George Orwell and the road to 1984

In recent weeks the long-awaited Orwell circus has come to town. The Orwell legend has been employed to make political capital by the kind of people Orwell raged against with typewriter and rifle. It has been used to sell horoscopes and to draw conclusions about English soccer. We await the "Orwell Lives!" tee-shirt and the Big Brother Bubblegum. GENE KERRIGAN examines the man 's life and politics.

IT GOT SO COLD THAT WINTER IN THE flat in Porto bello Road that sometimes his fingers became too numb to write. When that happened he would light a candle and cup his hands around the flame. His writing paper was a dwindling stack of Burmese government notepaper filched before he came home on leave in August.

In September he had decided to quit his job with the Indian Imperial Police. He would become a writer. He spent the autumn and winter of 1927 in this cheap Notting Hill flat, sometimes going on tramping expeditions to take notes on the conditions of down and outs, mostly writing, writing, writing. He was a terrible writer.

"Inside the park, the crocuses were out ... "

Ruth Pitter, a poet, lived in the flat next door and sometimes read his stuff, corrected his spelling, tried not to laugh at his clumsiness with words. "He was like a cow with a musket."

Eric Blair was 24, teaching himself to write, struggling WIth words. He had believed from the age of five or six that he would be a writer. As a teenager he assumed his destiny to be that of "Famous Author" and discussed with a friend the type of binding he would like to have on his Collected Works. He hadn't done much about it, dawdling through an upper class education and spending five years as a cop policing the British Empire, never showing any inclination to write.

Now he was back in England and serving his apprenticeeship to the writing trade. A year would pass before he had anything published, and then just penny-ante articles here and there. It would be five years before his first book was published, seven years before his first novel was published. In the meantime he would eke out a living as a dishwasher, a hop picker, a teacher and a bookshop assistant. His first eighteen years as a writer would be years of poverty.

When he started in the business he didn't have much to write about, no burning need to express anything signifiicant was apparent. He just wanted to write. Years later he said: "In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties." But it was a most unnpeaceful age and Eric Blair would become embroiled in radical politics, fight with typewriter and rifle for his beliefs and, as George Orwell, become the most successful, controoversial and misunderstood political writer of his century. He would also triumphantly win his struggle with words and his work become an unbeatable example of consisstently clear, honest and stimulating English.

He believed, and would try to show in his work and his life, that "genuine progress can only happen through inncreasing enlightenment, which means the continuous desstruction of myths". Yet he would himself become a myth -.Gloomy George, author of the paranoiacs'bible,Nineteen Eighty-Four. Many on the left would denounce him others would compete with the right-wing to claim him as their ?wn. The radical who fought oppression with a typewriter in one hand and a Mauser in the other would become capiitalism's favourite socialist.

ORWELL ON BLAIR: "WHEN I WAS FOUR· teen or fifteen I was an odious little snob, but no worse than other boys of my own age and class." He would describe that class as the "lowermiddle class". That precise assessment of his family's point on the social scale was to become typical of Orwell's obsession with the trappings and fixtures of the class system.

His father, Richard Blair, was a very minor official in the administration of the Empire: sub-deputy agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Eric Blair was born in Bengal in 1903. He was raised in England and was taken on at half fees at St Cyrian's, an upper class boarding school. Such schools liked to take prormsmg youngsters and push them to attain scholarships to the better public schools. There was no philantrophy involved - the more successful the kids the better the reputation of the school and the higher the fees that could be charged to parents who could afford the full whack. In the superrmarket trade this is known as a loss-leader.

Eric obliged and won a scholarship to Eton. He was a proper little bastion of Empire. When war broke out in 1914 he, aged eleven, had a poem published in a local paper, the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard. It was called "Awake Young Men of England".

Oh! give me the strength of the Lion The wisdom of Reynard the Fox

And then I11 hurl troops at the Germans And give them the hardest of knocks.

At Eton he dossed. In his final exam he would finish 138th out of 167. He was reading Wells and Shaw and even Jack London, in his spare time and was developing an indeependent streak. And word was coming back of the slaughter involved in hurling troops at the Germans. Almost half of the 5,687 Eton past pupils who fought in the war were killed or wounded, a staggering proportion.

