What if the past has already disappeared? For me, there is one passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four which outdoes all the rest of the book. Telescreens, torture in the Ministry of Love, Newspeak, and the rest of them are all very well. But even now, when aspects of them have begun to come true, they feel remote from my comfortable 2024 life. The few pages which live most strongly for me are those when Winston Smith ventures into a proletarian bar and there tries to question an old man about the past. The conversation is a disaster, reminding me of Lewis Carroll’s poem about the “aged, aged man / a-Sitting on a gate”, who despite being thumped on the head and shaken hard from side to side can emit nothing but drivel about who he is and what he does. Unlike most of the rest of Orwell’s rather heavy-handed volume, the conversation in the pub is actually quite funny, if you know anything about British politics (especially the passage about Top Hats and Hyenas). It is sometimes lyrical. I love Orwell’s description of the sort of things people actually do remember: “A million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago.”
But the big things just go out of mind, and people get used to novelty in public affairs with amazing willingness. A new liturgy or a sudden unexplained change in English grammar which, in a matter of days, replaces the older style, very soon become commonplace for most people. Many Anglicans came to accept, with barely a sigh, the systematic suppression of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. And then there is language itself. For example, for the first fifty or so years of my life the verb “commit” was reflexive. You committed yourself, and I committed myself. Then, one day, everybody in public life and the media dropped the reflexive pronoun. It happened much as yellow became a fashionable color in women’s clothes, and “taupe,” whatever that is, ceased to be. Are there committees which decide this?
Far worse, when I mention these events to people, they look at me as if I am mad. They are unaware of the change. We have always been at war with Eastasia, as it were. The same thing happened with the word “lichen.” All through my school days and teens, this rhymed with “kitchen.” Suddenly it began to rhyme instead with, well, “liken.” I know English has no rules, but if “ich” is now to be pronounced “ike,” I don’t know where we will end up, especially the rich. People simply don’t believe me when I say it was once different. The same problem arises if I muse that The Times of London until recently spelled “connection” “connexion”—let alone that it used to have nothing but small advertisements on its front page or that it printed off a special final “Royal Edition” on heavy, creamy paper, in the early hours of each morning, to be delivered to Buckingham Palace, Downing Street, and other favored addresses. Again, I seem to be “the last alive that knows it”, like the decrepit beggar in the (likewise forgotten) John Masefield poem “Spanish Waters”. He knows where the buried treasure is but cannot hope to reach it before he dies in destitution.
Only awkward persons, such as I am, are pained or troubled by such changes, disappearances and modifications, wondering what they are for and remembering what they replaced. This is why a despairing Comrade Smith (whose curiosity will of course bring him to a sticky end) concludes that “Within twenty years at the most . . . the huge and simple question, ‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’ would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another.”
And it is very much a matter of “before the revolution.” For we have had several. This would be a wonderful opportunity to muse on the disappearance of paraffin stoves, steamrollers, signal boxes, and collar studs, but it is language, popular culture, and knowledge that I am more worried by. The other day I wrote an article for Another Publication in which I recalled the rivers of drivel to which I had been subjected as a childish T.V. watcher in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Much of this electronic bilge took the form of advertisements, for cigarettes and ladies’ underwear (promoted in those times with what now seems to be astounding frankness), for instant coffee, and various types of beer. The slogans and jingles were especially memorable, as of course they were meant to be. But after my article was published, some of my older colleagues, with actual gray hair and bulging midriffs, confessed to me that they had never heard of several of the products and commercials I had mentioned. I am already sinking into my own past, a warm quicksand of memories apparently shared by . . . nobody at all. Well, who cares if the words “This is luxury you can afford—by Cyril Lord!” (a commercial for cheap carpets) has vanished from the public mind. It is not exactly the Magnificat, and the carpets involved did not look very appealing.
But I find the fog of unknowing affects much deeper things. Take the Hungarian author and journalist Arthur Koestler. In what I might call my formative years, Koestler was a giant, especially because of his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, about the fate of an Old Bolshevik, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov. It was perhaps the most devastating literary blow ever aimed at Communist tyranny, and some believe it fatally wounded the French Communist party when it was published in Paris in the 1940s—not a bad day’s work for any writer. Rubashov, probably modeled on Nikolai Bukharin, is compelled by his own Leninist logic to confess to ludicrous crimes alleged against him by what is obviously Stalin’s N.K.V.D., though the U.S.S.R. is never named. This is bad enough. But what is far worse is that this lie will conquer free minds. The reader knows, because it happened, that many in the democratic world will believe Rubashov’s lies, as many gullible “progressives” in free countries did indeed credit Stalin’s Moscow trials. Then, after Stalin became the indispensable ally of the democracies after 1941, even more people, far beyond the political left, needed to disbelieve the truth about him. We could surely not be the mighty army of democracy if we were allied to this grisly monster. So he ceased, in our minds, to be a monster. This long season of credulousness, still not entirely finished, is probably the worst aspect of the whole dismal series of events which Koestler sought to portray in a book written in a great hurry as war approached. It is, by the way, an enthralling work, though literary purists like to dwell on its faults. I found, when I re-read it this summer after many years of neglect, that I recalled almost every important moment in it, yet was still held, right to the end, by the sheer concentrated intelligence and understanding it conveys.
Koestler, I think, knew that it was what he had been born to do. Somehow, as he lived his rackety, nomadic exile life (at one stage supporting himself by writing sex manuals) he had to get it published in English before the approaching disaster arrived. It was Koestler’s final farewell to his own Communist past. Unusually, Koestler also wrote a sort of biography of the book, another work of genius called Scum of the Earth, which is by far the best portrayal of the miserable, confused final months of poor France, unwillingly fighting a war it knows it will lose. In this account of arrests, escapes, deceptions, and disappointments, he confesses to a moment of despair and a serious suicide attempt (he would, many years later, die by his own hand). He tries to take his own life amid the ruins of the French Republic, because he is told, falsely as so often happens in war, that the ship to England carrying his girlfriend and translator, Daphne Hardy, has been torpedoed. He thinks she has died and the manuscript has been lost. And so he reaches for the poison he has carefully kept for such a moment. It fails to kill him.
I always assumed (experts tell me I am wrong, but I’m sticking to it ) that the unforgettable title of the novel (chosen by Hardy) was a reference to Luke 23:44-45: “And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.” The more accepted version is that the origin is an obscure passage from Job 5:14: “They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night”, which you may believe if you wish, just as you may mispronounce “lichen.” For me, the whole point of it is that, for Koestler and any thinking person, the secular god of Communism died with the Stalin–Hitler pact of August 1939. It is that evil religion of utopian ends justifying any means at all which Rubashov has pursued, with nauseating enthusiasm. And it is that belief which in the end compels him to justify his own murder by the secret police, and the humiliating public lies he must tell before he is shot. Koestler was not, for many reasons, tempted by Christianity, but he could see its countervailing power. A careful reading notes the persistence of Christian imagery and morality, notably the Pieta, as the only other great guiding moral and political idea of any significance in the world.
Well, there you are anyway. For a large part of my life, this potent political novel, and its accompanying volume Scum of the Earth were vital parts of human knowledge and understanding. Where I found people who had not read both or either, I pressed these works on them. When I found people who had read them, I knew I was in good company, among the undeceived, and the hard-to-deceive. For me, Koestler was a narrow but firm bridge from the Bolshevism of my past to the lawful social democracy and then to the Christianity which sustain me now. But I now find, even among the educated, many who simply have not heard of him or his greatest book. The whole giant dilemma of 1939 is a mystery to them, as obscure as the Diet of Worms or the Defenestration of Prague, if not more so. The very existence of a homicidally cruel French concentration camp at Vernet in 1939, in which the Third Republic imprisoned Koestler, silencing his voice and almost preventing his book from being written, defies the modern mind. It is a mystery so deep and inexplicable, so inconsistent with the current official myth of these years, that it is easier not to know it.
Has Koestler’s slow disappearance happened because he turned out to be such a bad man? I never doubted it anyway. He was for some years a wily and knowing propagandist for the Communist movement. His own self-description, especially of his feral cunning when he escaped from internment and death in 1940 Paris by sheer nerve, suggests a person without any fundamental scruples. Biographies after his death have revealed a man who was often shamefully brutal to women, in some cases an actual rapist. I do not myself find this an unbearable paradox. It may well be that those who know for certain that they can do wicked things are—if they choose—more capable of confronting the great moral questions than those who have never done anything seriously bad at all. This does not wipe away their wickedness. But it also does not mean that we can cancel out any good they may have done, to make ourselves feel more pure. And have we not now agreed that men can do terrible things and paint good paintings, carve fine sculptures, or write great books? The evil actions remain bad, and the works remain good, because God has allowed us the freedom to be good and bad, wrong and right, in the same life and sometimes even during the same long, grueling day.
No, I think Koestler is increasingly forgotten because there has never been a time when the past has been such an unmapped mystery to the young and to the middle-aged. Hardly anyone now knows what she or he ought to know, ought to have read, ought to have seen. Around 1989, a great fog descended over the past, not just of human action, but of human thought. From Darkness at Noon, we have come to a world where a thick smog of unknowing lies all around us from first light till sunset. Yet we think we see clearly.
