Reading Orwell as a child
I was about eleven or twelve or perhaps thirteen years old when I first read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It made an indelible impression on me, probably greater than it would have if I’d waited till at least college age. I’m not sure where I picked it up, or why. Had I heard about it somewhere?
I also read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World at around the same time. I didn’t understand it except on a very basic level. Nor did Huxley’s book frighten me; it merely puzzled me and parts of it amused me:
Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children…
But what was this “Our Ford” business? “Alcohol in his blood surrogate”? The references were too sophisticated for me, although years later I appreciated the book and found it fascinating.
But Orwell? Orwell I understood from the start. It cast a terrifying spell, so much so that it colored my days for a while. There were images that gripped me with fear – Room 101, of course, but so much more. Even the ulcer on Winston Smith’s leg, and the grayness of the entire world. The language of Newspeak and its purpose were instantly intelligible, too. And the ending – terrible, terrible.
Perhaps horror is more accessible to a child than satire. And probably the horror was even more comprehensible – on a certain level anyway – because I was a Cold War child. At any rate, it was one of the more influential books I’ve ever read, and I consider it a masterpiece. I read it again as an adult, and understood it on a deeper level intellectually and historically. But I think that when I was a child, my visceral understanding was stronger.
Why am I writing about this now? The other day I was talking to a friend – a well-educated and intelligent friend – and I was illustrating some point by a reference to Orwell’s book. “You know, like the scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four where Winston…” and I saw her look at me blankly. That caused me to ask whether she’d ever read it, and the answer was “I don’t remember, but I don’t think I ever did.”
This friend happens to be a Democrat, although not a leftist. I’ve been talking to her a bit lately about politics, trying to explain my view of how far to the left Democrats have gone. The moment she said that demonstrated to me something I’d already known but hadn’t thought that much about lately, which is that we all draw on our life experiences when we make political decisions. That’s elementary, of course, but what struck me when she said that was that we may assume a certain basic commonality of experience – just from being about the same age and living in the same place, having about the same amount of education, being of similar ethnic background, and being friends – when our experiences are really quite different after all.
For me, Orwell looms large. For her, he barely exists.
[NOTE: I’m aware that reading Orwell at any age does not determine political orientation. For example, a lot of leftists think that Trump is trying to implement some sort of tyrannical regime as in Orwell’s book. Or at least, they say that to gullible listeners.]
Neo wrote: “. . . we may assume a certain basic commonality of experience – just from being about the same age and living in the same place, having about the same amount of education, being of similar ethnic background, and being friends – when our experiences are really quite different after all.”
And herein lies the major benefit the left reaps from having Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” in American high school classrooms. As you said, Neo, you’re a Cold War child. So am I.
I don’t know about you, but I grew up fearing and disliking the ideology that was put out by the Soviet Union. But people who have gone to high school since 1980 have likely been exposed to Zinn’s book, and have the same fear and distaste for America I had for the USSR. They believe America was built on — not merely accepted — exploitation of racial minorities. They believe without hesitation the lies BLM tells, while I do not and never could.
We do not have a commonality of experience with our younger generation. And that might just be an unbridgeable gap.
Can you even find 1984 in a college library any longer? I would think it would be a target for removal.
I read 1984 again lately. It was absolutely terrifying, so close to the modern zeitgeist.
If the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the Presidency, we may yet experience the horrors depicted in 1984. Will they seek to regulate the internet to get rid of conservative sites, reinstate the fairness doctrine to get rid of conservative talk radio and create all kinds of “hate crimes”, where hate amounts to defending conservative principles?
PJ…I did as well…maybe 2 months ago. As a Cold War child I was that 13/14-year-old again reading as if for the first time…but with a lifetime of experience & it scared me.
I used to tutor at the local JC. Something in the problem we were working made me say to the student, “No, 2+2 can’t be 5, this isn’t “1984”. She’s never heard of it either.
Neo
” we may assume a certain basic commonality of experience – just from being about the same age and living in the same place, having about the same amount of education, being of similar ethnic background, and being friends – when our experiences are really quite different after all.”
I am reminded of reading the memoir of Mark Rudd, of Columbia SDS fame. I also heard him speak when I was a college freshman. I wondered how he could have so receptive to the Commie narrative, when at a similar age it had no attraction for me whatsoever. I got the impression that before college he was rather apolitical, and some sort of existential crisis his freshman year- necessitating visits to a psychiatrist- led him to look for lefty politics as a solution.
I also noted that he told of meeting relatives from Europe who had survived the Holocaust, implying that as the USSR fought Nazi Germany, Communism opposed Nazism.
