1985 Read Online Free PDF Page A

the World
, fish and chips, stopped-up drains. He got the feel of 1948 all right. Physical grittiness. Weariness and privation. Those weren’t tragic. All the tragedy then was reserved for the Nazi deathcamps. And the Russian ones too, but you weren’t supposed to think of those. Ergo, our own troubles were comic.
    You mean: if a thing isn’t tragic it has to be comic
?
    In art, if not in real life. Let me tell you more about 1949, when I was reading Orwell’s book about 1948. The war had been over four years, and we missed the dangers – buzz-bombs, for instance. You can put up with privations when you have the luxury of danger. But now we had worse privations than during the war, and they seemed to get worse every week. The meat ration was down to a couple of slices of fatty corned beef. One egg a month, and the egg was usually bad. I seem to remember you could get cabbages easily enough. Boiled cabbage was a redolent staple of the British diet. You couldn’t get cigarettes. Razor blades had disappeared from the market. I remember a short story that began, ‘It was the fifty-fourth day of the new razor blade’ – there’s comedy for you. You saw the effects of German bombing everywhere, with London pride and loosestrife growing brilliantly in the craters. It’s all in Orwell.
    What you seem to be saying is that
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is no more than a comic transcription of the London of the end of the Second World War
.
    Well, yes. Big Brother, for instance. We all knew about Big Brother. The advertisements of the Bennett Correspondence College were a feature of the pre-war press. You had a picture of Bennett
père
, a nice old man, shrewd but benevolent, saying, ‘Let me be your father.’ Then Bennett
fils
came along, taking over the business, a very brutal-looking individual, saying: ‘ LET ME BE YOUR BIG BROTHER .’ Then you get this business of the Hate Week. The hero of the book, Winston Smith, can’t take the lift to his flat because the electricity’s been cut off – we were all used to that. But the 1984 juice has been cut as part of an economy drive in preparation for Hate Week – typical government
non sequitur
.Now we knew all about organized hate. When I was in the army I was sent on a course at a Hate School. It was run by a suspiciously young lieutenant-colonel – boy friend of which influential sadist, eh? We were taught Hatred of the Enemy. ‘Come on, you chaps, hate, for God’s sake. Look at those pictures of Hun atrocities. Surely you want to slit the throats of the bastards. Spit on the swine, put the boot in.’ A lot of damned nonsense.
    And I suppose the contradiction of that section of the book is meant to be comic too?
    Contradiction?
    The electricity has been cut off, but the telescreen is braying statistics to an empty apartment. It’s hard to accept the notion of two distinct power supplies
.
    I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t think anybody thinks of it. But there you are – a necessary suspension of disbelief, appropriate to a kind of comic fairy tale. And the television screen that looks at you – Orwell had lifted that from Chaplin’s
Modern Times
. But it’s prophetic, too. We’re in the supermarket age already, with a notice saying, ‘Smile – you’re on TV!’
    Did England have television in those days?
    Are you mad? We’d had television back in the 1930s. The Baird system, what James Joyce called the ‘bairdbombardmentboard’ or something. Logie Baird, his name dimly echoing in Yogi Bear. I saw the very first BBC television play – Pirandello,
The Man with a Flower in His Mouth
. You got vision from your Baird screen and sound from your radio. Aldous Huxley transferred that system to his
Brave New World
– 1932, as I remember. Mind you, it’s never been necessary actually to have television in order to appreciate its