The war destabilised society and many old values were drowned in blood. In 1920 one of Blair's teachers at Eton asked the class to state whom they considered to be "the ten greatest men now living". The average age in the class was seventeen. All but one of the sixteen. boys included Lenin in their list. "The mood of anti-militarism which followed naturally upon the fighting was extended into a general revolt against orthodoxy and authority", wrote Orwell later . "For several years it was all the fashion to be a 'Bolshie'." The young Eric Blair "loosely described myyself as a socialist", but didn't know what it meant. "Commmon people" were brutal and repulsive. "Looking back on that period, I seem to have spent half the time in denounncing the capitalist system and the other half raging over the insolence of bus conductors."

In 1922, at the age of 19, Eric Blair set off to take his place as a servant and beneficiary of the Empire. He joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and served at a number of stations as an assistant district supervisor.

NOT MUCH IS KNOWN ABOUT BLAIR'S time in Burma, not much needs to be known.

He was a minor cog, doing what minor cogs do. "By the end of that time I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear." There has been much unnnecessary speculation about Blair's Burmese experience and renunciation of imperialism. He set off initially to fill the role assigned to him by his class and' education, but he was a perceptive and sensitive man. Perceptive and sensitive people do not like being studs on despotism's jackboot. He played the role for five years and went home on leave in 1927. He decided to resign and remain in England.

I was not going back to be a part of that evil despotism. But I wanted much more than merely to escape from my job. For five years I had been part of an oppressive sysstem, and it left me with a bad conscience. Innumerable remembered faces - faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I had bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of rage (nearly everyone does these things in the East, at any rate occasionally: Orientals can be very provoking) - haunted me intolerably. I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. I suppose that sounds exagggerated; but if you do for five years a job that you thooroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the same. I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself. I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man's dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myyself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants.

That passage (from The Road To Wigan Pier) is more than an explanation of Eric Blair's decision to leave the police and of his subsequent explorations of poverty in Britain. It also contains the essence of his politics in the period 1927-36. Bitter, guilt-ridden, idealistic, curious and naive. He would read and argue politics in those years, becoming more knowledgeable and opinionated, but would remain naive. He would go to extraordinary lengths to understand the oppressed and experience their misery, to examine and break down his own class characteristics 0but that was all. Enough, perhaps, for an individual deterrmined on expiation and understanding, but a very narrow vein to work and hardly one that might be expected to lead to any general enlightenment.

IN AUGUST 1931 ERIC BLAIR WROTE TO a friend, Dennis Collings, to tell him about a ghost he had seen in a cemetary. In passing, he remarked, "I haven't anything of great interest to report yet about the Lower Classes".

Blair was deliberately immersing himself in that sea of humanity at the bottom of society, the "Lower Classes". He had done this back in 1927 and had then gone to Paris for almost two years. There he wrote and destroyed two novels, had the odd piece published, and worked for ten weeks as a dish washer and kitchen porter in a luxury hotel.

Back in England in 1930, Eric Blair continued writing.

He didn't have much luck. The odd article here and there, a dreadful poem or two, mostly reviews. Over the next couple of years he taught or went hop picking to earn a living. And he went tramping.

Blair was genuinely poor, but could easily have borrowwed or bummed from friends and relatives. Instead, to connfront his own class prejudice and to gather material for his writing, he sold his clothes, bought tatty clothes and went in search of the "Lower Classes". He was to some extent consciously setting out in the footsteps of Jack London, who had explored the poverty of the East End and written about it in People of the Abyss the year before Blair was born.

Fearful of arrest as a vagrant, nervous that his posh accent would cause suspicion, Blair set forth. "My new clothes had put me instantly into a new world. Everyone's demeanour seemed to have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow that he had upset. 'Thank's mate', he said with a grin. No one had called me mate before in my life."

