George Orwell's war-time diaries were a book that failed. Their failure provides a interesting study of how Orwell thought and wrote because the Second World War provided him with much of the material for his last two novels, and one might have expected his diaries to record the development of his ideas, but those developments are more conspicuous by their absence.

A diary is an unusual place to begin the study of memory because the construction of a diary seems to carry with it implications which are the opposite of memory: a diary is a contemporary journal of events, written soon after they have occurred, surely? And Orwell, at the time of his diary-keeping, insisted on the importance of memory. Yet it was only later, when he was able to invert the experiences he had encountered in his diary writing and reject his use of memory, that he produced great work.

Orwell's diary was explicitly self-aware in both its media and its creation: an entry such as 'Have been unable for some days to buy another volume to continue this diary because, of the three or four stationers' shops in the immediate neighbourhood, all but one are cordoned off because of unexploded bombs' (21 September '40) records the diary's own construction, as does another eleven days earlier, when Orwell wrote: 'Can't write much of the insanities of the last few days. It is not so much that the bombing is worrying in itself as that the disorganization of traffic, frequent difficulty of telephoning, shutting of shops whenever there is a raid on etc. etc., combined with the necessity of getting on with one's ordinary work, wear one out and turn life into a constant scramble to catch up lost time' (10 September '40).

There are, though, limits to this explicitness: most importantly neither Orwell nor his eventual editors mention that the diary was written for publication⁽²⁾ - another consideration which must shape the construction of the work. He had also lost all his regular sources of income and only just become re-united with his wife. The diaries were thus affected by a number of things: their potential attractiveness to readers, time to write, subjects to write about, eventual market size, and even the availability of materials in which to write them. Yet only some of these became themes in the diaries.

The inconsistencies this implies can be seen in an entry for 17 September '40: 'Yesterday, when having my hair cut in the City, asked the barber if he carried on during raids. He said he did. And even if he was shaving someone? I said. Oh, yes, he carried on just the same. And one day a bomb will drop near enough to make him jump, and he will slice half somebody's face off.' Orwell the diarist continues to trawl for material (and fails to recognise it) but protests at the barber continuing to shave, even though elsewhere Orwell was bemoaning the shutting of shops and closing down of normality⁽³⁾.

At the beginning of 1941 Orwell began to write his 'London Letter' to the American Partisan Review. He ended his first letter with a few quotations from the Diary for September 1940 (checking the two texts reveals some discrepancies). In the second letter he described the current writing scene: 'So far as I know, nothing of consequence is being written, except in fragmentary form, diaries and short sketches for instance' (that is, he himself was typical). He then went onto say: 'if any major work were now produced it would be escapist, or at any rate subjective. I infer this from looking into my own mind. If I could get the time and mental peace to write a novel now I should want to write about the past, the pre-1914 period, which I suppose comes under the heading of "escapism"'⁽⁴⁾.

Oddly, Orwell after the one set of quotations never seems to have referred to the diaries again, even though diary writing was important through his career⁽⁵⁾. Another diary, however, seems to have combined the two elements (memories of the past in the face of present horror) Orwell refers to in his London Letter: in April 1940, a year before, he had reviewed the published diaries of the author Julian Green and identified almost exactly the same criteria as mattering: 'He writes much of his work ... and of his remembered childhood in the golden age "before the war" ... Julian Green is ... young enough to expect something from life and old enough to remember "before the war". It is a fact that the people who are now twenty do not appear to notice that the world is falling into ruins'⁽⁶⁾.

One month later, and eight months after the War began, Orwell started his own diary. It may have been coincidence, it may be that a number of things came together with Warburg the publisher's assistance. However, Orwell clearly identified a major element in his London Letters and the repetitions in his review: the idea of the past, of life 'before the war'⁽⁷⁾ - a diary that covered the period from the Belgian surrender through the Blitz was written by a man intent on exploring the past.

Orwell ended his first diary in August 1941 when he joined the B.B.C., and began it again on 14 March '42 with this sentence: 'I reopen this diary after an interval of about six months, the war being once again in a new phase'.

