In February 1949, George Orwell sent a letter from his retreat on the Scottish island of Jura to his London friend Julian Symons. "My new book," he wrote, "is a Utopia in the form of a novel. I ballsed it up rather, partly owing to being so ill while I was writing it, but I think some of the ideas in it might interest you."
"Ballsed up" or not, Nineteen Eighty- Four, which was published on June 8th, 1949, was an immediate success and its ideas have been heavily influential since in all discourse about totalitarianism, particularly in its Soviet variant.
Orwell had "become a writer" - in the sense of consciously deciding that was what he would be and how he would earn his living - on his return from Burma in 1927. First publication took a mere six years, but it was not until 1945 and the publication of Animal Farm that the living was anything but meagre. Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, took off instantly on publication, selling 50,000 copies in Britain alone in its first year. Published in paperback by Penguin in 1954, it went on to sell a steady 250,000 a year. By 1984, a year which obviously saw a renewed marketing effort, sales had reached 11 million.
So why this success for a novel its creator thought somewhat "ballsed up"? Well, firstly, there was its timing. By 1947, the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western allies had irretrievably broken down, Soviet Russia was extinguishing political liberty in eastern Europe and there were fears of renewed war. At the same time, the prestige of Marxism-Leninism among western intellectuals had never been higher.
Clearly in such circumstances an expose of the logic of totalitarian socialism (or indeed of any socialism) would be warmly welcomed by "bourgeois" opinion; Koestler's Darkness at Noon enjoyed a similar success in France.
Secondly, Nineteen Eighty-Four was and is, in spite of faults of structure and characterisation, a remarkable novel, in particular a remarkable political novel. Its plot is no doubt familiar in outline. Winston Smith is a functionary in the Ministry of Truth of Airstrip One (Britain), part of the superstate of Oceania. Oceania is constantly at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia, the other world superstates. His job consists largely of falsifying the historical record of these wars to accommodate the latest shift in policy.
But Winston is unhappy in his work. Together with his lover, Julia, he rebels against state and party, is entrapped, arrested, tortured and broken. Revolt is snuffed out and the ideology of Winston's inquisitor, O'Brien - a mystique of power and cruelty ("a boot stamping on a human face - for ever") - is triumphant. Or is it?
Nineteen Eighty-Four has been criticised for the clumsiness of its structure, in particular the interpolation of a long treatise on the dominant ideology of Oceania, "Ingsoc", and the appending of a brief account of "The Principles of Newspeak", its official language.
Yet the appendix has a real structural function in the novel, and one which few critics have drawn attention to. The vital point is that it is written in the past tense: "Newspeak was the official language of Oceania . . ." - in other words from a vantage point in time at which it, and presumably Ingsoc and Oceania and Big Brother, have ceased to exist. Thus, though Winston and Julia's story ends in defeat, humanity's does not.
Orwell's consciousness of the importance of the Newspeak appendix is illustrated by the fact that he faced down a demand by the Book-of-the-Month club in the US that it be cut, thereby risking the loss, according to his publisher, of "a minimum of £40,000".
Other aspects of his novel's reception in the US worried him too. After a series of rave reviews in right-wing journals he responded to an anxious cable from an American trade unionist as follows: "My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter). . . "
Certainly, Nineteen Eighty-Four is not exclusively a satire on the communist system (as Animal Farm was). The organised demonstrations of collective hysteria (Hate Week) are more reminiscent of Nazism, while the mass culture of sport, sensation, spectacle and pornography ("prolefeed") is obviously chiefly a feature of capitalist societies. Nevertheless, it is the acute analysis of the intellectual abdication of the communist intellectual that is the book's satiric core. O'Brien's dictum - "It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party" - would have been simply a truism for any party member right up to the 1980s.
Orwell's vision of the future - a satire not a prophecy, he insisted - has, of course, not come to pass. Soviet communism, essentially dependent on coercion, began its long decline as early as 1953 with the death of Stalin. Nor indeed is Orwell's own political philosophy, "democratic Socialism", in any great shape, obscured as it now is by the miasma of Tony Blair's Third Way.
It is perhaps inevitable, therefore, that Orwell's themes may seem quaintly old-fashioned today, Newspeak no more than an elegant intellectual conceit, the Thought Police merely a bogy of the wilder shores of libertarianism. In Europe, at least, we have seen off totalitarianism. History now is more forgotten than rewritten and prolefeed a greater danger than Big Brother.
Yet Orwell is still important. Animal Farm, the essays and much of the journalism, are among the finest things written in English this century, while his politics - though rickety and unsystematic - embodies enduring ethical values. If he did not find Truth, he knew lies. Above all, there is Orwell the man: subtle, quirky and humane, if occasionally puritanical and unfair.
The success and fame which Nineteen Eighty-Four brought its author came a little late in a lifetime of literary and political struggle. In October 1949, Orwell married Sonia Brownell in a ceremony at University College Hospital in London, where he was being treated for acute tuberculosis. On January 21st, 1950, he died there. He was 46.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist