Collected Essays

There are few rewards for the Party faithful except power. Power is seen as an end in itself. The real, undeclared aim of the Party is, we are told, to remove all the pleasure from the sexual act. This startling but negative aim, which Orwell does not consistently pursue, reflects the negativity of power; it is doubtful whether Big Brother actually exists, while higher up officials like O’Brien are merely inquisitors with some new, some ancient, tortures at their command. Orwell can imagine rats but not Stalin.

Power, like money, is useless in itself. There has to be something to spend it on. It is true that ‘purges and vaporizations’ are a part of the mechanism of the Party’s regime of government, but this is scarcely enough to satisfy a Party member. Puritanism is all they get. Orwell himself was possibly dissatisfied with this arrangement. When Smith gets to O’Brien’s flat, we see that it is not as austere as all that. There is wallpaper on the walls, the floors are carpeted, the telescreen can be switched off, the butler pours wine from a decanter, and there are good cigarettes in a silver box. Not sybaritic, exactly; more the sort of thing to which typical Old Etonians (Orwell was an untypical example) could be said to be accustomed.

Even in these elegant surroundings, O’Brien is discovered still working. The proles he helps to oppress enjoy greater freedom.

For the proles in their seedy bits of decaying London there are trashy newspapers, astrology, films ‘oozing with sex’, pornography, rubbishy novels, booze, sport and gambling. These are all in plentiful supply. Orwell shows his traditional mixture of despisal and envy of the working classes; Smith’s attitude is very much that of Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, written thirteen years earlier. Gordon ‘wanted to sink down, down into the muck where the money does not rule’. The proles are free from worries, only the proles have double beds, and no one cares if there are bed bugs. Smith manages to reach that place mentioned longingly by Gordon: ‘down, down, into some dreadful sub-world that as yet he could only imagine’. Orwell did finally imagine it, in his most extraordinary novel, and that repeated ‘down, down’ shows how far the journey was.

One can see how George Orwell enjoyed writing 1984 for its own sake. I believe the prophetic element to be only part of its attraction, and in any case the prophecy was apotropaic, intended to warn. Thus, the more it succeeded in conveying its warning, the less likely was its picture of the future to become reality. Its success is that it fails to paint a true portrait of the true 1984. However grim we may hold our 1984 to be, it is not Orwell’s grimness. We perhaps owe Orwell some gratitude that his widely influential 1984 is not our 1984.

Some commentators have claimed as a weakness the fact that the dialectic of the novel is all with the Party, with O’Brien, with the Thought Police, and that nothing positive is offered by the way of opposition. Such comments show a misreading of the book. In the long line of utopianists, Orwell has an honourable place.

H. G. Wells perceived that for a utopia to exist in a period of rapid communications it had to be world-wide; and for 1905, before the First World War, this was an acute perception. By the late 1940s, after a second World War, Orwell saw that a countervailing paradox was required. His way to happiness on Earth lies in the subversive message which Julia slips Smith in the corridor, a note saying merely I LOVE YOU. And utopia, far from being worldwide, has shrunk to a shabby little room over a shop, with a willing girl, a double bed, and plenty of privacy.

Thus have our expectations diminished over the century.

Such a utopia needs no dialectic. Its strength is precisely that it does not require words. For the true enemy in 1984 is ultimately words themselves, those treacherous words that will serve any vile purpose to which they are put. Even Julia’s message has a taint to it, since its three words hold the most important one in common with that other well known three-worder, the much-feared Ministry of Love: indeed in Smith’s case, one leads almost directly to the other.

In place of words came objects, and the inarticulate life of proledom, personified in the old washerwoman singing under the lovers’ window as she hangs out her washing. It is a distinctly nostalgic substitution. As Smith says, referring to a paperweight he has bought, a piece of coral embedded in glass, ‘If the past survives anywhere, it’s a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there’. Words are the allies of doublethink.

In a television broadcast made over the Christmas period, 1982, the novelist Anthony Burgess claimed to have read 1984 thirty times. He said of it that it was one of those rare books which tells us what we need to know, which informs us of what reality is.

Like all of Orwell’s novels, with the brilliant exception of Animal Farm, 1984 is not a masterpiece judged purely as novel. Judged as a vehicle for putting over what Orwell wished to tell us, for conveying that pungent mixture of squalor, nostalgia, disillusion and analysis of betrayal, it is brilliant.

Although 1984 does not on the surface hold up a mirror to our 1984, I believe that Burgess was right on a more inward plane. In 1948, that drab year best never relived, the novel seemed indeed to be a prediction of the future, exact in each realistic detail. Read in the year of its title, it turned disconcertingly into a secret history of all our lives. For we have lived in a parallel world of political bullying and hypocrisy, of wars and totalitarianism, of cultural revolutions and anti-cultural movements, of blind hedonism and wild-eyed shortage. Even if these things have not overcome us, they have marked us. Our shadows—to use the word in a Jungian sense—have conspired with the Thought Police and the Party. What has happened to us here is, in O’Brien’s words, forever.

