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The Inaugural Modern Intellectual History Lecture, Cambridge, 22 November 2019
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2020
George Orwell and William Empson worked closely together at the BBC during the Second World War and they remained friends thereafter. In The Structure of Complex Words (1951) Empson paid surprisingly serious attention to the view of language expounded in Nineteen Eighty-Four, seeing in Orwell's presentation of the meaningless slogans of totalitarianism, such as “War Is Peace,” a challenge to his own more rationalistic analysis of how language works. This article first explores the development of Orwell's thinking about language, including his engagement with Basic English (which Empson helped to propagate); a particularly close, and critical, analysis is given of his celebrated essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell's views are then contrasted with Empson's unpacking of the interplay of multiple senses within individual words, demonstrating that even the most extreme propaganda statements need to draw upon and respect the mechanics of meaning as embodied in such words if they are to be persuasive. Intellectual historians have much to learn from these exchanges, as do contemporary analysts of “fake news” and authoritarian bombast more generally.
1 Empson to Ian Parsons, 24 Nov. 1950; Chatto and Windus archives, University of Reading.
2 Empson, William, The Structure of Complex Words (London, 1951), 83Google Scholar.
3 Ibid., 351–9.
4 See especially his tribute “Orwell at the BBC,” first published in The Listener, 4 Feb. 1971, and in Gross, Miriam (ed.), The World of George Orwell (London, 1971)Google Scholar; reprinted in Empson, William, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Haffenden, John (London, 1987)Google Scholar. The chapter on Lear in Empson, Complex Words contains thirteen references to Orwell's essay “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool,” which had appeared in Polemic in March 1947.
5 “I should imagine that this little bit is more likely to be quoted in reviews than anything else, because it is fairly contemporary; and I am very anxious that the book should feel fairly contemporary. I realise your difficulties, and that these additions are a nuisance, but am sure you don't want it to appear feeling out of date.” Empson to Ian Parsons, 24 Nov. 1950, Chatto and Windus archives, University of Reading.
6 Haffenden, John, William Empson, vol. 1, Among the Mandarins (Oxford, 2005), esp. “Postscript,” 537–48Google Scholar.
7 See Rodden, John, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St George” Orwell (New York, 1989)Google Scholar.
8 Empson, “Orwell at the BBC,” in Empson, Argufying, 495.
9 It is relevant to recall that Orwell had been born in India, where his father worked in the Indian civil service, and that he had served in the imperial police force in Burma from 1922 to 1927. Empson had taught in Japan between 1931 and 1934, and in China between 1937 and 1940; he returned to teach in Peking between 1947 and 1952.
10 “Often the BBC broadcasters, including Orwell, Empson and Anand, would go out drinking at a pub in Great Portland Street after a day's stint at the microphone.’ Haffenden, John, William Empson, vol. 2, Against the Christians (Oxford, 2006), p. 52Google Scholar.
11 Empson to Richards, 12 Jan. 1943; quoted in Haffenden, William Empson, 2: 74.
12 According to one estimate, there were 85,000 radios in India in 1939 for a population of around four hundred million; see Dinsman, Melissa, Modernism at the Microphone: Radio, Propaganda, and Literary Aesthetics during World War II (London, 2015), 217 n. 76Google Scholar.
13 Empson’s later view—unreliable in this, perhaps, as in so much else—was that even after Orwell had left the BBC, “the experience of being Indian Editor continued to work on him, and the early parts of Nineteen Eighty-Four were evidently conceived as farce about it.” Empson, “Orwell at the BBC,” in Empson, Argufying, 500.
14 See e.g. Crick, Bernard, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth, 1982; first published 1980), 464, 500Google Scholar; Haffenden, William Empson, 2: 46–56.
15 See e.g.Orwell's letters to Robert Giroux: “I would be interested to know where Empson's essay [on King Lear] appeared, as I'd like to know what he has to say about ‘Lear.’ He has disappeared into China and I did not even know he was writing anything at present” (14 April 1949). Thanking Giroux for the copy of the Sewanee Review containing Empson's essay, “I note with interest from the Sewanee Review that Empson has decided to stay on in Pekin. I wonder if you are in touch with him? I should certainly be glad of any news of him. I had had vague ideas of writing, but I thought it might be embarrassing for foreigners in China to get letters from outside at this moment.” And again: “I wonder if there is any news of the Empsons? There was a rumour in London that William had reached the USA, but I can't get it confirmed.” (3 June 1949) See also Orwell to Julian Symons, 16 June 1949: “Have you any news of the Empsons, who were in Pekin …? There have been various rumours, and I am trying to get some news from Empson's American publishers.” And Orwell to Leonard Moore (his literary agent), 30 Aug. 1949: “William Empson in China has asked for a copy of 1984. I think it might be wise to get two copies sent, one from London and one from New York. He already seems uncertain as to whether his letters are being opened, so could you ask both publishers not to enclose the usual card saying ‘Compliments of the Author,’ as this might just conceivably be embarrassing to him.” (Orwell included Empson's Peking address.) This letter suggests that Empson had been in touch with Orwell directly or indirectly to request a copy. See The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Davison, Peter, 20 vols. (London, 1998)Google Scholar (hereafter CW with volume and page number), 20: 84, 117, 125, 137, 162.
