George Orwell’s America (February/March 1984 | Volume: 35, Issue: 2)

George Orwell’s America

AH article image

Authors:

Historic Era:

Historic Theme:

Subject:

February/March 1984 | Volume 35, Issue 2

FOR A WHILE George Orwell thought of calling his novel about life in a totalitarian future The Last Man in Europe. But in the end that title didn’t quite satisfy him, and he chose another simply by reversing the last two digits of the year in which he finished the manuscript. It is a good indication of the book’s enduring power that as the year thus whimsically chosen approached, a score of magazines came out with articles assessing the actual state of the world in 1984 against Orwell’s vision of it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and offering edgy reassurances that things aren’t quite so bad as he’d predicted.

All this literalistic stir would have surprised and amused Orwell, for he never intended his novel as prophecy. “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive,” he wrote, “but I believe… that something like it could arrive.” And indeed, the novel’s dismal setting suggests the dusty, played-out, bombed-out London the author knew more than it does a cityscape of the future. Nevertheless, something in the book lifted it out of its slender genre of political satire: to date it has sold more than ten million copies in English alone. Over four hundred thousand were sold in the first year, most of them in the United States, the book’s powerful “Oceania.” Orwell had contributed a regular letter from London to the Partisan Review during World War II, but it wasn’t until 1945 that the success of his cautionary fable Animal Farm made him well known in America, and not until after his death in 1950—a few months after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four—that he became widely read over here. But once established, his reputation has held as steadily in the United States as it has in his native England.

This is fitting, for our country always interested Orwell, and although he never set foot on these shores, he was a thoughtful and perceptive critic of the American scene. He was not a sentimental one nor, as the following selections from his writings demonstrate, did he embrace any accepted wisdom. He scores Mark Twain for being a toady, for instance, and he violated a tacit wartime understanding by speaking out against the American servicemen he saw rattling around London with too much money in their pockets and too much liquor in their bellies. People got mad at him for that, but he was used to people being mad at him. A quiet, personable, retiring man, he could be absolutely ruthless in the fight against social injustice that was his life-long occupation.

“I have had a bloody life a good deal of the time,” he wrote in 1936, “but in some ways an interesting one.” He was born Eric Blair in India in 1903, the son of a civil servant. Shortly after his birth he returned