The significance of this 'new phase' in Orwell's imagination can be seen in the entry for 28 July '42: 'After the Hamburg raid of 2 nights ago (the Germans) described the casualties as heavy. The papers here reproduce this with pride. Two years ago we would all have been aghast at the idea of killing civilians. I remember saying to someone during the blitz, when the R.A.F. were hitting back as best they could, "In a year's time you'll see the headlines in the Daily Express: 'Successful Raid on Berlin Orphanage. Babies Set on Fire'." It hasn't come to that yet, but that is the direction we are going in.'

In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) the telescreens display little else but events such as those. Orwell's diary had become the place in which the events of the current time would first be extended into their worst-case scenarios.

In 1982 the newspapers gave us the headline 'Gotcha!'. Orwell had got there forty years before, yet still did not manage to build the foundations of a dam that would halt that outburst of filthy jingoism in The Sun.

So the world in which Orwell was making his personal record was moving in parallel streams - it was one in which this intelligence could be put to work, but it was also one in which other forces provided the subjects on which to comment. Yet the rockets that fell from 1943 until 1984 in that vision of his stopped falling in our pasts in 1945.

Bernard Crick's criticism of the Diaries appears to be true: 'It is a rather stilted commentary on the wartime news, at times amusingly tendentious but often inaccurate and rarely personal, falling rather clumsily between "what the papers should have said" and (all too little of) "what I saw myself"'⁽⁸⁾. Crick goes onto recount Orwell's numerous experiments with diaries and concludes: 'Finally there was Winston Smith's attempt to set down the truth -- something Orwell never seriously attempted to do in a diary'.

In fact, Nineteen Eighty-Four brings together most of the elements that had concerned Orwell even before the war - Orwell details some of them in the diaries but it is clear that he did not realise how significant they were at the time. The novel melds diaries, memory and experience to show that nothing can be reliable. That is, Orwell was himself able to overcome the criticisms that Crick uses against him.

Orwell closed his diary on 15 November '42 with the words: 'Church bells rung this morning -- in celebration of the victory in Egypt. The first time I have heard them in over two years.'

'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen' were the words he chose to open Nineteen Eighty-Four⁽⁹⁾. Winston Smith was going home at lunchtime to write his diary for the first time: an account of a visit the previous evening to the cinema to see an atrocity newsreel: 'then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up in the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up'⁽¹⁰⁾. This echoes Orwell's prophecy of the Berlin orphanage.

The physical conditions under which both men wrote were very similar but Smith's reason and practise for writing were the obverse of Orwell's - Orwell could not buy a book to write in, Winston's experience was the opposite: 'It was partly the unusual geography of the room ... But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of drawer'⁽¹¹⁾ (which he found in Charrington's junk shop), yet Smith cannot identify his reason for writing: 'For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn.... How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.'⁽¹²⁾ There is no market for a helpful Fred Warberg to find.

Orwell contrasts the diary with two uses of memory: Smith's job in the Records Department, where he re-writes the past; and Smith's memories and dreams of the past (which fall into two parts - his childhood, and the more recent past where he has dreamed of the 'Golden Country' and the 'place where there is no darkness'). Both of these become important plot elements in Smith's discovery of how subjective all reality has become under the Party. In building this subjectivity Orwell was inverting much of his experience, including his experience of the B.B.C as a bureaucratic organisation filled with paper which was neither re-written nor destroyed⁽¹³⁾. However, he went further in the underlying images which maintain Winston in his grim life: the 'Golden Country' of Winston's dreams, which might be 'escapist' are revealed to be part of the trap and the torture of everyday life.

'Winston was dreaming of his mother...

'Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country'⁽¹⁴⁾.

While writing his diary for the first time, Smith remembers something else: 'Years ago - how long was it? Seven years it must be - he had dreamed he was walking through pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness"'.⁽¹⁵⁾

When Smith and Julia go to O'Brien's apartment to join the opposition the phrase is picked up when O'Brien says: '"We shall meet again - if we do meet again - "

'Winston looked up at him. "In the place where there is no darkness?" he said hesitantly.

