Orwell (28 page)

Crick does not mention, for example, that the opening stanzas of Gordon Comstock's poem in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
convey the same sense of bleak discomfort as the first page of the novel (the new film of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
reminds us that conditions in postwar London resembled those of the Depression); that Leopold Bloom refers to God as “Big Brother” in
Ulysses
(508); that Winston's prophecy of doom, “We are the dead,” repeated by both Julia and the telescreen when they are arrested, is an ironic echo of an accusatory line, spoken by a corpse, in John Macrae's popular Canadian poem of the Great War, “In Flanders Fields”; and that “Two and two are five” was used by Mikhail Bakunin in “Reaction in Germany,” published in the
Deutsche Jahrbücher
in October 1842.

Crick, who frequently cites his biography of Orwell in the introduction, presents his dubious dating of “Such, Such Were the Joys” as if it were an established fact, and has many serious mistakes and misreadings. Orwell did not take the example of “pacification” (for retaliatory bombing of villages) “from the British on the North-West frontier of India,” but from the savage wars in southeast Asia in the late 1940s. The “Nancy poets” in
The Road to Wigan Pier
, a specific reference to the Auden circle, are certainly homosexual. Crick's belief that “Big Brother Is Watching You” is a comfort as well as a threat cosily ignores the fearful menace of that slogan. His statement that hope lies in the proles ignores the important qualification “if there was hope, it must lie in the proles,” for there is no hope in the ignorant masses who have no political awareness or desire to revolt against oppression.

Crick first says that Winston Smith “is a more educated [George] Bowling”—though the two characters are entirely different—and later contradicts himself by stating that Bowling is a “decent but politically useless man” while Smith is actually very brave and “holds out for truth under torture astonishingly long.” Finally, Crick repeats that “O'Brien turns out to be insane, he thinks he can levitate and reach the stars.” But O'Brien, who is quite sane, represents Orwell's belief that a totalitarian system can impose ideology on scientific truth. O'Brien, who maintains that “reality is inside the skull,” can force Winston to believe that O'Brien could levitate or, if he wished, even reach the stars.

The weakest aspect of Crick's edition, however, is the astonishing number of mistakes in names, places, books and quotations. There are typographical errors on pages 3, 6, 10n, and 98, and crooked lines on page 21. The names William Jovanovich, Anthony West, H. G. Wells, Veronica Wedgwood, Alfred Kazin, Diana Trilling, Alexander von Humboldt, F. A. Hayek and Ellen Leyburn are misspelled. My first name is given three variants and five references to my work are omitted from the index. Francis A. Hendon appears variously as Hendron and Henson. Crick also misspells Teheran (in a direct quotation from Orwell) and Balnibarbi (from
Gulliver's Travels).
The titles of
The Beggar's Opera
, A
Clockwork Orange
, and A. J. P. Taylor's
English History, 1914–1945
as well as the place of publication of Raymond Williams'
George Orwell:
A
Collection of Critical Essays
are all incorrect. The date of Wells'
The Sleeper Awakes
is listed in one place as 1898 and in another as 1900, though
When the Sleeper Wakes
was actually published in 1899. Crick also misquotes the text of the novel: “The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the time”—instead of “all the same.” He concludes his introduction by characteristically garbling
Tristram Shandy:
“He can make two and to five, replied the Papish doctors.” Crick,
who needs an army of copy-editors, commits more than twenty blunders when left to his own devices by the publisher. In this “scholarly” edition of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, Clarendon Press has abandoned its high standards and produced perhaps the worst book in its long history.

 

After Crick's slipshod effort, it is a pleasure to study Davison's masterful scholarly work. The six-pound, 10-by-14-inch book—carefully, faithfully, lovingly produced—is excellent value at £25. The typed and handwritten manuscript, reproduced to show the blue ink, is transcribed in both roman and italic type on a scale that allows a line-for-line reference to the facsimile. The transcription and the textual notes are scrupulously accurate, though Denis Donoghue (in the
London Review of Books
, December 20, 1984, p.7) has noted five minor errors and two typos. The one flaw I have found is that Davison first quotes Orwell's letter of October 22, 1948, to Fredric Warburg—“I first thought of it in 1943”—and then concludes, without justification, that the novel was “conceived at some time between mid-1940 and the end of 1943.”

