The Orwellian World Is Here. Now What?
As we navigate a world of "alternative facts" and corporate-state surveillance, George Orwell’s life, times, and pain, transformed into enduring art, like 1984, show us how to be defiant today. Resistance begins in the mind.
This week, we’re joined by British critic Dorian Lynskey, author of The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984, to trace the biography of a nightmare. The Orwellian slogan "2+2=5" was taken from Soviet propaganda. Orwell reviewed Assignment in Utopia by Eugene Lyons, an American reporter who confesses in the chapter “The Press Corps Conceals a Famine,” to joining with other influential foreign correspondents in Moscow to label Gareth Jones a liar in their articles in exchange for access to the Soviet regime. Lyons and Orwell are both characters in Andrea’s film Mr. Jones.
The trauma of 1984 started during the Spanish Civil War, alongside his wife, Eileen Blair, the unsung hero who saved his life and helped him find his voice as an artist, to break through the lies. In Catalonia, Eileen and Eric Blair watched Stalin-backed communists turn a socialist revolution into a paranoid police state. It was here, nearly killed by the "Soviet myth," that they realized nowhere is immune: lies and conformity keep people complacent as the sadists consolidate power.
Orwell’s message is clear for us today: in an era of state-sponsored lies, holding onto your humanity is the ultimate act of defiance.
Join us to celebrate the power of art and defiance at the book launch of Mrs. Orwell, Andrea’s inspiring new graphic novel, illustrated by the genius Brahm Revel.
When: April 13
Where: PowerHouse Books Arena, DUMBO, Brooklyn
Details here: https://powerhousearena.com/events/book-launch-mrs-orwell-by-andrea-chalupa-in-conversation-with-nomiki-konst/
Patreon Supporters: You and your guests get in free and receive a complimentary book! Just message us through Patreon to claim yours.
Not a member yet? Join our community at Patreon.com/Gaslit. We couldn’t make this show without you–see you there!
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Show Notes:
Our opening song was “Ride at Dawn” by Deena Marie. Check out her GoFundMe here to help her produce her next album: https://gofund.me/623a9c9b1
IG: @deenamariedmt
Spotify: Listen here
Apple Music: Listen here
TikTok: @deenamariedmt
YouTube: Watch here
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/580453/the-ministry-of-truth-by-dorian-lynskey/
33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day https://www.harpercollins.com/products/33-revolutions-per-minute-dorian-lynskey?variant=32210443141154
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Deena Marie (00:00):
One, two, three, four. Uncle Lord had a mission. He smoked and then he hollered for his fellow. He said we won't be going without a five.
Andrea Chalupa (01:25):
Our opening clip was Ride at Dawn by Deena Marie, a longtime Gaslit Nation listener. So if you want to know who listens to the show along with you, it's a lot of talented, defiant people like Dina. If you want to listen to more of her music and support the production of her next album, check out her GoFundMe in the show notes along with her social media. Thank you, Deena, for your powerful art, shining a light in this world.
(01:49):
Speaking of, this week's episode looks at the history that inspired George Orwell's 1984, a book that people refer to today to describe the hellscape we find ourselves in. It's well known among Orwell scholars, at least that Yevgeny Zamyatin, his 1921 novel, We, lit a fire in Orwell to write 1984, but art is composting grief, rage, pain, the hopes for a better world, a different world.
(02:26):
So what was Eric Blair, AKA George Orwell, composting in his life and times that transformed into 1984. We, for instance, the novel We, is the story of a futuristic utopia, quote unquote utopia of strict conformity and surveillance that shows the ultimate goal of the Soviet Union if they were allowed to succeed. And it was written during the brutal rise of that mass murdering system, which happened thanks in part to conformity, not just within Russia and all of the captive states, but abroad in the so- called international revolution to try to spread the Soviet system wherever they could. There was a strict conformity. You had to be tribal, you couldn't dare challenge, or you would bear the brunt of mass disinformation campaigns. It was rough, rough times for people like Orwell and his wife, Eileen, who saw the truth, who witnessed the truth firsthand, and dared to speak the truth.
