George Orwell (1903-1993)

I don't know if this idea has been discussed before, but I thought this could be an interesting literary/cultural WI:

Basically what it says in the title: suppose George Orwell has far greater fortunes regarding his health, and manages to live to a ripe old age? Considering the impact that both his fiction and non-fiction has had on our popular culture IOTL, what works would he have perhaps written, and by extension, what impact might Orwell have had in both literature and popular culture had he outlasted the USSR?

One idea I heard bandied about somewhere (I forget where exactly) was that Orwell, had he lived longer, would have perhaps written a third novel dealing with totalitarianism: a novel dealing with the collapse of a totalitarian state (in the same way that Animal Farm dealt with the rise of a totalitarian society and 1984 showed a totalitarian society arguably at its apogee).

Thoughts?

I think he would have written a third novel in his totalitarianism 'trilogy', although again a different setting from Manor Farm or Airstrip One and based mainly after the regime had collapsed. He would have been far too intelligent to write as anything utopian so we'd probably get something close to a prediction of what was going to happen to the Soviet Union (presuming butterflies aren't too big), with initial celebration then the economy failing and the country descending into poverty and corruption.

It would be interesting to see his reaction to Kruschev and the fall of Franco, maybe he'd return to Catalonia?

The Red said:

It would be interesting to see his reaction to Kruschev and the fall of Franco, maybe he'd return to Catalonia?

Click to expand...

I don't know if I posted about this before, but I've thought a lot about this. As my nick suggests, I'm an Orwell fanboy.

More than his reaction about the Spanish and Soviet events, I'm interested about his reaction over later developements of mass communication, the AI notion, and control not becoming crueler, but subtler. But even more than that, I'm very interested about his reaction to the Consumer Society. Think about this 1984 line.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.

Click to expand...

If Orwell really took this as true, it would have take him to live just two more decades to realize how ridiculously absurd, almost retrospectively funny, this statement is, especially the idea of wealth not being stupefying. I'm very curious about what his reaction would have been.

I can see him having interesting things to say about the rise of the mass media in the 60s and 70s, and it'd be interesting to see the direction his career took after 1950. I can imagine him going to work in television - it could be through working with Nigel Kneale on the adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, or through his radio work in the Talks department - and that could lead to some interesting fictional and factual programmes being created.

I'm now getting an idea where he, rather than Attenborough, ends up running BBC2 in the 60s...

I wonder how he would react to the New Left, Reagan & Thatcher, and the fall of Communism.

IIRC he was moving more to social democracy as he aged.

Also, I'm pretty sure his next novel was going to be another story about middle England and it's value system.

He was sketching out ideas for two stories at the time of his death IIRC. A Smoking-Room Story, set in Burma(?), and The Quick and The Dead - I don't know anything about the latter except that it was intended to be a novel in three parts, perhaps it's the one Chronix was referring to?

All of this is from memory, so take it with a pinch of salt until I can dig out the references, but one interesting POD is that he did receive and turn down an invitation to the Southern US towards the end of his life. The climate would have been better for his lungs.

Shaucker said:

He was sketching out ideas for two stories at the time of his death IIRC. A Smoking-Room Story, set in Burma(?), and The Quick and The Dead - I don't know anything about the latter except that it was intended to be a novel in three parts, perhaps it's the one Chronix was referring to?

All of this is from memory, so take it with a pinch of salt until I can dig out the references, but one interesting POD is that he did receive and turn down an invitation to the Southern US towards the end of his life. The climate would have been better for his lungs.

Click to expand...

Maybe a better PoD would be that he either doesn't get shot in the neck during the Spanish Civil War (which led to his breathing problems later in life) or that he didn't go to Jura to finish 1984 and thus had access to medical care.

George Orwell is very, very singular in his ideology. Remember, his whole career is about refusing to adapt to the politics of the world around him.

Which is good for mounting a critique of pre-Keynesian economics, or for being a 'premature anti-fascist', or for helping to shake people out of their WWII-induced slumber RE the Soviet police state--but most of the time he's a fairly cranky independent socialist promoting an unworkable fusion with cultural (anti-intellectual?) tradition. Overall his greatest achievement is in being a successful literary stylist who wrote some cogent polemics and fantastical stories before dying a timely death.

If he lives I think he either has to wind down the ideological side of career*, or risk becoming a conformist... or an Apostate. (Is he capable of becoming a genre-only writer? I don't know how much, if any, sci-fi or fantasy he read. But then I'm not certain it matters for his creative process, seeing as we know people like J.R.R. Tolkien and Cormac McCarthy never read much in that field.)