By contrast, I had been very interested in politics before I got to college. A politics course in 9th grade, where I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and also wrote a term paper on Soviet agriculture, leading me to the conclusion that Communism was both evil and also “no way to run a railroad.”
I didn’t know any Holocaust survivors, but had a number of Jewish classmates whose parents had fled Europe before the war began. I also knew a number of Iron Curtain refugees, some of whom were parents of my classmates. I knew refugees from Estonia who as children had endured both Hitler and Stalin, so I saw Communism and Nazism as 2 sides of a no-win coin. Which also helps explain why I never fell for the Commie narrative, as did Mark Rudd.
If your friend didn’t recall 1984, she wasn’t as well-educated as assumed. I read 1984 in 10th grade- not for a class. Need to reread.
I read “1984” on my own in 8th grade. (I tend to remember when I did things by grade, not age.) It was indeed horrifying.
The book was never assigned in school. I guess the sexuality would have been tough in a Catholic school. I believe we read “Animal Farm” instead. But by the time I graduated high school, most of my friends had read “1984” because we knew it was an important book and we read books.
Here’s David Gelernter, speaking of his Yale students in 2015:
__________________________________________________
I’m a teacher of college students. I’m lucky to be at one of the best colleges in the world, at Yale. Our students are as smart as any in the world. They work very hard to get here. They are eager, they’re likable. My generation is getting a chip on its shoulder, we always thought we knew everything about every topic, our professors were morons, and we were the ones who were building the world.
My students today are much less obnoxious. Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century – just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let’s say, at all. I mean, these are people who – we have failed.
https://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/david-gelernter-transcript/
__________________________________________________
Geez. Beethoven!
I too read 1984 fairly young: 15, I’ll guess. It was on the bookshelf at home and I think I thought it was science fiction– which it is, but not exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. As with all of you, it made a huge and permanent impact on me. I think it’s part of the reason why even as an alienated hippie I never for a moment took communism and the communist countries as good things.
What has really struck me about the hysterical anti-Trump use of the book over the past few years is that the people doing that have clearly either not read or did not understand it.
I had the same reactions to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. I understood the latter to be even more dystopian than the former.
And, I read them at about the same point in my life as neo — in junior high school.
I think there are four essential books that must be read–and as far as I know have never been required reading anywhere:
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm; Huxley’s Brave New World; and Ayn Rand’s We the Living.
I read them all one after the other.
We can be proud of what we have read. So what? The streets of many cities are ruled by illiterate monsters. They want to branch out to suburbia and small towns. If djt is reelected or SloJo wins it will get worse. You need the ability to administer high velocity lead injections.
To think otherwise is to be a fool.
F,
High School??? I was first exposed to Zinn’s “People’s History” in sixth grade. Granted, I grew up in a very lefty college town. My assumption is public schools (even in otherwise conservative areas) are pumping Zinn into children in the primary grades now.
huxley,
No comment on when you read, “Brave New World?”
There is a sign in front of a neighborhood house that says, “Keep Orwell fiction.” This same house had a Buttigieg sign up for the primary.
There are (too) many people who believe Trump is leading the way to 1984.
Which side endorses Speech is Violence as well as Silence is Violence? Which side calls violent protests as peaceful protests? Which side endorses cancelling and doxing people for speech or actions they disapprove of?
Which side controls most of the media and culture in the country? Which side has a stranglehold on education that influences the young?
With all of that, people still believe Trump is a dictator. No matter what happens or what they control, Orange Man Bad.
I remember being at my mother’s parents’ house when I read, “Brave New World,” but I don’t remember how old I was. I got it. And it stayed with me; made me think, but I don’t recall associating it with politics much. To me it seemed more universal regarding human nature.
I was 23 when I read Ayn Rand’s, “Atlas Shrugged.” Couldn’t put it down. Ripped through it (as much as one can rip through Rand’s often absurdly repetitive text) and it really hit me. Got into my dreams. Can’t say it changed my personal outlook. I didn’t become egotistical, or obsessed with my own individualism, but it did help me to see it’s O.K. to be monomaniacal about important things and that wealthy people can sometimes be good and it’s not wrong to want personal success. The politicians’ behavior in Rand’s story is eerily similar to present times.
P.J. O’Rourke, of all people, is probably the author who most shaped me politically. He wrote for “Rolling Stone” so reading him seemed O.K., cool. And he was funny. He showed me the corruption often involved with foreign aid. The selfishness of so many of our politicians. The importance of not taking people at their word, but thinking through the true pros and cons of what they are advocating.
I’ve never read, “1984,” but I tend to remedy that soon.