(03:40):
Now, Zamyatin wrote his novel during the hell of the Soviet Union rising in the world. Orwell would have sought out his book because Orwell and his wife were nearly killed by Stalin's agents while fighting fascists on their honeymoon in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. That terror is what opened their eyes to the Soviet myth, which is still going strong, I must say, among some leftist circles in the West today. If you do not believe me, Google Gaslit Nation iTunes and look at a review. Someone recently left the show blasting me for being critical of communism, simply for posting something once about the Holodomore and then this review popped up. I simply stated facts, the Holodomore is real. It happened, it exists. Stalin, the Soviets deliberately mass murdered millions in Ukraine and some Joe Schmo in the West who saw that decided to leave a review saying, "Damn, this show." So they're still out there.
(04:48):
If you don't believe me, they are still out there. Maybe they're in your life, the Tankies, as we call them. Yep. The cult works across the political extremes. It's not just MAGA. The left, the far left have their own cultists as well. Not everybody, obviously, that's not what I'm saying. All right. Now, Orwell began working on 1984 shortly after reading We. And we all know famously that it's a big influence for that novel, but in every artist's life, there's a swirling storm of influences, certainly Orwell's life. And we're going to travel back in time to understand the world that produced 1984 so that we can confront the same forces today. It's about giving us a language, a way of seeing, understanding the larger patterns. With me on this journey is the brilliant British critic and journalist, Dorian Lynskey, author of The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984, as well as a book, Deena Marie and the other Gaslit Nation listeners who are songwriters might find of interest.
(05:53):
It's called 33 Revolutions Per Minute, a book that explores the history of protest music through 33 pivotal songs from Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit to Green Day's American Idiot. Now, to all of my listeners, join us for a Gaslit Nation Night Out. We're going to celebrate the power of art to transform our pain into hope and defiance at the book launch of my new graphic novel with the genius artist, Brahm Revel. Brahm will not be there because he amazingly lives in Spain. We get a whole section in our graphic novel dedicated to Spain where Brahm lives, so it's very authentic. He's an amazing, amazing, stunning artist, widely respected in the graphic novel space. I will be in conversation with my friend, Nomiki Koontz, who is an executive director of Matriarch, which helps working women run for office. And she was also mentored early on in her career by the great investigative journalist, Wayne Barrett, who was one of the very first, earliest warning systems when it came to Donald Trump.
(07:03):
Wayne Barrett tried to warn us all. And so I'm going to be in conversation with Nomi, and this is going to be April 13 at Powerhouse Books Arena in Dumbo, Brooklyn. And if you are a Patreon supporter, you and your guests get in free and you even get a book. Just message me through Patreon. To join our community, go to patreon.com/gaslit. That's patreon.com/gaslit. Excited to see you there. Thank you to everyone who supports the show. We cannot make Gaslit Nation without you. Now, here's the book trailer for Mrs. Orwell, followed by my interview with Dorian Linsky.
(07:40):
Before the world knew George Orwell, history remembers the writer, but behind Orwell stood a brilliant mind of her own. Together, Eileen and Eric Blair faced war, censorship, and the rise of fascism and helped shape the ideas that would change the world. But the story behind those books belongs to Mrs. Orwell, a graphic novel written by me, Andrea Chalupa, and illustrated by Brahm Revelle, Mrs. Orwell, available wherever books are sold. This week, we are talking to British journalist Dorian Lynskey, the author of the essential book, The Ministry of Truth, a biography on George Orwell's 1984, written 80 years ago. And it's very much, of course, a mirror to the world we find ourselves in today. Welcome to Gaslit Nation, Dorian. I'm so glad to finally have you on the show.
Dorian Lynskey (08:35):
Oh, delighted. Thanks, Andrea.
Andrea Chalupa (08:38):
So what made you want to write a biography of Orwell's 1984?
Dorian Lynskey (08:44):
Well, as often happens, I sort of come at an idea from an angle, from a slant. And I was just really interested in influence and kind of cultural transmission in various genres. The book I wrote before was about protest songs, and I just was noticing so many dystopian stories and so many tropes that we would all recognize. And I was just thinking, where did these all come from? Who was the first person to think of these certain kind of images and ideas that are now just so normalized in dystopian fiction? And so I was going to do a history of that genre. And then as I started looking into it, I was like, okay, most of them come from 1984. And the reason that is the case is because he was drawing from a lot of previous, much more obscure novels and occasionally films and plays.