By the end of 1930 he had a version of Down and Out in Paris and London. It's an interesting book in itself, but it also gives a curious picture of Blair's politics at the time. Those politics were purely moralistic, naive and without any grounding in a theoretical or philosophical underrstanding of society. "The mass of the rich and poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit." Blair was writing for, appealing to, the middle classes and the book is primarily an assurance to his readers .•.. that the dreaded Lower Classes are human. "The trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor." They know nothing of the poor and so fear them. If they could put aside the trappings of their class, steel themselves against the dirt and the smell and the crudities, they would find that the poor were - why, just people.

The fact that Blair thought it necessary to assert such a fundamental truth says more about his naivety and about the class from which he came and for which he was writing than it does about the poor.

Beyond its sociological usefulness, its insights into the culture of poverty (one tramp "never passed an automatic machine without giving a tug at the handle, for he said that sometimes they are out of order and will eject pennies if you tug at them"), and its humour ("He was an embittered atheist - the sort of atheist who does not so much dissbelieve in God as personally dislike Him"), beyond its concern with poverty, the book's aim is to establish the common humanity of rich and poor. The book goes further than reporting - it argues a case. And that case is not so much for the eradication of poverty as for an understanding of it and a bridging of classes.

Blair saw class as a matter of background and upbringing - a cultural difference rather than a political one. The structure of society and the different and conflicting interests of different classes was not part of his outlook. He was concerned with class distinction and not. class interests. This would be his position right up to 1936. "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."

A curious feature of the book is its acceptance of the casual anti-semitism then rampant. At one point Orwell tells of a man fiddling him out of wages. "He called himself a Greek, but in reality he was an Armenian. After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb 'Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don't trust an Armeenian'." There are other disparaging references of this type. It was an attitude which Orwell would quickly throw off.

Down and Out in Paris and London was rejected by Cape and by Faber. The manuscript was almost thrown away in despair. After much rewriting it was eventually pu blished by Victor Gollancz in 1933. Blair wasn't happy with the book and wanted a pseudonym. At first the author was to be known as "X", then Blair figured that a name would be better. If the book flopped he could dispense with the name and choose another, if it was a success he could keep the name for future books. He became George Orwell.

THE GEORGE ORWELL OF THE EARLY 1930s was a man set upon establishing a liteerary reputation, still determined to become a "Famous Author". He aimed at a book a year and in 1934, 1935 and 1936 published novels. He wasn't happy with any of them. Burmese Days:

"My novel about Burma made me spew when I saw it in print ... as for the novel I am completing (A Clergyman s Daughter) it makes me spew even worse ... " Keep The Aspidistra Flying: "That book is bollox . . . there are two or three books which I am ashamed of and have not allowed to be reprinted or translated, and that is one of them." A Clergyman s Daughter "was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn't have published it, but I was desperate for money, ditto when I wrote Keep the A. At that time I simply hadn't a book in me, but I was half-starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so."

They are very much minor works and had it not been for Orwell's later celebrity it is doubtful if they would still be in print. He wasn't making much money, but that wasn't bothering him. "I expect we shall rub along all right - as to money I mean - but it will always be hand to mouth as I don't see myself ever writing a best -seller."

Increasingly, politics was tugging at his sleeve. He still remained a lefty merely in instinct. What politics crept into his work was only to be expected, given the nature of the times.

The 1930s was a high old time for the right. Hitler and Mussolini were strutting their stuff and they had their suppporters in Britain. Not just the loonies in black shirts ˜Lloyd George met Hitler and declared him to be "a great man". Upper class twits like the Mitfords were peddling fascism. The Bishop of Gloucester was praising the Nazis and preaching anti-semitism. A number of MPs thought Hitler was a fine man and said so loudly. (One of these, Col. Thomas Moore, had a fascinating background, having served in Ireland in 1916, then Russia in 1918-20 - when a number of states including Britain sent armies in to desstroy the new soviet state - back to Ireland for the War of Independence, into parliament, a knighthood, steadfast support of Hitler.) Various admirals, Lords, bishops and intellectuals saw fascism as the way forward. The Daily Mail and its owner, Lord Rothermere, su pported the Nazis up to 1938.

