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28.
Isaac Deutscher,
The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 1929–1940
(New York, 1963), p. 360.

29.
Quoted in Tucker and Cohen,
The Great Purge Trial
, p. 508.

30.
B.T. Oxley,
George Orwell
(London, 1967), p. 81, mentions this striking similarity as well as the parallel to the Kronstadt revolt.

31.
Tucker and Cohen,
The Great Purge Trial
, pp. xxvii and note.

32.
Deutscher,
Stalin
, p. 434.

33.
Ibid., pp. 519–520. Atkins,
George Orwell
, p. 230, mentions this similarity.

34.
Isaac Deutscher,
“1984
—The Mysticism of Cruelty,”
Russia in Transition
(New York, 1960), p. 263n.

35.
See Karl Marx,
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
(Moscow, 1959), p. 73: the worker “in his human functions no longer feels himself to be anything but animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”

36.
Tom Hopkinson,
George Orwell
(London, 1953), p. 29.

37.
Laurence Brander,
George Orwell
(London, 1954), p. 171.

38.
See
Animal Farm
, p. 72: “In the old days there had often been scenes of bloodshed equally terrible, but it seemed to all of them that it was far worse now that it was happening among themselves.”

39.
Conrad,
Nostromo
, pp. 406, 414. Orwell was working on a study of Conrad's political novels when he died.

For a similar idea, see
Homage to Catalonia
, p. 180: “every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.”

 

13.
T
HE
E
VOLUTION OF
N
INETEEN
E
IGHTY-
F
OUR

1.
See Irving Howe, “Orwell: History as Nightmare,”
Politics and the Novel
(New York, 1957), pp. 235–251; Langdon Elsbree, “The Structured Nightmare of
1984,” Twentieth Century Literature
5 (1959), 135–151; Toshiko Shibata, “The Road to Nightmare: An Essay on George Orwell,”
Studies in English Language and Literature
(Kyushu University, Fukuoka) 11 (1962), 41–53. Others who make the “nightmare vision” comparison are: Wyndham Lewis, “Orwell, or Two and Two Make Four,”
The Writer and the Absolute
(London, 1952), p. 154; Deutscher,
“1984
—the Mysticism of Cruelty,” p. 252; Philip Rieff, “George Orwell and the Post-Liberal Imagination,”
Kenyon Review
16 (1954), 54; Max Lerner, “Introduction” to Jack London,
The Iron Heel
(New York, 1957), p. vii; Samuel Yorks, “George Orwell: Seer Over His Shoulder,”
Bucknell Review
9 (1960), 33; Frederick Karl, “George Orwell: The White Man's Burden,” A
Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel
(New York, 1962), p. 164; Thomas,
Orwell
, p. 78; and Woodcock,
Crystal Spirit
, pp. 67, 218.

2.
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell
, 4:329–330 502.

3.
Howe, “History as Nightmare,” p. 250.

4.
A historical event, the 1943 Teheran Conference, gave Orwell the idea of three totalitarian super-states. He writes that what
Nineteen Eighty-Four
“really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into ‘Zones of influence'” (4:460). See Deutscher,
Stalin
, p. 514: “in the months that followed the Teheran Conference, the plans for the division of Europe into Zones were becoming more and more explicit…. Politicians and journalists in the allied countries had discussed a condominium of the three great allied powers, each of whom was to wield paramount influence within its own orbit.”

5.
Orwell is indebted to his earlier description of a hanging in Burma for the details used in his last work: “‘I have known cases where the doctor was obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner's legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable.' ‘Wriggling about, eh? That's bad'” (1:47).

“‘It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently. ‘I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking'”
(Nineteen Eighty-Four
, p. 50).

6.
Swift,
Gulliver's Travels
, p. 146.

7.
Orwell, “Review of
Home Guard For Victory!
by Hugh Slater,”
Horizon
3 (March 1941), 219.

8.
Czeslaw Milosz,
The Captive Mind
, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York, 1953), p. 42.

9.
Orwell's concept of Thoughtcrime is as old as Matthew 5.28: “Whoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

10.
Trotsky,
The Revolution Betrayed
, pp. 100, 162.

11.
Deutscher,
Stalin
, p. 373.

12.
Orwell,
Down and Out in Paris and London
, p. 87.

13.
Orwell,
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, p. 95.

14.
Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
, pp. 189, 149.

15.
Orwell,
Coming Up For Air
, p. 149.

16.
Orwell quoted this sentence in hisessay on
Gulliver's Travels
(4:208).

17.
London,
The Iron Heel
, p. 150.

18.
Orwell,
Coming Up For Air
, p. 148.

19.
Orwell, “General de Gaulle,”
Manchester Evening News
, May 5, 1944, p. 2.

20.
Swift,
Gulliver's Travels
, p. 68.

21.
Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
, p. 132.

22.
Orwell,
Coming Up For Air
, p. 218.

23.
Orwell,
Animal Farm
, pp. 9, 66.

24.
Wain, “The Last of George Orwell,” p. 72.

25.
Orwell,
Down and Out in Paris and London
, p. 5.

26.
Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
, p. 45.

27.
Dostoyevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov
, pp. 308–309.

28.
Dostoyevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov
, pp. 314, 318. See
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, p. 265.

29.
Bruno Bettelheim,
The Informed Heart
(Glencoe, Illinois, 1960), pp. 109, 242.

30.
The Letters of Anton Chekhov
, trans. and ed. Constance Garnett (London, 1920), p. 120.

31.
Brombert,
The Intellectual Hero
, p. 137.

32.
Harold Rosenberg,
The Tradition of the New
(New York, 1965), p. 270.

 

14.
N
INETEEN
E
IGHTY-
F
OUR:
A
N
OVEL OF THE 1930S

1.
Quoted in Jeffrey Meyers,
The Enemy: A Life of Wyndham Lewis
(London, 1980), p. 286.

2.
Irving Howe,
Celebrations and Attacks
(London, 1979), pp. 208–209.

3.
From 1948 to 1984 wars have been fought in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya, Indonesia, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus,
Yemen, Iran, Iraq, the Congo, Kenya, Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Chad, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador and the Falkland Islands.

4.
I have examined a microfilm copy of the typescript of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
in the Orwell Archive at University College, London University.

5.
The standard works on this period are Samuel Hynes,
The Auden Generation
(London, 1976) and Bernard Bergonzi,
Reading the Thirties
(London, 1978).

6.
Orwell,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, p. 35.

7.
Letter from George Seldes to Jeffrey Meyers, April 2, 1983.

8.
Ernest Hemingway,
Death in the Afternoon
(New York, 1932), p. 191.

9.
Ernest Hemingway, A
Farewell to Arms
(1929; New York, 1969), pp. 184–185.

10.
John Macrae, “In Flanders Fields,”
The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse
(Toronto, 1960), p. 110.

11.
Wyndham Lewis, “Ernest Hemingway: ‘The Dumb Ox,'”
Men Without Art
(London, 1934), p. 29.

12.
W. H. Auden, “Gresham's School, Holt,”
The Old School
, ed. Graham Greene (London, 1934), p. 14.

13.
Anthony West, “George Orwell,”
Principles and Persuasions
(London 1958), pp. 156, 158.

14.
Malcolm Muggeridge, “Langham Diary,”
Listener
, October 6, 1983, p. 18.

15.
Malcolm Muggeridge, “A Knight of the Woeful Countenance,”
The World of George Orwell
, ed. Miriam Gross (London, 1971), p. 172.

16.
Bergonzi,
Reading the Thirties
, p. 52.

17.
Julian Symons,
The Thirties:
A
Dream Revolved
(London, 1960), p. 142.

SOURCES AND JEFFREY MEYERS: OTHER WORKS ON ORWELL

Sources

“Orwell's Painful Childhood,”
Ariel
, 3 (January 1972), 54–61.

