On the 75th anniversary of Orwell's "1984"

His greatest novel, written on the Scottish island of Jura as he was dying, was published in 1949. Among other things, it warns of the danger of re-writing history.

WASHINGTON (AP), March 19, 2024 -- Republican Donald Trump has launched his general election campaign not merely rewriting the history of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack, but positioning the violent siege and the failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a cornerstone of his bid to return to the White House.

At a weekend rally in Ohio, his first as the presumed Republican Party presidential nominee, Trump stood onstage, his hand raised in a salute to the brim of his red MAGA hat, as a recorded chorus of prisoners in jail for their roles in the Jan. 6 attacks sang the national anthem.

An announcer asked the crowd to please rise "for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages." And people did, and sang along. 

"They were unbelievable patriots," Trump said as the recording ended.

Having previously vowed to pardon the rioters, he promised to help them "the first day we get in office."

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is one the great novels of the 20th century. It was the horror story and cautionary tale about a dystopian state, Oceania, ruled by The Party and its omnipotent and omniscient leader, Big Brother. The totalitarian state controls the population through constant surveillance and a vast network of informants. It inculcates in them its twisted ideology through an endless stream of propaganda. The Party has three slogans. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

The story’s protagonist, Winston Smith, works for the Ministry of Truth where he spends his days erasing and re-writing all records of the past to destroy any evidence that the truth was anything other than what Oceania says it is right now. Smith, however, has a mind of his own. He questions and ultimately rebels. In case you haven’t read Nineteen Eighty-Four, I won’t reveal any more of the plot here.

In Orwell’s novel, one of the tricks employed by the repressive state with fiendish effectiveness is the re-writing history. In Oceania, history and even truth itself are mutable.

“If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.”

Orwell was sick and we know now already dying of tuberculosis when he retreated to a spartan, rented house on the remote Scottish island of Jura to write Nineteen-Eighty-Four, a bleak, dispiriting tale composed at a location of staggering beauty.

Nineteen-Eighty-Four was published in June 1949. Soon after, Orwell’s health went into steep decline. He died in a hospital in London the following January. He was 50 years old.

Below is the article I wrote about my trip to the site where Orwell wrote his masterpiece. It first appeared in Facebook Bulletin in August 2022.

George Orwell, photo credit: albee5

A JOURNEY TO JURA, SCOTLAND, WHERE GEORGE ORWELL WROTE NINETEEN-EIGHTY-FOUR

It was 1946 and, by all rights, Eric Blair deserved to be happy. The Second World War was over. England had been battered, but survived. Blair's long writing career had been catapulted by the success of his most recent novel, which was published under his pen name, George Orwell.

Instead, Orwell's life was in tumult. His wife, Eileen, had died suddenly the year before, leaving him to raise their adopted son, Richard, a toddler, alone. One of his sisters died. And the professional success from the publication of his book, Animal Farm, had resulted in heavy demands on his time as a journalist, essayist and commentator.

He longed to escape, to get away from London and focus on writing his next book, a novel.

"Smothered under journalism," he told a friend, according to The Guardian newspaper. "I have become more and more like a sucked orange."

A friend had family property on an island off the west coast of Scotland, Jura. He offered it to Orwell as a place for him to retreat to. That spring, Orwell moved into Barnhill, the house on the property. It was a big house near the northern tip of the remote island. It was a spartan dwelling without heat or electricity. Getting there was difficult. It was four miles past the end of the only road, and 25 miles from the nearest store. Orwell called it "an extremely un-get-at able place." There, he started writing his book. It began with the tentative title, The Last Man In Europe. When it was published three years later, the name would be changed to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell is my favorite writer. I've read most of his novels and essays. He had an ironic sense of humor and a powerful, moral voice. His writing is crisp, clear, and persuasive. It is forceful but without bombast. He was a self-declared democratic socialist who decried fascism, communism, colonialism and inequality. Living in an era of social, economic and political crises, he held that all important writing should be political.

As a stylist, Orwell had no tolerance for the ornamental or artificial. He despised cant.

"Good prose is like a window pane," he once wrote. When I teach news writing, I cite his writing tips from the essay, Politics and the English Language, to impress the value of precision and clarity, and to be vigilant about falling prey to cliches such as, well, "falling prey to."

