Orwell’s Notes on 1984: Mapping the Inspiration of a Modern Classic

At least three of George Orwell’s novels can be tracked back to the particular image or thought process that inspired their conception. With Animal Farm, it was the sight of a small boy escorting a giant cart horse down a country lane and the thought of what might happen if the animal world rose up against its human oppressors. Keep the Aspidistra Flying looks as if it began life at the moment on St. Andrew’s Day 1934 when Orwell stared out of the window of the Hampstead bookshop in which he worked and found the first fragments of the poem whose composition occupies its opening chapter (“Sharply the menacing wind sweeps o’er / The bending poplars, newly bare”) taking shape in his head.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the other hand, took its impetus from a hugely significant political event—the Tehran Conference of November 28 to December 1, 1943, in which, with the end of the Second World War in sight, the Allied leaders Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill sat down with the aim of carving up the post-war world. “I first thought of it in 1943,” Orwell told his publisher, Fred Warburg, nearly five years later, although a later note to Warburg’s associate, Roger Senhouse, suggests that there was a slight delay between the event itself and the seed of a novel taking root in Orwell’s mind. Here, after complaining that the jacket copy blurb Senhouse has devised makes the novel sound like a thriller mixed up with a love story, Orwell insists that “What it is really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into “Zones of Influence” (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran Conference), and in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism.”

But if the pictures of “the big three,” as the Allied leaders were known, battling for territorial precedence gave Orwell the creative nudge he needed, then there is a suspicion that much of the background to Nineteen Eighty-Four had been taking shape in his mind for several years. One of the most intriguing items in the Orwell Archive at University College London is an exercise book containing notes for two projected novels entitled The Quick and the Dead and The Last Man in Europe. The first set of jottings looks back to the world of Orwell’s childhood—there are references to Charing Cross Station in the last year of the Great War and a dying horse in “the retreat in 1918” and lists of old rhymes, “childhood fallacies,” and folk-sayings—but “The Last Man in Europe” (Nineteen Eighty-Four’s working title until at least the end of 1948) is instantly recognizable. Under the heading To be brought in, for example, Orwell has reminded himself about “Newspeak,” “position of the proles,” “comparison of weights, measures etc,” “Bakerism & ingsoc,” “the party slogans (War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery),” and “The Two Minutes Hate.”

Beneath this runs a long section of notes headed The general lay-out as follows. This includes “The system of organized lying on which society is founded,” “The way in which this is done (falsification of records etc),” “The nightmare feeling caused by the disappearance of objective truth,” “Leader-worship etc,” and “Loneliness of the writer. His feeling of being the last man,” “The brief interlude of the love affair with Y,” and “The arrest & torture.” There is also mention of “the phantasmagorical effect” produced by such questions as “Were we at war with Eastasia in 1974? Were we at war with Eastasia in 1978? Were A, B & C present at the secret conference in 1976?” and “the effect of lies & hatred” produced by such phenomena as “Films. Extract of anti-Jew propaganda. B’casts’ and ‘The Two Minutes Hate. Enemy propaganda & writer’s response to it.” A final section, which lists words under the headings Adjectives,” “Adjectives & nouns,” “Metaphors,” “Metaphorical words & phrases,” “Redundancies,” and “Stale slang & jargon phrases,” looks as if it is a dry run for some of the obfuscations of Newspeak and ends with a file of phrases whose real definition represents a 180-degree turn from the original (“People’s democracy . . . One party dictatorship. Acceptance in principle . . . refusal,” etc.).

When were the notebooks compiled? There is a strong suspicion that some of the material in them dates back to the early part of the war, as an autobiographical note from April 1940 states that Orwell is “projecting a long novel in three parts to be called either ‘The Lion & the Unicorn’ or ‘The Quick and the Dead.'” They are unlikely to have been completed later than January 1944, as Orwell refers to the list of “childhood fallacies” (“That dogs are good judges of character/That snakes sting,” etc.) which he claims in one of his Tribune essays to have “in a notebook.” The final “Newspeak” section is written using a blue-black Biro, a writing implement not available in the UK until after the war: Orwell first ordered one in February 1946. Clearly the first two sections predate this, but by how long? Were they set down as an outline of future schemes as he prepared to leave the BBC in the autumn of 1943? Or during the fortnight’s holiday that we know him to have taken in September? Alternatively, are they simply a fair copy of existing material which Orwell has now decided to get into some kind of coherent order?

Certainly, the notes are neatly written, devoid of crossings out or repetitions. As literary preliminaries go, they look more like parts of an outline than a series of random jottings. None of this is conclusive, but it would seem that by the autumn of 1943, having brooded on the material for some time—perhaps as long as three or four years—Orwell had produced a ground plan of what became Nineteen Eighty-Four and that the Tehran Conference gave his consciousness a decisive kick.

Whatever the dating of Orwell’s notes for “The Last Man in Europe,” and for however long its central themes had been crowding out his imagination, by the spring of 1944, we can see his mind beginning to focus on what he believed to be the defining characteristics of the totalitarian state. In early February, for example, the “As I Please” column that he had begun to contribute to the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune suggests that totalitarianism’s most terrifying quality is not only that it instigates atrocities, but that it seeks to control “the concept of objective truth” and thereby manipulates both past and future. A few weeks later, he produced an Observer review of F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, shortly to become a key text in the canon of the post-war Right.