(09:39):
And he was actually a kind of a scholar of dystopian fiction before writing 1984. And because I'd always been interested in all, obviously I'd read A 1984 on Animal Farm when I was younger. I'd read a lot of his essays when I was older and I thought, oh, this is actually the story is that you do it through him and his reading list and why that book is so important. And then the more I got into that, the more I found that I was able to do bits of biography. There are very good biographies of Orwell. So I didn't have to do the whole story, but the bits that are relevant to 1984. And he's just such a good person to hang out with, even though you can tell that he was quite a difficult person to hang out with in real life, just to spend time reading his complete works.
(10:33):
It was like 20 volumes and I read all of them. And even when you're straying away from the really big, famous pieces of work and you're just reading his film reviews, his theater reviews, his letters, his diary entries, there's so much there and you can see him becoming more and more obsessed with the themes of 1984 and indeed trying out a lot of ideas, even sentences that end up in that book you can find scattered throughout his work in the previous years. So it was such a fascinating process that ended up being about dystopian fiction, but so much more.
Andrea Chalupa (11:16):
And what were some of George Orwell's influences on creating 1984 that surprised you?
Dorian Lynskey (11:23):
Well, there were some that, I mean, I suppose I wouldn't say were that surprising, but were very interesting to dig into. Jack London's novel, The Iron Heel, The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells and just H.G. Wells in general, who is himself an absolutely fascinating and essential figure who invented all kinds of things, from the dystopia to the atomic bomb to the time machine. But then I was finding other things that he was reading and it was very exciting to locate ideas for 1984 in, for example, writing about the Soviet Union. Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon is the most obvious big influence there. But also you could see him plucking phrases from various books. There's a very strong theory that two + two equals five comes from a book by Eugene Lyons called Assignment in Utopia. Eugene Lions, I think, appears in Mr. Jones or in the background of Mr. Jones.
Andrea Chalupa (12:22):
Absolutely. Played by a wonderful British actor who was just fantastic to work with. Yeah. So yet Eugene Lyons, he wrote, as you said, Assignment Utopia two plus two equals five. Lyons got that from the Soviets themselves. It was...
Dorian Lynskey (12:39):
Hmm.
Andrea Chalupa (12:41):
Basically Stalin was trying to rally the people to say, "Let's all join together and build my five-year plan in four years, two plus two equals five." And obviously the five-year plan killed millions of people, most famously the Hotemore in Ukraine, the genocide famine. And so it became this cruel absurdity, two plus two equals five.
Dorian Lynskey (13:05):
And I mean, it's not a criticism of all well to say that he did not have a great imagination. If you read any of his novels, they are based largely on things that happened to him or things that he read. There's not much that he sort of comes up with all on his own. And that's why it's so fun to follow this chain of influences because it's like, "Oh, okay. I think this is where he got this phrase. This is where he found this observation." Obviously the stuff from his real life in 1984, working at the BBC was his only experience of corporate office life. So that goes into that and his time in London during the Blitz and after the war, that goes into the description of Airstrip One. And then there are other things that he wrote about that I think perhaps are less obvious.
(13:53):
There's like espionage thrillers. And people often forget that 1984 is partly an espionage thriller with important documents in briefcases and betrayals and people that you think are on your side, but are not. So they go into it as well. So I mean, there's almost everything that he's writing, particularly around the end of the war. Almost everything, even like his nature writing ends up going into 1984. It's sort of extraordinary that he was, as a good freelance journalist, he didn't like to waste an opportunity to reuse an idea or align.
Andrea Chalupa (14:34):
Your book absolutely covers such an amazing artist diary of Orwell's mind. And you give a wonderful overview of the history, including movements, creative movements in literature during that time in Europe, debates through books over utopia versus dystopia. Could you talk about that?
Dorian Lynskey (14:55):
Well, because it starts with utopian fiction, which goes back, I mean, centuries to Thomas Moore's Utopia and then has this massive revival driven by America at the end of the 80s in Edward Bellamy's book, Looking Backward. And I think again, there's something I didn't know. I think most people don't know what a phenomenon it was, how it influenced politicians from members of FDR's administration to the Labor Prime Minister Clement Atlee in the UK. And it's not a great novel. It is basically somebody who wakes up a hundred or so years in the future and in a utopian society, which was socialist, but it was Edward Bellamy's very moderate American, somewhat Christian version of socialism. So it's nothing obviously like say Stalin's regime, it's his idealized world and it's mainly a character explaining the world to this other character. And the reason it was so influential is because people who had a particular political project they wanted to advance realized that instead of writing just a nonfiction book or a manifesto, they could use this idea that the sleeper who wakes up after a hundred years, the time traveler, whatever, emerges into this future idealized world, and then it is all explained to him.
