Orwell's Revenge (31 page)

And then there's America, the America of
1984.
Recall that the expanded America—Oceania—is the third sheaf of com, the third totalitarian superstate, which by 1984 has replaced the pound with the dollar and renamed England Airstrip One. An evil place, America. Or is it? On the last page of
1984,
at the end of the Appendix on the structure of Newspeak, we suddenly stumble across a familiar text: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
^I
What on earth is
that
doing here? Well, Orwell's ostensible purpose is to explain how “it would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original.” But Orwell never chooses his texts by accident. So Orwell, the man who frequently sneers at the American speculator, embezzler, millionaire, cereal-eating hotel guest,
tee-totaling missionary,
and English-killing new-speaker, leaves us, on the last page of
1984,
with the words of Thomas Jefferson ringing in our ears. Orwell, we discover, admires American liberty. The theory at least. What he doesn't care for is the practice. American liberty begins with “a buoyant, carefree quality that you can feel . . . like a physical sensation in your belly.” But in the end, American freedom is betrayed by “the rise of large-scale industry and the
exploiting of cheap immigrant labour.”

For Orwell, the glory of being human is to doublethink your way through everything, even human love. All the human relations in 2984 progress from trust to betrayal. Throughout the book, Winston is haunted by the memory of his adored mother, whose death he somehow caused when, as a child, he stole a piece of chocolate intended for
his starving little sister. There is something about O'Brien that inspires intimacy; Winston confides in him; O'Brien is then unmasked as a faithful member of the Party. Charrington, the softly spoken, sixty-year-old owner of the junk shop, is “frail and bowed, with a long, benevolent nose, and mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles.” He has “a vague air of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man,
or perhaps a musician.” He turns out to be a member of the Thought Police.

And how about Julia? At first Winston hates her as much as he desires her; his fantasy is to flog her with a rubber truncheon. Then they are ecstatically in love. “The one thing that matters,” Winston says to Julia, “is that we shouldn't betray one another. . . . If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal.”

“They can't do that,” Julia replies. “That's the one thing they can't do.”

Winston agrees. “If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”

Later, when the two lovers confide in O'Brien, the question of loyalty comes up again. When pressed by O'Brien, both Winston and Julia agree to commit murder, to kill children, to betray their country, to commit any number of atrocities on behalf of the underground brotherhood. There is one last test.

“You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?” O'Brien finally asks.

“No!” replies Julia at once.

“No,” replies Winston, after a pause.

In prison, Winston consoles himself with the knowledge that he has not betrayed Julia. “She betrayed you, Winston,” O'Brien informs him. “Immediately—unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly.” A while later, O'Brien asks Winston: “Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?”

“I have not betrayed Julia,” Winston replies.

So O'Brien goes back to work. At the very last second, as the starving rats are about to tear into Winston's eyes and mouth, Winston understands what's expected of him. “Do it to Julia!” he screams. “Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”

Orwell pulls it all together when Julia and Winston meet again at the very end of the book:

“I betrayed you,” she said baldly

“I betrayed you,” he said.

She gave him another quick look of dislike. . . .

“[P]erhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. . . . All you care about is yourself.”

“All you care about is yourself,” he echoed.

“And after that,
you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer.”

“No,” he said, “you don't feel the same.”

The scene is as unspeakably miserable as the day itself, “a vile, biting day in March, when the earth was like iron and all the grass seemed dead and there was not a bud anywhere except a few crocuses which had pushed themselves up
to be dismembered by the wind.” And it is the last word on love and loyalty in
1984.

Happily, however, it is not the last word. Orwell set out his doublethought on the subject a year later, shortly before he died. It appears in his magnificent essay, “Reflections on Gandhi.” Orwell is talking about the perils of sainthood and the challenge of being human. He writes this single, wonderful sentence: “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of
fastening one's love upon other human individuals.”

We should hardly be surprised, then, to find doublethink woven all through the writings of the man who invented the word. The market begins buoyant and free and ends with the parasitic monopolist. American liberty begins with Thomas Jefferson and ends with Airstrip One. Love begins with Julia and ends with rats. Life begins with friendship and ends with defeat. Poverty, socialism, England, America—Orwell loves them all, and hates them too, for they all begin beautiful and end
ugly—or is it the other way around? Black is White, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Doublethink is the whole point.

And that makes the big puzzle all the more puzzling. Ask the question once again: Why did the man who saw both sides of everything so clearly believe so unequivocally that
the machine itself is the enemy
? Why did Orwell never doublethink the telescreen?

•  •  •

Psycholiterary criticism is usually a waste of time, but with Orwell's views about machines and markets, it's inescapable.

Orwell's hero of
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
is an irritating poet called Gordon Comstock. Comstock has a thing about money: he hates it. And it's all because at school he was a poor boy among richer classmates. His life was miserable, of course. “Probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to school
among children richer than itself.” “Even twenty years afterwards the memory of that school
made Gordon shudder.”

But this is not Gordon Comstock who is speaking.
It is George Orwell. Orwell uses almost the same words in an autobiographical essay—“Such, Such Were the Joys”—which was published (because of concerns about libel suits) only in 1968,
two decades after his death. The essay describes in Dickensian detail the miseries of Orwell's own experiences at Crossgates, the boarding school he attended on scholarship
before going on to Eton. “[T]he very rich boys were more or less undisguisedly favoured”; the “poor but ‘clever'” scholarship boys didn't go riding, didn't get a cricket bat, didn't get a birthday cake, were caned more often, were publicly reminded of their poverty, and were expected to be snivelingly grateful to Crossgates for its charity.

