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‘Freedom is so painful an obligation that there will always be some who would prefer to abandon it. Burgess believed that this increased freedom was partly thanks to Orwell, and that Nineteen Eighty-Four acted as a prophylactic against totalitarianism: As the year 1984 was dawning, Burgess published an article in the Miami Herald titled ‘Good Morning! It’s 1984: Are we Free?’ In this piece he assesses the state of freedom in Great Britain in 1984 as opposed to that of 1948, ‘when we had to tolerate the insolence of clerks of the Ministry of Food and be brainwashed into thinking the rascally Groundnut scheme a good thing’. It’s all in Orwell.’īurgess never stopped returning to Orwell. You saw the effects of German bombing everywhere, with London pride and loosestrife growing brilliantly in the craters. I remember a short story that began, ‘It was the fifty-fourth day of the new razor blade’ - there’s comedy for you. Razor blades had disappeared from the market.
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Boiled cabbage was a redolent staple of the British diet. I seem to remember you could get cabbages easily enough. One egg a month, and the egg was usually bad. The meat ration was down to a couple of slices of fatty corned beef. But now we had worse privations than during the war, and they seemed to get worse every week. You can put up with privations when you have the luxury of danger. The war had been over four years and we had missed the dangers - buzz-bombs, for instance. ‘Let me tell you about 1949, when I was reading Orwell’s book about 1948. In this passage Burgess discusses Nineteen Eighty-Four as a creative critique of 1948: The first half of Burgess’s book contains a commentary on Orwell’s dystopia and discusses the origins of IngSoc. Zamyatin, two texts which demonstrate Orwell’s strong interest in political dystopia.īurgess’s most sustained analysis of Orwell comes in 1985, a critical/creative book which responds to many of the ideas in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Burgess has inserted a card in volume four, on which he has made notes on the essay ‘The Prevention of Literature’ and Orwell’s review of We by E.I. In the book collection at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, there is the well-thumbed, four volume edition of Orwell’s complete essays, journalism and letters. The essays and novels of George Orwell were a major influence for Anthony Burgess.