After Kristallnacht, the savage Nazi pogrom against the Jews in November 1938 which shocked even the right wing, an opinion poll showed that fifteen percent of British people thought that the Nazi treatment of the Jews was not "an obstacle to good understanding between Britain and Germany", and another twelve percent had no opinion. There was a significant minority base for fascism.

The left was a complicated entity. Since the end of the 1920s Stalin had achieved dominance in Russia and set about eliminating the rest of the old bolshevik leadership. In Britain, the Communist Party and its periphery looked first to the protection of what it saw as the socialist motherrland. Its domestic political line was determined by Russia's foreign policy needs, leading to extraordinary twists and turns. There was a spirit of disenchantment among many intellectuals that expressed itself in support for Commuunism (this was the period in which Philby, Blunt and the rest of the crew who would for decades wreak havoc in Britain's intelligence network were being recruited).

Orwell was aware of the inconsistencies of the Commuunist Party, was amused when a Daily Worker seller addresssed him as "sir" - but never got too worked up about it. While he might have some intellectual contempt for the servile way in which "the line" was kowtowed to he was a socialist of the let's-all-get-together variety. "We are at a moment", he wrote in 1936, "when it is desperately necesssary for left-wingers of all complexions to drop their diffferences and hang together". The differences didn't matter, "the whole Socialist movement is no more than a kind of exciting heresy-hunt - a leaping to and fro of frenzied witch-doctors to the beat of tom-toms and the tune of 'Fee fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of a right-wing diviationst!'." As for the differences - "the time to argue about them is afterwards" .

It is an appealing and common cry from idealists beemused by the factional fighting on the left.

Orwell's second non-fiction book, The Road To Wigan Pier, was written in 1936 and published the following year. Orwell had been commissioned by Victor Gollancz, the lefttwing publisher, to spend two months in the industrial towns of the North of England, and write a book on the conditions of working class life. The book is in two parts. The first, straight reporting of what Orwell found, is today as fresh and vivid as when it was written. Orwell was beecoming a superbly perceptive writer. The second part of the book is Orwell's polemic - part musing, part autoobiography, part political discourse. Again he rambled on at great length about his obsession with class differences and the difficulty of middle class lefties approaching the working class. ("But is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working class? I shall have to discuss that later: I will only say here that I do not think it is possible .") He  included a diatribe against socialists of the beard and sandles type. They alienated workers.

Again, Orwell wasn't too clear on what workers were being alienated from. He offered nothing, no suggestion of what should be done once everyone stopped arguing, shaved and dumped the sandles and the working class was converted. Somehow, if enough people were convinced, socialism would become a reality.

Orwell was excellent at getting down on paper the hard reality of working class life. He went down coal mines and didn't just write about the hard work. He wrote about the long walk underground, a mile or two, from the lift to the coalface, the roof so low you had to stoop, and this was just getting to work, it wasn't paid for. He was equally good at spotting more universal indignities - the queueing, the hatch, things coming by grace and favour and not by right. "This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is inherent in working class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act,he is acted upon."

Despite this, Orwell still felt a missionary among not very bright heathens, albeit a benevolent and compassionate one. Socialism was a blanket which caring middle class people would weave and in which they would convince the "Lower Classes" to wrap themselves. The battle could only be led by "people who pronounce their aitches". Orwell makes only passing references to the massive battles going on around him. The unions, the shop steward moveement, the unemployed movement - all very active at the time - get a passing mention. As late as 1941, when the American magazine Partisan Review asked him for inforrmation on the shop stewards movement he replied, "I know very little of industrial matters".

It is impossible now and must have been then for a working class person to read Orwell's references to that class without a sense of insult. "The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light."

The battle between left and right, between what Orwell saw as "decency" and despotism, focused on Spain in July 1936 when Franco's fascists rose in arms against the lefttwing government. Orwell had married Eileen O'Shaughnessy a month earlier. That December, as soon as he finished writing Wigan Pier, Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republic, with Eileen following a couple of months later.

ORWELL WAS IN A SANATORIUM IN BARRcelona, recovering from a bullet wound in the throat, on June 8 1937 when he wrote a letter to h is old school friend Cyril Connolly. "I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before." He had also seen terrible things.

