1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four E-Book

George Orwell

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 550

Beschreibung

THE JURA EDITION with new introduction by Alex Massie 'For him Jura was home' - Richard Blair on his father George Orwell 'The book of the twentieth century . . . haunts us with an ever-darker relevance' – Ben Pimlott, Independent 'The greatest British novel to have been written since the war' – Time Out 'His final masterpiece . . . enthralling and indispensable for understanding modern history' – New York Review of Books The year is 1984 and war and revolution have left the world unrecognisable. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party, led by Big Brother. Mass surveillance is everything and The Thought Police are employed to ensure that no individual thinking is allowed. Winston Smith works at The Ministry of Truth, carefully rewriting history, but he dreams of freedom and of rebellion. It is here that he meets and falls in love with Julia. They start a secret, forbidden affair - but nothing can be kept secret, and they are forced to face consequences more terrifying than either of them could have ever imagined. In this new edition of a modern classic, Alex Massie's introduction highlights the importance that Jura had on the writing of one of the twentieth century's most important works of fiction. 

Leseprobe

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

GEORGE ORWELL

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

THE JURA EDITION

Introduced byALEX MASSIE

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2021 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

First published in 1949 by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd

Introduction © Alex Massie, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 84697 576 9

ebook ISBN 978 1 78885 380 4

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

INTRODUCTION

GEORGE ORWELL AND JURA

Much has been written about George Orwell and Barnhill and the Isle of Jura and Nineteen Eighty-Four and plenty of it, I am afraid, is the most awful rot. Almost all of it is coloured by one indisputable fact: Jura was his principal residence in the final years of his life until he died, on 21 January 1950, aged 46, from tuberculosis. As a result, and on account of Jura’s remoteness, its allegedly inhospitable climate, the hardship of living there, and the pressure of writing, and revising, Nineteen Eighty-Four, it has typically been assumed Orwell’s sojourn on the island was some kind of desperate folly and, by any reasonable measure, a mistake. If Jura did not quite kill Orwell, it certainly did not help him live.

One critic, Jeffrey Meyers, decreed that Orwell’s life on Jura was a ‘mad and suicidal sojourn’. Another, T.R. Fyvel, Orwell’s successor as literary editor of Tribune, wrote shortly after Orwell’s death that ‘Forty years of conflict had burnt him out . . . And as for his uncomfortable life in the rough Atlantic climate – totally unsuitable for a consumptive – and the accidents through which his health finally broke down, it seemed to me at times as though some force in him were driving him to complete the drama.’

Other assessors have agreed, condemning the ‘harsh Hebridean air which blew into Orwell’s ailing lungs and killed him in the most literal sense’ or noting, as another put it, that ‘It was almost as if he had signed his own deathwarrant: the climate of Jura and the primitive conditions of life on an isolated farm, damp as a delta, were the worst possible for a consumptive.’ So there you have it: Orwell wrote himself into a premature grave and did so, moreover, alone in a bleak, unforgiving, landscape almost unimaginably distant from London. There was, clearly, something perverse about this.

One can only wonder if, had Orwell remained in London – then a city of smog, it might be recalled – and had his health deteriorated on an identical timetable, London would have been blamed for the great writer’s untimely demise. It seems unlikely.

Ever since, however, Jura has loomed large in the burgeoning world of Orwell mythology. In recent years at least two novels have been written which were inspired by, or drawn on, Orwell’s time on the island; and pilgrimages to Barnhill have for years been a staple of weekend newspaper supplements. In all of these, you may discern the hope that, by following in Orwell’s footsteps, even unto the ends of the British isles, something of his magic may be absorbed. Come to Jura to understand Nineteen Eighty-Four; come to Jura to catch a faint whisper of its creator.

It will not quite do. Jura is where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four but beyond that straightforward reality the island has no connection to, or bearing on, the novel. Despite occasional claims to the contrary, little in the book draws on or is otherwise inspired by Jura and a visit to the island, while always worthwhile, conveys no fresh appreciation for, or understanding of, the novel. Perhaps it is unfashionable to insist upon a separation between a place of work and the work itself but in the case of Nineteen Eighty-Four no convincing connection may be made between them.

