Orwell's Revenge (13 page)

“Shopkeepers at War,” the second chapter of
The Lion and the Unicorn,
argues that England is certainly going to lose World War II unless it, like Hitler,
embraces a form of socialism. The fields of Norway and Flanders have proved “once and for all . . . that a planned economy is
stronger than a planless one.” Orwell concludes this argument with the following astonishing passage:

However horrible [fascism] may seem to us, it works. . . .
British capitalism does not work. . . . Hitler will at any rate go down in history as the man who made the City of London laugh on the wrong side of its face. . . . [T]he
ghastly job of trying to convince artificially stupefied people that a planned economy might be better than a free-for-all in which the worst man wins—that job will never be
quite so ghastly again.

The only trouble (for Orwell) is that a few years later it's clear that fascism doesn't work after all. Hitler goes down in history as the symbol of collectivist efficiency only in matters of mass murder, whereas the City of London survives pretty much unchanged, laughing as it always did—all the way to the bank. In a 1944 essay Orwell confesses how wrong his predictions were, most notably his “very great error” in believing that England would certainly lose the war unless it too
established a collectivist economy A year later, with the embers on Hitler's funeral pyre scarcely cool, one might have supposed that Orwell's faith in the “efficiency” of collectivism would have been shattered forever.

But it hasn't been. Orwell has not revised his basic views about collectivism, only his timetable. Britain is still “moving
towards a planned economy.” “[T]here will be no return
to laissez-faire capitalism.” Civilization will
not
“revert again towards economic chaos and individualism. Whether we like it or not, the trend is towards centralism and planning and it is more useful to try to humanise the collectivist society that is certainly coming than to pretend . . . that we could
revert to a past phase.” The ordinary people “have become entirely habituated to a planned, regimented sort of life” and actually “prefer it
to what they had before.” History hasn't unfolded as fast as Orwell expected, but it's still unfolding. “Socialism, in the sense of economic collectivism, is conquering the earth at a speed that would hardly have seemed possible sixty years ago,”
he writes in 1948.

And by 1984? By 1984, four huge Ministries will govern all of England.

Blair woke up to the shrill whistle of the telescreen. Groggy with sleep, still sodden in
the atmosphere of a dream, he stumbled out of bed and began his Physical Jerks before he remembered.

He had not bothered to get undressed the night before. They always
came for you at night, and there was no sense in trying to flee. So he had stretched out on the bed, fully dressed, and resolved to wait for them calmly. It was as though England had slid back into the Stone Age, he thought. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries—the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor—had reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but
as the masters of the world. And now they were coming after him.

Quite unexpectedly, he had fallen into a deep sleep, and had dreamed vividly, as though his brain was determined to anesthetize itself against what lay ahead. He had dreamed a vast, luminous dream, in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on
a summer evening after rain. He was floating in space, under the glass dome of the sky He saw his mother gesture, as if to surround him in her embrace. He was with a beautiful naked woman again, the one he had once dreamed of flogging with a truncheon. Now they were sitting together under the spreading
branches of
a flowering chestnut tree, and every touch was of unconditional love. He was floating in an ocean of strange, pink, convoluted coral, as delicate as a sea anemone, dividing and subdividing again, each arm joined to two others,
growing ever finer and more intricate. Everything was flooded with clear, soft light in which one could
see into interminable distances. Everything was connected. He was overwhelmed with a sense of perfect unity. His life had become whole.

And then he had woken. They had apparently decided not to arrest him quite yet. He wondered why, as he flapped his arms up and down in time with the bossy woman on the telescreen. It suddenly struck him that he had no reason to submit to this nonsense any more. He walked resolutely to the door of his apartment, and stepped out.

By pure instinct he turned in the direction of the Ministry. Halfway there he wondered whether he shouldn't just spend whatever time he had left in the spring air, strolling through the proles' market once again. But habit proved too strong—habit and a tiny glimmer of hope that somehow, for some convoluted reason, they had decided to leave him alone. He spent his day at work in a daze, moving mechanically from one task to the next, waiting for the inevitable. By evening they still hadn't arrived.

When he left work he turned away from the bus stop once again. He had intended at first to return to the stallkeeper and seek his help, but then changed his mind. He moved roughly southward—through the wastes of Camden Town, down Tottenham Court Road. It grew dark. He crossed Oxford Street, threaded through Covent Garden, found himself in the Strand, and crossed the river by Waterloo Bridge. With night
the cold had descended.

He passed a cluster of prostitutes, shivering in their skimpy clothes. London was full of these women. Many of them, he knew, could be bought
for a bottle of gin. He walked along aimlessly, inhaling the chilly air of the evening. It had been like this for several days now—warm spring afternoons, followed by near freezing nights. He thrust his hands in his pockets. After a time, he found himself in front of the junk shop he had passed twice before in search of razor blades.

It was then that he heard the girl singing from down the alley. The thin sound filled the air like the song of a bird, and brightened the drab walls of the gray street. It was a strange thing to hear singing, especially by a woman—like smelling scent. Party women never sang. It wasn't exactly forbidden; it was just unthinkable that any member of the Party would ever sing, except in unison, in crowds. This girl sang alone. The sound floated up the alley, the words belied by an incongruous note of defiance:

As I write this letter

Send my love to you

Re-mem-ber that I'll always

Be in love with you.

The girl sang the same words again, and then again, with undiminished conviction each time. Once she inserted an “Oh-oh-oh” at the end of a line.

The song obviously hadn't been composed by the versificators at the Ministry of Truth. None of the machines there would ever have included a line about writing letters; no one
wrote letters any more. By a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit. For the few messages still needed, there were preprinted postcards, bearing either canned sentiments or long lists of phrases, so you could strike out
the ones that were inapplicable. No one remembered anything much either, least of all love.