Spain did away with Orwell's vague notion of socialism as something decent which would somehow arrive if enough people were converted. He began to see it as a matter of power, the shape of society being determined by who was "in the saddle". He found Barcelona "startling and overrwhelming. It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle." Buildings had been seized, shops, cafes and even bootblacks collectivised ("and their boxes painted red and black"). "Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared." Private transport had been commmandeered, trams and taxis painted red and black.

In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'wellldressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

Orwell was not swept up in revolutionary fervour (Orwell was never swept up in anything), he observed, compared and chose his side on the barricades. There were notices in barber shops "solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes". He was moved but at the same time somewhat embarrassed by the seriousness with which the Spaniards took "the •.. hackneyed phrases of revolution".

Before leaving London Orwell had sought help from the Communist Party in getting an introduction to parties in Spain. He was refused and linked up with members of the Independent Labour Party who were going out to fight. The ILP was well to the left of the CP and had contacts with the Spanish PODM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxists, the United Marxist Workers' Party) and Orwell enlisted with the PODM militia.

After sixteen weeks at the front Orwell returned to Barcelona on leave. While getting along with the PODM members he was politically more sympathetic to the Communist Party line. He intended transferring to the CP-dominated International Brigade in Madrid. The PODM believed that the socialist character of the revolution had , to be protected at all costs, while the CP believed the war against the fascists was the first priority, that middle class support for the moderately socialist government should not be alienated by advancing revolutionary demands.

Also, Stalin, wanting to maintain good relations with Britain and France, did not want to alarm them 'by promoting revolution in Spain. And the CP followed the line, toning things down.

While Orwell was in Barcelona fighting broke out beetween the government and CP forces on the one hand, and on the other the anarchists, trotskyists and the PODM. Although disagreeing with the PODM on political priorities, Orwell stood with his comrades and took part in some desultory and confused fighting. He abandoned his plan to leave the PODM and went back to the front, where he was shot in the throat by a sniper. It was typical of the man that he recorded a graphic and detached description of what it is like to be shot, even though he believed himself to be dying.

It took Orwell a month to recover. Two days after his discharge the PODM was suppressed. The Communists began their purge of their socialist opponents, hunting, jailing and executing them. He spent three nights sleeping out before he, Eileen and two others escaped across the border to France.

Orwell was outraged by the behaviour of the Commuunists - but more crucial to his development was his disscovery of the extent to which lies had been told about the events in Barcelona. These weren't your workaday lies, the kind of thing that might be put about in - let's say - a Fianna Fail leadership contest. This was lying on a grand scale, the kind of thing that literally changes history. The Communist press reported battles that were never fought, ignored battles where hundreds died; distorted some events and just plain invented others. Orwell read about things which he had seen and didn't recognise them.

Claud Cockburn was a grand old man of letters who spent the latter part of his life in Ireland. He recycled ancient anecdotes ("This reminds me of something that happened' in Berlin in the Thirties ... ") and rethreaded old jokes and elegant phrases from decades ago. An amiable old bore with an interesting life behind him. He was also an unrepentant liar. As "Frank Pitcairn" he reported from Spain for the Communist press, distorting and inventing until Orwell and his comrades were portrayed as fascists.

Challenged about his lying, he denied that people had a right to read the truth. "Who gave them such a right? Perhaps when they have exerted themselves enough to alter the policy of their bloody government, and the fasscists are beaten in Spain, they will have such a right. This isn't an abstract question. It's a shooting war."

A CRUCIAL PART OF THE ORWELL LEGEND is that he returned from Spain a disillusioned man, rejecting socialism and thereafter using his literary talents to warn against its dangers. As is not unusual when legends are concerned, the commplete opposite is closer to the truth. "Mter what I have seen in Spain I have come to the conclusion that it is futile to be 'anti-Fascist' while attempting to preserve capitalism ... if one collaborates with a capitalisttimperialist government in a struggle 'against Fascism', i.e. against a rival imperialism, one is simply letting fascism in by the back door."