The manuscript of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
was sold at auction by Christie's to Scribner's rare books department for $140 in June 1952. Scribner's sold it to a collector in Kansas City for $275 in September of that year, and bought it back from him for $2,000 in May 1969. The following month, they sold it for $5,000 to Daniel Siegel, the present owner and joint publisher of the facsimile.

The extant manuscript, which represents 44 percent of the text of the novel, was composed in four stages. Most of the facsimile comes from the last, handwritten stage, “possibly because Orwell found it too painful to sit at a table and type in 1948.” Orwell was terminally ill when he wrote the novel and had great difficulty completing it. He usually wrote clear drafts of his work, but more than half the typescript of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
was crossed out and completely rewritten. The successive drafts, as Davison points out, reveal a consistency of conception and a sense of driving urgency to finish what he knew would be his final work. Like the facsimile of
Sons and Lovers
, edited by Mark Schorer, this manuscript reveals the author's “actual working methods” and provides the basis for a study of the genesis of the novel.

The manuscript shows that the title of the novel was changed from
1980
to
1982
to
1984;
and that three significant passages were omitted from the published version. In the first section of the novel, after the description of the horrific war film, Orwell wrote: “Typical prole reaction–not to care about the thing itself, only about its being shown in front of children. Cf. last year
when they were showing Romeo and Juliet and suddenly it was flashed on the screen that a good nigger lynching was happening somewhere in America and would be televised. One of the niggers was a pregnant woman and when they hoisted her up she gave birth to the baby. The crowd played football with it. Again an old prole woman started making a fuss because she said that till then her little granddaughter aged nine hadn't known where babies came from.” Orwell probably realized that this passage was overwritten, far-fetched and slightly comical, that it emphasized the gratuitous cruelty rather than the perverse morality of the proles. (The first use of “proletarian” in English was in Samuel Butler's
Hudibras
, 1663.) The stereotyped lynching recalls the black humor of the news report in the Cyclops section of
Ulysses:
“Black Beast Burned in Omaha, Ga.” (328), just as the physiological effect of hanging recalls the execution of Joe Brady: “when they cut him down after the drop [his tool] was standing up in their faces like a poker” (304).

In the second deleted passage Winston is intimidated by the luxury of O'Brien's Inner Party flat. The third passage, which describes Winston and Julia's embrace after visiting O'Brien, prefigures their tragic end and could well have been retained: “She kissed his cheek almost violently a number of times, then slipped away into the shadow of the wall and promptly disappeared…. He had a curious feeling that … the embrace she had given him was intended as some kind of good-bye.”

Conrad, a perceptive political novelist whom Orwell planned to write an essay about at the end of his life, foreshadowed the themes of both
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
in a moving passage in
Under Western Eyes:
“The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent, may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.”

 

 

Peter Davison followed his facsimile of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
with a titanic accomplishment: the magisterial 8,500-page, 20-volume edition—with definitive texts and useful notes—of the
Complete Works
(1998). I was probably the only one, of the very few reviewers, who read every word. The completeness of the edition allows us to see Orwell in a new way and trace his artistic evolution from 1929 to 1949—an astonishing achievement in only twenty years. Gillian Fenwick's clear, thorough and accurate bibliography (1998) provides an excellent complement to Davison's edition. Both works make a tremendous advance in Orwell scholarship.

