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 Empson.
*
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.
Beyond the glass screen, his producer held up his left hand, his five fingers outstretched, and folded the fingers one-by-one into his palm by way of counting down: five, four, three, two, one. A red light lit up on the control panel in front of him and he began to speak, reading from the altered script.
‘A great naval battle has taken place in the Pacific,’ he began, then skipped the next line, which the censors had blacked out – obviously it contained something less than glorious for the Allies. ‘A week ago we reported that the Japanese fleet had made an unsuccessful attack on Midway Island, and since then the full figures of their losses have come. It is now known that they lost four plane-carriers and a number of other ships. Full figures for the Battle of the Coral Sea have now also been released, and it appears from those that in the two battles the Japanese lost thirty-seven ships of various classes sunk or damaged, including a battleship and five cruisers sunk.’
There was, he noted, no mention of the Allies’ losses. He continued reading as steadily as he could – praying an outbreak of coughing wouldn’t spoil it and cause them to restart. Heavy fighting was continuing in Eastern China, and the Japanese had been making inroads into Inner Mongolia, cutting a vital trade route into Russia … As always, there were rousing accounts of production figures, which he fully expected to be overlaid with uplifting martial music. ‘Mr Oliver Lyttelton, British Foreign Minister for Production, has just announced the truly staggering figures of Britain’s current war production. He announces, among other things, that Britain is now producing vehicles for war purposes – this of course includes tanks – at the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand a year; big guns at forty thousand a year, and ammunition for those guns at a rate of twenty-five million rounds. He announces also that Britain’s aircraft production has made a one hundred per cent increase, while the production of merchant shipping has increased by fifty-seven per cent …’
That evening he found himself back at the diary. He had reopened it some weeks before, thinking the war had entered a new and more promising phase. Churchill’s grip on power had seemed to be loosening and there was increased talk of a second front. The people, he had thought, were recovering their revolutionary spirit. Perhaps under Cripps something positive could be won from the war. But once again he was wrong. How could he of all people – whose job was to produce propaganda – have fallen victim to such optimistic nonsense? Now that the cheap thrill of invention had passed, he recalled with disgust his own contribution to the propaganda effort that afternoon, with its typical fare of vast strategic manoeuvres, glorious victories, countless enemy aircraft shot down and ships sunk, prodigies of manufacturing output, meaningless statistic after meaningless statistic, the final victory once again within measurable distance – all while a neighbour’s son had disappeared into some prison camp in the Far East, the enemy air raids continued nightly, and rationing got tighter and tighter. It was nothing but a record of daily forgeries, and he was sure no one believed a word of it.
Where would it end? The problem, of course, was that after he and everyone else who had lived through the actual events were dead, what he had written would likely pass into history as some sort of reliable source – a set of facts taken as the objective truth. More than any air raid, this thought frightened him. Memory – human memory. That’s what had to be preserved.
With a start, he realised that while he had been thinking, he had also been writing furiously, filling page after page of the diary, setting out his horror, his fears, his sense of mental loneliness, above all his incomprehension of the world in which he now lived. It struck him that if the literature of totalitarianism was now triumphing, he was complicit in it. He was overcome by a feeling of disgust. He put a cross through the passages he had just written and wrote a single line on the following page: ‘All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.’
How long, he wondered, could he go on being part of it? As soon as he could escape his job, he would.