Plato observes that poets love their poems like fathers love their children. That’s why writers hate to cut their own work — to “murder their babies”, as they must learn to do if they hope to be any good. But they hate it more when others murder their babies, and are even ready to die for the ones they’ve raised and sent out into the world.

D-503 — the protagonist of We, the dystopian sci-fi novel of totalitarianism published in 1921, for which the Soviet author Yevgeny Zamyatin was lucky to be exiled rather than shot — calls the diary he has just begun “a new, still tiny, still blind little human being. It is I and, at the same time, not I.”

And when the KGB confiscated the manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s magnum opus Life and Fate, Grossman wrote to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, asking: “What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested?”

A famous passage from the Talmud helps to explain why writers feel this way — and why we should, too: “Adam was created alone to teach you that whoever destroys a single soul, Scripture regards him as if he destroyed the entire world. And whoever saves a single soul, Scripture regards him as if he preserved the entire world.”

Had the first human being died alone, neither Eve nor any of her descendants would have existed. The destruction of a soul is the annihilation of all of its potential offspring, physical and spiritual, until the end of time. But a human soul is an entire world in another way. Perception, thought and feeling open the soul to very many things beyond itself — in principle, to all things — whose impressions it absorbs and assembles into a more or less meaningful whole. Apart from this humanising work, the notion of a universe, a single, all-encompassing whole, might never have occurred to anyone. But this inner world can also be destroyed, corrupted by forgetfulness and publicly erased.

For writers, this Biblical passage rings true: “In the beginning was the Word [logos].” God is said to have fashioned the waters of primordial chaos into a universe by divine speech. One need not be a believer to learn from this story. Human beings are obliged to sort social and psychological chaos by way of logos — reason, speech, order, proportion — in the first instance through law, ritual and the cultural memory of myth. Communities of shared meaning and purpose are woven of language, without which individual experiences would otherwise be poor possessions held in dumb isolation by lonely hominids.

Like the poets and chroniclers of remote antiquity, novelists and dramatists speak to the enduring questions of human life: who we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going. They fabricate buzzing microcosms peopled by characters that live and breathe on contact with other minds and fertile imaginations. Censors don’t just cut out writers’ tongues and stop up readers’ ears, they obliterate worlds.

But the public response to the extensive and aggressive censorship of our time has been depressingly muted. In part, this reflects a widespread loss of what the Germans call Sprachgefühl, a feeling for language and the meaning of words. Most people don’t read books, let alone good ones. They produce and consume short, easily digestible “texts” through electronic media, but hard-won habits of literacy rust in disuse.

Few people know the thrill of repeatedly casting into the depths of a difficult piece of writing, feeling a tug on the line and hauling up a catch of meaning. That experience was more common when deep and challenging books were recited, studied and memorised as sources of wisdom. “Turn it and turn it,” an ancient commentator said of the Bible, “for everything is in it.” Generations of our forebears thought the same of Homer and Dante, Aristotle and Confucius. Who reads like that anymore?

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Books won't save you

By Sarah Ditum

The metallic clang of abstractions now drowns out the living word of particular human minds. Like all bureaucratic and ideological jargon, the governing language of our time is flat, colourless and crude. It is no longer that of poets, prophets and statesmen, but of what Nietzsche called “the coldest of all cold monsters” — the increasingly unified, propaganda-generating, information-gathering-and-monitoring conglomeration of public and private entities that is the post-modern State.

The contemporary sclerosis of language has profound psychological and political consequences. One of Samuel Beckett’s characters wistfully contemplates the dance and hum of bees as they enter and exit their sun-drenched hives, exhibiting a kind of connectedness from which he is excluded by his lonely consciousness. That consciousness of exile is both quintessentially modern and distinctively human. It envies the bees, but cannot find satisfaction in any socially-ordered aggregation of identical units. It yearns for the inner connection between individuals that distinguishes a community from a characterless crowd. But censorship and the decay of language serve only to strengthen the hive-mind and the crowd.

The corruptions of language, politics and society we are now witnessing were foretold in some great dystopian novels of the 20th century. But the English and American authors of those novels had the evidence of history before them, in the form of ideological tyranny: Leninism, Stalinism, Hitlerism and Maoism. And they’d learned from the Bard that what’s past is prologue.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” one of the characters in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remarks. In the regime of Oceania, which is ruled by a technocratic elite “shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government”, books are everywhere hunted down and destroyed. The State language is crudely binary (like one university’s definition of a lesbian as “a non-man attracted to non-men”), purged of nuance and full of “telescoped words and phrases”, of which its very name, Newspeak, is exemplary. A large department meticulously destroys and reproduces newspapers on a daily basis, rewriting the past to conform with the demands of the present. (Orwell couldn’t have guessed how easy this would be in the digital age.)

