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.
........
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