Orwell had swung around to sharp disagreement with the CP line and adopted a revolutionary socialist position. "Class collaboration" was out - the thing to fight for was a workers' state. "For several months large blocks of people believed that all men are equal and were able to act on their belief. The result was a feeling of liberation and hope that is difficult to conceive in our money -tainted atmosphere." Orwell was now committed to a vision of a democratic socialism which rejected the system in which he lived but which with equal vehemence rejected the Stalinist system. "Is it socialism, or is it a peculiarly vicious form of stateecapitalism ?"

Far from being disillusioned, Orwell now had strong political beliefs where before he had a vague compassion. In June 1938 he joined the Independent Labour Party. "It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it." It was sometime after this that Orwell named his dog Marx.

The Orwell legend tells the last ten years of his life like this: war breaks out, Orwell rallies round the flag, becomes a patriot, drops his radicalism. War ends, he writes Animal Farm, denouncing the Russian revolution and ridiculing revolutions in general. Then writes Nineteen Eighty-Four, predicting the onset of totalitarianism. There's a left-wing code to the legend which says that he made a bundle from the books, took the money and ran, bought an island.

In 1938 Orwell published Homage to Catalonia, his book on the Spanish civil war. It is his best book, a brilliant mixture of the personal and the political; glimpses of dernoocartic socialism's possibilities, despair at Stalinist manipuulation. Crystal clear honesty. His publisher, Victor Gollancz, a fellow-traveller of the Communists, refused to publish it before Orwell had written a word. Orwell transferred to Seeker and War burg. The New Statesman refused to publish an article on the suppression of the POUM. They asked Orwell to review a book on Spain, his review was critical of the Communists, it was turned down as it was "against editorial policy".

In January 1939 Orwell was proposing to a friend a plan to "start organising for illegal anti-war activities". It would be an underground organisation. "If we don't make prepaarations we may find ourselves silenced and absolutely helppless when either war or the pre-war fascizing processes begin". He wrote an anti-war pamphlet. He-maintained his line that it would be futile to oppose fascism without opposing capitalism

When war came Orwell's politics changed abruptly  but with subtlety. The left was either locked into the system - Labour - or in opportunistic convulsion - the Communists - or too small - everyone else. "There was a sort of gap in the ladder which we never got over and which it was perhaps impossible to get over while no revoluutionary party and no able left-wing leadership existed." And, "in the circumstances all one could do was 'support' the war, which involved supporting Churchill, and hope that in some way it would all come right on the night."

In his lengthy essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell argued that patriotism could be a positive force. Socialism could not be achieved without defeating Hitler; Hitler could not be defeated "while we remain economically and socially in the nineteenth century ... the initiative will have to come from below. That means that there will have to arise something that has never existed in England, a socialist movement that actually has the mass of people behind it." Sections of the middle class would have to be won over and "the only approach to them is through their patriotism."

Orwell's politics had changed to supporting the war while trying to turn it into a revolutionary war. England was "a family with the wrong members in charge". His instincts and intellect both were strongly with democracy. The mass of the people should control society, the mass of the people should control the pursuit of the war. "Tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons." Ann the people, he wrote. With joy he discovered the sten gun. The British had captured vast amounts of Italian ammunition and manuufactured the sten to use it. It weighed 516 pounds, cost eighteen shillings, no spare parts, if it goes wrong just chuck it away and get another. "I can see a million or two million of these things, each with 500 cartridges and a book of instructions, floating down allover Europe on little parachutes. If the Government has the guts to do that they would really have burned their boats."

Some hope. Arming the people would give power to those same people. It might mean a quicker defeat of fascism - but who would be in control after the war?

As the years went on and Orwell's vision of a demoocartic war subsided, he became an observer - reporting, but mostly just earning a living (at the· BBC and later as literary editor of Tribune) and thinking about future books. He had published a novel, Coming Up For Air, in 1939 but wasn't too happy with that, either. He concluded he wasn't really a novelist. He was constantly writing articles but couldn't get down to a book. "Only the mentally dead are capable of sitting down and writing.novels while this nighttmare is going on."

