AT THE start of 1950, George Orwell's reputation was rising faster than any English-language writer of his generation. The novel 1984had been published six months earlier, to huge critical acclaim and commercial success. He was 46, famous, becoming wealthy, and full of ideas for future work. There was only one problem. He was also dying.
His death came 60 years ago today and, in a sense, it was 1984that killed him. He was not destined for old age anyway. When his long-suspected tuberculosis was finally diagnosed in late 1947, he thought the disease "bound to claim me sooner or later". But he had already completed the first draft of 1984by then, and was now struggling manfully to rewrite it.
When he suffered a relapse in the autumn of 1948, he could at least have arrested his condition with proper treatment.
Instead, as he wrote to a friend, he devoted himself to “that wretched book, which, thanks to illness, I had been messing about with for 18 months and which the publishers were harrying me for”.
He wrote it in his farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura: a place of escape from the pressures of London, but with a climate that could hardly have been less suitable for a TB patient. Nor did his work end with the manuscript, handwritten and barely legible. Unable to find a typist to produce a clean copy, he had to do the “grisly job” himself: 4,000 words a day, every day for three weeks.
He was in a lot of pain, feverish, and working mostly from bed. And the dire conditions in which the book was produced – even the medication he was taking – probably helped to make it the extraordinarily vivid nightmare it is.
But despite his epic struggle to finish it, Orwell had no high regard for the end product. “It’s a ghastly mess now,” he complained; “a good idea ruined.”
The degree to which he drove himself in his last years led some people to believe Orwell had a death wish. His biographer, Michael Shelden, argued otherwise. “It would be better to say his life wish was too extreme,” Shelden wrote.
Orwell was brimming with thoughts and plans, and risked destruction only because “he could not stop himself from pursuing goals once he had set them”. His puritan zeal for work bordered on psychosis. Maybe it was just that; because, despite a back catalogue that writers twice his age would have been proud of, Orwell admitted late in life: “There has literally not been one day in which I did not feel I was idling.”
He had a particular sense of mission with 1984, which arose from his belief that totalitarian leaders such as Hitler and Stalin were motivated less by any ideology than by pure lust for power.
This new creed was expressed in the novel by Big Brother’s agent O’Brien, whose job was to cure “thought criminals” (and who may have been partly inspired by another BB, the Tipperary-born Brendan Bracken, who became a close ally of Churchill and director of the war-time Ministry of Information, with which Orwell had run-ins while working for the BBC).
THE MISSIONARY aspect of Orwell’s personality also inspired one of the non-literary projects of his final years: the controversial notebook in which he listed people in British public life he thought were “crypto-communists”. Its 100-plus names included George Bernard Shaw and Seán O’Casey. And although he gradually whittled the list down as more information became known, he eventually sent a truncated version to the British government.
In fairness to Orwell, his McCarthyism was typically fair-minded. He wanted to know where various prominent people stood on the Stalinist regime, and to force those who were silent or evasive on the issue into the open. Even outright apologists might have excuses, he conceded in an article: “Probably some of them are actuated by nothing other than stupidity.”
In fact, he excused O’Casey on just such grounds. Among the comments attached after names in the notebook, he wrote of the playwright: “very stupid” (not that O’Casey was the only one to qualify for this description).
It’s unclear whether any of those named ever suffered much in the way of consequences, anyway. Politically, Orwell was still considered something of a maverick then, and his views would not have carried anything like the weight they acquired in the years since, during which his reputation for clear writing, plain speaking, and love of his country has elevated him to secular sainthood in Britain.
The circumstances in which he produced 1984only added to his legend. And although its dystopian vision did not come to pass – it was more a warning than a prediction after all – the book was still hugely influential.
Many of its phrases – "thought police", "double-think", "newspeak", and so on – have passed permanently into English; as has "Orwellian" itself. You could hardly hold a debate now about civil liberties without using them. And apart from anything else, 1984has also been an invaluable source of ideas for 21st century TV shows, from Room 101to Big Brother: although surely not even his critics would blame Orwell for those.
fmcnally@irishtimes.com