The Last Man in Europe Read online

  There was nothing to be done but sit there and take it.

  Wells turned a few pages and continued, his voice – similar in pitch to Orwell’s but noticeably less public school – becoming increasingly dismissive. ‘“Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this.” So says Orwell.’

  Wells turned a page. They sat, no one daring to move.

  ‘“The singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now.” This is Orwell.’

  ‘I did write some decent things among all that criticism …’

  Wells ignored him and flicked more pages, before standing up for the denouement. ‘“Wells is too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began again …”’ Wells threw the magazine down on the table and completed the sentence, as if from memory: ‘“… and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons.” So says Mr George bloody Orwell!’

  They sat in silence for nearly a full minute.

  ‘Well, Orwell, what have you to say? Damned cheek, don’t you think, to invite a man into your home after writing something like that?’

  ‘Actually, you were invited before I wrote it,’ he replied. ‘You did give me the book and ask my opinion. Anyway. One must write as one sees it; personal feelings can’t come into it. It certainly wasn’t my intention to offend—’

  ‘It may not have been your intention, Orwell, but it was your effect. Diplomacy isn’t your strength, that’s obvious.’

  ‘I’m sorry, H.G., but I have to stand by every word. I’m the greatest admirer there is of your work—’

  ‘Only some of it, it seems.’ Wells looked down at the novel and pen and pushed them further away.

  ‘Oh, no. Never stops rereading your books, H.G.,’ said Eileen. ‘It’s like being married to a schoolboy sometimes – he’s always flying off to some other world. Hard to get him back usually.’

  ‘I think it’s pretty clear the world of science and progress you foretold hasn’t quite turned out as we’d all hoped,’ Orwell said.

  ‘Nonsense, Orwell. People live incalculably better now.’

  ‘Really? Did you notice the bomb craters on the way here this evening? Half of London lies in ruins thanks to the invention of the aeroplane.’

  ‘As I predicted in The Shape of Things to Come. You saw the movie! So don’t call me naive. I won’t have it.’

  ‘You got it half-right, H.G. But science is in the service of tyranny, not democracy. Freedom won’t automatically be the victor. You’ve been to Russia; you’ve met Lenin and Stalin. You ought to know.’

  ‘Yes, and I thought them dangerous fools. Reason will win out, Orwell. We must keep urging it. You’re a defeatist. A defeatist!’

  ‘You must retract, H.G.,’ Empson broke in. ‘The chap fought in Spain.’

  ‘With Eileen,’ said Inez.

  ‘Bagged a few fascists too, as I read,’ said Empson. ‘And nearly some communists.’

  ‘It’s true. Saw him in the trenches with my own eyes,’ Eileen said. ‘And smelled him. Squalid business.’

  Wells loosened a little. ‘Alright, then, I apologise. But tell me, what does your future look like, Orwell? I guess we’re going to hear about it sooner or later. What’s your utopia?’

  A utopia. As a child he’d been fascinated by the idea – thanks mainly to Wells himself. Mankind starting all over again, creating a new world, free of human vices, with hope triumphing over human folly. Like every literate child of his generation, he’d harboured a secret desire to write such a book himself, but the juvenile nature of it soon became obvious and he had surrendered the notion along with short trousers. Since then he hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. Gloominess, not jolly optimism about the future, was his thing.

  ‘There’s not going to be a utopia,’ he told Wells. ‘The future’s going to be much like the present, except maybe amplified. Unless—’

  ‘How? How like the present?’

  ‘The shabbiness, the food queues, the endless wars, the leader worship, the watery beer and plastic meat we’re forced to eat.’

  ‘But why? All that’s just the effect of the war. It’s temporary. The way for mankind is up.’

  ‘Because emotion, not reason, is what governs men. A world state governed by the wise … It’s impossible! But if—’

  ‘But how does emotion govern us? Why can’t we change? Look at the progress man has made.’

  ‘Look, H.G., I’m trying to answer, but every time I explain how, you ask why – and every time I explain why, you ask how. The way I see it, progress is just another bloody swindle.’ He paused. ‘The past was better. Infinitely better.’