(16:17):
So you just get people literally walking around going, "How do the police work? What about prisons? What about taxation?" And so lots of people wanted to do it. And so you got people who run supermarkets, retail chains would write one, which is a retail utopia. You had Keen Golfords who would write ones in which was a utopia where there was an awful lot of golf. And then you had conservatives doing sort of anti-utopias, doing almost like dark parodies of looking backward and going, "Well, actually this socialist paradise would be hell." And you also got once in Britain. You got things like William Morris, News from Nowhere. He was a very important figure in British socialism and in the foundation of the Labor Party. And that is actually a very good, very interesting book. A lot of these books are quite cranky and rightly forgotten, but then that leads H.G. Wells, who was a proper novelist, to do what I feel is the first proper dystopia, which is When The Sleeper Awakes and the plot kind of falls apart, but a lot of the world that he describes is recognizable to a reader of 1984, the kind of future totalitarian state, this obviously being before totalitarianism existed.
(17:36):
It was before the rise of fascism. It was before the Russian Revolution, but a lot of the tropes are there so much so that actually if you think of Apple's famous 1984 ad from the year 1984, directed by Ridley Scott, the world that he depicts is more like the one in H.G. Wells' novel than in Orwell's novel. So there's so many of these books that are not great because they are largely political arguments, but are very influential and very interesting. Allwell's great achievement, which is why I mentioned the influence of thrillers and the fact there's a love story in there. His great achievement was to take all of these tropes and ideas and his theory of totalitarianism. And obviously there's such a political argument in the book, but to kind of harness that to a proper plot with twists and excitement and interesting characters, and that hadn't really been done before, even if you read Jack London's The Iron Hill, which is a pretty mad book, it doesn't really hang together.
(18:46):
There's another one called Swastika Night, which is kind of like a feminist anti-fascist dystopia from the 30s. Again, really interesting until the plot just collapses. So I think it's almost Orwell's ability to make it an interesting story, which I think is why you can read 1984 when you're 12 and find it exciting and fascinating, even if you don't know anything about the politics. And that's one of the reasons that it's just so readable. It's just so influential. His use of language as well, the invention of phrases like The Thought Police and Big Brother, which he probably took from HG Wells as well, just makes it so much more important and so much more entertaining than all of these dozens of other books that preceded it that I was reading.
Andrea Chalupa (19:36):
What do you think he's trying to tell us with 1984?
Dorian Lynskey (19:44):
I think what he's trying to do, on one level, he's trying to advance a theory of totalitarianism. And a lot of his ideas you also see in Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, obviously a nonfiction book, happened to have the same American editor as 1984 did. And she's coming to a lot of the same conclusions. He was trying to work out why is it that Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR ended up having so much in common when obviously ostensibly there were these ideological enemies. And I'm not talking here about the Nazi Soviet pact, but just their use of power and their mangling of information, the use of propaganda, their dehumanization of people, the license to mass murder, all of these things. And this was a really live debate at the time because a lot of people couldn't understand. It's like, well, how are the communists and the fascists resembling each other in so many ways?
(20:39):
So partly it's him working through that, talking to people, reading as much as he could, really just trying to understand at the end of the Second World War, well, what happened? And he ends up concentrating more obviously on the Soviet Union because Stalin was still alive. Hitler was dead. Nazi Germany was finished. So inevitably, he ends up being drawn more to what he sees as the current threat, the dictatorship that survived. And then...
Andrea Chalupa (21:08):
Right, that almost killed him on his honeymoon in Spain.
