304. Orwell: Animal Farm, 1984 & Totalitarian Dystopia (Part 3)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrumpur. Now, of course, you don't need me to tell you, but we are in the middle of our little Orwell miniseries. And in the last episode, we were talking about Orwell's time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, how he got dramatically shot in the throat, how his wife leapt in and saved his life and got them both out. And it's during this time that he writes Homage to Catalonia in 1938. And in that book, I mean, it's so much a signature of his thinking and developing and writing. He abhors the violence, this time of sectarianism on the left during the Civil War.

1:11This period of, I think, all was life, it's fair to say, is like watching a Polaroid develop and stabilise, because this is the period when his political views really hardly adopts a new and very characteristic view of the world. And he sees the problem as being the power and totalitarianism, which he contrasts with libertarianism. Everyone else in his generation is thinking left or right. He sees extreme left and extreme right as totalitarian. and against that he is for democratic libertarianism. And as we said in the last episode, this philosophy is brought out and developed and deployed in his two most famous works, Animal Farm and 1984.

1:54And this year of his writing is what we're going to be doing today. We are going to talk about Animal Farm and 1984 in great depth, a book that I know many of you listening to this podcast will have read at school. And it was an absolute joy to sort of reread them again for this. It works still, doesn't it? I mean, it's amazing. I also last reread these books when I was at A-level. And quite a lot of books that you read and enjoy aged 18 or 19 don't necessarily work later in life. And these definitely do stand up. You found that too? Oh, God, it was ridiculous. I was reading out chapters to friends and family saying, you know, this could be about where we live today.

2:30This is about our house. This is about where we are. Anyway, look, following the publication of homage to Catalonia. Orwell briefly thought about going to India because at heart he was a recorder of events. He was sort of living them, taking part in them, but also wanted to record them. So he's thinking about going to work in India, which is a place that he knows. He wants to work for a newspaper called The Pioneer. It's a newspaper based in Lucknow. And the person who gets the job, if I'm not wrong, is his close friend, Malcolm Muggeridge. Malcolm Muggeridge goes out and takes that job rather than Orwell, as a result of which he gets to seduce the wonderful painter, what she called Amrita Shergill.

3:09Oh, right. Who's up in Simla with him. He has an affair with her, which is very steamy stuff. If anyone wants to read an Amrita Shergill biography, Malcolm Muggeridge and her in 1938-39 in Simla is one of the highlights of the story. Anyway, I digress. Actually, just on Amrita Shergill, I mean, it's a name that everybody in India will be completely familiar with, but not maybe people in the West. But I really urge you to go and Google what she looked like. This woman was film star material, beautiful and elegant and an amazing painter. But getting back to Orwell himself, these plans that he had of going to India and becoming a great journalist, you know, there in the gritty front line, you know, sort of talking about things that really mattered.

3:49It was his health that thwarted him because he got very, very seriously ill in 1938 with TB, tuberculosis. And so he's incarcerated for six months in a sanatorium with only his thoughts as company. And he's discharged in September. And also, you know, sort of dispirited. Health was one thing, but also dispirited because homage to Catalonia had sold pretty poorly. And, you know, he wasn't this sort of great celebrated hero of letters that he had thought he might be. Do you know, Anita, if TB was a thing that many people suffered from at this point because I'd imagine it was a disease which was a rare and unlucky thing to get by this stage, wouldn't it be?

4:28Well, I mean, a very unlucky thing to get and not as rare as you might think. Unlucky because the antibiotics used to treat TB had a few years yet to be discovered. So Orwell gets TB at a terrible, terrible time. So yet when TB ripped through a population, it really did let rip. So yes, he was hugely, hugely unlucky. That autumn, after he comes out of the sanatorium, and you can just imagine the bleakness of how he feels. He's been really ill. He's been really depleted. He's been in isolation almost for six months. And his first book did not do well. That really matters to him. It's a complete trial by fire in his life to go through what he did in Spain.