'O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. "In the place where there is no darkness," he said, as though he recognised the allusion.'⁽¹⁶⁾

And finally these two things - the 'Golden Country' and the 'place where there is no darkness' - come together in the final tortures of the Ministry of Love, where they are revealed to be different things:

'One day ... he fell into a strange, blissful reverie ... He was not any longer in the narrow white corridors in the Ministry of Love, he was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide, down which he had seemed to walk in the delirium induced by drugs. He was in the Golden Country'⁽¹⁷⁾

Winston final recollection of the Golden Country coincides with his realisation that he still loves Julia. O'Brien brings the place where there is no darkness into the final torture: '(Winston) had the feeling of sitting in utter loneliness. He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat desert drenched with sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances. Yet the cage with the rats was not two metres away'⁽¹⁸⁾.

All mention of sunlight disappears for the rest of the book until the penultimate paragraph: 'He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain'⁽¹⁹⁾.

The 'Golden Country' must recall the 'golden age "before the war"' Orwell referred to in that 1940 review of Julian Green's diaries, and the past he had mentioned in his 'London Letter', but what other memory did people have? In June 1940 Britain had heard Winston Churchill say: 'If we can stand up to him (Hitler), all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science'⁽²⁰⁾ One paragraph brought together two central themes that Orwell would use in his novel⁽²¹⁾ - the sunlit uplands and perverted science.

As the war went on Orwell came to realise that he could not write about a particular past ('the golden age "before the war"'), but about the past - its use and abuse. The gable end where the slogans of Animal Farm are written and re-written is one representation of this and the later slogan of the Party, 'who controls the present controls the past'⁽²²⁾, in Nineteen Eighty-Four a development of it. O'Brien's dialogues with Winston at the end of the novel discuss the psychology of memory explicitly. Orwell was able to see through the vision of a golden age and present it as a false consciousness or the delirium of drugs, an image that is implanted for ideological purposes, as Churchill went on to use the dream for party political purposes.

Orwell constructed his post-war novel by reversing what he regarded as important during the war. The diaries he kept identify some of those important beliefs, and were also, he thought, typical of how all writers were dealing with the war. Yet, Orwell abandoned them as a project, to use the futility of diary writing as one more input into the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Diary keeping and the subjectivity of experience (Orwell's description of current writing in his London Letter to America) become the fatal flaws that destroy Winston Smith. As Orwell once had difficulty finding a stationer's open, so Winston only finds a diary once, but unlike Orwell who could not write because of the pressures of war, Winston cannot write because the reason for writing has been removed from him.

At the time they happened Orwell failed to realise the significance of events: even 'shaving through the Blitz' escaped him, if only as a source of income that went to someone else. Yet he quickly made sense of the implications of the war and of the pressures on individuals it had both exposed and developed.

Orwell's longing to write of the lost 'golden age "before the war"' became the psychological trap by which Winston was lead into the cells of the Ministry of Love. Speeches such as Churchill's which played with memories of the golden age both past and to come⁽²³⁾ provided more potential traps for the English people. Finally recognising how he had almost been trapped himself, it was not the memory but the consideration of his experiences of the war that provided Orwell with the bases of his last novel. In the end memory, like patriotism, was not enough.

1. "War-Time Diaries" in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1970), pages 385 - 508.

Orwell kept two diaries during the War, covering the periods May 1940 to August 1941, and March 1942 to November 1942.

I shall give the date of the entry when quoting from the text, rather than a page reference.

Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell in four volumes abbreviated C.E.J.L hereafter.

2. See George Orwell: A Life by Bernard Crick (London: Secker and Warburg 1980) page 264. Crick says 'It was intended for publication jointly with the novelist and journalist Inez Holden (1904 -1974) whom he met in 1940 through Fred Warburg. They could not agree on editing his part of it (though they became close friends), so she published separately (It Was Different At The Time, Bodley Head 1945)'.

