1985 Read Online Free PDF Page B

of geniality into regimentation. The post-war proletariat accepted the Holiday Camps as readily as they accepted American Army units in English villages, endless shopping lines, the insolence of petty bureaucrats.
    And that proves what?
    I refuse to draw a moral. The moral that Orwell draws from what he saw of the British working man is terrible and excessive. I insist on looking for comedy.
    And for an identification of 1984 with 1948?
    Yes, which is part of the comedy, comedy a bit grim at times, positively black. And a touch of pathos. One wants to weep over Winston Smith, so recognizable as an Englishman of the forties bred out of the working class – ‘a smallish, frail figure . . . his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended’. Inured to cold weather and privation, undersized through a tradition of poverty and bad feeding. He looks out on London ‘with a sort of vague distaste. . . . Were there always those vistas of rotting nineteenthcentury houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?’ The answer is – not always. This is the London of war-time or just after. It’s certainly not a London of prophetic vision.
    It is, surely. How about the Ministry of Love, of Truth and so on?
    Well, the Ministry of Truth may certainly be accepted as the Broadcasting House where Orwell worked during the war. Headquarters of the BBC. The other ministries merely have to look like this prototype. In the Ministry of Love there’s that terrible room where the worst thing in the world happens – Room 101. Room 101, in the basement of Broadcasting House, was where Orwell used to broadcast propaganda toIndia. Not far from Broadcasting House was, and still is, a pub called the George, popular with BBC employees. Sir Thomas Beecham christened it the Gluepot, because his musicians got stuck in it. The name itself has stuck. Now, in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
you have this place with a bad aura, the Chestnut Tree Café, where Winston Smith ends up with his cloveflavoured gin, waiting for the bullet. They’re one and the same place, though the Chestnut Tree Café has a touch of the Mandrake Club about it, a place where you drank gin of mysterious provenance and played chess. Strangely, the bad aura of the George began after Orwell’s death. It was the pub where you had a drink with Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice or Roy Campbell and, on your next visit, learned they were dead. Notice what the song is that Winston hears coming out of the telescreen as he drinks his gin and puzzles over a chess problem:
    Underneath the spreading chestnut tree,
I sold you and you sold me. . . .
    We always associated that – not with those unpleasant words, of course – with King George VI in his scoutmaster capacity. The song was even turned into a dance, like the Lambeth Walk, and was terribly and bucolically innocent. Orwell really poisons the past when he puts in the sneering yellow note. Not funny. Not comic at all.
    But, otherwise, you’d say that the book was an exaggerated picture of a bad time, no more?
    Oh, much more, but I have to establish that Orwell wasn’t really forecasting the future. Novels are made out of sense data, not ideas, and it’s the sensuous impact of this novel that counts to me. I mean the gin – giving off ‘a sickly oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit’ (how could Winston know that? That’s the author himself, late of the Burma police, getting in the way.) The shortage of cigarettes, and the only cigarettes on the ration are called Victory, the very brand that was issued to us overseas British troops during the war – sporadically. The cheating of the senses with shoddy food, drink and tobacco, the rough clothes, coarse soap, blunt razor blades, the feeling of being