And yet, despite that, the heart-breaking but magnificent portrait of the fast-ruining novelist sacrificing his life for his art persists. Orwell must be made into a doomed romantic figure even if doing so requires the reality of his experiences to be so thoroughly rewritten they lose contact with their source material.

Orwell’s decision to move to Scotland was not necessarily a sudden or impulsive one. On 20 June 1940, Orwell wrote in his war-time diary that he was, once again, ‘Thinking always of my island in the Hebrides, which I suppose I shall never possess nor even see’. If this was a manifestation of wishful thinking it was also a seed, albeit one which would not sprout for some years yet.

Four years later, something had to be done. On 28 June 1944, the flat in which Orwell and his wife Eileen were living suffered bomb damage rendering the house uninhabitable. The couple moved to new premises in Canonbury Square in Islington, then what might now be deemed a shabby-chic, marginal neighbourhood. They were adamant, however, that as soon as the war was finally over they would depart London for the country, thinking a rural upbringing better for their young adopted son, Richard.

But where? Orwell first visited Jura in 1944, courtesy of his friend David Astor, proprietor and editor of the Observer, whose family owned – as they still do – the Tarbert Estate on the island. Orwell had, at last, discovered his Hebridean island. That first visit prompted further enquiries about the possibility of making a more substantial, quasi-permanent move to the island. Astor put Orwell in touch with the Fletcher family, who had bought the Ardlussa Estate, north of Tarbert, from the Astors some fifteen years previously. Eileen began a correspondence with Margaret Fletcher, impressing Ardlussa’s young owner with the good sense and practicality with which she prepared for a possible move to the island.

Eileen would never see Jura. In March 1945, while Orwell was in France working as a war correspondent for the Manchester Evening News and the Observer, Eileen died on the operating table while undergoing a hysterectomy. A little over a year later, Orwell’s sister died too. In three years he had lost his mother, sister, and wife. A second visit to Jura in September 1945, again arranged by Astor, allowed Orwell to visit Barnhill, a four bedroom farmhouse at the far north of the island, and an agreement was reached to rent it from the Fletchers the following summer.

Margaret Fletcher was an accidental landlord. She had inherited the Ardlussa estate following the death in October 1944 of her brother Sandy, a Scots Guards officer, killed in Belgium. Another brother, Hugh, had died earlier in the war. At the time, her husband Robin Fletcher, formerly a classics master at Eton, was incarcerated in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, having been captured at the fall of Singapore. In the three years of his captivity, his wife received precisely three postcards from her husband.

On Robin’s eventual return from the far east, the couple decided to make Jura their home. Living on Jura would, they felt, be easier for Robin and, in any case, the estate needed to be reimagined too. The Fletchers were, at least by the standards of the time, ‘progressive’ landowners, keen to do what they could to stem, and reverse, the island’s population decline and improve its economic viability. (In collaboration with the Riley-Smith family, Yorkshire brewers who owned the Ardfin estate at the south end of Jura, Robin Fletcher did much to revive the dormant Jura whisky distillery, seeing it as a means by which secure, nonagricultural employment could be brought to the island; in later years, after Robin’s death in 1960, Margaret sold one of the estate’s houses for £1 on the – unfulfilled – promise the new owner would live in it on a full-time basis.)

And so, on 22 May 1946, Orwell arrived at Ardlussa en route to Barnhill. Eric Blair’s signature in the house’s visitor’s book is one of the few remaining touchable reminders of his life on Jura. A reminder, too, that George Orwell was not yet ‘George Orwell’. Though Animal Farm had been published, and become a considerable success, the previous year, Orwell was a journalist and pamphleteer of perhaps middling renown; a writer for small magazines and small-circulation newspapers, not the world-famous figure he would become. The Orwell industry had not yet been conceived, let alone built. On Jura, in any case, he was always Eric Blair and there was a strict demarcation between Mr Blair the gentleman crofter and Mr Orwell, the writer.