But he was mentally pulling together the strands for his next two books. Bits and pieces here and there, impressions, ideas, arguments. For instance, in 1938 he reviewed a book called Assignment in Utopia, by Eugene Lyons, who had spent time in Russia and had written about it. Lyons wrote about Stalin's attempt to implement the "five year plan" in four years. "5-in4" was the slogan. Then, another slogan went up on posters and in electric lights on Moscow houseefronts.

"2+2 = 5"

WHEN THE WAR HAD BEGUN ORWELL had resigned from the ILP. This few months had been his only experience of political activity Øand then he hadn't been at all active. He was an intellectual, observing in isolation, only drawn into activity when the pull was irresistible, as in Spain. With contempt he watched the twisting and turnning of his old enemy - the Communist Party.

The CP had called for a Popular Front, an all-class alliance, against fascism in the late Thirties. When Stalin and Hitler made their pact the CP abruptly changed its line - and when war broke out they denounced it as an immperialist war, socialists had no part in it. When Hitler innvaded Russia in 1941 the line was again stood on its head and now the CP called for full support for the "antiifascist" war. The Stalinist motherland had to be protected at all costs. Orwell had contempt for the facility with which the Stalinist left could change direction shamelessly according to the dictates of the Leader in Moscow. If your politics were such that you could jump from one line to another you could believe in anything. And if you could believe in anything you really believed in nothing. Except power.

Orwell's old literary ambitions were by now secondary.

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism." By 1943 he was well on his way to writing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

"The actual outlook", he wrote, "so far as I can calcuulate the probabilities, is very dark, and any serious thought should start out from that fact".

ORWELL'S INITIAL NOTES FOR NINETEEN Eighty-Four were drawn up in 1943. Before that he would write Animal Farm, which was finished in January 1944. The dates are important for several reasons.

Orwell had never feared the war itself - in fact, he had a somewhat cold attitude to killing (on hearing of the death of a notorious fascist he wrote in his diary, "That bastard Chiappe is cold meat. Everyone delighhted ... ") and supported any measures, including saturation bombing, to win the war. What he feared was the war's aftermath. Either the right would impose a dictatorship or - if there was a clash - a left-wing victory would be led by the Stalinists. "Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships - an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaninggless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be .•.. stamped out of existence." "All power is in the hands of paranoiacs." "This is (he wrote after a visit to parliament) the twilight of Parliamentary democracy and these creatures are simply ghosts gibbering in some comer while the real events happen elsewhere."

This was his cast of mind when he began planning his two famous novels. The only way out "is to present someewhere or other, on a large scale, the spectacle of a commuunity where people are relatively free and happy and where the main motive in life is not the pursuit of money or power. In other words, democratic Socialism must be made '1' to work throughout some large area."

First, his writings would deal with the betrayal of the ~ revolution in Russia, then with his vision of how totaliitarianism works. Russia: "Nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement." Thus, Animal Farm, the fairy tale of the animals who took over the farm and how some became more equal than others.

Then, totalitarianism: "Totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences." Orwell wasn't making predictions - he was satirising the views and attitudes of intellectuals attracted to the power of fascism and Stalinism. He chose an established literary genre in which to work, the prophetic novel. He had read and written about various examples of the genre: H.G. Wells's The Sleeper Wakes;Jack London's The Iron Heel; Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; Ernest Bramah's The Secret of the League; above all, E.I. Zamyatin's We.

His journalism, essays and letters are peppered with references to the themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four. For instance, he noted a Japanese broadcast in 1942 which said:

"In order to do justice to the patriotic spirit of the Koreans, the Japanese government have decided to introduce commpulsory military service in Korea." Remembering the Eugene Lyons book and both the Spanish experiences and Stalin's slogan for the Five Year Plan, he mentions " ... a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened' - well, it never happened. If he says two and two are five - well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs."

WHEN ORWELL DIED IN JANUARY 1950 his Homage to Catalonia, published thirteen years earlier, had sold just 900 copies. He was quite well known in certain circles for his journaalism, but he was a minor author with a minor audience. His audience knew and understood his politics. He wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four within a framework of other writings. In a letter in April 1940 Orwell wrote, "I have never had the slightest fear of a dictatorship of the proletariat, if it could happen, and certain things I saw in the Spanish war connfirmed me in this. But I admit to having a perfect horror of a dictatorship of theorists, as in Russia and Germany." That difference was always to be a part of Orwell's outlook and was understood to be so by the people he was writing for.

