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 rigidity 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 regularly,
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.