As the great myth of Orwell’s Jura has grown, Barnhill has become a place of literary pilgrimage. It remains a place hard to reach and that, for many visitors, is precisely the point. Were you to depart Glasgow at 9 a.m. you would be doing well to reach Barnhill by 5 p.m. First you must head north, along Loch Lomond, then through the Arrochar Alps and over the Rest and Be Thankful pass, before hugging the shores of Loch Fyne as you progress south through Inveraray to Lochgilphead and beyond, to the ferry at Kennacraig. A Caledonian MacBrayne ferry will take you to Port Askaig on Islay in just under two hours, before you hop aboard a tiny, council-run ferry for the five-minute crossing from Islay to Jura.

Even now you are a long way from your destination. The single-track public road – possibly Britain’s worst A-road – winds its way along Jura’s eastern shore for twenty-five miles, passing through Craighouse, the island’s principle conurbation en route to Ardlussa in the far north. Three miles north of Ardlussa, the public road comes to an end, giving way to a private Land Rover track that even offroad vehicles must treat with a certain measure of respect. Four miles later you will, at last, arrive at Barnhill. Though certain particulars of the journey have changed since Orwell’s time its essence is much the same. This, as he put it himself, is an ‘unget-at-able’ place. There was no electricity, no telephone, and mail had to be collected from Ardlussa.

That remains the case today, though some concessions to modernity are evident. A new mast on the mainland has brought a 4G mobile phone signal to Barnhill, while the recent installation of a handful of solar panels allows a freezer to be plugged in on a full-time basis. Heat is provided by a coal- and peat-fired Rayburn and cooking is on a stove powered by 45kg Calor gas canisters. What further electricity is needed may be provided by a clattering diesel generator. Few signs of Orwell remain, though in truth this matters little for Barnhill is a place of atmosphere. Yes, Orwell stood here, walked this road, pottered around in this garden, shot rabbits on this hillside, fished in those waters, bathed – except in periods of summer drought – in this very bath but these fragments of connection are useful only to the extent they prompt consideration of a deeper, imaginative, link between past and present.

No one has ever accused Barnhill of being a warm house but, perched above a cove, it possesses an austere splendour of its own and when the sun shines, and the sea sparkles, and the long summer nights stretch on and on, it offers something rare and valuable: distance. That is a matter of geography but also of the mind. Above all, like Jura as a whole, it is a place of both stern beauty and deep peace.

It is quieter now than it was in Orwell’s time. Of the many misconceptions about Orwell’s life on Jura, few are so grave as the idea of the writer as hermit, locked away in a Hebridean bolthole. In the first place, Orwell had company. He arrived with Susan Watson, who was to be Richard’s nanny, though the arrangement foundered on a personality clash with Orwell’s protective sister Avril, who insisted on her prerogatives as, first, Eric’s relative and second, his housekeeper. Paul Potts, the novelist, also arrived and stayed for several months as did the writer and editor Richard Rees. In 1947, more help arrived in the form of Bill Dunn, a onelegged ex-serviceman who, wishing to escape Glasgow and become a farmer, was engaged by Robin Fletcher to farm at Kinuachdrach and latterly Barnhill on a profit-sharing basis. (Following Orwell’s death, Dunn would marry Avril and the pair would bring up young Richard.)

A near constant stream of visitors from London arrived that first summer. Barnhill was not an empty place and the Orwells were not alone. A mile north of Barnhill, the neighbouring small farm at Kinuachdrach was occupied, first by the Darroch family and subsequently by Tony and Betty Rozga. Tony Rozga was a Pole, taken prisoner by the Germans, who subsequently walked across Europe before washing up on Jura. The Rozgas deemed Orwell ‘a peculiar and kindly gentleman’ and they named one of their sons Blair in honour of the man they, like the other islanders, only knew as Eric Blair.

Still, Orwell’s guests were, as Bernard Crick, perhaps Orwell’s most comprehensive biographer (and one more sympathetic than most to Orwell’s Jura choices), put it: ‘different from the sort of people the islanders had seen before’. There is a hint of condescension here, just as there is in Crick’s subsequent suggestion that ‘the islanders, slow, gentle, stubborn, kindly and reserved, did not mingle, but observed and remembered’. One such neighbour, Francis Boyle, whose relatives, like those of the Darrochs and the Rozgas, still live on the island, remembered Orwell as ‘a kindly man’ who ‘kept himself to himself and interfered with no one’. This may fairly be thought high praise. As a matter of temperament, Orwell possessed some of the qualities required to make a success of Jura life: determination, patience, and perspective.

