1985 (5 page)

Why?

Oh, Winston Churchill himself had something to do with it. The senior officers liked him, but he wasn't all that popular with the troops. He'd many of the qualities that make a people's hero – eccentric colourfulness, a gift for obscenity and coarse wit, a mode of speech that sounded more demotic than that of certain of the Labour leaders – though it was really the aristocratic twang of an earlier age. He had a large capacity for brandy and cigars. But it was unwise of him to smoke these when visiting the troops. Some of us at times would have given our souls for a puff at a Victory cigarette.

What, apart from the cigars, was the matter with him?

He was too fond of war. Many of us, by the time of the 1945 election, had been in uniform for nearly six years. We wanted to get out and resume – or begin, most of us – our real lives. Churchill orated about the dangers of a too-hasty disbanding of the citizen army. An iron curtain had come down in Eastern Europe; the Russian ally had returned to his old role of the Bolshevik menace. We knew nothing, we simple soldiers,
of the new processes of international politics – the sudden shifts of policy. We'd thought Russia was our great fellow-fighter against fascist tyranny, and now she'd become the enemy. We were naïve enough to imagine that to great statesmen, as to us, war was a necessary but painful interlude. We didn't know that great statesmen consider war to be an aspect of a continuing policy. We'd had enough of Churchill. He wept when we rejected him.

But Orwell obviously admired him. He wouldn't have named his hero for him otherwise
.

No, no, no. It seemed to many of the first American readers of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
that Winston Smith's name was a symbol of a noble free tradition lost for ever. But it was nothing of the kind. It was comedy again. The name Winston Smith is comic: it gets a laugh from British readers. It also suggests something vaguely shameful, a political amateurism that never stood a chance against the new professionals.

The rejection of Churchill must surely have represented a very small part of the reason for turning to Socialism in 1945. Wasn't there compulsory instruction in civics during the war? Didn't that lead servicemen to a wish for a change of government?

To some extent. The greater part of the British population had never been much interested in politics, but there was indeed a measure of compulsory civic education during the war, especially in the army, with weekly discussions led by platoon commanders on topical material supplied by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs – ABCA, a whiff of the new age, the pregnant acronym. There was even a stirring song that nobody sang:

ABCA –

Sing it or say it –

Leading the way

To a brave new world.

Till over Europe, freed from her chains,

Liberty's flag is again unfurled,

We'll keep aflame

Democracy's torchlight,

Scorching the wings

Of this night of shame –

Freedom to all,

To act and to utter:

ABCA is calling

In freedom's name.

God help us. There were also lectures by education officers or sergeants on what was called the British Way and Purpose. There was, in fact, a self-avowed attempt to revive the idea of a well-informed citizen army on the lines of Cromwell's Roundheads, who are said to have known what they were fighting for. There were also frank borrowings from the Soviet Army, with its wall-newspapers and political commissars or polkoms.

What, on a point of historical interest, were or was the British Way and Purpose?

I'm not sure. It seems to have been divided, even schizophrenic. Or perhaps the Way and the Purpose were not easily compatible. Much of the material provided was embarrassingly diehard, with its glorification of a colonial system already in process of being dismantled, but articulate members of service audiences were at liberty, during the weekly session, to denounce imperialism and influence comrades who had hardly known that a British Empire existed. Other material was about the building of the Welfare State, with a unified national insurance scheme borrowed from Bismarck's Germany by Lord Beveridge, the Liberal, and known as the Beveridge Plan. I think the British Way was democratic and the British Purpose to establish a sort of cautious egalitarianism wherever possible. I don't know. I do know that some reactionary colonels refused to allow either ABCA or BWP sessions in their battalions, saying that it was all ‘socialism'.

Were there any revolutionary colonels?

Not in the British Army. There were plenty of revolutionaries in the rank and file, though, and the odd lieutenant from the London School of Economics. Generally speaking, however, the British class system found its most grotesque expression in the British Army. The professional officers of high rank imposed traditional modes of speech and social behaviour: an officer had to be a gentleman, whatever a gentleman was. Certainly there was, to say the least, a general antipathy on the part of the troops towards their officers, a great gulf of manners, speech, social values, a chasm between those who had to lead and those who did not want to be led. Thirty-odd years after demobilization, there are many
former other ranks who enjoy a dream of avenging old insults, injustices, nuances of upper-class disdain. There remains something still in the memory of the ‘officer voice' – the reedy vowels of Field-Marshal Lord Montgomery, for instance – which arouses a hopeless fury. The structure of the army was a kind of gross parody of the structure of pre-war civilian society. If a man entered the army as a mild radical, he approached the 1945 election as a raging one. A Welsh sergeant summed it up for me: ‘When I joined up I was red. Now I'm bloody purple.' If the British Communist Party had fielded more candidates, the make-up of that first post-War Parliament might have been very interesting indeed.

And this was all it was? The British troops put the Labour Party in because they didn't like Churchill and didn't like the way the services were run?

No, there was much more than that. Along with the radical emotions there was a kind of utopianism necessary to fighting men. They had to believe they were struggling for something more than the mere defeat of an enemy. They weren't defending a good cause against a bad but a bad cause against a worse. Modern war disrupts civilian society and makes it easier to rebuild than to reconstitute. Rebuilding from scratch to secure long-delayed social justice – that had been a dream of the 1914–18 war, with its slogan, ‘A country fit for heroes to live in,' but the dream had not been fulfilled. Discharged soldiers in slums or casualty wards, jobless and hopeless, wished they'd been killed on the Somme. It was not to happen again, the British said, and in fact it did not. In 1945, perhaps for the first time in history, the ordinary British people got what they asked for.

Did Orwell get what he asked for?