16 See Haffenden, William Empson, 2: 264–5.
17 His most extensive account—inaccurate in various details, as so many of Empson's later recollections tended to be—was “Orwell at the BBC,” but there are thirteen further references to Orwell in the pieces collected in Argufying alone.
18 Though he did go out of his way to praise Empson’s contribution at the BBC. Orwell to Alex Comfort, 11[?] July 1943, CW, 15: 166.
19 For an account of the rise of the concept of “totalitarianism” see Gleason, Abbott, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar. The term began to be used as a pejorative description of both the Nazi and Communist regimes in the mid- and late 1930s, and then became very common in the USA and the UK in the 1940s.
20 See Young, John Wesley, Totalitarian Language: Orwell's Newspeak and Its Nazi and Communist Antecedents (Charlottesville, 1991), esp. “Introduction.”Google Scholar
21 Steinhoff, William, George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (Ann Arbor, 1975), 169Google Scholar.
22 See West, W. J., ed., Orwell: The War Broadcasts (London, 1985), pp. 24–5, 77–9Google Scholar.
23 CW, 16: 126.
24 This is extensively discussed in Haffenden, William Empson, 1: 304–10, 530–33, and 2: 74–6, 166–9.
25 Empson, Complex Words, 398.
26 Orwell to Leonora Lockhart, 18 Aug. 1942, CW, 13: 481–2.
27 Orwell to C. K. Ogden, 16 Dec. 1942, CW, 14: 239. Copies of Ogden's side of the correspondence are held in the Orwell Archive, Special Collections, University College London. Orwell reported there being some resistance within the BBC to further use of Basic, and Ogden explained some of the general prejudices that Basic was up against—“There is the usual sort of British ‘literary’ reaction to anything a little different & hearsay (that someone has said somewhere that Basic won't wash), from second-rate writers”—and mentioned Empson and Richards among leading literary figures who were sympathetic to the enterprise. Ogden to Orwell, 17 Dec. 1942. H/2/37, Orwell Archive, UCL.
28 West, The War Broadcasts, 47. The claim is not made more plausible by West's further remark that Empson “had commissioned a talk the previous year called ‘Wordsworth and Basic’.” I have failed to find direct evidence of this talk, though when Empson was en route back to Britain from China at the beginning of 1940, he gave a talk for the WRUL station in Boston on “Basic English and Wordsworth,” which was later published in the Kenyon Review 2 (1940), reprinted in Empson, Argufying, 232–8. See Haffenden, William Empson, 1: 542–3.
29 Ogden, C. K., Basic English versus the Artificial Languages (London, 1935)Google Scholar, claimed to demonstrate the superiority of Basic over all “invented” languages, of which Esperanto was the best known.
30 George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, 28 Jan. 1944, CW, 16: 81–2. It may have been this piece that prompted Ogden to write again, to which Orwell responded on 1 March 1944, again emphasizing the objections he encountered to broadcasts about Basic while at the BBC. CW, 16: 108.
31 William Empson, “Basic English and the Modern World,” Tribune, 18 Feb. 1944, 18.
32 See Haffenden, William Empson, 2: 74–6.
33 George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, 18 August 1944; CW, 16: 338.
34 Was he, as a result, to figure in coded form in Nineteen Eighty-Four? In the novel, one of Winston's erstwhile colleagues, Ampleforth, described as “the poet,” is convicted of thoughtcrime for having left the word “God” in the “rectification” of the works of Kipling, an error he made in order to preserve the rhyme with “rod.” In the surviving draft typescript, the author whose work he had been rewriting was given as “Wordsworth.” See George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Facsimile of the Extant Manuscript, ed. Davison, Peter (London, 1984), 221Google Scholar. It is not clear when this was changed, but the corrected proofs held in the Orwell Archive at UCL show that by proof stage it had already been changed to “Kipling.” West speculates that “if ‘Wordsworth’ had been allowed to stand in the text it could have been taken as a direct reference to Empson,” perhaps because of Empson's article on “Wordsworth and Basic,” cited above. West, War Broadcasts, 47 n. 92.
35 George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, 27 Oct. 1944, and subsequent letters, 3 Nov. 1944, CW, 16: 439–45.
36 CW, 17: 31.
37 George Orwell, “Propaganda and Demotic Speech,” Persuasion, Summer 1944; CW, 16: 310–16.
38 For a somewhat idiosyncratic account of Orwell’s views in the light of subsequent work in linguistics see Bolton, W. F., The Language of 1984: Orwell's Language and Ours (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.
39 For all Orwell’s close involvement with the journal Polemic, which specified “the problem of verbal meaning” as one of its four main themes, he does not seem to have shared or responded to the views on “The Fallacy of Real Meaning” expressed in the fourth issue by the editor, Humphrey Slater, who called for more scientific and philosophical study of language (Polemic 4 (1946), 57–64Google Scholar). The short-list of books Slater recommended included Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity.
