1985 Read Online Free Page B

or, to avoid plagiarism, 1985. Orwell’s story was set in England, and so will be mine. Americans may reflect, before deploring this author’s inverted chauvinism, that Britain has usually, with the absent-mindedness that acquired her an empire, blazed the major trails of social change. Change for the worse, as well as the better.
    The French are cleverer than the British! They are skilful at the intellectual work of getting new constitutions on to paper, but the forms of new order have to emerge in Britain first. Montesquieu’s
The Spirit of the Laws
, which had such an influence on the American Constitution, could not have been written if there had not been an existing social contract in Britain – one that Montesquieu did not thoroughly understand. The British do not well understand their political systems either, but they make no claim to be clever. It was Walter Bagehot who described the British as stupid. They lack the collective intelligence on which the French pride themselves, but they do not noticeably suffer for this deficiency. French intellectuality may have had something to do with the French surrender of 1940; British stupidity counselled resistance to Nazi Germany. Out of stupidity, which may be glossed as intuition, came the seventeenth-century revolution and the settlement of 1688, complete with limitation of the power of the executive and Bill of Rights. Out of the muddle and mess of contemporary Britain the pattern of the future of the West may well be emerging. It is a pattern which many of us must deplore, but only Ingsoc and Big Brother will prove capable of breaking it.

1948: an old man interviewed
    Orwell’s book is essentially a comic book.
    A
WHAT ?
    Consider. My bookshelves are disorganized. Wishing to reread
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, I could find at first only the Italian edition. This, for the moment, would have to do. But there was something wrong with that first sentence. ‘
Era una bella e fredda mattina d’aprile e gli orologi batterono l’una
.’ It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks struck one. It ought to be ‘
battevano tredici colpi
’: they were striking thirteen. Latin logic, you see. The translator couldn’t believe that clocks would strike thirteen, even in 1984, since no reasonable ear could ever take in more than twelve. So Italian readers were forced to miss a signal of the comic. Here’s the original: ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ You laugh, or smile.
    Or shudder
?
    Or shudder pleasurably. As at the beginning of the best kind of ogre story – one in which strange and terrible and unbelievable things are imposed on a familiar world. The world of English April weather, to begin with. A liverish wind mocking the sun. Swirls of dust at street corners. Grit in your eye. A run-down weary city at the end of a long war. Apartment blocks collapsing, a smell of boiled cabbage and old rag mats in the hallway.
    COMIC ,
for God’s sake
?
    Comic in the way of the old music halls. The comedy of the all-toorecognizable. You have to remember what it was like in 1948 to appreciate
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. Somebody in 1949 told me – that was the year the book came out – that Orwell had wanted to call
it Nineteen Forty-Eight
. But they wouldn’t let him.
    You remember the first reviews
?
    Yes. For the most part, tepidly laudatory. Only Bertrand Russell saw that this was that rare thing, a philosophical novel. The others said thatMr Orwell was more convincing with his boiled cabbage and rag mats than with his totalitarianism. Some truth there. Orwell was known as a kind of comic poet of the run-down and seedy.
Down and Out in Paris and London. The Road to Wigan Pier.
Wigan Pier – that was always a great music-hall joke. Orwell was good at things like working-class kitchens, nice cups of tea so strong as to be mahogany coloured, the latest murder in the
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