Orwell was a good Socialist and was delighted to see a Socialist government in power at last.

But his response was to write a terrifying novel in which English Socialism is far worse than either the Nazi or the Russian variety. Why? What went wrong?

I don't know. The English Socialism that came to power in 1945 had nothing of Ingsoc about it. There was power-seeking there, of course, as well as corruption, inefficiency, a love of control for its own sake, a dour pleasure in prolonging ‘austerity'. British radicalism has never been able to rid itself of its Puritan origins, and perhaps it hasn't wished to. A typical figure of the post-War Socialist Government was Sir Stafford Cripps, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was a sour devotee of progress without pleasure, of whom Winston Churchill
once said: ‘There but for the grace of God goes God.' He was treated by the common people as something of a joke. Potato crisps were metathesized in his honour, and men in pubs would ask for a packet of ‘Sir Staffs'. But he was no joke, and British Puritanism has been too obdurate a strain to laugh off. The Puritanism of 1984, which goes to the limit – not even Sir Stafford Cripps could abolish sex – owes a lot to 1948. Along with the austerity went an insolent bureaucracy, as I've said, and it was the more insolent the closer it was to the ordinary citizen, as in the local Food Office, but there was no Big Brother. Among the first readers in America of Orwell's book there were many who assumed that here was a bitter satire on Labour Britain; even a few of the stupider British Tories rubbed their hands gleefully at what Orwell seemed to be doing for the Tory vote. None of these seemed to know, what was available for the knowing, that Orwell was a committed Socialist and was to remain so till his death. The paradox of an English Socialism appalled by English Socialism remains to be resolved, and the resolution is an intricate business.

I think I can resolve it
.

How?

Listen to this extract from
The Road to Wigan Pier.
Orwell was looking from the window of a train into the backyard of a Northern slum:

A young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe. I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face . . . and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. . . . What I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold . . . poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe
.

The same image comes in
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
you remember. Mrs Parsons, in the first part of the book. Her wastepipe's blocked up and Winston Smith unblocks it for her. It's a kind of Sisyphus image. The hopelessness of the working-woman's lot. Orwell saw that the allegiance of a good Socialist was to the woman struggling with the wastepipe, not to the big men of the Party. And yet
how could you help her without putting the Party in power? The Party's in power, but the waste-pipe remains clogged. It's the disparity between the reality of life and the abstraction of Party doctrine – that's what sickened Orwell
.

That's part of it. But put it another way. One of the troubles with political commitment is that no political party can tell the whole truth about man's needs in society. If it could, it wouldn't be a political party. And yet the honest man who wants to work for the improvement of his country has to belong to a party, which means – somewhat hopelessly – accepting what amounts to a merely partial truth. Only the vicious or stupid can accord total loyalty to a party. Orwell was a Socialist because he could see no future in a continuance of traditional
laissez faire
. But it's very difficult to sustain a kind of wobbly liberal idiosyncratic socialism of your own in the face of the
real
Socialists – those who want to push Socialism, with impeccable logic, to the utter limit.

You mean Orwell's Socialism was pragmatic rather than doctrinaire?

Look at it this way. When he worked for the left-wing paper
Tribune
, he had to withstand the rebukes of more orthodox readers who didn't like his writing about literature that seemed to hinder rather than help the ‘cause' – the poems of the Royalist Anglican Tory T. S. Eliot, for instance, or the in-grown verbal experiments of James Joyce. He almost had to apologize for bidding his readers go and look at the first daffodils in the park instead of spending yet another Saturday distributing leftwing pamphlets. He knew what Marxism was about. He'd fought alongside Marxists in Spain, but he wasn't, like the redder British Socialists, prepared to blind himself to what Russia was doing in the name of Marxism. His radicalism was of a nineteenth-century kind, with a strong tinge of something older – the dissenting spirit of Defoe and the humane anger of Swift. Swift he declared to be the writer he admired with least reserve, and that Swift was Dean of St Patrick's in Dublin didn't offend his agnosticism. There's a bad but touching poem Orwell wrote – he sees himself in an earlier incarnation as a country rector, meditating in his garden, watching his walnuts grow.

There was more English than Socialism in his English Socialism
.

Very neat, and there's some truth in it. He loved his country more than his party. He didn't like the tendency in more orthodox Socialists to inhabit a world of pure doctrine and ignore the realities of an inherited national tradition. Orwell prized his English inheritance – the language, the wild flowers, church architecture, Cooper's Oxford marmalade, the
innocent obscenity of seaside picture postcards, Anglican hymns, bitter beer, a good strong cup of tea. His tastes were bourgeois, and they veered towards the working class.

But he couldn't identify himself with the workers. It's horrible that he should seem to blame the workers for his inability to join them. I mean, that total condemnation of the proles in
Nineteen Eighty-Four. . . .

He was sick, remember, and hopeless. He tried to love the workers but couldn't. After all, he was born on the fringe of the ruling class, he went to Eton, he spoke with a patrician accent. When he called on his fellow middle-class intellectuals to take a step downward and embrace the culture of miners and factory workers, he said: ‘You have nothing to lose but your aitches.' But those were just what he could not lose. He had at heart the cause of working-class justice, but he couldn't really accept the workers as real people. They were animals – noble and powerful, like Boxer the horse in
Animal Farm
, but essentially of a different substance from himself. He fought against his inability to love them by desperate acts of dispossession – making himself down and out in Paris and London, spending the season in hell which produced the Wigan Pier book. He pitied the workers, or animals. He also feared them. There was a strong element of nostalgia in him – for the working-class life he couldn't have. Nostalgia has come to mean frustrated home-sickness. This got itself mixed up with another nostalgia.