On his third day at Barnhill, Orwell recorded the start of his new existence: ‘Started digging garden, i.e., breaking in the turf. Back-breaking work. Soil not only dry as a bone, but very stony. Nevertheless there was a little rain last night. As soon as I have a fair patch dug, shall stick in salad vegetables. This autumn shall put in bushes, rhubarb & fruit trees if possible, but it will need a very high & strong fence to keep the deer off them.’ That set the tone. Life at Barnhill was one of constant labour but Orwell, at least at first and while his health permitted it, threw himself into gardening and small-scale animal husbandry. By his calculation, the Barnhill policies amounted to sixteen acres or so and his Jura diaries are almost exclusively concerned with domestic matters, offering little hint that he was embarking on what would become his greatest, longest-lasting project: Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Indeed, progress on that front was almost as slow as growth in the Barnhill garden. Orwell, usually a quick and fluent writer, chiselled away at his novel but, having written more than 120 articles in the year before he arrived on Jura, there is a sense too of a writer taking an opportunity to breathe, forsaking the demands of weekly journalism and embracing the procrastinating possibilities inherent in tackling a ‘big’ novel. The success of Animal Farm – the first American print run was of 50,000 copies, delivering royalties Orwell considered ‘fairy gold’ – offered the tantalising prospect of leaving Grub Street.

George Woodcock, Orwell’s friend and author of The Crystal Spirit, a penetrating study of Orwell’s politics, felt that Orwell’s insistence on over-wintering on Jura in 1948 was motivated by ‘that infatuation with the semi-idyllic life of remote and fairly primitive communities which, at times, seizes demandingly on city-tired intellectuals’. This does Jura and Orwell a disservice but, more revealingly, Woodcock, writing in 1954, suggested: ‘I do not think Orwell was entirely indifferent to comfort, but he certainly set no great store by appearances, and his times of hardship had given him an easy contempt for the trappings of the bourgeois life’. Richard Rees agreed, arguing that ‘I fear that the near-impossibility of making a tolerably comfortable life there was a positive inducement to Orwell’.

Once again, this is a view founded, in essence, on the notion the metropolitan life is the life which counts and deviations from it are, at best, eccentric and more probably folly. Life on a Hebridean island might be fine for those who knew nothing else, but for a man of the world? Surely not. But Jura was not an affectation for Orwell. ‘Jura was a wonderful place to be a child’, Richard Blair told the Guardian in 2019. ‘But this wasn’t a holiday for us. Everything my Dad wrote and said indicates that he wanted to be here full time. For him, Jura was home.’

‘I never imagined that he’d stay there’, David Astor once said but as he conceded, when Orwell reached Jura, ‘it must have been like a blinding flash of recognition, discovering that the place suited him, because he did settle there extremely happily’, even though ‘very few people could possibly have lived in that house’.

Orwell wrote little about Scotland, per se, and indeed given his previous low-level but confirmed antipathy to Scotsmen – a product, in part perhaps, of his imperial days in Burma – there was a small irony in him washing up on a Hebridean island at all. But in his ‘As I Please’ column in Tribune he wrote that ‘Up to date the Scottish Nationalist movement seems to have gone almost unnoticed in England . . . It is true that it is a small movement, but it could grow, because there is a basis for it. In this country I don’t think it is enough realised – I myself had no idea of it until a few years ago – that Scotland has a case against England’. Although it was not a ‘very strong case’ on economic grounds, Orwell conceded that ‘many Scottish people, often quite moderate in outlook, are beginning to think about autonomy and to feel that they are pushed into an inferior position’. His Jura days informed some of this, certainly, not least in persuading Orwell that Gaelic, still then spoken by around half the island’s population, should be promoted and protected. A daily programme on the BBC (radio, of course), rather than two or three ‘amateurish’ if ‘eagerly listened to’ shows a week, would ‘buy a little good-will’.