5:09It hasn't done great. So you've got sort of friends of his rallying around. And this is another thing about his life is that friends rally around him and pick Orwell up when he's at his lowest point. And there's a novelist called L.H. Myers who says, okay, you know what, Orwell, you've got to buck up and I will pay money so that you don't have to worry about how to eat, how to live. And I think you should really go to French Morocco. I think you'll like it. I think the warm climate is going to be good for your chest. And I think it's just going to be something different and new. So Orwell takes his wife, you know, the same wife who saves his life when he's shot through the throat, and they go off to Morocco in 1938.

5:50And they travel around Gibraltar and Tangier. They avoid Spanish Morocco for obvious reasons, because a man's just been shot in the neck. And they reach Marrakesh. And there, and this is, again, such a romantic thing to say, on the road to Casablanca, they rent a villa. And that's where they hunker down for several months. And at this point, he gets to see French colonialism in action. And he and Eileen don't take to it, which of course is no surprise as we know his views. Eileen writes at this point, you'll probably have heard that we don't like Marrakesh. While Orwell himself writes, the French are every bit as bad as ourselves, but somewhat better on the surface.

6:29The backdrop to this, you know, where he's sort of putting himself together, is that Europe is beginning to fall apart and Europe is crawling towards war. Everything one writes, Orwell says, now is overshadowed by this ghastly feeling that we are rushing towards a precipice. precipice. And at the same time, as he's writing this, there's news coming in from Spain. And that too is debilitating. He writes, you know, I had news of the few Spaniards I had known and always that they had been killed. So a man who's trying to sort of put himself together, who's trying to find something brighter, something hopeful to look for, he doesn't see it in the world around him.

7:06He doesn't see it from the news from Spain. Again, all of this is really very crushing. And then something else happens, William, to flatten him further. Well, two things happen in 1939. First of all, he gets the news of his father's death. They hadn't been particularly close, and his father was a lot less lively a character and less of an influence on him than his mother. Nonetheless, it struck him, I think, more than he realised. And then, of course, 1939, the war breaks out, and the Orwells are back in London in the middle of the Blitz. And And there's these extraordinary entries in his diaries and in his letters.

7:40A downed aeroplane tumbles out of the clouds, just like a snipe that has been shot high overhead. And you notice a few churches whose spines have broken off in the middle, making them look like lizards that have lost their tails. He's really in his flow now. And he's also there. I mean, you know, this is a thing about Orwell. He's there at times that really matters. So there is one occasion during the Blitz, a bunch of residents from the East End who are absolutely terrified of this death raining down from them from the sky charge the Savoy Hotel, which, if you don't know, is one of the grandest hotels in London.

8:17And they say, let us in. They're hammering on the doors, let us in because we need to use it as an air raid shelter. And again, this is instructive for Orwell. Look at this. It's a class hammering on a door that won't open to people who are the have-nots in London. And he writes, when you see how the wealthy are still behaving in what is manifestly developing into a revolutionary war, you think of St. Petersburg in 1916. And with that, of course, he's talking about the Russian Revolution and how czars were toppled and ownership was upended in Russia. It's funny because that's not at all our perception, is it, of the Blitz?

8:54We think of the Blitz as being a time when everyone's together. The myth is, you know, the Pathé newsreels, Everyone's down in the underground together. Yeah. Or alternatively, we think of, you know, all those people, you know, the love charm of bombs, all those people having sort of frantic affairs as their libraries go up in smoke and their houses are smashed up. But Orwell is developing his sort of political program at this point. He says there is a six point plan that he would like to develop for British politics. Number one, nationalization. Two, income limitation. That's a popular one for any electoral platform.

9:27Three, democratic reform of education. Four, dominion status for India. Five, an imperial general council, quotes, in which the coloured peoples are to be represented, unquote. And six, an anti-fascist alliance. And Orwell's wife is working now at the censorship department at the Ministry of Information, very 1984, in central London. And can I just say this belies a lie in the Orwell story, the Orwell mythology that is often told, because it is so often taught in schools that Room 101, the place where truth goes to die, where Tor Winston Smith, who is working in Room 101, the worst place in the world, is charged with rewriting history every few days.

10:10It was always said to me that, oh, look, that's the office in Senate House Library, which is a place I used to go to frequently, where Orwell used to work and do this stuff, which drove him mad, you know, that he had to keep twisting truth. It wasn't him at all. It was Eileen who worked in the censorship department of the Ministry of Information. So she's working away. He and they both are staying with her family in Greenwich. And, you know, very much you get the sense, I think it's fair to say that somehow, you know, his manhood is being chipped away a little bit because she's doing the interesting work, the important work.