“Orwell's Burma,”
Condé Nast Traveler
, November 2001, pp. 177–188.

“The Ethics of Responsibility: Orwell's
Burmese Days,” University Review
, 35 (December 1968), 83–87.

“George Orwell, the Honorary Proletarian,”
Philological Quarterly
, 48 (October 1969), 526–549.

“Orwell and the Experience of France,”
The World and I
, 18 (November 2003), 274–291.

“‘An Affirming Flame': Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia,” Arizona Quarterly
, 27 (Spring 1971), 5–22.

“Repeating the Old Lies,”
New Criterion
, 17 (April 1999), 77–80.

“Orwell's Apocalypse:
Coming Up For Air,” Modern Fiction Studies
, 21 (Spring 1975), 69–80.

“Orwell as Film Critic,”
Sight and Sound
, 48 (Autumn 1979), 255–256.

“A Reluctant Propagandist,”
National Review
, 37 (November 29, 1985), 56–57.

“Righteous Lies,”
National Review
, 39 (March 13, 1987), 52.


The Wind in the Willows
: A New Source for
Animal Farm
,”
Salmagundi
, 162–163, (Spring–Summer 2009), 200–208.

“Orwell's Bestiary: The Political Allegory of
Animal Farm
,”
Studies in the 20th Century
, 8 (Fall 1971), 65–84.

“The Evolution of
Nineteen Eighty–Four,” English Miscellany
, 23 (1972), 247–261.


Nineteen Eighty-Four:
A Novel of the 1930s.”
George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Ed. John Broderick. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985.Pp. 79–89.

“Miseries and Splendors of Scholarship,”
University of Toronto Quarterly
, 55 (Fall 1985), 117–121.

“The Complete Works of George Orwell,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
, 95 (March 2001), 121–124.

“George Orwell: A Voice That Naked Goes,”
London Magazine
, 40 (Feb-ruary–March 2001), 30–40.

“George Orwell and the Art of Writing,”
Kenyon Review
, 27 (Fall 2005), 92–114.

“Orwell's Satiric Humor,”
Common Review
, 5 (Summer 2006), 34–41.

“The Well Known Orwell,”
Modern Fiction Studies
, 19 (Summer 1973), 250–254.

“Wintry Conscience,”
Virginia Quarterly Review
, 58 (Spring 1982), 353–359.

“Hunting the Essential Orwell,”
Boston Globe
, October 27, 1991, p. A–16.

“A Life of Loss and Longing,”
Times Higher Education Supplement
, June 20, 2003, p. 25.

“Writing Orwell's Biography: The Mystery of the Real,”
Partisan Review
, 68 (Winter 2001), 11–20, 51–52, 44.

Jeffrey Meyers: Other Works on Orwell
Books

A
Reader's Guide to George Orwell.
London: Thames & Hudson, 1975.

George Orwell: The Critical Heritage.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.

(With Valerie Meyers)
George Orwell: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism.
New York: Garland, 1977.

Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation.
New York: Norton, 2000.

Other Articles

“Review of Raymond Williams'
George Orwell
and Miriam Gross, ed.
The World of George Orwell,” Commonweal
, 96 (June 2, 1972), 313–314.

“Orwell in Burma,”
American Notes and Queries
, 11 (December 1972), 52–54.

“George Orwell,”
Bulletin of Bibliography
, 31 (July–September 1974), 117–121.

“Review of Alex Zwerdling's
Orwell and the Left,” London Magazine
, 15 (April–May 1975), 104–107.

“George Orwell: Selected Checklist,”
Modern Fiction Studies
, 21 (Spring 1975) 133–136.

“Review of William Steinhoff's
George Orwell and the Origins of ‘1984',” English Language Notes
, 13 (March 1976), 227–230.

“Orwell's Debt to Maugham,”
Notes on Contemporary Literature
, 33 (January 2003), 8–12.

“Orwell on Writing,”
New Criterion
, 22 (October 2003), 27–33.

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