Dorian Lynskey (21:11):
Right. Well, he'd experienced, because that was the thing. He liked to write about what he'd experienced and when he's fighting in the Spanish Civil War, which is where he first starts to notice communists, he goes there to fight fascists or whether or not you define Franco's forces as fascist as a debate, but that was certainly what he considered them at the time. And then he finds that the Stalin backed communists are persecuting the Trotskyists, the anarchists, the non-aligned socialists. And so he finds himself, there's like a civil war within a civil war, like the left is fighting the left, which is not the first or last time in history that that's happened. And so he attributes both 1984 and Animal Farm to the experience of the Spanish Civil War, this primal sort of trauma of thinking that he was fighting for the left against the far rights and finding that the real threat ... Well, I mean, he did almost get shot by a fascist bullet.
Andrea Chalupa (22:10):
He got shot through the neck.
Dorian Lynskey (22:11):
He did get shot somewhere.
Andrea Chalupa (22:12):
He lost his voice for several months.
Dorian Lynskey (22:13):
He almost died. It was one of those things where it's like millimeters away from killing him. But then when he goes back to Barcelona, which was briefly this sort of freewheeling socialist anarchist paradise, and then he finds that the communists have turned it into a police state. This is his only experience. It's not very long at all, but it's his only experience of being in a police state atmosphere. And if you read his memories in Homish Catalonia, which comes out more than a decade before 1984, but you see very similar descriptions that he's drawing on his memory of that climate of fear and paranoia and suspicion.
(22:59):
And thanks to kind of the resourcefulness of his wife, Eileen, who was there as well, she obviously wasn't on the front line, but she was in Barcelona, they managed to escape. She warns him. They go into hiding, they escape into France. But he is very explicit about the fact that this was this turning point in his life and in his understanding of politics, because he was pretty naive about politics up to that point. This idea that we have of Allwell as somebody that was very, very clear-sighted and sophisticated in his political understanding, that was really hard won. There's some astonishingly naive things that he wrote in the '90s. He was constantly working through things and correcting his prejudices and trying to fill in his blind spots. Obviously he didn't fill them all in, but he's just incredible dedication to understanding what was going on in his time, in this unbelievably complicated time.
(24:00):
And then having presented, I suppose, his analysis of what Nazi Germany was like and what started Soviet Union was like, the point of locating it in London is to say, "Well, this could potentially happen in Britain. We're not immune. This could happen in America, that nowhere is immune and you should not think that this is something that only Germans or Russians could be susceptible to." And that's why the ending has to be bleak. There's kind of like a myth that the ending is bleak because he was very ill with tuberculosis when he was writing it.
Andrea Chalupa (24:40):
And his wife had died and he remarried on his deathbed some young girl.
Dorian Lynskey (24:46):
He'd been through a lot and was really kind of shattered by Eileen's death in 1945. But I mean, for one thing, all of his novels have bleak endings. That was just kind of his worldview. And for another, the whole point he's trying to make, which you don't get in more popular dystopian fiction, like the Hunger Games, is that by the time the regime has been established, it is too late for a kind of plucky rebel to bring it down.You're kind of encouraged reading the novel to think that he and Julia, his lover, will team up with the brotherhood, this resistance movement, and sort of bring down Big Brothers regime. And that doesn't happen at all. And that's essential to the argument of the novel that the time to act is before such a regime takes hold.
Andrea Chalupa (25:46):
Absolutely. I mean, that's exactly what he's saying. We're still battling the KGB. And so he's right. He's absolutely right. And not only that, the fact that his fake friend, O'Brien, turns out to be a regime plant and not his entryway into the resistance is also what the FBI and CIA have done against resistance movements worldwide, most famously Martin Luther King Jr. We just had an episode on that and it's extraordinary. Yeah. It's very difficult to dismantle these regimes. It can take generations of martyrs in order to do it. And so yeah, good on Orwell for not sugarcoating it with some Hunger Games Hollywood ending.
Dorian Lynskey (26:31):
Yeah. He sort of sets up a certain genre expectation that there will be this rebellion and then takes it away from you. And so this Winston Smith is talking about how hope lies with the pros. My reading of that is not that they will all rise up because it's quite peculiar the way that the world of 1984 is constructed. Obviously you know and anybody listening he's read it or know that the actual party is only like 15% of the population, I think. And there's all these people who just get, they're sort of getting on with their lives, but they're sort of powerless to rise up. And when he says hope lies in the pros, what I think he's saying because of the way that he talks about them, is it's just the ability to remain human because a lot of what he was reading, and you find this in Hannah Arent as well, is about the dehumanizing nature of these regimes and how you lose your morality, you lose your sense of what is true and what is false.