The vocabulary of Newspeak is constantly shrinking, because its “whole aim … is to narrow the range of thought”. The State hopes that restricting speech to “short, clipped words which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind” will ultimately eliminate “thoughtcrime” — or independent thought — if only because “there will be no words in which to express it”.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, elite technicians govern a stratified society composed of classes of virtually identical human beings grown in scientific hatcheries. While a global State founded on eugenics hasn’t yet materialised, much that Huxley imagines has already come to pass. The society he foresees is debased in familiar ways. It is characterised by a cult of youth; an economy driven by entertainment and the pleasures of virtual reality; the near-universal, habitual use of psychoactive drugs, contraceptives and aphrodisiacs; overt public sexuality; general promiscuity; and a swarming media that makes a great public spectacle of non-conformists.

Love and friendship are hardly possible under these conditions. The citizens of the World State are mere shadows of human beings: smiling surfaces without tragic depth. Little wonder that the one surviving lover of Shakespeare is driven to suicide.

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I was sacked for writing about trans censorship

By Julie Szego

Most people in Brave New World are content with their lot. Thankfully, we are not quite there yet. Ray Bradbury envisions a society more like our own, one full of vague foreboding. Fahrenheit 451 describes a rushing world of violence, suicide and looming war in which a depressed populace distracts itself from the slow death of love and longing with vapid entertainment. Bradbury explicitly connects the fact that “our civilisation is flinging itself to pieces” with the destruction of literature and the deliberate falsification of the past.

Montag, the protagonist, makes a living burning books, in accordance with rules said to have been established in 1790 by the “First Fireman”, Benjamin Franklin. His wife Mildred, who claims to be happy, spends her days in a room with three walls of television screens, surrounded by her “family”: soap-opera uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews who “said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud”. She has no recollection of swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills one night.

An old professor who’s been unemployed since the last liberal arts college shut its doors tells Montag that the magic of books lay in “how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us”. But they are hated because they “show the pores in the face of life” to a world that wants “only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless”.

Chief Beatty, Montag’s deeply conflicted boss, explains how we got here. Everything sped up in the 20th century, when horses, dogs and carts were replaced by faster and faster machines. Time contracted. Books were condensed and pre-digested, “levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm”. School was shortened, “discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored”. Sound familiar?

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Fahrenheit 451 concludes apocalyptically, with a revelatory global catastrophe. Bradbury draws on some very old stories to make the meaning of this ending fully intelligible. Montag flees a doomed city like Lot escaping the burning of Sodom. The world collapses and must be rebuilt. Insofar as there is hope, it lives in the hearts and minds of scattered old men who remember the writings of Plato, Swift, Jefferson and Lincoln, as well as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Montag himself recalls passages from a forbidden volume of Ecclesiastes.

At the novel’s end, Montag remembers a verse from Revelations, The Book of the Apocalypse: “And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruits every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”

The Jews called the Bible — in Greek, to biblion, or “the book” — an etz chaim, or tree of life. In Revelations, the river of the waters of life sustains two trees of life: the Hebrew Scriptures (whose fruits were the twelve tribes of Israel) and New Testament. The “leaves” of these trees, their pages, were understood to be medicine for the sickness of “the nations”, people who knew nothing of the Bible.

Despite the best efforts of some of our greatest writers, the healing power of books has been mostly forgotten in our time. Must we really wait until our world is thoroughly burned and broken before we begin to mend it?

When he created his artist’s name — and this is not known for sure, but it is too good not to be true — he thought of England. George for the saint, Orwell for the East Anglian river. The central question of his work is whether he saw Englishness as a tradition in itself and for itself, or as a source of imagery to be exploited for his own political purposes. Most of us don’t get that far though. The performance blocks our view.

A contemporary thought him “as English as the grass that grows alongside the Thames at Runnymede”. Another said “George Orwell walking down the road, was England”. “A quintessentially” wrote J.R. Hammond, “English writer.” “Full of good English qualities” reckoned the American literary critic Edmund Wilson, like common sense and concrete thoughts. Raymond Williams described him as the “most native and English of writers”. We still do. Whenever England or Englishness is the subject, Orwell is ready, the scripture we quote, the trusted authority.

