Part One
Chapter 6
Winston was writing in his diary:
It was three years ago. It was
on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big railway
stations. She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp
that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very thick. It was
really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and
the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces. There was nobody
else in the street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I --
For the moment it was too difficult
to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to
squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming
temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang
his head against the wall, to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through
the window -- to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out
the memory that was tormenting him.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the
tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. He
thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back; a quite
ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five to forty, tallish and
thin, carrying a brief-case. They were a few metres apart when the left side of
the man's face was suddenly contorted by a sort of
spasm. It happened again just
as they were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the
clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at
the time: That poor devil is done for. And what was frightening was that the
action was quite possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking
in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could
see.
He drew his breath and went on writing:
I went with her through the
doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against
the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She --
His teeth were set on edge. He would
have liked to spit. Simultaneously with the woman in the basement kitchen he
thought of Katharine, his wife. Winston was married -- had been married, at any
rate: probably he still was married, so far as he knew his wife was not dead. He
seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour
compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but
nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could
be imagined as doing so. Only the proles used scent. In his mind the smell of it
was inextricably mixed up with
fornication.
When he had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years or
thereabouts. Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, of course, but it was
one of those rules that you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. It was
dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be caught with a
prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour camp: not more, if you had
committed no other offence. And it was easy enough, provided that you could
avoid being caught in the act. The poorer quarters swarmed with women who were
ready to sell themselves. Some could even be purchased for a bottle of gin,
which the proles were not supposed to drink. Tacitly the
Party was even inclined
to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could not be
altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it
was furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a submerged and despised
class. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between Party members. But --
though this was one of the crimes that the accused in the great purges
invariably confessed to -- it was difficult to imagine any such thing actually
happening.
The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming
loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose
was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism
was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between
Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and
-- though the principle was never clearly stated -- permission was always
refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically
attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget
children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as
a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was
never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every
Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organizations such as the
Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All
children were to be begotten by artificial
insemination (artsem, it was
called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions. This, Winston was
aware, was not meant altogether seriously, but somehow it fitted in with the
general ideology of the
Party. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct,
or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know
why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And as far as the
women were concerned, the Party's efforts were largely successful.
He thought again of Katharine. It must be nine, ten -- nearly eleven years since
they had parted. It was curious how seldom he thought of her. For days at a time
he was capable of forgetting that he had ever been married. They had only been
together for about fifteen months. The Party did not permit divorce, but it
rather encouraged separation in cases where there were no children.
Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements.
She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one
discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. Very early in
her married life he had decided -- though perhaps it was only that he knew her
more intimately than he knew most people -- that she had without exception the
most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a
thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility,
absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it
out to her. 'The human sound-track' he nicknamed her in his own mind. Yet he
could have endured living with her if it had not been for just one thing -- sex.
As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was
like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when
she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously
pushing him away with all her strength. The rigidlty of her muscles managed to
convey that impression. She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting
nor co-operating but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing,
and, after a while, horrible. But even then he could have borne living with her
if it had been agreed that they should remain celibate. But curiously enough it
was Katharine who refused this. They must, she said, produce a child if they
could. So the performance continued to happen, once a week quite regulariy,
whenever it was not impossible. She even used to remind him of it in the
morning, as something which had to be done that evening and which must not be
forgotten. She had two names for it. One was 'making a baby', and the other was
'our duty to the Party' (yes, she had actually used that phrase). Quite soon he
grew to have a feeling of positive dread when the appointed day came round. But
luckily no child appeared, and in the end she agreed to give up trying, and soon
afterwards they parted.
Winston sighed inaudibly. He picked up his pen again and wrote:
She threw herself down on the
bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible
way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt. I --
He saw himself standing there in the
dim lamplight, with the smell of bugs and cheap scent in his nostrils, and in
his heart a feeling of defeat and resentment which even at that moment was mixed
up with the thought of Katharine's white body, frozen for ever by the hypnotic
power of the Party. Why did it always have to be like this? Why could he not
have a woman of his own instead of these filthy scuffles at intervals of years?
But a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The women of the Party
were all alike. Chastity was as deep
ingrained in them as
Party loyalty. By
careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was
dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth
League, by lectures,
parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven
out of them. His reason told him that there must be exceptions, but his heart
did not believe it. They were all impregnable, as the
Party intended that they
should be. And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down
that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual
act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. Even to
have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.
But the rest of the story had got to be written down. He wrote:
I turned up the lamp. When I
saw her in the light --
After the darkness the feeble light
of the paraffin lamp had seemed very bright. For the first time he could see the
woman properly. He had taken a step towards her and then halted, full of lust
and terror. He was painfully conscious of the risk he had taken in coming here.
It was perfectly possible that the patrols would catch him on the way out: for
that matter they might be waiting outside the door at this moment. If he went
away without even doing what he had come here to do -!
It had got to be written down, it had got to be confessed. What he had suddenly
seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered
so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard
mask. There were streaks of white in her hair; but the truly dreadful detail was
that her mouth had fallen a little open, revealing nothing except a cavernous
blackness. She had no teeth at all.
He wrote hurriedly, in scrabbling handwriting:
When I saw her in the light she
was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it
just the same.
He pressed his fingers against his
eyelids again. He had written it down at last, but it made no difference. The
therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice
was as strong as ever.
Contents