We see the novel’s transformation through time: from a prophecy of the future to a parable of our worldly existence, 1948–1984.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of Orwell’s novel now that the year 1984 is over and concentration on it has died away. It would be pleasant to believe that Animal Farm would be more generally read and recognized, for it remains the book on revolution and revolution’s betrayal and one of the seminal fables of our century.

My personal feeling is that 1984 will continue to be read and loved by ordinary people; and this for a good reason. Though we prefer to overlook the fact, many aspects of 1984 closely correspond to the lives of those ‘ordinary people’. For most, life is a battle against poverty, shortages, inadequate housing, ill health. They too experience betrayals which may prove fatal. They too come to experience in their own anatomy—and without needing words—what Julia experienced, a thickened stiffened body, unrecognizable from behind. They too are manipulated by uncaring governments.

In one film version of 1984, the ending showed Smith and Julia reunited, clinging happily to each other, unchanged by their ordeal. We have a contempt of that sort of thing. Not only is such nonsense untrue to Orwell’s novel: it is unfortunately untrue to most people’s experience.

What we value most about Orwell’s work is not its prophecy or even its polemics, but rather the way it faithfully mirrors the experience of the majority of the people.

PEEP (#ulink_cc84dba7-9bb0-51e8-a417-ef6b270449b0)

When James Blish was yielding finally in the battle against cancer which he had fought for many years, my wife and I went to visit him in the ominously named Battle Hospital in Reading, England.

He lay in bed in a towelling robe, dark, bitter, lightweight—intense against the pallid room. As ever, he radiated great mental energy. Books were piled all over the place, by the bedside, on the bed. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West lay open, face down, on the blankets.

Dear Blish! What tenacity of life and intellect! I thought of that incident in Battle Hospital when reading The Quincunx of Time once again. Quincunx is a rare thing, true SF with a scientific basis—the sort of story that readers have always been saying isn’t written any more. And it is something more than that. It is, in a way, gadget fiction; central to it is a marvellous gadget, the Dirac transmitter—but the Dirac leads to deep metaphysical water, into which Blish plunges with glee.

The science chiefly involved is mathematics, proverbially the queen of the sciences. New dimensions of time are opened in the novel; a more complex math has been achieved in the future, in which time is subsumed as an extra spatial dimension. Hence Quincunx’s world-lines. Hence, too, one of its most famous passages, when one of the characters who has been listening to the transmitter declares:

I’ve heard the commander of a world-line cruiser, travelling from 8873 to 8704 along the world-line of the planet Heth-shepa, which circles a star on the rim of NGC 4725, call for help across eleven million light years …

The characters who overhear this extraordinary communication are perplexed, as well they might be. They work out the problem, the solution to which is neat and exciting. Their perplexity springs from the fact that they are looking into a future where different number-worlds from ours prevail. It’s wonderful but also logical: there is not, and there cannot be, numbers as such. The line in italics is not mine but Spengler’s. He put it in italics too.

Spengler amplified his statement by saying, ‘There are several number worlds as there are several Cultures. We find an Indian, an Arabian, a Classical, a Western type of mathematical thought and, corresponding with each, a type of number—each type fundamentally peculiar and unique, an expression of a particular world-feeling …’

Whether or not Blish derived some of his ideas direct from Spengler, we cannot now determine. In this case, it seems likely.

A different cultural base would naturally make the future difficult for us to comprehend, and vice versa. The future will no more understand our compulsion to stock-pile enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over than we understand why the Egyptians built the pyramids.

‘You’ll know the future, but not what it means’, says one of the characters in Quincunx. ‘The farther into the future you travel with the machine, the more incomprehensible the messages become …’

One of the many original features of this novel is that it does actually concern the future. Most science fiction, if it is not fantasy, is about some extension of the present which only by agreement do we call ‘the future’. It catches our attention because we see it in the mirror of the present day. Blish was after something different. Quincunx is like few other fictions, and does not resemble closely anything else Blish wrote.

Another strange feature is the fact that the story is about a galactic empire, although this does not appear to be the case at first. (I anthologized it under its original title, ‘Beep’, in my two-volume Galactic Empires (Avon Books, 1979). Blish solves the vital question of how communications could be maintained over vast distances. The strange thing about Blish’s galactic empire is that it is a utopia. This we have never heard before. Things always go wrong in galactic empires, as we know. In Blish’s empire, things go obstinately right. Instant communication has brought perfect communion.