Peter Davison's magisterial edition of Orwell's
Complete Works
includes everything listed in Fenwick's
Bibliography
and a great deal of fascinating complementary material. It has a handsome format and binding, attractive paper and type, and the rough lettering on the dust wrappers and endpapers looks like crudely stenciled words on a prison wall. The first nine volumes were published in 1986–87; the last eleven—with Orwell's essays, reviews and letters—appeared in 1998 and provide an intellectual context for the major works. The substantial indexes in the final volume total 220 pages. The text is usually definitive; the notes concise and helpful; and the authoritative editing will provide a distinguished standard for the
Works
of all other modern writers.

Orwell's letters from hospitals in 1948–49 to his sister, looking after his house and child on the island of Jura, and to his future wife, involved in London literary life, have not survived. A few other letters have been omitted: an extraordinary love letter to Celia Paget, 1946, which she refused to make public; another letter to Malcolm Muggeridge, December 4, 1948,
published in Ian Hunter's biography of the Blessed Mugg; and five letters, 1945–49, to “David,” John Stuart Groves and John Courtenay Trewin at the University of Texas.

This scholarly work, like the
Bibliography
, has some flaws. Davison does not give the death dates of many people cited in the notes—from Godfrey Harvey (born 1889) and Rashid Ali (born 1892) to Lawrence Durrell (died 1990), Dorothy Lamour (died 1996), James Laughlin and A. L. Rowse (both died 1997) and Halldór Laxness (died 1998). He should have noted the publishers of the books that Orwell reviewed and indicated which pieces were previously included in the four-volume, 2,000-page edition of Orwell's
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
(1968). Many important figures in Orwell's life—Bob Edwards, Geoffrey Gorer, Sally McEwan, Leonard Moore, Gwen O'shaughnessy, Richard Rees and Reginald Reynolds—need more substantial biographical notes.

Davison credits the work of many scholars, but does not mention, in connection with the material he reprints, that I was the first to publish, in articles and books: the India Office records of Orwell's career in Burma (1972); Georges Kopp's report, in the British Library, of Orwell's bullet wound in Spain; the English translation of Orwell's introduction to the French edition of
Down and Out in Paris and London
; and Humbert Possenti's letter protesting Orwell's libel of French kitchens (all 1975). I also wrote the only essay on “Orwell as Film Critic” (1979).

The elaborate textual apparatus for the first nine volumes are a delight. As Cecil Lang wrote in his edition of Matthew Arnold's
Letters
, “no detail is too niggling, no nuance too nice, no mite of pointing or mote of orthography too puny for the dainty appetence of what Carlyle called the ‘Able Editor.'” But the minute textual alterations do not fundamentally change our understanding of Orwell's works. And in a few places the text is badly garbled. In
The Clergyman's Daughter
(3. 228), for example, Davison prints: “Nonconformist ind. th the best will” instead of “Nonconformist mind. With the best will.” He moves chapter 5 of
Homage to Catalonia
to the end of the book, but fails to see that without it the political discussion that follows in chapter 8 now makes no sense. It would have been more useful to have explanatory notes on the foreign words, quotations, allusions and obscure references in the first nine volumes as well as introductions that give the essential background and provide critical evaluations of his work.

The completeness of the edition enables us to see Orwell in a new way. His writing at Eton, compared to more sophisticated contemporaries like Harold Acton and Brian Howard, was conventional and rather dull. But we can now
trace his artistic evolution from early sketches on tramps and beggars (first published in French in 1929) to “The Spike” (1931), his first distinctively “Orwellian” work, to the final version in
Down and Out
(1933); from a letter about sleeping outdoors in Trafalgar Square (August 1931) to a fuller account of this experience in his diary (October 1931) to the fictionalized version in
A Clergyman's Daughter
(1935).

Orwell described the atmosphere of the BBC, where he worked during 1941–43, as “something half way between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum” and concluded that “all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless.” The three volumes on these three wasted years are filled with boring bureaucratic detail. Most of the hundreds of books Orwell reviewed were mediocre, so his brief notices (as opposed to the major essays on writers he loved—or hated) were competent but uninspiring. There are many descriptions of Orwell's typing till 3 a.m., but none of him quietly reading, and it's clear that he didn't have time to read many of the books he wrote about.