George Orwell: 1984

By Robert McCrum
The Observer, May 10, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide.

The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Orwell was desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a windswept Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war.

In 1945, he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his Islington lodgings, and working incessantly to dam the grief at his wife's premature death.

David Astor's family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura. There was a house, Barnhill, at the remote northern tip of this rocky finger. Astor offered it to Orwell for an extended stay.

In May 1946, Orwell took the train north for the journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was "almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage". Orwell was not in good health. Postwar Britain was bleaker even than wartime, and he had always suffered from a bad chest.

Years before, in the essay "Why I Write", he had described the struggle to complete a book: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality. Good prose is like a window pane."

Barnhill was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world. Orwell arrived with just a camp bed, a table, a couple of chairs, and a few pots and pans. It was a spartan existence.

The locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own. The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his sister, Avril.

In May 1947, Orwell told his publisher, Fred Warburg: "I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time because I really have been in most wretched health this year ever since about January (my chest as usual) and can't quite shake it off."

Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. In November, he collapsed with "inflammation of the lungs". Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news that he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis.

In November 1948, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter" by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting the house night and day, he struggled on.

The typescript reached London in December, as promised. Warburg recognised its qualities at once and said it was "amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read".

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949.
 

AR  I was of course deeply impressed by Nineteen Eighty-Four. I would love to write a prophetic story with similar resonance — with less suffering, naturally.