10:44They're staying with her family. and he's still trying to build himself up from the beleaguered few months that he's had before. So he tries to do something about it. He submits his name to the Central Register for War Work, but they don't want him. And again, it's another blow to what we have discovered and will further discover is an enormous male ego that wants to be useful, that wants to do something, that wants to lead any kind of revolution with a six-point plan as everything goes on fire around you. So he turns instead to the BBC, doesn't he? And at 1941, he's taken on full time by the BBC's Eastern Service, supervising cultural broadcasts to India to help counter propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine imperial links.

11:30And so Orwell, who's been such a vocal anti-imperialist all his life, finds that his primary duty is to disseminate British imperial propaganda at India, bolstering Indian support for the Allied war effort. And the BBC was, of course, subject to strict censorship policies at this stage, and Orwell absolutely hates it. And just to say a little bit more about trying to counter Nazi propaganda, the Germans were aiming so much at India to try and cause mutinies in regiments. You had Goebbels himself reminding the populace in India of what the British had done to them during the Raj. It's 1941, so it's a year after Michael O'Dwyer, the man who is responsible for the Jaliyahwana Bark massacre, has been gunned down by an Indian in London, Utham Singh.

12:17Goebbels is going out on the radio saying, he is a hero. He shot the British. This is what they are all like. You can see the panic in London and in Whitehall that we cannot let this fester and go unanswered, which is why all this stuff is pouring out of the BBC. Now, he writes in his diary at this time, He's sick of it. He might be able to understand why it's happening, but he doesn't like it. And this is what he says. One rapidly becomes propaganda minded and develops a cunning one did not previously have. I'm regularly alleging in my newsletters that the Japanese are plotting the attack on Russia, but I don't believe it to be so.

12:51And in the same entry, a little lower down, he says, all propaganda is lies, even when one is dealing with the truth. I don't think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing and why. Now, I hate to say this, Anita, for one who is so loyal to her BBC life, he regards these years as wasted years. Thanks for trying to get me to leave for ages. This is like a complete complete deal. I think you should just do empire. I think full-time empire is what we need to do. Spend more time with you. That's what you've always wanted to do, isn't it? It is. It's a dream. One day. Anyway, always on my side, because he regards the BBC office environment, and this is a direct quote, I'm not making this up, as something halfway between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum.

13:34Do you find that, Anita? Well, look, notably, there is a room at the BBC, which is called Room 101, because I should have said the room in Senate House was never called Room 101. And so there are a lot of disagreements about whether it was based on Senate House or whether it is, you know, this Room 101. But look, there's an amalgam of this. And again, this is how his life funnels into his writing and becomes what we now know to be 1984, where the truth goes to die. So in both of their ways, him and Eileen, who are very idealistic people, are going in and tampering with truth for one reason or the other.

14:11So Orwell writes this fabulous essay, Freedom of the Press, at this point. And I think you can see that it absolutely stands as true today as it did then, if not more so. This is what he writes. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veil censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films, and radio. At any given moment, there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas, which is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that, or the other, but it is not done to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was not done to mention trousers and the presence of a lady.

15:01Yeah, it's a great example. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in highbrow periodicals. So it's not surprising that he leaves the Rue C in 1943. He's had enough. No more Room 101. No, that's it. He's out. And he starts channeling himself into the writing of what, I mean, I think it's extraordinary, this piece of rage and frustration for children, Animal Farm in 1943. I mean, I don't think he wrote it for children at the time, but it is now a book that children study in school.

15:42And Orwell's mother dies around the same time. and he does get to tell her that he's starting on a new book but she has no idea that it's going to be 1984 but everything that has just gone on in the last few months the frustration with big organizations that scene of hammering on the door of the savoy and people not being allowed in you can see it you can feel it in the birthing of 1984 what i'm interested in is that he's able just to give up work in the middle of the war because he's only 40 it doesn't like he's no man Eileen supports him. It's not surprising at all. Eileen is carrying this man for a lot of their marriage.