The long short story ‘Beep’ has been only slightly expanded to make Quincunx. Most of the expansion is in the nature of philosophical exploration of the theme, and includes a portrait of Captain Weinbaum as seen through an extra dimension: ‘a foot thick, two feet wide, five feet five inches in height, and five hundred and eighty-six trillion, five hundred and sixty-nine billion, six hundred million miles in duration’.

Blish in his introduction makes a typically prickly defence of his book, quoting a critic’s comment that it is ‘not redundant with physical action’. That may be so. But ‘Beep’ achieved immediate popularity, and has proved unforgettable. There is no rule which says that science fiction has to be packed with action. Better a tale of real imagination and ingenuity—like this one.

One of the most ingenious features of the original story lay hidden in its title, ‘Beep’. ‘Beep’ contains a wealth of meaning just like the beep in the story. Noise is information in disguise, Blish tells us. To ram the notion home, he has two people in disguise, plus a popular song, also disguised. And free will disguised as rigid determinism.

We are not taken into the galactic empire. All we are allowed is a peep, because we are stuck here in the present, without benefit of Dirac transmitters. But that peep, like the beep, contains infinite worlds, once you consider it.

Quincunx is really a clever bag of tricks. No wonder readers loved it. Its story-line is shaped in an odd spiral, the world-line of which whirls you into a fiery heart of speculation, then out again.

I just wish Blish in his introduction had taken the opportunity to explain his new title, since that task now devolves on me.

The title refers to the five-dimensional framework within which the affairs of the story are conducted. A quincunx is an arrangement of five objects at four corners with one in the centre, in the figure of a lozenge or other rectangle. The structure of the story leads us to believe that Blish may have visualized his small cast of characters set out in some such quincuncial fashion:

This figure lines up the males on the left and the women on the right, with the indeterminate figure of J. Selby Stevens in the middle to represent the vanishing fifth dimension.

Blish seized upon the idea of a mystical all-pervasive quincunx from Sir Thomas Browne’s curious work, The Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincuncial Lozenge (1658). Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, restored the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, planting out saplings in lozenge configurations. Our word ‘Paradise’ comes from the Persian word for garden, and Quincunx depicts a kind of paradise, where sins and crimes are easily forgiven and young lovers have guardian angels—in the shape of Event Police—watching over them.

Browne’s tract is a discourse upon all the manifestations of quincunxes in nature, in mankind, on earth, and in the heavens. According to Browne, it is an all-pervasive sign, although little commented upon. This, of course, fits in with Blish’s conception of the world-lines and the math behind them. Despite all of which, I still think that ‘Beep’ is the better title.

But Blish liked such archaic systems of knowledge as Browne’s, and his books are choked with their fossils. We both had a passion for Browne’s writings, though I lack Blish’s ferocious appetite for archaic systems. Also by his bedside, that last time we saw him in Battle Hospital, lay a copy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Coleridge described this book as ‘sketches of my literary life’, but it consists mainly of discussions of Wordsworth’s poetry and the philosophy of Kant, Schelling, and the German philosophers. I had a vision of Blish about to enter the complex realm of Coleridge’s thought. He seemed too frail to traverse those gusty corridors of metaphysics. Here was one more ramshackle structure of thought, tempting him in. But Time, with which he wrestled in Quincunx and the other works, had run out.

When James Blish and his stalwart wife Judy received visitors in their Harpsden home during the last stages of Blish’s illness, he would not be able to speak at first. In any case, he was not a man all found it easy to feel at home with, though his intimate friends had no problems on that score. When he had drunk a neat tumbler of whisky, he would liven up, and then would begin to talk. He spoke impersonally for the most part, eyes darkly gleaming in his skull; perhaps he could talk about opera, to which he listened on LPs. The operas of Richard Strauss especially appealed to him. He made dry jokes as he went along, creaking with mirth. He had great admirations, great hatreds.

At one time, when our mutual friend, Harry Harrison, was also present, Blish was going on at some length about Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, on which he was an enthusiastic authority.

Harry grew impatient at last.

‘Come on, Jim’, he said ‘it’s only a bunch of krauts singing’.

At which Blish broke off into tremendous fits of laughter.

All Blish’s novels repay reading and re-reading. He was never one of the most popular writers in our field, although his Cities in Flight series received great acclaim, and certainly A Case of Conscience—which won a Hugo Award—became popular even beyond the confines of SF. Perhaps it is because most of his books are ‘not redundant with physical action’ that he has otherwise been less widely enjoyed. He is, however, one of the most original of writers, and The Quincunx of Time one of his most original books.

He would have been delighted to see this new edition.

Time has gone by since the above was written. Books do not get reprinted as once they did, as the babble of voices grows higher. Jim Blish’s name is no longer greatly remembered.