The Bookmonger
Episode 515: 'Who Is Big Brother?' by D. J. Taylor
[MUSIC] Hello and welcome to the Bookmonger. I'm John J. Miller of National Review. Thanks for listening. This shows a production of National Review and we're recording from the studio of WRTH, the campus radio station of Hillsdale College. Our guest is DJ Taylor, author of Who Is Big Brother? A Reader's Guide to George Orwell. David, welcome to the Bookmonger. It's very good to be with you again, John. There are a lot of books about George Orwell. In fact, you were on this show last year to discuss your excellent biography of him called The New Life. But why does the world need another book about George Orwell? You're right. There's a kind of unstoppable tide that's been rolling in over the shores of the UK and the US in the last year of Orwell material. My justification for this is that even when I got to the end of Orwell The New Life, which, as you know, is my second full biography of Orwell, it seemed to me that there was still a whole bunch of material out there that I couldn't effectively work into the standard narrative progressions of a cradle to grave biography. And although this book is described as a reader's guide to George Orwell, that's slightly deceptive. It's not quite what it says on the tin because as well as providing a kind of overview of his work and context and so on, it's also, as I think the title hints, it's a book of Orwell puzzles. It's a book about some of the Orwell conundrums that I turned up while working on his life and work and the kind of way they lead you back into the top soil of his psychology and his view of the world. I mean, the first question is suggested in the title, who was Big Brother? But there are other things I'm interested in. I mean, there's a whole half a chapter about why is it that Orwell, that great fan of the natural world and the animal kingdom, why does he hate pigs so much? Why does he make them the villains of animal farm? So it's that kind of thing that I say, some Orwell puzzles that I sort of go off into pursuit of in the hope that they'll illuminate wider parts of his life and work. - So let's take on a couple of these puzzles. Let's start with the pigs. He was an animal lover in so many ways. - He was a terrific animal lover. I mean, here is a man who once remarked with no irony whatsoever that some of the best experiences of his life had been with animals. And when we were talking before we came on about Orwell's son, Richard Blair, whom he with the assistant's banana, he brought up more or less on his own after his first wife, Aynina died. This is in the late 1940s on the Hebradine Island of Jura. And someone once remarked to Orwell that what a good, you know, how good he was at dealing with the infant Richard. And all again, without any sort of self-conscious thoughts of, oh, well, you know, I've always been good with animals. But this didn't extend to pigs. I mean, we all know, apart from rats, we know he had a terrific rat phobia that runs through all his work. And finally, you know, blazes up in the talk to interrogation scenes of 1984. Apart from rats, the only animal that Orwell seemed to dislike was pigs. And finally, I mean, he was a great sort of small holder and a small farmer. And whenever he went, whenever he had the opportunity, he'd knock up some cages and have some ends in a round and eggs and so forth. And when he lived in a remote cottage in Hertfordshire in the later 1930s, he had a goat. But he never had a pig until he got to Jura. And in 1948, suddenly, finally, they had one. And Orwell writes about it in letters and his diary. And he says, you know, they really are the most disgusting brutes. I think his fastidiousness was revolted, by the way, in which sort of pigs went on and wandered about, and galloped up their food. And so here you are, there you are in animal farm. And suddenly, he decides it's the pigs, you have to be the baddest. Now, I did some research on this. And I discussed, 'cause you know, there's that famous scene, the concluding scene of animal farm, where the other animals creep up and look through the window, as the pigs are entertaining the rival farmers. And the pigs, by this point, you know, drinking soup out of chorines and standing on their hind legs. And the animals look from pig to man and man to pig, and can't tell which is which. It strikes me that this goes all the way back to an incident in the pre-war era, because there's a very odd scene in Orwell's fourth novel, Coming Up for Air, written published just before the onset of the Second World War. And the book's hero, the novel's hero, George Bowling, is walking in an Oxfordshire village. And he suddenly sees, coming down the hill towards him, what he thinks is a herd of pigs. And in a split second, he realizes what's gone wrong and corrects himself. He's actually a group of children wearing gas masks, because this is just before the war. Everyone had been issued a gas mask and they're having drills, you know, in case of aerial attacks. And Orwell realizes that, you know, for the moment, he thought that he thought they were herd of pigs. And so the anthropomorphization of the pigs, pigs looking like human beings, human beings looking like pigs, goes all the way back sort of six or seven years before animal farms. So that seems to me, there was a very interesting link in the chain. But no, he doesn't like anything else. You know, dogs, cats, baby headshops that crawl into his house of an evening. No, but pigs, pigs are absolutely on the forbidden list. - Let's turn to the puzzle in the title. Who is Big Brother? That's a problem in the novel, 1984 itself. Who is Big Brothers? Is an actual person? Is it a group of concept? We really don't know in the novel. So who is Big Brother? - It's interesting, you see, as you've just hinted in your preamble, there is one argument that says that Big Brother doesn't exist. He's just, as you say, a concept. He's a symbol that the people, the party members have to sort of worship and obey. Although he obviously he has a face and can be seen, he doesn't have to, and it could be that he doesn't exist at all. The part answer, the obvious answer is that it's supposed to be Stalin. And obviously Orwell himself said that although 1984 was regarded, especially in America simply as an assault on Soviet communism, in fact, his target was totalitarianism per se, whether it came from the right or left. But it does have to be said that there are, there are strong hints that it's Stalin being caricatured here. And this was picked up interestingly by the initial American audience. I don't know if you've ever seen, but the paperback jacket of the first Signet Press edition of 1984, published in the US in 1950 as an absolutely fascinating thing