Still, ‘In some areas, at any rate, Scotland is almost an occupied country. You have an English or Anglicised upper-class, and a Scottish working-class which speaks with a markedly different accent, or even, part of the time, in a different language. This is a more dangerous kind of class division than any now existing in England. Given favourable circumstances it might develop in an ugly way, and the fact that there was a progressive Labour Government in London might not make much difference.

‘I think we should pay more attention to the small but violent separatist movements which exist within our own island’, he told his readers. ‘They may look unimportant now, but, after all, the Communist Manifesto was once a very obscure document, and the Nazi Party had only six members when Hitler joined it.’ Since writers on both left and right have mined Orwell for the gold that will substantiate their own authority, it seems only appropriate that, more than seventy years later, supporters and opponents of Scottish independence can find succour for their positions in Orwell’s brief, almost off-hand, evaluation of Scottish politics.

His only other significant account of Scotland came in a letter to George Woodcock, detailing his life on the island. ‘The crofters have to work very hard,’ Orwell asserted, ‘but in many ways they are better off and more independent than a town labourer, and they would be quite comfortable if they could get a bit of help in the way of machinery, electrical power, and roads, and could get the landlords off their backs and get rid of the deer.

‘These animals are so common on this particular island that they are an absolute curse. They eat up the pastures where there ought to be sheep, and they make fencing immensely more expensive than it need be. The crofters aren’t allowed to shoot them, and are constantly having to waste their time dragging the carcasses of deer down from the hills during the stalking season. Everything is sacrificed to the brutes because they are an easy source of meat and therefore popular to the people who own them.’ Much of this analysis is still echoed in certain left-wing, and environmental, quarters today.

It is true that, on Jura, the deer population had boomed during the war but Orwell’s own landlords were more interested in sheep than stags and not just because there was then little commercial demand for, or opportunity in, deer stalking. Most of the deer at Ardlussa were shot by the estate’s employees. (It might also be noted that the name Jura is believed to be derived from the Norse for ‘Deer Island’; perhaps it is humans who are the interlopers here.)

‘I suppose sooner or later these islands will be taken in hand,’ Orwell continued, ‘and then they could either be turned into a first-rate place for dairy produce and meat, or else they would support a large population of small peasants living off cattle and fishing.’ It is telling, I think, that this letter was written in the first blush of his Jura romance and even Orwell later appreciated this was romantic tosh, there being neither opportunity, means nor value in turning Jura – with its marked paucity of tolerable, let alone lush, grazing ground – into a dairy-farming stronghold.

But ‘In the eighteenth century’, Orwell confidently told Woodcock, ‘the population here was 10,000 – now less than 300’. In fact, Jura’s population probably peaked around 2,000 and by 1831 had already declined to 1,300 people. There were never any forced clearances on Jura but a paucity of good ground and attractive opportunities, combined with intolerable rent increases, meant there didn’t have to be. Orwell was neither the first nor the last outsider to envisage a crofting revival on the islands, though in this regard the islanders themselves have always disappointed those who would have them lead a largely self-sufficient – or, put more harshly, a subsistence-based – existence.

Accounts of Orwell’s time on Jura necessarily pay great attention to his health. Even Orwell’s neighbours allowed that living so far from a doctor was, as one of them put it, ‘not wise – but of course we all felt that, particularly those with old people or children in the house’. Orwell, then, endured privations in this regard that were no different to those accepted by his neighbours and considered a deprivation worth bearing, being of less importance than the advantages to be accrued from living at the northern end of the island. If it was folly for him to live at Barnhill, it was folly for them to live in such an isolated place too.

There were consolations to relative isolation too. As Orwell wrote to one correspondent, ‘These islands are one of the most beautiful parts of the British Isles’. Of course, he added, ‘it rains all the time, but if one takes that for granted it doesn’t seem to matter’. As, indeed, it does not. Visitors to the Hebrides may be divided between those who can hack it and those who cannot; Orwell was an emphatic member of the former group.