  Empson belched and began to talk. ‘Come on, H.G., don’t be so hurt. He’s got a point. Saw it myself in China. Bloody mess: communists on the one side, Japanese militarists on the other, both claiming to modernise the place. Absolute shambles. I read George’s essay too.’

  ‘It seems the whole of London did.’

  ‘George really did say such nice things about you too. You didn’t read those passages out.’

  Empson picked up Wells’ copy of Horizon and flicked through it. ‘“Up to 1914 –”’ Empson let out another belch – ‘“Up to 1914 Wells was in the main a true prophet. In physical details his vision of the new world has been fulfilled to a surprising extent.” A chap can’t be much more generous than that.’ Empson turned the pages. ‘Yes, here it is. “All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr Wells says; but the sensible men have no power, and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves.”’ Empson set the magazine down. ‘You see, he’s not saying you’re the problem, H.G., but that the rest of us are inadequate. Especially the politicians.’

  Wells theatrically surrendered. He reached across the table, seized the book and pen and signed it. ‘There you go, Orwell. The Sleeper Awakes, autographed copy.’

  ‘And anyway, you must make allowances for George,’ Empson went on. ‘He’s an Etonian, and they’re trained as sprogs to be blunt. They don’t mean it. Do you, George?’

  ‘Well, I suppose my manners aren’t so good on paper.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. You should see what George wrote about Auden and Spender, H.G. Called them pansies.’

  ‘A “gutless Kipling”, wasn’t it?’ said Eileen.

  ‘Yes, but he apologised and now they’re all the best of chums. Come on, H.G., have some scotch.’ Empson lurched at the decanter and managed to pour everyone a measure without spilling any. Wells drank his down.

  ‘Every thinking person agrees with you, H.G.,’ said Orwell. ‘It’s just that the thinking people are not the ones in charge. You know, we really want the same sort of world – some form of socialism and cooperation. It’s our only hope. It’s just that I have a different idea about how we’ll get there.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘We’ll probably need to fight the communists first. Then reinstate a little of the world Polly and Kipps lived in. By which I mean keep the Royal Family, the House of Commons, all the judges in their horsehair wigs and so forth. As well as nationalise the mines, the banks and Eton.’

  ‘You see,’ said Empson, ‘there’s plenty to agree on.’ He topped up everyone’s glasses again. ‘We should all drink to something. What will it be, H.G.?’

  ‘Yes, H.G.,’ said Inez, warmly. ‘What?’

  He thought for a moment, then stood and held up his glass. ‘To the future.’

  ‘And to the past,’ Orwell added.

  3
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br />   London, June 1942. With Eileen he took an early tube to work, taking care not to disturb the drowsy families who had spent the night on their mattresses on the platforms, sheltering from the Luftwaffe’s bombers, even though the raids by now had become little more than a nuisance that interrupted one’s sleep.

  They emerged from the sandbagged station into the West End and passed the hole in the ground where the John Lewis store had been. He’d begged on this very spot once, when tramping, and recalled how after one of the big raids back in ’41 a pile of mannequins rescued from the store had been stacked neatly on the pavement like bleached corpses, and how he had absentmindedly kicked a loose hand into the gutter. At 200 Oxford Street, the old Peter Robinson department store, he kissed Eileen on the cheek and descended the stairs to his office. The army of hideously fat charwomen, one of whom must have been a yard across the hips, was already hard at work, singing in chorus as its members swept the passages with their brooms. It was one of the romantic tunes from an American musical that had become ubiquitous. The only uplifting time of the day to be here, he thought.

  In the higher of the two basements he found his office, number 310. It wasn’t actually what you’d call an office, but one of around fifty identical cubicles, divided by seven-feet-high lath and plaster walls, which provided minimal privacy and did nothing to deaden the intolerable background noise of conversation, dictation and typing that frayed everyone’s tempers and made it all but impossible to do anything creative.

