves with the fire precaution information made available by their communication services.' Bev, sobbing, 'Oh my God,' was out of that room and fumbling with the multilocks while the announcer was saying, 'Soccer - tonight's fixtures,' and Bessie, as ever slow on the uptake, was wailing before switching back to her cartoon. An old Popeye was just coming on. She was content. And then she remembered her hunger. But Bev was out of the apartment before her complaints grew loud.