because obviously it's published, the whole concept, the design is effectively that of a pulp novel designed to attract the largest number of readers. And so Winston Smith, who in the novel is this rather frail 39 year old with Marica Spain's and terrible calf. He looks like Rock Hudson, Julia, who's also pictured. Julia is basically abroad from the Bronx, with cleavage all over the place and this extraordinary expression on her face. But the most fascinating thing is the poster of the big brother on the wall behind them because not only does he look like Stalin, but the illustrator has given him a pair of all gears as well, you know, just to sort of emphasize his depravity and sort of non-human qualities. So there's that aspect of it. But I've got one of my own theories about who big brother is, takes us back to all himself because Orwell had a think, Orwell was very meticulous usually about describing people's faces. He does this in all his novel. He'll start off with the character sketch, always there's something sort of quite distinctive and arresting about their facial characteristics. On the other hand, big brother's face in 1984 was always described quite sort of vaguely, never very much detail. And there's one very striking phrase where Orwell describes big brother's face as being quote, "full of power and mysterious calm." Now there's a famous photograph of Orwell, one of the very last ever taken of him in the spring of 1946 when he was living in the Islington flat with Richard. He looks terribly old and worn. He's only in his early 40s, but he looks about 60 or 70 and he's staring face on at the camera and just looking at it. And to me, it's a face that's full of power and mysterious calm. And I just have this kind of suspicion that in a way when he's describing big brother, unwittingly or not, Orwell is kind of describing himself. - And that photo is on the cover of your book. - It is. - That's why we put it there. - It was big brother. - Exactly. - You spent a lot of your life studying this guy. If you had 30 minutes to interview the ghost of George Orwell on anything, what would you want to know? - What I want to know? Oh, you see these, it's fascinating, this idea that what would happen if you met your great literary heroes in the past? It's something I'd be very doubtful of because I think these encounter, I mean, when you meet your heroes in real life, it rarely goes off quite as you think. I suppose in an odd sort of way, John, I'd be wanting to ask absolutely detailed specific nitty gritty questions about Orwell puzzles that have always fascinated me. I'd want to say to him, for example, there's an obvious connection between 1984 and the famous essay he wrote about the prep school he went to during the Great Walcles and Cyprions where the school is effectively represented as a police state and we know that he wrote that there are connections between the two works. And so if the world of his prep school is like that of 1984, then there's a way in which the world of 1984 is like the world of his prep school, the police state and the spies and the headmaster being on this yet and all powerful. And so I suppose I'd like to say to him, George, Eric, Mr. Orwell, when can you give me the data which you actually wrote this so that I can be able, I will know the chronology and I will know in that chicken and the egg way, which predated which. I'd like to ask him things like that, I suppose sort of very, very detailed nitty gritty questions rather than grand conceptual questions about, you know, what is your view of the world, what is your view of politics, that kind of thing. Because I speak, you know, being a biographer or having been a biographer on the scent, there are really specific things I suppose I would like to ask him. - You're such a great reader of his work and that's one of the strengths of your biography are the connections you make between his works. And that's really what this new book is all about, bringing a lot of these threads together. A lot of our listeners, I'm gonna guess, have read 1984 and or animal farm. If you've read one book by him, it's gonna be one of them. If you've read two books by him is probably those two. David, what do you suggest for a third book, maybe among the novels? If you're gonna read book number three by George Orwell, what do you recommend? - Okay, I'd just like to, you're absolutely right about that. People having written those, read those two books. I was doing one or two events in Boston last four, and I used to start by asking people to put their hands up if they read one or the other. And virtually every hand in the room went up, which is quite gratifying in a way, 'cause you're starting from a very high base. There's not a lot you have to explain about all of the significance. If I were advising your listeners on another Orwell novel to read, I would suggest either that they read Coming Up For Air, 1939, which is the pre-war one, which you can glimpse quite a bit of 1984, starting to take shape. All my own, one of my personal favorites from the '30s is his third novel, Keep the Asperdistra Flying, which is about this end of tether ground down poet called Gordon Comstock. And it's essentially, it's interesting because all his '30s novels have the same plot as 1984. They're all about this ground down individual trying to rebel against a life and a world that's constraining them and failing and being brought back to the place where they started. So there's a great deal in them, I suppose, the people who've read the two post-war books and want to see some of the continuities between them. So one of those two. - One more question. George Orwell died in 1950. Why do we still read him now? Why does he endure? - In a nutshell, I think we read him quite apart from his outstanding literary merit. We read him because in so many ways, this is a man who, despite having died three quarters of a century ago, seems in a number of extraordinary ways of predicted many of the outlines of the modern world. I mean, his presciences extraordinary and scarcely a month goes by without something happening in the world that causes some pundit to say, "Oh, you know, we've been here before. "What would George have thought about all of this?" And this is a very unusual thing. It happens only two or three times a century with writers getting to that sort of position in the world consciousness. And I think Orwell is possibly the 20th century writer who most managed to create that state. The author is D.J. Taylor. The book is Who Is Big Brother? A Reader's Guide to George Orwell. David, thanks for joining us on "The Book Manger." - Thanks very much, John, it was great. - Thanks to all of you for listening. 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