He saw her as she stepped out of the doorway under the street lamp just a few yards down at the end of the short alley. She was a bold-looking girl of about twenty-seven, with a wildrose face and long thick hair, the color of autumn leaves. Beneath the thin silky raincoat, belted at the waist, her youthful
flanks showed supple and trim. Her freckled face was partly turned. She hadn't seen him.

For a moment Blair's gaze lingered on the shapeliness of her hips.

As I write this letter

Send my love—

She gave him a quick sidelong glance and stopped. Was she another one of them, Blair wondered, another prole, running another stall,
with her merchandise between her legs? He couldn't quite tell, but it didn't matter. In a flash of wild inspiration, he finished the line for her.

“To me?” he said.

She tossed her head and made no reply.

“What song is that?” he asked.

“Dunno,” she said. “Mum used to sing it years ago.” A small smile brushed across her face. She moved up the alley toward him. Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes
to make them brighter. It was not very skillfully done, but Blair's standards in such matters were not high. He had never seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face, and the girl seemed intensely feminine. A wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half-darkness of a basement kitchen and a woman's cavernous, toothless mouth. It was the very same scent that she had used; but at the moment he didn't care. The young woman paused, as if about to say something to him, but didn't. Then she tossed her head again, and turned back into the doorway.

Blair felt a pang of sadness. She had sung the song—perhaps she had been singing it just for him. He wondered how he might have drawn out the conversation. Was she selling her body, like so much smooth chocolate on a stall? It didn't matter, he thought again.
She was a prole, she was pretty, he wanted her, and that thought alone filled him with an unexpected contentment. The Party of course taught that sex was a despicable appetite for men, a frigid duty for women. But a man who was not entirely dead inside could still feel desire and not be ashamed of it.

“Cripes, it ain't 'alf fucking cold out 'ere,” said a short, powerful, jolly man
with a grin as he passed. Blair walked aimlessly on down the street, thoughts of the girl's face and body filling his mind. He would not let his desire for her be dirtied by the Party. Sex was part of the human condition, and coupling was connection. In a world of unfathomable loneliness, connection of any kind was good. Proles like her still understood. A prostitute might sell what should not be sold, but it was the selling that was wrong, not the sex.
Among the proles—even among their prostitutes—men and women tangled and strove, lusted and loved, all fleeing from solitude, all searching for something larger—searching for desire certainly, but mostly searching to sate a hunger that rose from their loins to fill their hearts. It didn't matter if the freckle-faced girl was a prostitute. She was beautiful, and he wanted her, and he wanted her to want him; he wanted to see desire rising in her eyes and melting in her face; he wanted her to unfold her thighs beneath his touch and become a part of him.

Two men were standing in an alley talking loudly but amiably.

“Scrumping's what yer want,” one of them said. “All them rows of turkeys in the winders, like rows of fucking soldiers with no clothes on—don't it make yer fucking mouth water to look at 'em. Bet yer a tanner I 'ave one of 'em afore tonight.”

“I know where I can flog it for a keypad,”
the second replied.

Blair thought again of the song the girl had been singing. It struck him that a song, like an idea, like thought itself, could take on a life of its own after it had been composed. The words might change, the composer might be forgotten, the tune might be used to celebrate different things in different cultures, yet the song continued to live. It went through the ages remaining the same in itself but
getting into very different company.

He had walked a long way, now, five or seven miles perhaps. His feet were swollen from the pavements. He was in a slummy quarter where the narrow, puddled streets plunged into blackness at fifty yards' distance. The few lamps, ringed in a frosty mist, hung like isolated stars illuminating nothing save themselves. He went under some echoing railway arches and up the alley on to Hungerford Bridge. On the miry water, lit by the glare of skysigns, the muck of East London was racing inland. Corks, lemons, barrel-staves, a dead dog, hunks of bread. He walked along the Embankment to Westminster. The wind
made the plane trees rattle. Up Tottenham Court Road and Camden Road it was a dreary drudge. He slowed, dragging his feet a little. There was a penetrating chill in the air.

He thought of turning back, of seeking her out again.
“I love you,” he would say. He would say that first, before anything else. He would explain that he had committed thoughtcrime from which
there could be no reprieve, that he was now already numbered among the dead, that it was only a matter of time, but that in the time he still had he needed her, he needed her desperately, he couldn't stand the thought of living for even a moment without her. But he didn't turn, he kept on walking. He lost track of the time.

Then somehow, without apparent design, Blair was back in the alley where the girl had been. It seemed he had moved in a wide circle. An icy rain had begun to fall, and a stiff wind was blowing. Before him, at the corner of the alley, he recognized the junk shop. Although it was nearly twenty-three hours the shop was still open. With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement in the rain, he stepped through the doorway.

He saw the phreak at once, in a back corner of the room, rummaging through shelves of metal boxes, discarded radios, and dusty electronics. The room was lit by a single flickering oil lamp, which gave off an unclean though friendly smell. By the dim light, Blair could see that most of the room was dominated by ragtag pieces of furniture, china, glass, picture frames. One corner contained the hardware—discarded speakwrites, some ancient computers of no conceivable value, bits and pieces of every description. The phreak was picking through them methodically.

Their eyes met again, but only for an instant. And once again, as had happened before, Blair felt sure that a message had passed, that they had a link of understanding between them, that their two minds had opened and thought had flowed from one into the other. Then the phreak turned back to the shelves. A moment later he seemed to have found what he wanted—a sort of keyboard with twelve or so flatish white buttons. The man picked them up, nodded to the proprietor, and headed for the door. And again as he passed, Blair heard, or thought he heard, him say:
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.