  His desk was half smothered in unopened mail and copies of news cables. As he sat down, a mailroom clerk paused with his trolley and upended another batch of papers onto it. Ahead of him lay a dreary morning of drafting letters to pompous literary gents, filling out booking forms for radio talks, and tracking down his guests’ missing speaking fees. The sheer pointlessness of it all, with everything having to be produced in triplicate to be rubber-stamped by committees full of bloody fools. He couldn’t face it yet, and looked instead at a BBC monitoring report on top of the sea of paper before him.

  PRAGUE (CZECH HOME STATIONS) IN GERMAN FOR PROTECTORATE. 10.6.42

  Heydrich Revenge: Village Wiped Out: All Men Shot: ANNOUNCEMENT

  He read the report. In retaliation for the assassination of SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, all the male inhabitants of the village of Lidice had been shot, the women sent to concentration camps and the children ‘handed over to the appropriate authorities’. He read it again: handed over to the appropriate authorities. This was the world in which he now lived. Soon enough, he thought, you would probably be jeered at for suggesting the story of Lidice was true, even though the facts had been announced by the Germans themselves. He thought up a list of atrocities he knew to be true and determined to make a record of them for posterity.

  He lit a cigarette and began work. It was his day with his secretary, Mrs Barratt, whom he shared with Empson, relieving him of the burden of typing his programs and correspondence. He reached wearily for his Dictaphone and began composing letters. In the cubicle across the narrow corridor he could hear a colleague talking some nonsense in a loathsome posh voice, and flashed him a hostile look.

  At midday he took lunch in the canteen on the lower basement floor. With any luck, he thought, she would be there – Stevie Smith, the poet, whom he wanted to bed. He lined up, walking past piles of unwashed plates and chipped mugs on the sideboards. Grim-looking stews and puddings sat in steaming serving bins; one dish looked to be boiled cod and turnip tops. One had to grin and bear it; after all, there was a war on and merchant sailors had drowned to deliver this protein – assuming it wasn’t synthetic.

  When the queue moved along he saw the chalkboard: ‘Today’s special is Victory Pie.’ He handed over a few coins for his portion and searched for a table, spotting Empson, who unfortunately was sitting with his colleague Sunday Wilshin, a silly blonde former actress who he suspected had eyes for his job.

  ‘Ah, Sunday, Bill – just the people I was looking for,’ he lied. ‘I’m thinking about recording a program for the Indians on Basic English.’

  ‘Excellent idea,’ said Empson. ‘Its benefits for teaching English are obvious.’ With an opening into his favourite topic, the usually engaging Empson became rather a bore. ‘The real beauty of the language lies in its simplicity, and its reductions in the number of words in its vocabulary. Do you know you can fit all the words you need onto a single page? Small type on a rather big page, obviously. The Basic English dictionary contains just a thousand words, aside from people and place names and so forth.’

  ‘Just a thousand?’ He knew all this already, of course.

  ‘Yes. Difficult to believe, really. Eight hundred and fifty in the first category – these are the basic vocabulary. Fifty in the second category – international words like radio and gramophone. And another one hundred to do with applied science. Ogden and Richards think only fifteen per cent of the current Basic vocabulary is now of doubtful use, so the next edition may perhaps be regarded as definitive. Your chum Wells wants it to be the language of the world government after the war.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised it was so advanced,’ said Wilshin, dumbly.

  ‘The secret is getting rid of the verbs. Ogden leaves just ten verbal operations. None of this will, would business. Just confuses people. And the number of nouns – slashed. I mean, why say puppy when you can just say young dog? Or for that matter bitch when female dog is easier to learn? And so on. As you see, by training your mind like this – an object by time, an object by sex, and so on – you can find words for just about anything with a fraction of the words we use today.’

  He listened on, distractedly watching fat ooze out of his Victory Pie and congeal in the coolness of the basement air.

  ‘The food here really is better, don’t you think?’ said Wilshin, who was watching him.