(27:41):
You surrender your judgment to the party, to the leader, and that it crushes you in some way. And so he's looking at people who just have the ability to just live, to find pleasure in things in humor and music and nature and so on. And that's the world outside of the regime. And that's where the hope lies, but it's a hope of kind of maintaining some psychological integrity and so much of it ends up being towards the end because it's not really a fight with the regime. It's a fight to keep himself resistant inside his own head. That's the fight he ends up losing. That's what O'Brien needs to crush that even if he's completely impotent in terms of what he can do to the regime, O'Brien needs to make sure that any thought of resistance has been driven from his head.
Andrea Chalupa (28:46):
I have to put in the time capsule of this episode recording that today I witnessed in the congressional hearing here in the US, Trump's Attorney General Pam Bondi testifying before Congress and the words that come out of her mouth, she says, Donald Trump is the greatest president in American history and she's defending this serial predator, convicted felon, Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator before dozens of their victims that are also seated in this gallery. And she's doing this as a woman. And my instant reaction was like, you're demeaning yourself to this criminal, you're demeaning yourself. You're not just being an attack dog, a North Korean Russian style, propaganda regime lackey, you are demeaning yourself as a woman and a human being. So that came up when you were describing holding onto your humanity and that being its own form of resistance.
Dorian Lynskey (29:48):
Yeah. And that's what I think is, and obviously I feel this even more so because this book came out in 2019. So obviously more so in Trump's second term, the Orwellian nature of it is that, of course, there's partisanship and increasing polarization and so on, but it did tend to be to the party, that loyalty would be to the Republican Party. And now you see both voters and Republican politicians having to contort themselves around the whims of a corrupt, racist, misogynist, narcissist, all of that. This very particular personality and they constantly just have to find ways around that. If you're Karoline Leavitt, it's like you just have to say it's all great actually. If you're Mike Johnson, you constantly have to claim that you haven't seen the video clip, you haven't seen the true social post. You seem completely oblivious to anything that the president is doing.
(30:55):
And that is what is so deeply corrupting. And I think that's the theme. That's such a huge theme in 1984, that actually when the novel starts, the way that Winston Smith thinks about women, the way that he thinks about refugees when he goes to see this movie where refugees are being murdered, the way that in earlier drafts, although this kind of didn't make it, the way he thinks about race, he is warped by the regime. He has these really unpleasant views. He's not this kind of hero who's kept his integrity. He actually has to try and win it back because he has been so distorted and it's just something triggers him. He starts writing this diary, he starts learning more, he starts questioning more, and he becomes a better person. But at the beginning, he is a loyal servant of the regime and he works at the Ministry of Truth and he does all the things that are expected and he has many of the prejudices that are expected.
(32:04):
And that I think is maybe something that can be a bit overlooked in discussion in 1984, that it's about what politics does to you inside.
Andrea Chalupa (32:15):
So I want to ask you about the psychology of George Orwell, and of course, Eileen, and I need to sort of phrase this for my own sake as a confession. For instance, my film, Mr. Jones, which you graciously reviewed, and thank you for that. We did an interview for Mr. Jones when it came out. That film was of course grounded in history. Yes, we took poetic license, but we had Tim Snyder as a historical advisor, and we had a team of historians in Canada and Ukraine look it over. But as I was being pressured last minute with rewrites on set, I was putting words in Gareth Jones' mouth that were healing my own heartbreak in various situations or saying things that I myself did not have the courage to say in certain relationships. So all art, even if it's political art, historical art, there's always an autobiographical aspect to it.
(33:08):
That's where you find the humanity in the art. And so in regards to Orwell's story, you talked about the Spanish Civil War. He was there on his honeymoon. He had just married his wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, who was an English Irish girl who was more Orwell than Orwell. You talked about how Orwell needed years and traumatic and near death experiences to find his footing, find his moral center, find his voice for that in the world. Eileen comes fully formed. She's giving, as a young girl in school, these fiery speeches. She was known as a really strong debater where she's giving these wonderful talks about how the pen is mightier than the sword. She goes on to be one of the earliest women to graduate from Oxford University. She studies under J.R. Tolkien. She embraces this new radical field of child psychology. And Orwell met her at a party and was like, "That's the kind of girl I want to marry." They rushed to the aisle because their families were trying to break it up because they're both sort of the loose cannons, the Bohemians, the free spirits and their families.
