1985 Read Free

Larry Adler (the so-called ‘Goon with the Wind’) in November 1980. Classical music, which often has no obvious political meaning, was of very little interest to Orwell, who hardly ever mentions it in his essays on culture.
    Whether or not Orwell and Burgess ever met is open to question, and most of the doubt arises from the unreliable nature of Burgess’s autobiography. When Burgess was away in Gibraltar between 1943 and 1946, his first wife, Llewela, was working in London, where Orwell was involved in broadcasting propaganda to India for the BBC Eastern Service. Llewela and Orwell drank in the same Soho pubs, and she established a close friendship with Sonia Brownell, who became the second Mrs Orwell in 1949. Burgess claims, in the first volume of his autobiography, that he was on drinking terms with Orwell just after the war, and that he introduced him to Victory cigarettes, which make an appearance in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, but this story deserves to be treated with caution. If it were true, it is likely that Burgess would have mentioned it somewhere in the text of
1985
, and it appears nowhere else in his non-fiction writing about Orwell. What is beyond doubt is that they had a number of friends in common, and it is clear from Burgess’s private diary (a more reliable source than his semi-fictional memoirs) that he got to know Sonia Orwell reasonably well in the mid-1960s, when he contributed occasional articles to
Art and Literature
, the cultural magazine of which she was the editor. It may be that Burgess and Orwell occasionally exchanged a nod across a crowded pub, and that their meetings were heavily embellished later on, when Sonia Orwell was no longer around to contradict Burgess’s version of events. Sonia died in 1980, and Burgess published his autobiography in 1987.
    Despite their obvious points of disagreement, Orwell and Burgess seem closest in their speculative fiction, and in their non-fiction writing about possible futures.
The Wanting Seed
and
A Clockwork Orange
, both published in 1962, are written in full awareness of the canon of dystopianwriting (e.g. Huxley’s
Brave New World
and Zamyatin’s
We
) identified in Orwell’s journalism. In
The Wanting Seed
, Burgess imagines a futuristic over-populated England where homosexuality has become the stateapproved norm. Instead of the clumsy device of having Winston Smith sit down to read long passages from Emmanuel Goldstein’s book in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, Burgess makes his protagonist a history teacher, who is capable of understanding his current situation and placing it in a wider context of historical forces. That said, Burgess’s theorizing about politics is not as well informed as Orwell’s, and all of his dystopias (including his later apocalyptic novel,
The End of the World News
) have a literary and theological flavour which reflects his preoccupations as a reader. Whereas Orwell is transparently a man of the Left, Burgess’s politics are so unpredictable and inconsistent that it would be impossible to identify him with any political party. Although he voted Conservative in 1951, this did not prevent him from supporting the Italian Communists when he lived in Rome in the 1970s.
    Orwell died before the publication of David Karp’s novel,
One
(1953), but it proved influential on Burgess’s thinking about the evils of the state. Burgess was much in demand as a futurologist after the publication of
A Clockwork Orange
. He discussed ‘The Future of Anglo-American’ in
Harper’s
in February 1968, and speculated about ‘The Novel in 2000 AD’ in the
New York Times
on 29 March 1970. Given that both Orwell and Burgess were concerned with linguistic and cultural change, it is unsurprising that both
Nineteen Eighty-Four
and
1985
end with descriptions of ‘Newspeak’ and ‘Worker’s English’. Orwell and Burgess were aware of the Basic English project proposed by I.