Ackler:
From what I have read about it, “Peoples History” is used in high school history classes. More than that I don’t know. It’s scary to think students might be exposed to it in sixth grade. Ugh.
The 1984 that I read had an intro by a left democrat. He argued that although people think Orwell was talking about Communism, actually the book fit American corporations just as well. For example, doublethink explained why a Ford exec would claim wholeheartedly that their cars were WAY better than GMs even though they were all pretty much the same.
I don’t recall him ever explaining about how Ford sent people to Room 101, or caused people to live in poverty, or spied on their private lives.
btw, I just came across this today.
Orwell wrote a book review of Mein Kampf.
In 1940, after England was at war with Germany. Before the USSR was at war with Germany.
Discussed here. About 16 minutes
https://youtu.be/LA4gI69CMsg
I read it in my early teens – I don’t specifically remember when, but it made an impression.
I picked it up again about 15 years ago; it was incredibly bracing.
Since then, I pick it up every few years and find something new and telling. Part III is really the most revealing. At some level, the entire book exists to advance Goldstein thesis and O’Brian rebuttal as explained to Smith.
It seems quite apt right now, but then as now, becoming sensitized to and wary of the threat necessarily means getting agitated and jumping at shadows and noises in the night.
I can’t tell if the things lurking in the shadows these days are real or how big and terrible they really are. But at least we can’t say we weren’t warned.
No comment on when you read, “Brave New World?”
Rufus T. Firefly: Fair enough with my pseud!
That was 9th or 10th grade. I was impressed with “Brave New World,” though I didn’t understand a fair amount. I must admit I didn’t really get the Savage’s unhappiness. Let’s say that a bland, comfortable, hi-tech world with lots of available sex had a certain appeal for me at that age.
The Huxley book which changed my life I read in 12th grade — “Island.” This was Huxley’s last novel and he packed it with as much wisdom as he had garnered in his deep, varied life. It was a Utopian novel about an island paradise, Pala, which, by its unlikely history, had managed to combine the best of the West with the best of Buddhism.
It wasn’t a fairy tale like William Morris’s “News from Nowhere.” There was still tragedy and sorrow in Pala, but its inhabitants met both with a positive attitude and more importantly with the best practices of the East and West, which Huxley had spent half his life researching.
Pala sounded possible and oh, how I wanted to live there. I never stopped searching for Pala, though it appears I may run out of time.
Sleep well, Uncle Aldous.
eeyore mood:
And it’s the left in the US that has the Two Minutes’ Hate – although it lasts a lot longer than two minutes.
Brave New World: “Let’s say that a bland, comfortable, hi-tech world with lots of available sex had a certain appeal for me at that age.”
That’s about all I recall, too.
Does anyone recommend reading again? Is there more to it, now that we’re older/wiser?
Yikes, Neo! No, not all of us have read “1984”. I have not. Purposefully. I did read “Animal House”…and many many other books including most of Rand’s. My parent’s escaped a communist country and I have been an anti-marxist my whole life. I did not need to read it. And sadly, I know many that did and the reading didn’t give them any kind of profound philosophical/political breakthrough-but then they were progressives from the get go, and short of them having to live in their mistakes, nothing will change them. More and more I believe one is genetically or characterologically predisposed to being pro-freedom vs pro-statist.
Rufus T. Firefly: I read Ayn Rand’s “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” in my college freshman and sophomore years. I was pretty far down the hippie road then, but her books still affected me.
I was uneasy about Rand, but I was also aware I didn’t have good rebuttals beyond there are times when people can’t take care of themselves, such as children. It seemed to me you couldn’t walk past them, drop a copy of “The Virtue of Selfishness” into their laps and feel your job was done.
Nonetheless, there was a hard truth to Rand’s teaching which I found echoed in more counter-cultural figures like Fritz Perls, Stephen Gaskin, Werner Erhard and Tony Robbins. I connected those dots later.
Ayn Rand was a wild woman, not without faults. I count her as one of my teachers.
From reading the comments, I get the impression that most of us who read 1984 before college did so on our own, not as a school assignment. Good news: kids who read on their own. Bad news: HS English or History departments didn’t consider the book worthy.
I never read Brave New World. Hearing in HS about “the feelies” didn’t attract me. It also sounded like sci fi, and I was never a sci fi fan.
eeyore mood
There is a sign in front of a neighborhood house that says, “Keep Orwell fiction.” This same house had a Buttigieg sign up for the primary.
Buttigieg’s father was a college professor of the Marxist persuasion, which further heightens the irony.