Context matters as well. The winter of 1947, for instance, was exceptionally harsh. In January and February temperatures of -20º Celsius were recorded even in southeastern England and almost the whole of Britain was covered in a thick blanket of snow. Rationing of fuel and food compounded the misery felt by millions; electricity was shut off for five hours a day; the BBC’s Third Programme shut down for a fortnight; weekly papers were cancelled, including Tribune. Many Britons scarcely dared to venture outside at all. Much of the country existed in a locked-down state of frozen animation. Unemployment quadrupled to 1.7 million in a matter of weeks.

In Canonbury Square, Orwell ran out of coal. As Avril later recalled, ‘We had no fuel, and Eric has been ill on and off during the winter with one thing and another. We even got to the point of chopping up young Richard’s toys and putting them on the fire in Eric’s room to try and keep him warm while he was writing.’ Orwell, likewise, noted that on one occasion he was ‘kept going’ by setting a ‘blitzed bedstead’ ablaze and ‘wrote an article by its grateful warmth’.

This London, not Jura, forms a backdrop to Nineteen Eighty-Four: the grime, the misery, the clapped-out buildings and the rotten food and the heavy hopelessness of everything. As Dorian Lynskey, the novel’s own biographer – it is a mark of Orwell’s standing that even his books now have biographers – observes: ‘The prole district, “to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station”, is Islington.’

In such circumstances, the Hebrides offered a real alternative and not just the happy prospect of an imaginative release. As Orwell had written to George Woodcock, ‘I can work here with fewer interruptions, and I think we shall be less cold here. The climate, although wet, is not quite as cold as England and it is much easier to get fuel.’ Far from being a daunting proposition, life on Jura was an enticing one.

Here he could work. Writing to Anthony Powell in September 1947, Orwell confessed: ‘I know that if I return to London and get caught up in weekly articles I shall never get on with anything longer.’ Jura’s isolation, its spiritual and physical distance from the London literary and journalism worlds, was wholly the point, not some demonstration of authorial eccentricity. Even so, Orwell was realistic about his health, telling Powell, ‘One seems to have a limited capacity for work nowadays and one has to husband it.’ The following month, he reminded Powell that, ‘we’ve got a lot more coal here than we should have in London, and this house is a lot more weatherproof than my flat, where the water was coming through the roof in twelve places last winter’. Again, there is a marked discrepancy between Orwell’s actual life on Jura and what others thought that life must be like.

That contrast also informs analysis of one of Orwell’s more dramatic misadventures on Jura: the time he, and his son, together with their companions, nearly drowned following a boating mishap in the Gulf of Corryvreckan, home to Europe’s third-largest whirlpool and a place of corresponding drama and danger. Orwell’s diary for 19 August 1947 – his second summer on the island – is almost comically phlegmatic:

Time to Glengarrisdale [a bay on the northwest coast of the island] about 1 hour 45 minutes. On return journey today ran into the whirlpool & we’re all nearly drowned. Engine sucked off by the sea & went to the bottom. Just managed to keep the boat steady with the oars, & after going through the whirlpool twice, ran into smooth water & found ourselves only about 100 yards from Eileen Mór [despite its name, a small rocky island in the gulf], so ran in quickly & managed to clamber ashore. HD [Humphrey Dakin, Orwell’s nephew] jumped ashore first with the rope, then the boat overturned spilling LD [Lucy Dakin, Orwell’s niece], R [Richard] & myself into the sea. R trapped under the boat for a moment, but we managed to get him out.

Three hours later the party were rescued by a passing group of fishermen from the nearby isle of Luing. Orwell noted that he had attempted to pass through the gulf around three hours after high tide and ‘It appears this was the very worst time, & one should time it so as to pass Corryvreckan on slack water. The boat is all right. Only serious loss, the engine & 12 blankets.’

The diary entry then continues: ‘Yesterday fished Loch nan Eileen & a Bhúrra. 12 trout, mostly small. There are a lot of fish in a Bhúrra but I could not catch anything over about 5 ounces. It was very shallow, with a sandy or shingly bottom.’