40 For example, the essay began to appear in composition “readers” in the early 1950s with the result, noted by John Rodden in the 1980s, that “it may be a more common experience for an American to read Orwell's essay in college than to read either Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four in high school.” Reacting against this elevated standing, one sardonic critic in 1974 awarded the essay “the golden essay award for ‘most anthologized essay in college texts’.” Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation, 390, 392.
41 Fowler, H. W. and Fowler, F. G., The King's English (Oxford, 1919; first published 1906), 1Google Scholar.
42 George Orwell, “Politics and the English language,” Horizon, April 1946; CW, 17: 425.
43 CW, 17: 425.
44 CW, 17: 427–8.
45 CW, 17: 428.
46 This sense first appears in the “Supplement” to the OED published in 1981. One illustrative quotation is from R. G. Collingwood in 1938: “Where a certain practical activity is stimulated as expedient, that which stimulates it is advertisement or (in the current modern sense, not the old sense) propaganda.” The first edition of the dictionary had been completed by 1928 and had appeared in revised form in 1933.
47 CW, 17: 429.
48 E.g. Morris, Mary Jo, “Bentham and Basic English: The ‘Pious Founders’ of Newspeak,” in Buitenhuis, Peter and Nadel, Ira B., eds., George Orwell: A Re-assessment (Basingstoke, 1988)Google Scholar.
49 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London, 1949); CW, 9: 312, 323, original emphasis.
50 Other scholars have tended to emphasize the continuities: for example, the observation that “Newspeak manifests so many of the ideas that Orwell treated approvingly elsewhere in his writings.” Bailey, Richard W., “George Orwell and the English language,” in Jensen, Ejner J., ed., The Future of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Ann Arbor, 1984), 36Google Scholar.
51 Or is this a superficial or misleading contrast? Given Orwell's assumption that words are somehow just transparent windows onto reality, the removal of cloudiness and abstraction as recommended in the essay should mean that the truth becomes visible, indeed self-evident, but in that case might this simply mean replacing one form of orthodoxy with another …?
52 This point is gestured towards in other terms in Delany, Paul, “Words, Deeds, and Things: Orwell's Quarrel with Language,” in Buitenhuis, Peter and Nadel, Ira B., eds., George Orwell: A Re-assessment (Basingstoke, 1988), 93–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Delany concludes, “We may still admire Winston's passion for truth, or, behind it, Orwell's own hatred of totalitarianism. What we must question, however, is the wish that these passions could be satisfied outside of language, in a more solid realm where things remain faithful to themselves.” Ibid. 101, original emphasis.
53 Empson, Complex Words, 56.
54 All quotations from Empson, Complex Words, 56–9, though this chapter of the book partly reproduces the article Empson had published under the same title (“Statements in Words”) in 1937, these pages are a later addition; see Empson, William, The Structure of Complex Words, ed. Thaventhiran, Helen and Collini, Stefan (Oxford, forthcoming 2020)Google Scholar, “Introduction” and “Textual Notes.”
55 Empson, Complex Words, 53.
56 Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, CW, 9: 6, 29.
57 Empson, Complex Words, pp. 353–6.
58 Ibid., 361.
59 West, Orwell: The War Broadcasts, 82–3.
60 As an honourable exception, note the passing remark of Norris, Christopher in William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London, 1978), 23Google Scholar: “Empson's implicit claim for the permutations of predicative logic—the topic of his first two chapters—is that they provide a more confident working notion of the limits of intelligibility. They lend weight to Empson's case against the view (as taken by Orwell in 1984) that language can be adapted without resistance to any perverted rhetoric or creed.”
61 See Helen Thaventhiran and Stefan Collini, “Introduction,” in Empson, Structure of Complex Words, ed. Thaventhiran and Collini.
62 E.g. in an exchange in Critical Quarterly in1959 Empson is affronted by a critic who claims to find unconscious Christian echoes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Quite the contrary, he asserts: Orwell knew what he was doing and intended his warning to apply to both Communism and Christianity. “The forecast of Orwell, in this horrible novel written while he was dying, is that Christianity and communism will soon wear each other down till both have lost their original ideals, and become the worship of a monster.” William Empson, “Christianity and 1984,” in Empson, Argufying, 601–4. Cf. Empson, Milton's God (London, 1961), 235Google Scholar.
63 Empson, Argufying, 163–4.
64 Young, Totalitarian Language, 220–23.
65 See, e.g. “George Orwell ‘1984’: Interest in Dystopian Novel Surges in Wake of Trump Administration's ‘Newspeak’,” New York Times, 2 June 2017.
66 Empson protested against linguistic pessimism in milder form when reviewing C. S. Lewis in 1961: “We have many grave things to worry about, but if we look round for a sturdy thing, proved to be able to take knocks, the eye rests with relief upon the English language; a great nuisance to handle, of course, but one need hardly fear that it is in decay” (Empson, Argufying, 145). This has the usual colouring of Empson's camped-up civility, but it is an affirmation of faith nonetheless, underlined by the use of “sturdy,” which was one of his most favoured terms of commendation.