It’s a lovely thing to have, in a way. Orwell there, on the bookshelf, waiting for us to steal ideas about our national identity from. When he imagined Charles Dickens’s face as “as the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of man who is generously angry” it is hard not to transfer the warm feeling these words summon to Orwell himself. It’s a preposterous feeling. They were both writers — so they were never in the open, and if they were they were in the open, then their reality was still their desks, and their words. Orwell’s best essays are always about the best English writers, like Dickens, and Kipling, and Gissing — projecting himself as a peer, and into the canon.

Orwell’s Dickens is a seductive fantasy, and the Orwell that comes down to us is a flattering fantasy, especially if you’re English. Kindly, gentle George, pottering about in his garden, counting the shillings he spends on books and cigarettes, contemplating pubs, all with a newspaper man’s interest in nitty-gritty detail. What elevates him into a figure, rather than a weird Jeremy Corbyn type stroking his marrows in an allotment, is that Orwell is a proper man, not soft or abstract, because he tells us he is prepared to use physical force, extreme violence even, to defend those flower pots, those books, and all those little shillings.

Until relatively recently in England we did not think of ourselves as aggressors. William Hazlitt, writing long before Orwell, said that England was the bravest nation. Why? Englishmen did not “delight in cruelty”. They only fought reactively: “not out of malice but to show pluck and manhood.” This is what Orwell meant 80 years ago when he described the “gentleness” of English life. It’s why he noted that all our war stories are tales of “disasters and retreats.” It’s why we quote him on this, and ignore that Trafalgar Day was toasted for more than a century. He wrote what we want to be true.

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By Will Lloyd

In a sense he was born to flatter. Eric Arthur Blair’s family were Imperial agents and bureaucrats. They were well-off, and they feared working people. He called it the “lower-upper-middle class” which meant comfortable, but not mink coat, Rolls-Royce comfortable. No land, no substantial property. They were professionals with salaries — providing service, without being servants, but bag-carriers all the same. Today, they would be setting up all the zoom calls for Davos, or working as expensive personal shoppers.

At school, he was the scholarship boy who was crap at games. He writes about the hatred and resentment he felt against those “whose parents were richer than mine and who took care to let me know it”. The performance grows out of the anger. Reminiscing, describing why he became a writer, he admits that he “created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life”. Orwell never really left the school gates. That’s why his books are best read, and immediately understood by teenagers. In Nineteen Eighty Four, O’Brien is the top prefect, and Big Brother the headmaster, and Winston Smith will stay in detention until he’s written “I Love Big Brother” 50 times on the blackboard in shaky chalk letters.

The other boys recognised him as an intellectual. Today, there is a collective denial about this — like an awful family secret — about what Orwell was. He is usually described as an “intelligence” not an intellect; simple, direct, honest, undeceived. A “light glinting in the darkness” wrote one biographer; “straight as an arrow” thought Simon Heffer; a “national treasure” according to Julian Barnes. Orwell was always saying that the English could not abide intellectuals, that the English people were not capable of abstract thought. Part of his performance was acting this version of Englishness out — an artist pretending to be artless, an intellectual pretending to be stupid, a revolutionary pretending to be conservative.

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But he has to be understood as an intellectual. From prep school onwards until the day he died, he thought away. He was prone to daydreams as a child, ennui as a teenager, and abstract schemes for the improvement of mankind as an adult. He smoked roll-ups, to the extent that he should have been French. All of this he knew about himself, and hated, which is how he wrote the best lines ever written about why intellectuals are so dreadful. And only a neurotic, isolated, lonely intellect like Orwell’s could ever have chased authenticity, hardship, and punishment the way he did. In the barbarous Thirties, with all its dismay and havoc, how could it be right to moon over books when real people were fighting real enemies in real wars? To be less than a socialist was a moral disaster.

Choosing socialism made Orwell typical of his generation (not an “English Rebel” as Robert Colls puts it), however pleadingly he later tried to distinguish himself from it. They were all socialist intellectuals too. The Empire was pond-stagnant, Hitler was screaming on the radio, and the volcano they felt beneath their feet was hot. They discovered the people. When W.H. Auden was at Oxford he relaxed by frequenting the dog track, the boxing ring, and the speedway. Orwell, too, slid down by the standards of his day, his class — he wrote about the Burmese, and pan-washers, and Parisian bums. It wasn’t enough.

The breakthrough came in Wigan, where he stayed for 56 days, then never returned. He discovered something less abstract than the proletariat of socialist theory. Here were the English people, the real ones, not the nasty boys at school. In his northern book he remembers a cup of tea with the “lower orders” as “a kind of baptism”. In Wigan he was reborn as one of them. He wanted to use the poor to regenerate the society he despised.