Animal Farm was rejected by Gollancz, Cape and Faber on political grounds. It wasn't published by Warburg until August 1945. A French edition would later be rejected by a publisher on similar grounds. (One American pubblisher refused it because he wasn't interested in animal stories.) There was an effective ban on anti-Stalinist writing. Earlier, an American publisher had sent out for review three books critical of the Stalin regime, including Trotsky's life of Stalin. Two days later, when America entered the war, the books were withdrawn. During the war an enorrmous hammer and sickle had been flying over Selfridges store, the Internationale was played on the BBC. It was in these circumstances that Orwell wrote the book, when Stalin was considered fme and dandy. By the time the book was published there had been a change of political wind. Russia was about to become the big baddy again. The original print run of Animal Farm was 4,500. In America it was made Book of the Month, sales eventually became enormous. Orwell, after a life of poverty, didn't have to worry any more about money. His wife, Eileen, had died suddenly before the success of the book, having endured the years of poverty.

Orwell had started writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in June 1944, over a year before Animal Farm was published. His health was bad - had been for years. He rented a house on the island of Jura, off Scotland, to be away from interrupptions. He cut back on his journalism and essays and conncentrated on finishing the book he had planned for years. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four", he would write in Nineteen Eighty-Four. "If that is granted, all else follows."

ON THE EVE OF 1984 RTE RADIO WAS running an advert. "With Orwell's 1984 almost upon us ... tonight in the Evening Herald Damien puts forward his astrological predictions

Seldom has an idea been so trivialised as Orwell's has been. The title Nineteen Eighty-Four was a very good marketing gimmick, and Orwell was always conncerned to get a good selling title. This one surpassed anyyone's dreams. "It isn't a book I would gamble on for a big sale", Orwell wrote to his publisher before publication, "but I suppose one could be sure of 1 0 ,000 anyway". Instead, the book sold massively, became more pervasive than ET, and took on a meaning Orwell had not intended. The book was within a specific literary and political tradiition and was intended to be read as such. It also caught the popular imagination and the fear that the world was driftting in a sinister direction. You didn't have to read Orwell to know what he was about. The name was enough. The Orwell legend was born.

The book was published in June 1949. Orwell died seven months later. Had he lived, the Orwell legend would have been destroyed - by Orwell.

Politically he was a minor figure, isolated always in the minority, trying to fashion phrases with which he could shout down louder voices. He left the Burma police just as Stalin assumed total power within the international Commmunist movement. He died three years before Stalin. Isolaated from the working class movement, determinedto stay outside the servility of Stalinism, trying to probe his own democratic road to socialism, he stumbled - but he walked forward, and that's the thing. "It is an unfortunate fact", he wrote in 1938, "that any hostile criticism of the present Russian regime is liable to be taken as propaganda against socialism; all Socialists are aware of this, and it does not make for honest discussion." Before he died he wrote a denial that the book was an attack on socialism.

A later generation, post-1968, would break the hold of Stalinism, and Orwell's writings, particularly Homage to Catalonia, would help make that break, would help contriibu te to that "honest discussion".

On the debit side, Margaret Thatcher can dismiss Orwell as a failed prophet, 1984, she says, will be a good year. Conor Cruise O'Brien, who while in power contemplated how he might put the editor of the Irish Press in jail, now uses Orwell's writings to lecture Neil Kinnock on the dangers of totalitarianism. "Liberty", wrote Orwell, "is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear."

In 1939 Orwell wrote a fine essay on Charles Dickens.

"The very people he attacked have swallowed him so commpletely that he has become a national institution himself." He wrote of how Dickens's Tale of Two Cities was rememmbered chiefly for its descriptions of The Terror during the French revolution. "To this day, to the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads. It is a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution than most Englishmen of his time, should have played a part in creating this impression." But then, Orwell also wrote that, "Any life, when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." _