I think he certainly had the potential to quit the Left and become a conservative of some type**, which is a problem as--trying not to make a value judgement here--sometimes that sort of move can be finessed by a talented writer, but mostly it can't be. I'm trying to think of a writer who underwent a major ideological change after their career had already reached it's peak and then was able to continue producing relevant work, and I'm not sure there are many. Do Kingsley Amis or John Dos Passos count?

The worst thing that could happen to him is he ends up a bland 'Mrs Thatcher is right!' hack, like the ex-Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt was in his final years.

*Which can be done. See Arthur Koestler.

**He thought Hayek's 'Road To Surfdom' was fundamentally right in addressing the evils of state power, and his disagreement with the details of that thesis was pretty mild compared to what he was writing in his other political op-eds. Ruh roh.

I am sure he would do another volume on totalitarianism, but there would be novels based on events in the ensuing decades:

1. The American Dream and new entertainment regimen that made the late fifties so idyllic.

2. The music, dress codes and counter-culture of the sixties.

3. The oil embargo of the seventies.

4. More third-world revolutions based on religion, as in Iran.

5. Personal computing, with a twist separate from Big Brother.

He might settle into a genre, as did James Michener with historically-accurate fiction about given regions and events.

What if he becomes the CS Lewis of socialism-ie a true believer but at the same time not an illogical, crazed fanatic?

The reason George Orwell died was because he had TB - so you could either do a POD where he doesn't get infected, in which case he would have served in WW2 during 1939-1945 which would have affected his writing career with major butterflies (e.g. he wouldn't have worked in the BBC Room 101 making propaganda for India)
or after his streptomycin treatment he is persuaded to spend the autumn/winter of 1948/1949 in the TB Sanatorium in Gloucester. This delays publication of 1984 by a few months, but otherwise his career continues as normal. He survives in pretty good health for the life time suggested.

Issues for Orwell to deal with:

British Nuclear Weapons test in 1952
The Suez crisis
The 1958 Notting Hill Race Riots, and new Commonwealth immigration into Britain in general
Albert Camus was a fan of his, I think they'd become friends for a period, but then have a big falling out over Algeria
Orwell should travel to India (for 10th anniversary of Independence, perhaps)
The Non-Aligned Movement and CND
It would be good if in 1960 he travels to the US, and meets a doctor who convinces him of the dangers of smoking. Orwell quits (if you don't know, he was a very heavy smoker, even by the standards of the time) and one of his minor crusades is against the distortions of medical evidence and propaganda put out by the tobacco lobby.
The US civil rights movement

Once you get into the 1960s you start to test him a little, to see if he's still left wing....
What does he think of Harold Wilson and the White Heat of Technology? I doubt he would approve.
Roy Jenkins' time at the Home Office? he'd support the end of capital punishment, probably be in favour of the end of literary censorship and theatre censorship, but he wouldn't like legalisation of abortion, not sure how he'd feel about decriminalising homosexual acts in private....
on the one hand, an end to state interference, on the other, Orwell didn't like "pansies"
What about the Catholic Civil Rights Movement in Ireland?

I think he might have written a novel with a similar theme to Michael Young's Rise of the Meritocracy sometime in the 1960s, a kind of anti-Fabian 1984, where there is a technocratic class system based on IQ testing, lots of consumerism and vegetarian, fruit-juice drinking, free love making crankery....

Orwell on feminism probably wouldn't have been fun to read...
George Orwell on the EEC? interesting, he could have jumped either way...

I can almost picture him as a member of Jo Grimond's Liberal Party, if he left Labour in disgust with Vietnam and the Wilson era generally - if he still had the farm on Jura, is it too much of a stretch to see him as the Liberal candidate for Argyll in the 1966 election?

George Orwell on the SNP.... he wouldn't have been nice, I don't think...

The Red said:

I think he would have written a third novel in his totalitarianism 'trilogy', although again a different setting from Manor Farm or Airstrip One and based mainly after the regime had collapsed.

Click to expand...

About a country in the grip of former secret service members and oligarchs, like Russia? No idea how probable that is, but it sounds good.

A J Kemble said:

Albert Camus was a fan of his, I think they'd become friends for a period

Click to expand...

This touches on something I was thinking about today: after Orwell's era we have not only the rise of a whole generation of famous Anglophone Leftwing (and not so Leftwing) academic historians and philosophers addressing the issue of radicalism in new terms, but we also have the rise of the French pomo theorists. Okay, Camus isn't Sartre, he's much less theoretical, so Orwell might relate to him. But I think Orwell is so profoundly anti-intellectual as to be incapable of reflecting on anything that comes from the structuralists and post-structuralists.

But that's nothing: I think he's so populist he'll have a hard time relating to any postwar humanist writer, or the new guardians of twentieth century history who rose to prominence by dissecting first the Third Reich and then Soviet Communism. He's barely even a functional Marxist when it comes to analysing things.