The west coast of Jura, Photo credit: Ron Claiborne

Seventy-five years ago, it took anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to get to Jura from London. This week, I made the trip in 20 hours. In truth, I could have gotten there in far less time if I had flown to Islay, the neighboring island to Jura, via Glasgow. But I wanted to retrace how Orwell traveled, and take the time to feel its remoteness. So, I took an overnight train to Glasgow, then caught a bus to a town called Lochgilphead, where I hoped to connect to a local bus to the even smaller coastal town of Tayvallich from which there was an evening ferry to Jura.

The bus from Glasgow wove its way through beautiful, lush valleys, beside glistening lochs. London has been in a severe drought and much of its famed greenery is desiccated and sad-looking. Not Scotland. The soaring landscape along the bus route was painted rich shades of green. London was hot. Scotland was refreshingly cool.

I missed my bus connection in Lochgilphead, so I called a car service to take me the rest of the way -- for an astronomical fare. I spent the next four hours killing time in Tayvallich, then caught the ferry. As we approached Jura, I spotted the Paps, three towering mountaintops that I recognized from my research. Their peaks were enshrouded in a band of wispy white clouds. The sky was leaden. Orwell's Jura, I thought to myself. This was my pilgrimage.

Jura Hotel, photo credit: Ron Claiborne

There's only one hotel on Jura, the Jura Hotel in the town of Craighouse, the only town. Across the street is a whisky (no "e") distillery, the Jura Distillery. There's one store, the Jura Community Shop. Only 200 people live on the island, the eighth largest in Scotland. The population is unchanged from when Orwell was there. The people are far outnumbered by the island's 6,000 wild red deer. It feels like time has stood still on Jura.

Photo Credit: Ron Claiborne

The next day, I went on an exploratory walk up the single track road that runs north along the eastern coast. I passed small houses, then larger houses -- some quite opulent -- and then very few houses, then none. To my right lay the glistening Sound of Jura with a scattering of small islands just offshore. To my left were fields and swaths of forest that spread up the side of an incline. The Paps soared in the distance. The scree near their peaks looked almost like snow. The scenery was breathtaking. The weather was perfect.

My room at the Jura Hotel was small, basic, but comfortable and inexpensive. The hotel has a lively pub and a less lively restaurant. It's one of two places where you can get a meal in Craighouse. The food was decent. The service was cheerful and efficient.

I'd heard about a new, mega-golf resort at the southern tip of the island, but I never saw any indication of its existence. The few people who mentioned it invoked the phrase "very exclusive," with a note of mystery, as if it were some Shangri-La about which they'd heard, but weren't entirely sure existed. I wasn't interested. I wanted to see Barnhill.

The town of Craighouse, photo credit: Ron Claiborne

On my third day on Jura, I caught a morning bus -- the bus; there was only one running -- heading north. It was a twisting, turning ride on a road so rough in stretches that it snapped my head like a bobblehead doll and tossed me around the little bus like a toy.

The bus driver was a woman I guessed to be in the early 30's. She told me she was from the "mainland" and was substituting for the regular driver who was on holiday. She hoped that she would be hired for a permanent position.

"I really want this job," she said.

We were passing through a wide valley of thick grass and stands of forest that rose dramatically to a range of mountains.

"It's very pretty," I said. "But it's very quiet."

"I like quiet," she said. "I've had a noisy life."

I got off the bus at the gate to the Lussa gin distillery. A sign said it was three miles to the end of the road. I secured my backpack and started walking. I had gone only about half a mile when a car approached from the other direction. It stopped. I approached the driver, a woman. Her manner was pleasant. Her accent was British.

I asked if this was, in fact, the right way to Barnhill. She assured me it was, then added, almost in embarrassment, "It's my house. I live there."

I walked and walked. Uphill, downhill, again and again, passing through a shady wooded area, then the road turned to skirt the coast, then it bent back inland again. I entered a treeless wide valley, crossing several short, stone-walled bridges over rushing streams. There was absolutely no sound except chirping birds. From a distance, a band of red deer eyed me cautiously.

The paved road came to an end beside a sign that announced that it was four more miles to Barnhill. A pair of cyclists sped past me. Otherwise, I saw no one. I pushed on. The path was strewn with rocks and the footing treacherous. I looked ahead to see where it would lead. It was aimed straight for a mountain several miles away. I became alarmed. If it went up and over that mountain, I was done for.

Luckily, the path turned away from the mountain, taking me instead along its shoulder. Then it descended in the direction of the sound with the mountains of the Scottish mainland beyond.

I was growing impatient. Then, I turned a corner and there it was. Large, solid looking, bright white against a rich backdrop of greenery. Barnhill.