  ‘One mustn’t complain.’ He hacked off a portion with his fork and managed to swallow it. ‘All very ingenious, of course. But, Bill, here’s my reservation. Don’t you think narrowing the vocabulary like that could also narrow thought? Our thoughts, after all, are limited by the words we have to express them. That’s the sort of thing that probably goes on in Russia.’

  ‘Oh, yes, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. As Ogden says, a good language is a machine for thought. Fewer words can actually sharpen our thinking and give our words more precise meaning.’

  ‘Less chance for misunderstanding,’ said Wilshin, whose stupidity he was beginning to loathe. ‘Between nations, as Wells says.’

  A childish smile broke out over Empson’s face. ‘You know, I once had a foreign student who thought the literal meaning of “out of sight, out of mind” was “invisible, insane”. The fewer the words the better, in my view.’

  ‘So how would you put it, in Basic English?’

  ‘Simple, really: “not seeable, not thinkable”. Much more precise. And more poetic, when you consider it.’

  ‘Iambic,’ said Wilshin.

  ‘Like Shakespeare.’

  Inwardly horrified at the comparison, he washed down the last of the pie with lukewarm synthetic coffee. He considered the student’s word, insanity. It seemed the sort of concept Basic English would struggle to get across adequately.

  Wilshin seemed to have read his thoughts. ‘Do you think Basic could handle Hamlet?’

  While Empson answered, he wondered to himself how the new language might describe someone who was insane: perhaps ‘wrong-thinker’, which could just as easily mean ‘political dissenter’ to someone with bad motives. A first step, perhaps, to criminalising thought altogether.

  ‘Tell me, Blair,’ Empson asked. ‘Are you familiar with my essay on the benefits of translating Wordsworth into Basic? Improves his meaning in a lot of ways, actually. Helps people today really understand the Romantics, instead of just pretending to. I’ll get you a copy if you like.’

  It suddenly occurred to him that, in some important way, insanity actually explained a lot about intellectuals like E
mpson.

  *

  After lunch, two basement floors down in Recording Studio 1, he prepared to record the weekly round-up of wartime news for broadcast to the subcontinent. Unlike his other tasks, with their never-ending boredom and routine, this one called upon all his creativity. He thought of it as a game, the object being to explain the facts of the war in a way that was both truthful and untruthful at the same time. The trick was not to make up positive facts or ignore negative ones, but rather to present them in a way that B.B. would consider ‘helpful’ to the war effort. One could, for example, report a successful fascist offensive, but only by hinting that it was part of a carefully prepared trap into which the enemy had stupidly stumbled. Deaths from bombing raids could be reported, but only to highlight Nazi inaccuracy or perfidy, or both simultaneously. Subtlety was the important thing.

  He had prepared this particular bulletin some days before, but it had only now emerged from the censorship bodies through which every utterance on the BBC had to pass. As he waited for the recording to start, his feet traversed the rim of a large manhole cover, beneath which the remnants of the River Fleet flowed on their subterranean course from Hampstead to the Thames. Everyone at the BBC knew its significance: it was the hole down which they must throw all classified documents should the Nazis invade. He had visions of his BBC Talks booking forms washing up on the riverbank at his childhood home in Shiplake, giving to the Gestapo the names of earnest literary dons who had misinterpreted Kipling. Through the concrete walls he heard the low rumble of a train passing along the Central Line, then the whoosh of its doors opening and closing at Oxford Circus.

  He scanned the studio’s cheap wartime fit-out: the plywood-faced office table, with its sound-deadening green baize covering; the long and confusing row of electrical switches and dials that controlled the round Bakelite BBC microphone; the bookshelf with stacks of old scripts and cardboard boxes full of uncatalogued soundtracks. He sighed and looked down at the typescript before him, brushing off the ash that had fallen from his last cigarette. It bore two stamps: PASSED FOR SECURITY and PASSED FOR POLICY. Five lines had been blacked out. Remembering what the now censored passages had contained, the reason for their omission was evident: doubt had unwittingly been cast on the outcome of a current military campaign, the sort of unthinking blunder for which a black mark might be placed against his name. At least, he thought, he had kept their propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been. Not that anyone in India was likely to be listening.