16:17I don't mean that. I mean, aren't you obliged, if you're not in the army, to be doing some useful propaganda work or something at this point? You couldn't just go off and write a novel when you fancy it. Well, I mean, I don't know. Maybe he's ill because the TB has ravaged his lungs. That would make him fail. But can I give you just an overview of Animal Farm, just in case you are one of the eight people listening to this who hasn't read it? So this is all initially set on a farm where you've got a farmer, Jones, who's in charge, and he treats his animals appallingly. And so the animals decide that enough is enough.

16:51They see just horrible atrocities visited on the animals. they are worked too hard, they're sent to the knacker's yard when they are dispensed with. And so there is a revolution. And you have these sort of characters who come to the fore. And most notably, I think, you know, you've got representations of Russia. So, you know, even though he's sort of dismayed by what's going on with capitalism in the Savoy, but it is the Russian revolution that he's thinking of. So you've got this heroic, wonderful character who is just tragic and heartbreaking boxer the cart horse who has this phraseology that comes up again I will work harder I will work harder Napoleon is always right and Napoleon is Stalin so you have sort of representations of the Russian hierarchy you've got Snowball who is Trotsky who's going to meet the same end in animal farm that Trotsky meets in real life with an ice pick to the back of their head and you have all the pigs who will become both at the same time those who run the state and eventually do exactly to Boxer what the capitalist system did to Boxer and Farmer Jones did in that they work him to death and they send him to the Nakaziar to be turned into glue.

18:02But you also have a dig at what's going on in the Russian revolution because he doesn't believe in them. He believes they are monsters who are visiting monstrous actions on the people. I have to say, Boxer, when I was learning this at school, sort of reflecting real life events, Boxer has this thing of he does more work. He does the harder work than anybody else. He's the horse who stays, who works later when the sun goes down. You know, when something goes wrong, he says, it must be due to some fault in ourselves. He blames himself rather than anybody else. And what is interesting is that in Russia at the same time, a similar kind of time, or I I think it was 1935.

18:42You have a man called, have you heard of Stakhanov? No, I haven't. Okay, so I got obsessed with Stakhanov at school because I was doing Russian history at the same time as reading Animal Farm. So Stakhanov was a miner. Oh, is he the kind of champion worker? He was the guy that kept getting the awards. Yes, I know this story. So, you know, they would set this sort of total, you know, monthly total. We want to have this many tons or in a day, we need each person to dig out 10 tons. Stakhanov would do it. They said Stakhanov would do more. And so, okay, let's make it 20 tons. And then Stachanoff would do it and Stachanoff would do more.

19:12Then it would be 30 tons. Stachanoff would do it. Stachanoff would do more. And then eventually, so the story goes on August the 31st, 1935, Stachanoff allegedly mines 102 tons of coal in a single shift, which is 14 times the quota. And all of his workers say, bugger you. We hate your guts. But Stachanoff is elevated to this sort of heroic level by the leadership, which is celebrating the fact that they are actually trying to work the workers to death. So you get the stuccanovite movement at the same time. It's a dogleg, but I found it really interesting how current events are funneling into his fiction.

19:50Meanwhile, in London, the Orwells are living through the height of the Blitz, and a V1 bomb actually strikes their home in Mortimer Crescent. And they're forced to find someone new to live. And Orwell returns to his home in this very poignant moment with a wheelbarrow, saving what books he can from the rubble. So it's like a sort of scene from modern Gaza, where he's sitting there trying to move bits of rubble and finding his favorite novels under them. But two other things happen. One is that they adopt a child. Neither Eileen nor Orwell seem to have been capable of having children. Orwell is believed to have been sterile, and Eileen may have been infertile due to uterine cancer.

20:31So they adopt a child. Then there's Another major thing that happens, which is that his publisher, Cape, withdraws its offer to publish Animal Farm after meeting with Peter Smollett, the Ministry of Information. Smollett was later revealed to be a Soviet agent. How fascinating. Isn't that extraordinary? So Smollett knew exactly what this was and how it would annoy his Russian or Soviet paymasters, and he quashes it. So again, you know, it's this crushing feeling for a writer that you've written something, you believe it to be good. I mean, William will tell you, writers normally have this sense of self-loathing that is the size of Mount Everest.