In Orwell’s vision of England, the miners are not so different from the coal they shovelled. They are fuel for his dream of a revolution. “No genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of socialism” he wrote — because ideas were for people like him to grasp. In another essay he equates the struggle of the workers to the growth of a plant: “blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards…” It’s not far from Lenin’s view of people. For all his famous words about “the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns” and “the old maids biking to Holy Communion”, Orwell did not care much for the English. They are insensible plants, to be trimmed and pruned by a higher intellect. They needed to “breed faster, work harder… think more deeply, get rid of their snobbishness… pay more attention to the world”. After a late baptism, he had a convert’s faith in the English. And the convert’s faith is liable to be disappointed.

The revolution Orwell yearned for never happened in his lifetime. The British Empire did not become “a socialist federation of states”. Country homes were not recast as political “children’s camps”. The Stock Exchange was not torn down, and the House of Lords was untouched. He believed all of it would happen, none of it did, and we remember him as one of our greatest prophets.

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Here comes 1984: The Musical

By Dorian Lynskey

These torpedoed expectations generated the hopeless air of Nineteen Eighty-Four. “If there is hope, it lies with the proles” writes Winston Smith — “proles” coldly described as drinking, gambling, singing, fat, anonymous people “who never learned how to think”. Winston wants dogs to take over a kennel. George Orwell was coming back around to the views of Eric Arthur Blair, the school boy who had “no notion” that the working class were human beings. Shortly before he died, Orwell put his son’s name down for Westminster.

A marker was placed with the first obituaries. Good, plain, honest, English George — not the ranting ideologue. He was the “wintry conscience of a generation” wrote V.S. Pritchett, a “kind of saint” who “prided himself on seeing through rackets”. Everyone assented to the performance Orwell made of himself in his writing. Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew him well, referred to Orwell’s clothes as “a sort of proletarian fancy dress”. He knew how kitsch it all was. When he read Orwell’s death notices in 1950, he “saw in them how the legend of the human is created, because although they were ostensibly correct… they were yet inherently false — e.g. everyone saying George was not given to self-pity, whereas it was of course his dominant emotion.”

Orwell would have liked to have been remembered for his “power of facing unpleasant facts”. His solidity and common sense. He would be amazed to find himself lazily cited every week in conservative newspapers by people who he would have put foot-first into a wood-chipper if it meant the brotherhood of man could be realised on Earth, in England.

He has become the opposite of common sense. If Millennials, as is so often argued, use Harry Potter as a kind of moral pattern recognition software, then this is what Orwell has been to three generations of Anglo-American journalists. It wasn’t that long ago that Christopher Hitchens was using Orwell to justify the Iraq War. The Trump administration was endlessly described as Orwellian, as was one of Theresa May’s Brexit deals, as is almost anything that is thought to be bad somehow. The performance has become an ideology. He’s what he railed against, but could never resist: an abstract thought. Maybe on April 23 it’s better to call him a saint — the other Saint George. “Sainthood is a thing human beings must avoid.” That’s one of his lines. It’s quite right. Just ask Eric Blair.

The details are hazy. Bowie variously described his take on Nineteen Eighty-Four as a TV show, a stage musical and an album. Despite his claim that Sonia was “the biggest upper-class snob I’ve ever met in my life,” it’s very unlikely that they ever spoke, or that she had a specific objection to Bowie. Horrified by the 1956 Hollywood version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which softened the edges and mangled the ending, she effectively imposed a blanket ban on adaptations (aside from radio) until shortly before her death in 1980. It is perhaps for the best that she died six months before the release of Rick Wakeman and Tim Rice’s unapproved concept album 1984, which featured a duet between Chaka Khan and comedian Kenny Lynch called “Robot Man”.

Bowie framed Sonia’s rejection as terribly unfair: a snobbish old fogey standing in the way of his brilliant notion. But really, what was lost? At the time, Bowie was far more interested in collaging striking images in his lyrics than in telling coherent stories and showed no indication of having the narrative discipline necessary to adapt a whole novel into songs. If Sonia had approved the project, it would probably have either collapsed or ended up as a grand folly. Instead, by having to combine fragments of Orwell’s dystopia with the more anarchic, youth-driven visions of Burroughs and Anthony Burgess, Bowie created a far more idiosyncratic and topical sci-fi nightmare. If you like Diamond Dogs, then you have Sonia Orwell to thank.