I descended another quarter-mile to the house. A sign warned that it’s a private residence (it is still owned by descendants of the same family). The front of the house opened onto a sloping lawn that tilted down toward the sea. The old house had two wings attached, perpendicular to the main structure. Approaching from behind it, I could see that one of them was open revealing what looked like farming equipment and a stack of cut logs.

Barnhill, photo credit: Ron Claiborne

I continued until I reached a locked metal gate. A sign was attached that read “Private.” So, I stepped into a thicket of vegetation to get a better view of the facade. I stared and made myself imagine the tall, gaunt figure of Orwell walking these grounds, brooding, thinking, smoking, tending his vegetables, hoisting his son on his shoulders and, day after day, contemplating how to tell his story right, in prose as clear as a window pane.

After a while, I turned away and headed in the other direction.

When Orwell moved into Barnhill, he brought only a few items and a motorbike that frequently broke down.

"Orwell relied on Calor gas to cook and heat water, peat and coal to heat the place and paraffin for lanterns," according to Alice Vincent's account in Penguin Press. "Margaret Fletcher, owner of the Ardlussa estate on which Barnhill was located and one of Orwell's nearer neighbours (said), 'He had only his basic needs -- a camp bed, table, a chair or two and a few essential cooking utensils."

He also brought a typewriter onto which he banged out the famous opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

It was a cold, clear April morning and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Month after month, Orwell wrote and rewrote, revised, discarded, started anew.

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness," he wrote in Why I Write. "One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand."

Aside from the self-inflicted torment of writing, Orwell was grappling with real illness, too. He had suffered from lung ailments for many years. Now, in the dankness of his first winter on Jura, his condition got worse. Much worse.

1949 edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four

The story he was telling was about Winston Smith, a mid-level bureaucrat in the futuristic totalitarian state of Oceania, toiling away re-writing documents from the past to conform the constantly changing orthodoxy of the government, which is lorded over by Big Brother. In this futuristic, dystopian London, the people live in squalor and under constant threat by the omnipresent Thought Police and the telescreens in their homes that monitor everything and everyone except the "proles," the impoverished, deliberately uneducated masses. Everyone else has been beaten down and deluded into accepting, even believing the government's lies as truth.

What distinguishes Winston is that he has a dawning awareness that something is amiss. He questions. He wonders if there isn't something more, something better, richer, freer; and whether such a world ever existed as the past is systematically erased. He knows too that he is doomed.

"We are the dead," he says early on to his clandestine girlfriend, Julia.

Photo credit: Ron Claiborne

In 1947, Orwell's son, Richard, and a sister, Avril, joined him at Barnhill. He continued to work on the novel, shaping and re-shaping it. He had many visitors too. Friends would make the arduous journey to visit him. When he wasn't writing, he tended his garden and went for long walks.

Did Orwell know he was dying as he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four? We don’t know. But he must have known that he was very ill and getting worse. He also finally had a diagnosis for his chronic and painful lung ailment — tuberculosis, for which there was no cure at the time.

The book was finished in late 1948. That December, Orwell left Jura for the last time.

When it was published in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was an immediate sensation. But Orwell had little time left to enjoy it. By late 1949, his health was declining rapidly. That fall, he married Sonia Brownell. Soon, he was hospitalized again. His condition became grave. In January of the new year, he died in a London hospital. He was 47.

Since it was published, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been printed in dozens of languages and sold tens of millions of copies. When I was first assigned to read it in school during the Cold War era, I was taught that it was a rebuke to Soviet communism. It is more than that.

The German social psychologist, Eric Fromm, in an afterword to an 1980s edition of the novel, wrote, "It would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and does not see that it means us too.”

Today, we live in a time in which a war of aggression is called by its wagers a “special military operation” and calling it otherwise is punishable by imprisonment. It is a time when the world broils in record breaking heat, yet climate change is still dismissed and vigorously denied by some. Violence is committed in the name of legitimate political expression. Conspiracy theorists spin fantastical tales and they are believed. Fact is dubbed fiction. Lies are called truth.

John Adams said, "Facts are stubborn things. Whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell essentially says, "Don't be so sure about that."

In his essay, In Front of Your Nose, Orwell said, "We are all capable of believing things we know to be untrue and then when we are finally proven wrong, impudently twisting the facts to show we were right.”

As he pushed and punished himself at Barnhill to finish his final masterpiece, with his life leaking away, Orwell tried to warn us.