George Orwell
1984

THE REVIEW

Julie was born in 1984 and that always strikes me. Every time.

She dresses slowly, she knows I like it. She’s redoing her sandals and a thought I read some time ago comes to mind, and I tell her:

• "Did you know Orwell sold the American rights to ‘1984’ for a pair of shoes?”
• "Orwell?” - she replies - “the one from my birth year? I'm almost 40... I'm old...”

And I know it's a setup, that I should respond with something like “what old, you're still beautiful!” or something like that. But my mind has already gone, off on its own paths, to the banks of that little river, down in Suffolk - the Orwell river - where I've fantasized a thousand times of going to understand what drove Eric Arthur Blair to create a nom de plume.

Eric, old damned reactionary disguised as a socialist, how many things I’ve forgiven you! Starting with that bullshit of the “list.” But, I know; you were there thrown in a sanatorium with one foot already in the grave, and Celia Kirwan was making you taste it – and who am I to be certain that in a similar situation I wouldn't have sold out all my friends, pig and godless as I find myself? – that, then, the girl didn’t even let you smell it is another story. Far cleverer was Sonia (also sent by the IRD like Celia) who, with just three months of marriage, snagged the rights to your novels which she promptly resold to the CIA, who knew well how to use them. More than those half-asses of the IRD, the Americans had well understood the potential of your books and, especially, those two “guides” of anti-communism that were “Animal Farm” and “1984”, and their blockbuster coolness!

And today that “Big Brother” is a format for TV-addled fools, “1984” (also) a song by David Bowie, that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” should be written indelibly outside every courthouse, hospital, school, and public building in our “Democracy Paradises”, that Cossack horses no longer even drink at the fountains of St. Petersburg and vacationing in Catalonia, what remains of all this?

A lot still, to tell the truth: a constant and never-rested number of “critics” and “experts” struggling to give themselves a nudge and repeat “how you were right” and blather about “thought police”, “newspeak”, “doublethink”, and “re-writing History”, convinced that you were looking to the future, warning us of the totalitarian monster as if you were a mustached Hannah Arendt.

But no! You had your eyes fixed on the present, indeed on your recent past, in that room of that little hotel in Barcelona, where you were about to be fooled and where, if your first wife Eileen hadn’t saved you, that bullet Franco’s fascists put in your throat would have served you little as a pass.

In short, that you had it in for the “communists” – at that point – can be understood as well.

(Meanwhile Julie has lit a cigarette, passes it to me, she’s too smart to be mad at me. I fill my lungs knowing that dose of tar will be the most transgressive thing I’ll have done today.)

And I ask myself again what you did, George, with those shoes (earnings taken from poor Sonia), where did you go?

I confess: I have loved Orwell, despite everything; I loved him even when he made me angry, even when I thought he was overrated for reasons not literary; but I loved him for “Homage to Catalonia,” “Keep the Aspidistra Flying,” “The Road to Wigan Pier” especially and, then, also for the other books, and – certainly – also for “Animal Farm” and “1984” which also stand there, among the chaos of my books.

Police officer, traveler, new St. Francis, spy, fighter, visionary, puppet, oracle; everything and its opposite, a well-squeezed lemon, there's no denying...

Yet.

Yet there would have been more to squeeze; cinema for example: only two films for “1984” (and, at least the second, with an extraordinary Richard Burton in his magnificent twilight drawing an unforgettable O’Brien, worth seeing), and a '54 cartoon for “Animal Farm.” But perhaps today that we have conquered Freedom&Prosperity at the cost of “low-intensity” wars and precarious work that produces more deaths than a plague, our fears have – simply – become different.

However, after all, there is still a point of this book that remains in my head: that “I love you” from which the rebellion and ruin of Winston and Julia starts. That “I love you” that seems so frightening to unleash that whole system against the two poor sacrificial victims.

And I believed it too – so much, too long ago – that an “I love you” could be an act of mutiny and transformation. But I was young, try to understand me! I confused Eros with Polemos, Gross and Fromm with Plato, the blonde from the first desk with class consciousness; and yet with that “love” which “relearns always to the gentle heart” a handful of Florentine thirty-somethings (and yes, it seems strange but – at that time – they were little more than thirty) planted a seed that bore fruit until it blossomed in the thought of a Rousseau and in the destruction of the Bastille those four centuries later! But that “love which by no loved one ever forgiven is loving” had nothing to do with the desperate and romantic “I love you” where one seeks refuge from defeats.

That same “I love you” which – here and now – dies in my throat; in this poorly furnished room with not even a “purple roof” to watch the sky and that sounds ridiculous just thinking about it, let alone sounding scary or rebellious!

In this too, you were wrong George.

And Julie is here still bearing my silences. Why is she so kind? If only she were a little mean it would all be easier.

“And what's in your room 101? Another 30 years of this life.”

I meet her gaze and I see in it the same urge to run away, but she still smiles at me, fixes my uniform, and ties my tie, lunch break is over, and she knows “at the Ministry of Truth they care about these things”, we light our personal screens that we can keep off even if we are not part of the inner party.

She smiles at me again and gives me one last, sweet, lie:

• “It was nice. We should do it again”
• “Yes, we should do it again... Goodbye Julie”
• “Goodbye Winston”