While Orwell profoundly disagreed with Hayek’s defense of the free market (“he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse . . . than that of the State”), he feared that its central thesis—that collectivism is inherently undemocratic—had a great deal of truth: “By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it.”

Significantly, these concerns soon began to leach into his private correspondence with readers who had responded to his newspaper columns or wanted his views on the probable shape of the post-war world. In May 1944, three weeks before the British and American armies landed on the Normandy coast, he wrote a long letter to an otherwise unidentified man named Noel Willmett predicting that while “Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear,” his overthrow will come at the expense of strengthening “(a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers.” Everywhere in the world, “movement” seems to be in the direction of centralized economies, which may deliver the goods in an economic sense but do so without regard to democratic accountability.

With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie, there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark.

This is a private letter, written in the month before D-Day, nearly a year before the Second World War had come to an end, but already the shadows of Big Brother, the Two Minutes Hate, and the Ministry of Truth are crowding in from all sides.

Then, in the summer of 1944, came another twitch on the conceptual thread. Late in August, Orwell attended a conference organized by the international writers’ association PEN. Here he listened to, and was impressed by, a lecture by the Oxford biologist John R. Baker. At first glance, Baker looks an unlikely focus for Orwell’s admiration. He was a conservatively minded social scientist, active in the Society for Freedom in Science, and later the author of a highly reactionary book on race, who believed that his discipline was a useful weapon in the fight against protest movements of the egalitarian left. Nevertheless, Orwell mentions him favorably in a review of a symposium to which Baker had contributed in October 1945, read his book Science and the Planned State sometime in the following spring, and seems to have wanted to involve him in a scheme to establish a pressure group bent on defending individual freedom. A letter to Arthur Koestler survives from April 1946 in which Orwell suggests that Baker might be “useful” in coming up with information about scientists who are “not totalitarian minded.”

It is not known whether Orwell made contact with Baker at the PEN conference, but he certainly attended his lecture. This developed one of Science and the Planned State’s key arguments, which is that scientific research cannot flourish under the rule of a bureaucracy, if only because the fruits of that research may undermine the bureaucracy’s ideological position. State interference, Baker insisted, was a challenge to scientific freedom (“The scientist’s most fundamental liberty is threatened to-day by the would-be central planners of the subject”). His particular bugbear was the Soviet scientist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, who in his capacity as director of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Science, rejected the findings of Western genetics and demanded that Soviet researchers adopt his beliefs. Anti-Mendel—there was no such thing as a “gene,” Lysenko maintained—and rejecting Darwin’s theories of natural selection, Lysenko’s paralyzing influence on Russian science lasted for something over twenty years. Warmly approved of by Stalin and the Soviet hierarchy, which in 1948 declared his views “the only correct theory,” his opponents denounced in the press as “bourgeois” and “fascists,” he was indirectly responsible for the execution of dozens of Soviet scientists and imprisonment of several thousand more. “Lysenkoism” remained a force in Eastern European scientific circles until at least the end of the 1950s. Lysenko’s rise to power offered “a vivid illustration of the degradation of science under a totalitarian regime,” Baker concluded.

Orwell continued to be fascinated by the Lysenko case and its implications for academic study. A letter from March 1947 to the botanist Cyril Darlington, known since his days as a BBC talks producer, notes that “I first heard about it in the speech given by John Baker at the PEN Conference in 1944 . . . I formed the opinion then that the story as told by Baker was true and am very glad to get this confirmation.” He was no scientist, Orwell admitted, but the Soviet Union’s persecution of scientists and its falsification of results seemed to follow naturally from its attacks on writers and historians. His interest in the duplicities of Soviet science kept up almost until the month of his death, and his last literary notebook contains a press cutting from December 1949 which quoted Lysenko as maintaining that “Wheat can become Rye.” That Orwell found himself sitting in Baker’s audience in August 1944 was clearly a pivotal moment to him. Among other things, it may explain a hitherto mysterious reference in the outline of the “The Last Man in Europe” to “the swindle of Bakerism and Ingsoc.” “Ingsoc” is a truncation of “English Socialism,” Oceania’s ideological creed, but “Bakerism” looks as if it tracks back to John Baker. Here, in the reality-denying of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Science, another fragment of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s mosaic fits neatly into place.

It was now the early autumn of 1944. Orwell had a conceptual spark, a theme, and a mounting pile of evidence that could be used to illustrate it. What stayed his hand? One of the most obvious questions to ask about Nineteen Eighty-Four’s gestation is: what took him so long? The pre-war Orwell had been known for his fluency: most of the books he wrote in the period 1932–9 had occupied him for less than a year. A Clergyman’s Daughter, written at his parents’ house in Southwold while he was convalescing from a bout of pneumonia, had taken a little over six months. Animal Farm—only 120 pages in length, admittedly, but tricky from the point of view of plot and alignment with the historical events it pastiched—was finished in half that time. Compared to these high-speed dashes to the finishing tape, Nineteen Eighty-Four was a marathon: a few pages written by the end of 1945; a first draft not completed until November 1947; a second draft not wrapped up until December 1948; publication not secured until June 1949; a whole five-and-a-half years gone by since the moment Orwell had read the press reports of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin caballing at Tehran. What went wrong?

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From On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography by D.J. Taylor. Used with the permission of Abrams Press. Copyright © 2019 by D.J. Taylor.