Magniac said:

I think he certainly had the potential to quit the Left and become a conservative of some type**, which is a problem as--trying not to make a value judgement here--sometimes that sort of move can be finessed by a talented writer, but mostly it can't be. I'm trying to think of a writer who underwent a major ideological change after their career had already reached it's peak and then was able to continue producing relevant work, and I'm not sure there are many. Do Kingsley Amis or John Dos Passos count?

The worst thing that could happen to him is he ends up a bland 'Mrs Thatcher is right!' hack, like the ex-Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt was in his final years.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure I can see Orwell staying on the left, of if he does it'll be - something which I'm surprised you didn't really consider - on a nominal basis.

He branded himself a Tory at one stage in the thirties for a time, did he not, and I've never actually particularly understood what his attachment to Socialism was, as he's always read (and everything I've read about him has suggested that he was) like an anti-establishment reformist Liberal/Tory type to me. I'd guess that that is probably the way he'll go, although whether there will be a 'break' with the left, I'm less certain. As Socialism becomes less of the thing it was in the thirties, and more of the 'norm', both globally and in Britain, will he really be willing to snuggle up to the post-war consensus? I can't really see that.

V-J said:

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure I can see Orwell staying on the left, of if he does it'll be - something which I'm surprised you didn't really consider - on a nominal basis.

Click to expand...

I think him going the Koestler route would probably see him continuing to call himself a socialist even as he loses interest in politics because, well, that's the Orwell brand.

V-J said:

He branded himself a Tory at one stage in the thirties for a time, did he not, and I've never actually particularly understood what his attachment to Socialism was, as he's always read (and everything I've read about him has suggested that he was) like an anti-establishment reformist Liberal/Tory type to me. I'd guess that that is probably the way he'll go, although whether there will be a 'break' with the left, I'm less certain. As Socialism becomes less of the thing it was in the thirties, and more of the 'norm', both globally and in Britain, will he really be willing to snuggle up to the post-war consensus? I can't really see that.

Click to expand...

He was a kind of follower of G.K. Chesterton, which I at first though was merely a display of his inherent communitarianism, but I was intrigued to find that a few modern scholars are convinced Orwell was a seriously hardcore anti-Catholic as much as anything else (my Orwell-obsessive uni professor didn't raise this). Does this mean he flirted with converting to one of the things he hated most?

His attitude towards the post-war consensus will probably be the same as his contempt for the way the wartime coalition ran its affairs. As a newspaper columnist during the second world war he was a big one for promoting Men On Horses, and there are occasions where he was convinced the government absolutely had to replace Churchill with either Cripps or Beveridge (the latter goes some way to supporting your observation about him not being truly Labour.) But he never went out of his way to talk up his friend Nye Bevan, which is odd--or at least politic.

I do think he's going to get along badly in an era of AJP Taylors and Karl Poppers. IIRC he did hate Bertrand Russell, but that might have been primarily because of his raging madness towards pacifists ("they are objectively pro-Nazi.") Yet when the subtler postwar intellectuals take over the chattering classes he's going to spend a lot of time just condemning people for living in ivory towers. That'll define his fifties and sixties more than any useful literary output, I'm afraid.

I am not sure we can assume his political or social leanings are completely cast in stone. He will see America's postwar consumerist prosperity and he may have a very dim view of it. The Cuban missile crisis? The nuclear test ban treaty? These issues will will not be ignored, and his response to them might change our attitudes towards his OTL works.

Along a similar line, if Albert Einstein had lived to 80 (1969) or longer, we would see, more likely than a big revelation in physics, a social activist in beads in San Francisco.

Another concern is whether he'll adapt his OTL pseudonym. Or become the critical writer that we all know and love. If he's better off, he might stick with more mainstream themes and topics and never write anything particularly innovative. (No, I'm not that pesimistic, it's just a possibility.)

I actually have a cameo appearance by Orwell in my European Crimson Skies TL (as a journalist travelling home from Soviet Russia), though he only introduces himself by his real name, Eric Arthur Blair.

He'd likely react badly to new cultural developments, he thought the first Superhero cartoons were 'trash' that were corrupting the youth with sex and violence.

Possibly, if he survives he'd become much less famous. It's more easy for the massive right-wing fanbase to dismiss his leftism if he'd dead, it would also dispel some happy myths, like that he named the main character Winston because he admired Churchill (he didn't) and conspiracy theorists would be less prone to hail him from the rooftops once they discover he was a supporter of European Union.

Perhaps he'll escape back to rural settings, and write more books like Coming Up for Air. Either that, or he'll match Ernst Junger in freakily accurate yet ignored predictions in his post-war novels.