21:09But to actually think, you know, actually this is good, and then be told no one's going to read it, utterly crushing. I find that you have this sense of that at the beginning. And normally by the end, when you've worked on a novel, or in my case, nonfiction, you think it's really quite good by the time you give it to the publisher. If the publisher doesn't like it, it's all the more catastrophic. So you've lost your flat and the book you've been working on, which you've given up your job to write, and Eileen's made all these sacrifices to allow all the time to write, is turned down by the publisher.

21:38But somebody does publish it because you get another publishing company called Secker and Warburg who say, you know what, in 1945, we will publish it. We'll do it. So, you know, there is light at the end of the tunnel. And, you know, while this is all happening, their personal life is in turmoil. They're having to move house. They move to Islington instead. And soon after, they get the publishing deal. He starts to work as a war correspondent for The Observer because David Astor of The Observer thinks there is something in the fire of this man that he wants to be on the front line. He wants to be something and he writes very, very well.

22:10So he sends him out. Just to clarify, Anita, how much success has he had up at this point? Nothing at this point. Nobody knows who George Orwell is. So he is still very much Eric Blair, you know, his other identity. People don't know that name George Orwell just yet. And so Aster is doing something extraordinary and perceptive to give him this job. He's taking a leap of faith and he's seen what he does. And he obviously thinks of him more as a journalist. I mean, maybe the conversation you can sort of well imagine is, oh, well, give up this writing stuff and actually do what you're meant to do, which is journalism, which you're good at.

22:42So he sends him to liberated Paris and then on through Germany. And this is the war. The Nazis have been routed. So he's traveling through this broken landscape, having left London, one broken landscape, going through Paris, Germany, Austria. He's visiting these catastrophically destroyed towns like Cologne, Stuttgart, the sort of just flat wastelands. There are still corpses lying in the streets when he goes. And so his dispatches are full of the horror of what has been visited on Germany and Austria as well. For the first time, people get to see what was happening on the other side. And these dispatches are published in The Observer, but also in the Manchester Evening News, which is a hugely powerful publication.

23:27I'll just read you an extract. It's from one of the articles that he writes that's published in February 1945. And he's talking about the state of the newspaper industry in Paris at this time. And he ends his article with, but the experience of occupation has produced a large number of new type of journalists, very young, idealistic, and hardened by illegality and completely non-commercial in outlook. And these men are bound to make their influence felt in post-war press. The public has also been educated by suffering, and French opinion as a whole has moved decisively to the left. If any freedom of the press survives, it is difficult to believe that the French people will again tolerate newspapers so stupid, scurrilous, and dishonest as the bulk of those they possessed before 1940.

24:15He writes with a cannon rather than a pen, even with his journalism. And then on the 29th of March, 1945, when he's in newly liberated Europe, Eileen enters hospital for hysterectomy. But instead, she dies suddenly from an allergic reaction to the anesthetic. And many expected Orwell to give up the care of their nine-year-old son, but he refuses. He briefly returns home after her death, then goes straight back to Europe before returning again in London to cover the general election in July. And this is going to be something, his relationship with Eileen, that we're going to look much more closely at with Anna Funder, the author of Wifedom, which is an incredible book, which I warmly recommend.

24:59So we're going to not go too far into this now. But Anna Funder certainly believes that Sir Orwell was oddly heartless about his wife's loss and that he picks himself up and moves on far too quickly for her liking, certainly, in the aftermath of this tragedy. Let's take a break. And then after the break, William was saying at the time that he's going off to write for The Observer, does he have any fame and fortune? No, but it's coming. Join us after the break.

25:33welcome back so as we were saying you know finally george orwell gets a publisher for animal farm and it comes out in august 1945 and then it comes out in the united states a year later and it's like a boulder it starts rolling then it starts rolling faster and getting bigger and bigger. By 1946, it had sold over 600 ,000 copies. So, you know, the man who was sort of sent through Europe is suddenly a name. He's a bestseller. And it is a massive, massive hit. That's not just a bestseller. 600 ,000 is a sort of spectacular sale even today. But at the time, when people were buying fewer books, absolutely astonishing sale.