The effects were predictable. “I despised anyone who was not describable as a ‘gentleman,'” Orwell recalls in
Wigan Pier,
“but also I hated the hoggishly rich, especially those who had grown rich too recently. The correct and elegant thing, I felt, was to be of gentle birth
but to have no money.” Gordon Comstock amplifies in
Aspidistra.
“At an earlier age than most people [I] grasped that all modem commerce is a swindle. . . . What [I] realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been
elevated into a religion.”

For the rest of his days, Orwell blames the humiliations of his childhood on capitalism and the laws of inheritance. He lives his adult life in almost constant rebellion against
the Crossgates money-culture. Like Comstock in
Aspidistra
and Flory in
Burmese Days,
Orwell infuriates his women friends by pursuing poverty as aggressively as most men pursue wealth. In
Burmese Days,
Elizabeth is a shallow, crassly commercial woman, who rejects
the sensitive, beauty-loving Flory. Orwell has identical problems with his own women: he despises money; they don't. As Comstock puts it in
Aspidistra,
“[s]ocial failure, artistic failure, sexual failure—they are all the same. And lack of money is
at the bottom of them all.”

The rest is obvious. Money stinks, property is abominable, people who compete are tapeworms, corpses should not control property, capitalism is the enemy, and markets corrupt everything they touch.
The free market is the enemy too.

•  •  •

If tapeworms and corpses will not control money and property, who will? The people, of course, which means the Ministry. Despite his deep distrust of Stalin and Hitler, Orwell the grown-up schoolboy loves the Ministry. Half of
Orwell
wants
collectivism, wants it desperately, because “economic justice” does not arise spontaneously. Orwell knows that absent ministries, the natural economic order is Crossgates.

In
1984
itself, Orwell acknowledges that among men there are
native inequalities of talent. He spends as little time as possible on this, and Blythe's book-within-a-book—while acknowledging these inequalities—strongly implies that equality would be inevitable but for the power-hungry oligarchy. In an earlier essay, Orwell even appeals to higher authority for support.
His “Politics and the English Language” quotes a familiar verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Orwell's ostensible purpose here is the same as with the Jefferson quotation in
1984:
he is simply going to illustrate how this magnificent language would be rendered in modem bureau-crap.
^II
But Orwell never chooses his texts by accident, especially not his
biblical texts, which he uses frequently In choosing this verse of Ecclesiastes, Orwell is not just illustrating good and bad writing; he is making a political statement too. Orwell is a lilies-of-the-field kind of man. He does not
want
the race to go to the swift. Conveniently for Orwell, the Bible says that it doesn't have to.

But the Bible notwithstanding, the race normally
is
to the swift, and Orwell knows it. Some people are smarter, more industrious, honest, cooperative, entertaining, or agreeable than others, and those people usually get ahead. Most of the time, talent prevails, at least when freedom leaves talent to its own devices. As Damon Runyon observed, “The race may not always be to the swift nor the victory to the strong, but
that's the way to bet it.”

For Orwell, this creates a miserable dilemma. Freedom, for Orwell, begins with
material sufficiency and economic equality. But it also means privacy and the “liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them
chosen for you from above.” Orwell knows that material equality in a world of unequal swiftness, strength, and wisdom requires something other than laissez-faire economics, capitalism, and the “obstructive nuisance” of private property. That something is a Ministry of Plenty. Which generally means another Ministry or two. Which means Big Brother.

Orwell runs into exactly the same problem with the wealth of nations. He desperately wants to treat all peoples and races fairly: the peasant soldier under his command in Spain, the “coolies” he oversees in Burma, the impoverished laborer he describes with deep compassion in an essay about Marrakech. The three totalitarian superstates in
1984
maintain “cultural integrity,” because if the average citizen were “allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he
has been told about them is lies.” With nations, as with individuals, Orwell wants to believe that time and chance happeneth to all. He
wants
to, but again he cant. “[T]he divisions between nation and nation are founded on real differences of outlook,” he admits in a 1941 essay. It was once “thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike,” but
Orwell concedes they aren't. So there isn't going to be any equality in the wealth of nations unless . . . unless what? World government is one possibility, but (as Orwell has remarked elsewhere) “it would be an outrage against the laws of God and Nature for England to be
ruled by foreigners.” The other road to national equality is
1984:
three sheaves of com, three Parties, three Big Brothers.

War presents Orwell with the same intolerable choice once again. Nations and cultures are not merely unequal in talent and industry; some are downright evil. To resist them you need two things:
superior weapons and political unity. Superior weapons are built by the same people who build telescreens. And political unity? In England, Orwell happily reports, “there can come moments when the whole nation suddenly swings together and does the same thing, like
a herd of cattle facing a wolf.” But such a nation, Orwell also knows, can be as “single-minded
as the Gadarene swine” in times of peace. No matter. War is sometimes necessary, and war requires Ministries of Peace and Plenty. Which means a Party. Which means Big Brother.