Masters of Despair

By Thomas Fensch

Masters of Despair analyzes one hundred years of dystopian fiction from: We, 1924; Brave New World, 1943; Darkness at Noon, 1932; Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949; Fahrenheit 451, 1953; The Man in the High Castle, 1962, The Handmaid's Tale, 1986. The Road, 2006 and others

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Century Books and E-Books
• Release date: Nov 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985683998

Thomas Fensch

Thomas Fensch has published 40 books in the past 50 years--his first three were published in 1970. He has published five books about John Steinbeck; two about James Thurber; two about Dr. Seuss; the only full biography of John Howard Griffin, the author of Black Like Me, and a variety other titles.

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Introduction

Despair ...

The complete loss, or absence, of hope.

Dystopia ...

An imagined world, or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives.

There have been dystopian incidents and societies since biblical times; indeed throughout history. They are as old as time itself.

Which books can be considered masters of this genre, classics in dystopian literature?

* This list might logically begin with We, Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 novel. In his One State, citizens have numbers not names, march step to step together and live in all-glass buildings so they can be under unending surveillance by the secret police or Bureau of Guardians.

We is still widely available in a variety of editions, print and e-book forms.

George Orwell had a copy, read it and reviewed it. What did he think of We, what do We and his masterwork 1984, published 25 years later, have in common and what are their differences?

* Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is surely a major title in dystopian literature. Published in 1932, Huxley focuses on genetic engineering, specifically genetic breeding. In his world, there are five classes of humanity: the Alphas; Betas; Gammas; Deltas and Epsilons. They all wear distinctive colored clothing. All citizens use copious amounts of soma, a happiness-inducing drug.

* It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1935. Lewis envisions a take-over by a Huey Long-type politician, who ushers in a fascistic regime of suppression and totalitarianism, all covered by red, white and blue flags. This president, Berzelious Buzz Windrip, disguises his fascism in the old-fashioned patriotism of the past.

* Forgotten for years—first published in 1937 and recently republished—Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin envisions Hitlerian Germany in its seventh century of power. Hitler is remembered as a seven foot tall, long blonde-haired, blue-eyed man who exploded from the head of God and is a God in his own right.

* Address Unknown, by Kressman Taylor, published in 1938, was highly regarded when it was first published but largely forgotten now. It is a unique contribution to this genre; it is epistolary, a novel as a series of letters between two Germans, one in America and the other in Germany. Ultimately the friend in Germany disappears into the abyss of Nazi Germany; the last letter from the American is returned with the stamp Address Unknown.

* The Woman Who Could Not Die, published in 1938, by Julia de Beausobre, is a memoir of a Russian woman; she and her husband were caught by the Russian Secret Police in 1932; the husband was immediately shot, though she did not know that until much later. She was sent into the Gulag, the vast prison system, with no hope of ever getting out. She was ransomed, did get out and fled to England, where she wrote her memoir.

George Orwell also read this and there were two major details of The Woman Who Could Not Die incorporated into 1984. It is almost impossible find now (and deserves to be reprinted).

* Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, published in 1940, is one of the most frightening novels published in the twentieth century. Koestler had been imprisoned three times: in Franco’s Spain; in Nazi Germany and in England.

Darkness ... reveals the horror of Stalin’s secret executions and show trials—

Over a period of years 1,200,000 Russians were executed by Stalin’s secret police and show trials.

* Hiroshima, by John Hersey may be an outlier here.

It is nonfiction: investigative journalism, published in 1946. Hersey was the first reporter in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city. He witnessed the misery of the people, the deaths, those who would die later, those with long-term radiation sickness. And in a truly horrific incident, he discovered a squad of Japanese Army air observers, still together; they all had their heads up, all watching the sky when the bomb exploded with a noiseless flash (cited at the end of that chapter) ...

* If This Is a Man by Prime Levi, a memoir published in 1947.

Haftling. I have learned i am a Haftling. My name is 174517.

Haftling means prisoner.

Levi, an Italian Jew, survived the Nazi death camps, but just barely. He was taken at one point to Monowitz, one of the satellite camps of Auschwitz. There were 650 Italian Jews in that camp, Levi was one of 20 that survived.

* How George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, first published in 1949, became one of the most influential—and memorable—books of the twentieth century and why it remains so to this day.

* Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, is equally dramatic—firemen are tasked with finding and burning books—which are illegal—and, as collateral damage, burning down houses in which they find books. And sometimes killing the residents inside the houses. 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which book paper burns.

* Night. Elie Weisel, published in 1960 is a memoir, like Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. Levi was an Italian Jew; Weisel, one of a family of Romanian Jews. In March 1944, the Nazis rounded up the Weisel family and put them in boxcars—the final destination: the death campus. Weisel, like Levi, survived, but also just barely. At one point he was forced to watch the execution of three inmates, one was boy his own age. Weisel eventually became a premier authority on the Holocaust, speaking internationally and writing books acclaimed world-wide.