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Yesterday, the Beatles and why talent isn't enough

By Dorian Lynskey

The other great counterfactual collision between rock and literature is the Beatles’ version of The Lord of the Rings. In 1968, Denis O’Dell from the Beatles’ Apple Films thought that J.R.R. Tolkien’s saga could form the basis for the band’s third live-action movie vehicle and pitched it to them while they were in India. United Artists, who had the Beatles on contract, had just acquired the movie rights from Tolkien, so that wasn’t an issue. It was loosely decided in India that Paul McCartney would play Frodo, Ringo Starr Sam, George Harrison Gandalf and John Lennon Gollum, and they would all record new songs for the film.

After David Lean and Stanley Kubrick turned it down, Michelangelo Antonioni was apparently interested in directing but as the band fell apart, so did the film. Again, it’s hard to mourn the loss. I can just about picture the Fabs in Middle Earth in an animated sequel to Yellow Submarine but a live-action musical fantasy epic starring four non-actors who were increasingly sick of each other’s company? It had all the ingredients of a historic disaster.

There is an enduring cultural obsession with might-have-beens. In The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, the critic David Hughes examines in tantalising detail such abandoned projects as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s version of Frank Herbert’s Dune (the job went to David Lynch) and Tim Burton’s Nicolas Cage-starring Superman Lives. Every couple of years, the story of Nick Cave’s berserk rejected screenplay for a sequel to Gladiator resurfaces to general delight. There are long Wikipedia pages devoted to films that the likes of Spielberg and Tarantino talked about but never made.

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The historical amnesia of culture warriors

By Dorian Lynskey

As the title of Hughes’ book indicates, such what-ifs are usually predicated on the assumption that movie-goers missed out because of killjoy rights-holders or short-sighted studio executives. If only the real artists had got their way! In the realm of the counterfactual, movies never have a chance to fail, so all we have to go on are their would-be creators’ best intentions. In reality, passion projects stumble all the time. Philip Roth is arguably the greatest novelist of his generation but until HBO’s The Plot Against America, adaptations of his books ranged from merely underwhelming (The Humbling) to utterly misbegotten (American Pastoral). In fact, Lego bricks have inspired more good movies than Roth.

To take one legendary example, it’s possible that Jodorowsky’s Dune, which was set to involve Orson Welles, Pink Floyd and Salvador Dalí, would have been a far-out masterpiece. But you could just as easily imagine Frank Herbert fans being bitterly disappointed by it and fantasising about what it could have been if only the visionary behind Eraserhead and The Elephant Man had been trusted with it. Counterfactuals usually flatter the thwarted.

The mythology of creativity requires villains in the form of out-of-touch gatekeepers who obstruct the path of talent. We laugh at the A&R man who turned down the Beatles and the numerous publishers who rejected Animal Farm because they epitomise the obstacles our heroes must overcome on their journey to greatness. That’s why Paul McCartney gave director Peter Jackson the misleading impression that the rock’n’roll-hating septuagenarian Tolkien himself kiboshed the Beatles’ Lord of the Rings movie, and it’s why Bowie invented a frosty encounter with Sonia. It’s a better story.

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By James Bloodworth

If Bowie were still alive, he would be free to do something with Nineteen Eighty-Four now that all of Orwell’s books are out of copyright. (The screen rights to that novel, which Sonia sold in 1980, are more complicated.) There is already an Animal Farm video game and what happens next will be interesting. I’d like to see people use Orwell’s books as springboards rather than blueprints. The movie Clueless, a freewheeling 90s reimagining of Jane Austen’s Emma, and Damon Lindelof’s ingenious HBO sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen both prove that one way to respect beloved source material is to turn it into something radically new. Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s inspired 2013 stage play of Nineteen Eighty-Four turned the book inside out.

I’m not sure, though, that even hamfisted takes on Orwell will do him any harm. Like other overzealous managers of literary estates — Lord Tennyson’s son, T. S. Eliot’s widow — Sonia believed that a reputation was a fragile thing, vulnerable to serious damage in the wrong hands, but great work is impressively resilient. It’s unlikely that Austen would have endorsed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or that Eliot would enjoyed the movie Cats, yet the status of those writers is undented. There is no idea bad enough to diminish the standing of Dickens or Shakespeare. It’s the adapter who takes the blame when a new version goes awry. So I suspect that when Sonia killed the glam-rock Nineteen Eighty-Four, it wasn’t her late husband’s reputation she ended up protecting but Bowie’s.