I read “1984” when I was in 10th grade right after reading “Animal Farm” which had a bigger impact on me because of how the piggies got power. Then I re-read it when I was in Poland in 1998 on a work assignment. Talking with the Polish people about life under communism was a real revelation. The despair, lies and what you had to do to survive was real and palpable. That is when I really appreciated America and our system of government.
Additionally I lived in Krakow and my neighborhood was where they filmed “Schindler’s List”. My factory was 15 miles from Auschwitz and I took many a trip there when expat’s came to town. It doesn’t get easier the more you visit. So I saw the evils of both sides of Totalitarianism first hand.
If you can’t have a friend read “1984” the John Hurt, Richard Burton film released in 1984 is a good proxy. People will commit to watching a film over reading a book and hopefully it will have them read the book. Warning it does have graphic nudity as the book does too. It is available on You Tube and Amazon Prime. The drab dilapidation shown is real. In 1999 I saw buildings with shell pockets in Warsaw, Gdansk, Lwow and East Berlin.
Anywhere atheistic totalitarianism is practiced the result is the same. Lives are drab, sad and gray EXCEPT for those on top. The nomenclatura. People who are appointed and believe they know what is good for us. Sound familiar? They are better educated (supposedly) and more urbane than the great unwashed masses that they can smell at Walmart.
In the film the difference in living conditions from Winston to O’Brien was stark. I saw that in Poland where the apparatchiks lived vs. the proletariat. That is our future if Biden and the democrats win. It is that stark. Look at California and New York for a vision of our future if he wins.
Gringo:
If you were to read Brave New World now, you might find it very good.
See this.
JimNorCal:
See my comment to “Gringo” above this one.
Brave New World is written with a much lighter, satiric touch compared to Orwell. But it is also profound, and in some ways it describes what has happened to us more closely than Nineteen Eight-Four does. Huxley’s book is about the loss of freedom of thought, not through terror but through luxury, protection, central planning, and mind-training by those in charge. And it’s got some humor as well, which isn’t the case for Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In my bookshelf, I’ve placed the two books next to each other, I see. And I think my copy of Brave New World is the original paperback I read over half a century ago, looking very worn and bearing a price tag of fifty cents.
Does anyone recommend reading again? Is there more to it, now that we’re older/wiser?
JimNorCal: I’ve never felt much impetus to reread “Brave New World,” though it pains me to say so. It was a novel of ideas and I had trouble believing the characters.
This was Huxley’s weakness as a novelist past the early satires. Lord, I’ve tried to reread “Point Counterpoint” and “Eyeless in Gaza” too. At this point I’m sticking with Huxley’s essays, “Island” and for wicked fun when Huxley was a young satirist with an acid tongue, “Crome Yellow.”
You might be better off reading his later essay, “Brave New World Revisited.”
huxley:
I LOVE Crome Yellow. I’ve recommended it to many people but I don’t think any have read it. So clever, and the stories-within-the-stories are great. Remember Sir Hercules?
Another book that Orwell wrote “Homage to Catalonia” that was his experiences fighting the fascists in Spain. His total disillusionment when he saw the purges Soviets did to control the republican movement comes through. That is when he became a committed anti-totalitarian.
Little noted but during WWII George Orwell did a series of BBC broadcasts that explained the evils of totalitarianism not just Nazism. They were an excellent dissection of that political system. I read a few.
It escapes me now but there was a great biography of Orwell by ?Baumgardner? that I can’t find for the life of me. It was a lot better than Hitchens “Why Orwell Matters” done in 2003.
Well, neo’s recommendation makes me rethink the virtues of “Brave New World.”
I’m pretty saturated with Huxley. I’ve read all the novels, the major essays and three biographies, so to a point I am jaded.
Sure, take a shot at BNW. Maybe I will too.
Every Latvian i know has a copy of the Gulag Archipelago…
Few people know Gustaw Herling’s “A World Apart”….
Many know 1984…
Evgenia Ginzburg’s “Journey into the Whirlwind”????
I’ve given up listing great readings no one reads..
Its why i am useless nothing now..
If you want to be REALLY creeped out about Huxley, learn the finer details of his family…
interesting Latvian reading…
Huxley knew a lot of well-known people and, understandably, inserts them in his novels.
“There’s the fascinating (though one’s tastes may differ) Bloomsbury set, whom he knew intimately and describes, often mockingly, in his earliest works.
“Point Counterpoint” features a mercurial character based on D.H. Lawrence.
“Eyeless in Gaza” (I believe) features a character based on F.M. Alexander.
(And then, I imagine, there are his psycho-tropic colleagues who pop in and out of his later works….)
I found BNW a bit too satirical and at the same time pedantic. I guess I like my dystopias “neat”.