* The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick, 1962. This is alternative history—American lost World War II and it is divided in half; the Nazis control the east and Japan controls the west coast. Dick died at 53, largely unknown outside the science fiction magazine world. Since his death, his novels and short stories have found world-wide audiences including two Blade Runner films, Total Recall and Minority Report, with Tom Cruise.

At one point he said he was too poor to pay the fines on late library books but after his death, the films made from his work have now sold over one billion dollars in ticket sales by 2009.

* The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, 1985. Atwood’s novel, in which women are relegated to the status of women in the 17th century, may well be as widely known and as well regarded as Orwell’s 1984. At one point, Atwood said the novel she was working on at that time was too far-fetched as to be believed. Now it is deadly real. With Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion made illegal in half of the states in the United States, Atwood’s image of women in red habits and white cowls (based on an image on cans of Old Dutch Cleanser, which frightened her as a child), may appear on women protesting in America’s streets by the thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands.

* The Plot Against America, Philip Roth, 2004, is alternative history, in which Franklin Roosevelt is defeated and Charles Lindbergh became president; Lindbergh then signs agreements with Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, promising that America would not interfere with their empire building and ushering in a reign of anti-semitism.

The protagonist in The Plot... is Roth himself as a young boy, narrating the story.

* The Road, Cormac McCarthy, 2006, is a dystopian novel that is, by turns, haunting, harrowing and hypnotic. McCarthy was once in a motel in El. Paso, Texas, with his son, looking out at the mountains and visualizing a barren, apocalyptic world. He made two pages of notes and later wrote The Road, about a father and son traveling on deserted roads and sometimes no roads, pushing a shopping cart full of the only belongings they have. The few strangers they meet might well be enemies, to kill just for the meager food they had, and might even be cannibals. McCarthy does not use conventional punctuation—no quotation marks—making his dialogue sound both biblical and intimate.

Some of the dialogue sections in The Road are said to be actual conversations McCarthy had previously with his own son.

Some of these books are quite famous and deservedly so: Huxley, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Darkness at Noon ...

And now, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Road; all are worth reading, as well as some lesser-known titles.

And you may well find other titles in dystopian literature worthy of your time.

—Thomas Fensch

June, 2022

AUTHOR’S NOTE: It Can’t Happen Here, Address Unknown, The Woman Who Could Not Die, Holocaust memoirs by Primo Levi and Elie Weisel and, more recently, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, are listed above, as part of this genre, but do not appear this book.

They are, however, extensively analyzed in The Books That Haunt Us, published in 2020. Haunt Us ... can be considered a companion volume to this title.

We

Yevgeny Zamyatin / 1924

The One State ... and constant surveillance

genre: dystopian novel

Ever since the first publication of We—in English—in 1924, it has been described as one of the first major, significant dystopian novels of the twentieth century.

And after the publication of a dystopian masterpiece 25 years later, George Orwell’s 1984, readers and critics alike have debated how much Orwell borrowed from We, to use in 1984.

Zamyatin’s father was a Russian orthodox priest and his mother a musician; he was born approximately 180 miles south of Moscow. He later described his early days (typical of children everywhere), You will see a very lonely child, without companions of his own age, on his stomach, over a book, or under the piano, on which his mother is playing Chopin.

He studied engineering for the Imperial Russian Navy from 1902–1908 in St. Petersburg, gave up his interest in religion, became an atheist and Marxist, and joined the Bolshevik part of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

In December, 1905, he hid a paper bag full of the explosive pyroxylin in his flat. The next day he and 30 other Bolsheviks were arrested. Zamyatin was beaten and imprisoned; he managed to smuggle a note out of prison to tell others to clean his quarters of any incriminating material. He was kept in solitary confinement for weeks, and finally released in the spring of 1906 and sent in internal exile to his home region. He escaped and returned to St. Petersburg, before moving to Helsinki, Finland.

He snuck back into St. Petersburg, but was arrested again in 1911. In 1913, he was granted amnesty as part of the 300-year celebration of rule by the House of Romanov and again returned to St. Petersburg.

His book, A Provincial Tale, a satire about life in a small Russian town, was published favorably that year.

In 1916, he was sent to the United Kingdom to help work on building the ships Krassin, said to be the most powerful icebreaker in the world, and the Lenin.

There were two ships named Lenin, the first, an icebreaker, Zamyatin worked on; the second Lenin was the world’s first nuclear-powered icebreaker. It began service in 1957 and was decommissioned in 1989. Nuclear power was an advantage in the Soviet Russian northern oceans where regularly refueling would have been inconvenient.

(In We,