Michael Sheldon Orwell: The Authorised Biography (London: Heinemann 1991) quotes from the diaries in the chapter 'Surviving the Blitz', but does not discuss their origins.

3. This form of 'business as usual' was written up by the New Statesman journalist George Stonier as 'Shaving Through The Blitz' in New Writing - see Robert Hewison Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1939 - 45 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1971) pages 41 and 190. It was reprinted in Denys Val Baker's Little Reviews Anthology (London: Allen and Unwin 1943) along with Orwell's own 'T.S. Eliot'. Orwell's relations with the New Statesman were often strained.

4. C.E.J.L Volume 2 pages 139 - 140, written in 1941

5. Bernard Crick points out that both Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier were written as diaries originally (the Wigan Diaries are re-printed in C.E.J.L Volume 1), and that Orwell kept another in Spain which he lost so had to reconstruct from memory for Homage to Catalonia. He kept the war-time diary for publication discussed here, and finally he kept dated notebooks that make up the last of his writing (re-printed in C.E.J.L. volume 4) while he was in hospital before he died. Crick page 264.

6. C.E.J.L. Volume 2 pages 35 - 37

7. Our own attitude to the period has grown more unclear, and we now have a period to consider - 'Between the Wars' (a song title used by Billy Bragg).

8. Crick page 264

9. George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four in Animal Farm, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up For Air, Keep The Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Eighty-Four (in one volume)(London: Secker and Warburg/Octopus 1976)pages 743 - 925.

George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four The Facsimile (London: Secker and Warburg 1984)

10. Nineteen Eighty-Four page 747

11. Nineteen Eighty-Four page 746

12. Nineteen Eighty-Four pages 746 - 747

13. 'Would you credit, for instance, that of every radio programme that goes out on the air, even the inconceivable rubbish of cross-talk comedians, at least six copies are typed -sometimes as many as fifteen copies? For years all this trash has been filed somewhere or other in enormous archives' C.E.J.L Volume 3 page 302.

However, it was not archived very well as the thirty year disappearance of Orwell's own work proves: see W. J. West (Ed) Orwell:The War Broadcasts (London: Duckworth/BBC 1984) and W.J West Orwell: The War Commentaries (London: Duckworth/BBC 1985).

14. Nineteen Eighty-Four pages 759 - 760. The 'Golden Country' comes to Winston in both his dreams and his waking thoughts.

15. Nineteen Eighty-Four page 757.

This is possibly ironic: that O'Brien knows Winston will end in the brightly lit cells of the Ministry of Love. The alternate reading is that thoughts of rebellion have been implanted in Winston's mind. I know of no literature which discusses the 'psy-war' and brainwashing theories which underlie such readings of the novel.

16. Nineteen Eighty-Four page 849

17. Nineteen Eighty-Four page 905

18. Nineteen Eighty-Four pages 908 - 909

19. Nineteen Eighty-Four page 916

20. House of Commons June 18 1940, re-printed in Sir Winston Churchill Great War Speeches (London: Corgi 1957) page 33. The speech ends just a few lines later 'This was their finest hour'.

Nigel Rees says '"Broad, sunlit uplands" was an image often invoked by Churchill' Dictionary of Twentieth Century Quotations (London: Fontana 1987) page 103.

The 'psy-war' mentioned above would certainly count as 'perverted science'.

21. Orwell did not comment on the speech in his diary, but he repeatedly mentions listening to the Nine O'Clock News and the broadcasts which used to follow it.

22. Nineteen Eighty-Four page 886

23. We do not know if Orwell ever learned after joining the B.B.C. that Churchill's 'sunlit uplands ... finest hour' broadcast on June 18 was made not by him but by Norman Shelley: 'the B.B.C. again asked a Children's Hour actor to mimick the drooling, slurring, lisping, elocution' - David Irving Churchill's War (New York: Avon 1991) page 338. It would provide another input into his understanding of the falsification of history.