Just curious. Has anyone read Thomas Constain’s “Silver Chalice”? That and “Son of a Hundred Kings” were some of the best books I read as a teenager. I found them when I raided my mother’s book club library for something to read. I read them once every other year and still enjoy them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_B._Costain
ps. don’t ever see the movie of “Silver Chalice” that introduced Paul Newman. It was bad beyond words. Bad, not just good bad but thoroughly bad.
neo: Lawsy! You are only the second person I know who read “Crome Yellow.” The first person had already read more books than I’m ever going to read.
Some of the fun of “Crome” is that it’s based on real people linked to the famous Bloomsbury group. As a small side project I’m fleshing that out. Mary Bracegirdle is supposed to be Dora Carrington. There was a good, fun 90s film, “Carrington,” about her and other Bloomsburyites, which I recommend.
In those days Huxley was a dangerous man to invite to a country house weekend.
I confess I’ve forgotten the Sir Hercules angle, but my current audiobook, Zelzany’s first Amber series, is nearing completion. I’ll cue up “Crome Yellow” next!
I’ve given up listing great readings no one reads..
Its why i am useless nothing now..
Artfldgr: If Covid ever ends and Tony Robbins is still in business, I’ll pay for you to attend “Unleash the Power Within,” if you’re interested and promise to be there for the full weekend.
Oh, and the other Tony Robbins’ requirement is to “Play Full Out!”
My memory, which could be wrong, was that Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm were all assigned reading in the (private) junior high or high schools I attended. Anyway it seemed like all of my friends read them. Politics weren’t a thing in the 60’s like they are now.
Re Aldous Huxley, reading “The Doors to Perception” started me down a very bad road….
Artfldgr: “Every Latvian i know has a copy of the Gulag Archipelago…”
Funny you mention Latvia. Up until 9th grade in 1963, I went to a very small rural school in the deep south. I can’t imagine how this came to be, but one day we had a Latvian come in to give us a talk about communism and what had happened to his country. I’ll guess I was 11 or 12, maybe a bit older. So let’s say it was ca 1960. I had never heard of Latvia and I don’t remember anything specific about what the guy said, though I still have an out-of-focus mental image of him. But it made a big impression on me. I think it was another of the things that sort of inoculated me against falling for communism.
Terrible to think that today 12 year olds are being affected in the same way by Zinn, 1619 Project, etc.
Little known trivia (but probably half of the group here know it):
JFK, Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis all died on the same day.
Facebook has decided to suppress speech of extremists on both ends of the political spectrum, sort of. I think that’s sort of Orwellian.
https://justthenews.com/nation/technology/facebook-cracking-down-antifa-removes-nearly-1000-affiliated-groups
huxley:
The Sir Hercules part is one of those side-stories. Here it is in its entirety. A tour de force.
“reading “The Doors of Perception” started me down a very bad road….”
Sorry to hear that. It’s been decades but my experience was overwhelmingly positive.
I read both of them around the same age you did, in the 1960’s. The tracking system in my school was alive, well, large and in charge.
Remember thinking “Beta! Cool!”.
“There are (too) many people who believe Trump is leading the way to 1984.” eeyore mood
That’s a tragic combination of projection and willful blindness.
Trump is trying to prevent America from sliding off the cliff into the Left’s 1984.
Most liberals may simply be suffering from TDS but clearly at least some liberals sense that the Left is leading/forcing America toward a 1984 reality. Unable to face the predictable results of the Left’s agenda, they project it upon Trump, which allows them to remain willfully blind to the path they are enabling.
I also read 1984 on my own. I was 17. I always went to highly ranked schools, but assigned reading from year to year is often up to the individual departments or the teachers themselves. I loved 1984. I found it to be beautifully written – that was what mattered to me when I was 17. It’s been one of my favorite books ever since I read it. It’s the only book I remember making me tear up at the end.
I also hear often that “A People’s History of the United States” is used as a school textbook, though I wonder how widespread it really is. It was never used in my classes, and I never saw any other students with it growing up. I’ve only seen adults reading it.
“Widely Adopted History Textbooks” http://historytextbooks.net/adopted.htm
“What Are the Best AP US History Textbooks” https://blog.prepscholar.com/what-are-the-best-ap-us-history-textbooks
“Is book by Howard Zinn the most popular high school history textbook?” https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/apr/15/rick-santorum/book-howard-zinn-most-popular-high-school-history-/
I’m surprised that, even if people haven’t read 1984, they haven’t seen the movie with John Hurt as Winston Smith. It is regularly on the various movie channels. Movie is as impactful and scary as the book.