(34:10):
And then to really stick it to their parents even further, they follow their big, beautiful, bleeding, progressive hearts and go spend their honeymoon in the Spanish Civil War, where Eileen had a significant post being a secretary for the Labor Party in Barcelona that was helping the foreign fighters from the UK with their idealism come fight against the fascists. And she would have had lists of names that Stalin's agents that would end up hunting the Orwells would have loved to have gotten their hands on. And what's significant about this time was not just as Orwell wrote famously that it opened his eyes to the Soviet myth because the Soviets nearly tried to kill him. The Soviet agents burst into the Orwell's hotel room in Barcelona when only Eileen was there because Orwell was at the front and they stole his papers and diaries and it's believed to this day that at least one of Orwell's diaries is still somewhere in Moscow.
(35:06):
But this moment was also significant because Orwell's commander in the POUM Battalion, a battalion that was famously aligned ideologically with Trotsky, Stalin's great enemy. The commander of this battalion was this charismatic, mysterious European figure. Was he Russian? Was he Belgium? We don't know. But we do know now. But at the time, he was just larger than life. And his name was George Copp and he was someone who George and Eric Blair and Eileen Blair were both madly in love with, life of the party. It's believed, it's rumored that there was an emotional affair between Eileen and George Copp. Maybe something happened one afternoon somewhere in Catalonia, but what ends up happening is after they finally all escaped Spain, George, it takes him longer because he's a political prisoner. He gets arrested by the communists. And so when he finally gets out, he moves to be next to the Orwells.
(36:00):
He basically follows them around for the rest of their lives. And there's even a quote that Orwell had where he believed that sexual affairs were no big deal, but an affair of the heart, that's a real tragedy. And so there's been speculation that the character in 1984, O'Brien, the physicality of this character, O'Brien who befriends Winston Smith and then becomes his greatest torturer, kind of looks like George Copp, his commander in Spain, who may have fallen in love with Eileen and stayed in her orbit, made sure to stay in Eileen's orbit for the rest of his life. What are your thoughts? Let's gossip about the Orwell's marriage.
Dorian Lynskey (36:44):
Yeah. I don't want to be a buzzkill, but I always like, whenever I looked into kind of the keys, like the idea that there would be a key to a certain character or key to the title or whatever, it never quite worked out. So there's this idea, various ideas of where the title of 1984 comes from, including there's an Eileen connection, but it doesn't add up. It doesn't quite work. And then similarly, people would go that Julia, Winston Smith's lover, was based on Sonya Orwell, his second wife, which again doesn't quite add up because he didn't know her that well when he was writing the novel. They got married after he'd sort of finished it. And then are there bits of Eileen in there? There are like bits. So I think what he did was he did a lot of composites.
(37:42):
And so it is perfectly possible that a physical resemblance might be real, that might be an influence, but there's always some other stuff going on in there. So for example, one of the guys he used to work with at the BBC, he read 1984 and he thought that it was like part of it was like a great satire on the BBC, which it isn't. But to him, he was just like, "Oh, well, the Ministry of Truth sounds like the BBC." And it's like, "Yeah, because that's the only office experience like that, that Orwell had." He worked in another office, but it was a very tiny kind of magazine one, so that wasn't that. And so I'm always kind of intrigued where it's just like these elements might be feeding into this or that, but then there's so much else. Brian also represents arguably the Catholic church, which all well thought was totalitarian.
Andrea Chalupa (38:35):
And look at America Supreme Court today, a majority Catholic, rubber stamping authoritarianism.
Dorian Lynskey (38:42):
I mean, he was on something with a certain kind of Catholic thought there. So yeah, so the biographical lens I always find is like a bit incomplete because it's never a like for like, but he has this kind of brain that like mulches together these experiences and these people he's met and so they kind of bits and pieces of them end up in there without ever being categories.
Andrea Chalupa (39:10):
He's composting his life into these other forms of art. Yeah. And I think everything you've said, all the influences, H.G. Wells was someone, I don't know if I read this in your book or in the Orwell archives in London, but H.G. Wells, they finally got him over for dinner one night. And I believe Eileen made a curry and it was a horrible night because H.G. Wells was kind of an asshole.