Orwell’s biographers have typically considered this mishap an act of wanton folly and proof, if it were really needed, of Orwell’s naivety and lack of preparedness for the realities of an island life. And perhaps it was. On the other hand, it seems worth noting that those who knew him best on Jura – his neighbours – took a notably more charitable view. According to Donald Darroch, ‘It could have happened to anyone’, though, admittedly ‘perhaps he might better first have taken advice from one who knew, who would have warned him or taken him over himself.’ Ian McKechnie, the boatman at Ardlussa, who often went lobster-fishing with Orwell, said Orwell knew what he was doing, but simply misread the tide tables, something it was ‘easy enough to do’. Island life is not a risk-free enterprise and the islanders knew something of its inherent fragility. When the bedraggled party finally made it back to Barnhill, Avril asked George: ‘What took you so long’?

By the end of that summer, however, it was obvious Orwell was unwell. The island’s doctor arranged for a specialist from Glasgow to visit him at Ardlussa. Margaret Fletcher, in whose house he had been staying for several days, recalled the specialist warning that subjecting Orwell to the long trip up to Barnhill risked provoking a life-ending haemorrage, ‘but Eric wouldn’t stay’, thinking it unfair – perhaps even dishonorable – for a man riddled with tuberculosis to stay in a house in which four young children lived.

Nevertheless, at the end of the year Orwell entered Hairmyres hospital near Glasgow, staying there until July 1948. ‘When he came out, he looked comparatively fit’, Avril recalled, ‘but he would insist on coming straight back to Barnhill, which he loved.’ Avril came to believe her brother might have made a full recovery had he moved to a convalescent home ‘but as it was he came back and insisted on living a quite ordinary life’. This, she said, ‘really was extremely stupid’.

Manual work at Barnhill of the kind Orwell had previously found so rewarding was increasingly beyond his capabilities. Nevertheless, he told Woodcock that his doctors ‘seem to think I am pretty well cured and will end up perfectly OK so long as I don’t relapse during the next few months’. This proved optimistic; working on finishing Nineteen Eighty-Four – a task made more onerous by the inability to persuade a typist to travel from London to produce a clean and workable version of the manuscript – sapped Orwell’s strength. By September he was in ‘a ghastly state’, admitting, with laconic understatement, that the ‘effort’ of completing the novel ‘didn’t make me any better’.

But at long last the work was done. As Avril remembered it, ‘I remember him coming down from his bedroom, where he did his writing. He got out the last bottle of wine that we had in the house and he and I and Bill Dunn had a drink to celebrate the new book.’

His health continued to deteriorate, however, and even Orwell accepted that Jura was no longer the most suitable place for him. There being no suitable private establishment with room for him in Scotland, he entered a sanatorium at Cranham in the Cotswolds on 6 January 1949. While recognising he would henceforth require to spend winters in a warmer climate, he still hoped to spend his summers at Barnhill, where he could write with greater freedom and fewer distractions than anywhere else. ‘I must try and stay alive for a while’, he told David Astor, ‘because, apart from other considerations, I have a good idea for a novel.’

Even when Bill Dunn and Avril decided it would be best to move to a farm on the mainland, Orwell still believed that, unless the Fletchers happened on a new tenant determined to farm Barnhill, he could retain his lease on the house, using it as a summer home.

To the end, he retained a faith in his idea of a Jura he would never see again. But then, how could he not? The final entry in his Jura diary, on Christmas Eve 1948, read:

Sharp frost the last two nights. The days sunny & still, sea calm. A[Avril] has very bad cold. The goose for Xmas disappeared, then was found swimming in the sea round at the anchorage, about a mile from our own beach. B[Bill] thinks it must have swum round. He had to follow it in a dinghy & shoot it. Weight before drawing & plucking, 10 1/2 lbs. Snowdrops up all over the place. A few tulips showing. Some wall-flowers still trying to flower.

ONE

– I –

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste – this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The Ministry of Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak1 – was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbedwire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quartosized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.

For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops (‘dealing on the free market’, it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never—

Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.

It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything so nebulous could be said to happen.

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably – since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner – she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general cleanmindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.

The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hush passed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was curiously disarming – in some indefinable way, curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenthcentury nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s urbane manner and his prize-fighter’s physique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief – or perhaps not even a belief, merely a hope – that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate he had the appearance of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O’Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandyhaired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even – so it was occasionally rumoured – in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard – a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party – an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed – and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein’s specious claptrap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army – row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots formed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were – in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.