Seventy-five years ago, on January 21, 1950, Eric Arthur Blair died of complications from tuberculosis at the age of 46. Months before his death, Blair, under the pen name George Orwell, had completed Nineteen Eighty-Four, a grimly prescient novel that has haunted the world ever since. And although Orwell spent his final days in a London hospital, he had hammered out the manuscript, in a desperate race against death, on the island of Jura. Biographers have long dwelt on Orwell’s stubborn attachment to this slab of mostly bog and rock off the western coast of Scotland. Then as now, it was home to some 200 residents, a place as far off the tourist path as the Heard and MacDonald islands, but without penguins.
Orwell first visited Jura in 1945. Weakened by tuberculosis, worsened by chain smoking, worried by his precarious financial situation, and burdened by his wife’s recent and sudden death, Orwell decided that same year to move with his sister and adopted son to Barnhill, a friend’s farmhouse nestled on the northeastern tip of the island.
As one Orwell biographer, Bernard Crick, pointed out nearly half a century ago, the popular belief that the writer moved to Jura because it was a barren rock blasted by frigid winds was based on an “isothermic fantasy”—namely, that the climate, thanks to the Gulf Stream, was milder and healthier than it was on much of the east coast of Britain. Orwell, who had done his research, knew what to expect. He was also interested in cultivating the land that belonged to Barnhill, so much so that he spent his first three months there working on the land rather than on his manuscript. And, of course, he was not a solitary hermit; along with his sister and son, the farmhouse was visited by a steady trickle of friends and editors who made the long and difficult trek to island to see him.
Along with a generous pouch of shag tobacco, Orwell’s provisions included the first pages of the manuscript. But there was one provision that only Barnhill could provide: the quiet to write, albeit noisily on a misfiring typewriter, and the perspective to reflect on the disquieting technology and bureaucratic banality that had wrought such mind-boggling destruction. In his bedroom on the second floor of the farmhouse, Orwell unfolded the fusion and finality of these ostensible advances; the working title of the novel he was pounding out was, unsurprisingly, The Last Man in Europe.
By the time he unpacked his few possessions, Orwell was still burdened by the recent Tehran Conference, where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill had met to discuss the opening of a second front in the war’s European theater. Yet Orwell was instead convinced that the Big Three had instead gathered to divide the globe into three zones of influence. From his bedroom window at Barnhill, Orwell glimpsed the dawning of a world he would replicate in the novel. The world did not quite turn out that way, but his vision has the punch of the might-have-been and could-always-be.
It was a world, moreover, transformed by the rising ash from Hiroshima and Auschwitz. In 1945, Orwell observed with restrained astonishment that “considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected.” Though he, too, had been prone earlier in his career to what has been labeled “polite” anti-Semitism—an issue still debated by scholars—Orwell shed it over the course of the war. “Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war,” he noted. “Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness.”
This attitude nearly aligns with what Orwell famously called doublethink, which he defined as the “power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.” He had already laid the basis for this notion in Animal Farm, the work that, to his great dismay, brought him great fame. As Orwell’s allegory underscored, doublethink was vital to the success of Stalinist communism, both in Russia and abroad with card-carrying Communists.
But if we think more about doublethink, we realize that this cognitive glitch is not unique to Soviet communism. Orwell had long seen instances of it at home. During the war, whenever a BBC broadcast revealed yet another Nazi atrocity, Orwell fastened not on the crime, but the public’s response. “What impresses me,” he wrote, is that “every case is believed in or disbelieved in according to political predilection, with utter non-interest in the facts and with complete willingness to alter one’s beliefs as soon the political scene alters.” The capture of others’ minds is crucial to any aspiring dictator not just then, but most certainly (and in the most unexpected places) now.
Yet there was one other and crucial element that provided the spark to his mixture of technology and bureaucracy: nationalism. Orwell had earlier defined this -ism as the “habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad.’” These elements combine and combust in the opening pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In a journal he has begun to keep—a practice forbidden by Big Brother—the hero, Winston Smith, describes his recent experience at a cinema. On the screen, he is suddenly confronted by the image, without voiceover, of a “Jewess.” Sitting in a boat, she has wrapped her arms around a child, trying to shield him from a hail of bullets. This terrifying image cuts to a helicopter that plants “a 20 kilo bomb” in the boat. There is a “terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up.”
As a torn limb spirals through the air, the audience roars in joy. But its cheers are interrupted by yet another quick cut. Glowering from the screen is the “face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People.” Hisses start to simmer in the semi-darkened hall, mingled with a “squeak of mingled fear and disgust.” Goldstein, we learn, was the “renegade and backslider who once, long ago … had been one of the leading figures of the Party,” not unlike Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik of Jewish origin who fled Stalin only to be murdered years later by a Soviet agent in Mexico City.
But we also learn something else, something of lasting value. In a wonderfully thoughtful essay, Stephen Metcalf observes that Orwell’s settling in Jura and the act of writing Nineteen Eighty-Four reflected “aspects of a single premonition: a coming world of perpetual engulfment by the forces of bigness.” Among the biggest forces in Orwell’s day were the technology of surveillance and destruction, our species’ vulnerability to irrational passions and passionate tyrants, and the poisonous ideology of nationalism, as different from patriotism as night is from day. Shortly before his death, Orwell was asked by his publisher to make a public statement on the book’s bleak ending. Frederic Warburg, the publisher, had hoped for an optimistic gloss, but was content with Orwell’s warning that the moral to be drawn is simple: “Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