Dorian Lynskey (39:36):
Yeah. But also Orwell was weirdly provocative and he seemed to have this idea that you could be incredibly intellectually honest and that that was in a separate sphere from your social relationship. So yeah, they invited over through ... Oh God, the name escapes me. Oh, Ines Holden, fascinating character, writer, someone else or Well might have had some kind of romantic attachment to. And her flat was bombed in the blitz. So she was staying in, I think in a flat above HG Wells' garage. So she made this social introduction because she knew that Owell loved Wells's early work and Orwell just didn't mention that he had just reviewed Wells' latest book and given it a really bad review. So they end up having this big row because Wells turns up with a copy of the magazine going, "What the hell is this all about? "
(40:30):
And Orwell just goes, "Well, it's not good. It's not good. It's not a good book, is it? " So they have this argument and then they patch it up and then Orwell does a bad review of Wells' next book and there's this Wells' fantastic response is, "Read my early works, you shit," which I always intend to use if I get any bad reviews. But he did this with Arthur Koestler as well. He spent Christmas with Arthur Koestler and Koestler's wife and he'd just given Koestler a savage review. Koestler picks him up at the station and goes, "That wasn't very good review." Orwell goes, "Well, it wasn't a very good play." And then they spend quite a nice Christmas together. So there was something very strained that Orwell thought that you could be ... He was so wedded to this idea of honesty as a kind of really morally important thing. At least, I don't quite know how that related to his affairs, but at least intellectual honesty, that he thought that that just shouldn't get in the way of personal relationships.
(41:35):
And pretty much all of his friends thought, actually probably your friends will be annoyed if you shred their work in print, which is a very important lesson to take away. But there was something about Orwell where he kind of prided himself in being the guy that would say what he believed to be true, even if it annoyed everybody, which is what I mean about how that could be very admirable when you're reading him, and yet you sometimes feel sorry for his friends.
Andrea Chalupa (42:04):
Certainly. His wife, he's a terrible husband. He cheated on her quite a bit. And I almost wondered if Malcolm Muggeridge had an ax to grind, because in the Orwell archives, Malcolm Muggeridge was like, "Yeah, Orwell would just go down to the park and just fuck women." It was almost like he was setting him up for a Me Too in history or something. So Orwell was not ... I can go on and on. I mean-
Dorian Lynskey (42:31):
Yeah. My understanding is that Eileen was also having affairs and it was like a very ... One thing I don't think we ... It's quite hard to get your head around now is how normalized adultery was.
Andrea Chalupa (42:42):
A trillion percent. They're all fucking everyone. And it was normal for the times and it was probably made even more extreme by fucking the pain away after the trauma of the great war and World War II.
Dorian Lynskey (42:55):
Yeah. And of course, then you've got people having affairs during the blitz and living in this very heightened ... It's very heightened time. There's some amazing writing from people during the blitz saying that they never felt more alive because they're brushing up against deaths. There was all kinds of hedonism going on, which is of course ... I mean, the good thing is about the book that I was writing is I didn't really need to go into his sex life. But yeah, I mean, his record with women was not great, but there was a genuine love between him and Eileen and a genuine loyalty and he was devastated when she died. And it was really interesting if you read some accounts where they go, "Oh, well, he didn't seem very upset." And of course, he's a public school boy, a product of the early 20th century, and it's like, well, yeah, he probably wasn't sobbing on his friend's shoulders, but if you're reading between the lines, he's absolutely devastated.
(43:57):
He goes a bit mad after she dies, basically. He throws himself into work. He starts proposing to every woman he knows, and they all say no because they can see that it's kind of the madness of grief rather than a serious proposition.
(44:14):
It's so much really, it was trying to understand the trauma and the unpredictability of the times that he and Eileen and everybody around him were living in. There's this sense that the world's just being sort of thrown up in the air and broken into pieces and you didn't know where the pieces were going to land. And that's what gives a lot of his writing this just incredible urgency and emotional intensity.
Deena Marie (44:40):
One, two, three, four. Uncle Lord had a mission. He. He spoke and then he hollered for his fellow to college. He said we won't be going now without a five. His tires creeped through cracks. On the backside, he said, "I'll never miss because. ". It's going to be loud and it's going to go down. He said, "Get out. ".
Andrea Chalupa (49:20):
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