Orwell
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We then got down to the sticky question. Though Frankford was still a Communist, he now conceded that “POUM was all right” and had been “badly treated during the political maneuvering and struggle for power.” Apparently contrite and eager to clear his name, though stumbling for words, he showed me a xeroxed page from Brockway's book and admitted that he had indeed broken down and begged forgiveness in London. The Daily Worker “twisted and changed the meaning of what I said,” he exclaimed. Pathetically, and rather touchingly, he pleaded: “Don't blame me for anything. I never meant those things to be put down that way!” I asked, for the record, if the accusations he'd made in 1937 were true or false. “Just say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” I said. Vague, evasive, yet eager to please, he thought for a long time. Finally, he said he wasn't sure.
I went back to London and called Lesser again. Friendlier this time, but more wary, he said that after being invalided out of the International Brigade he became Communist Party representative, head of English-language broadcasting (i.e., propaganda) and Daily Worker correspondent in Barcelona. When I mentioned Frankford's name, Lesser said he might have known him in Hackney (a working-class district in London's East End) before they went to Spain. But he could not recall getting Frankford out of prison and said he would surely have remembered that good deed if he had done so. When I mentioned the Daily Worker story, he asked: “Was it signed?” When I said it wasn't, he claimed he had no recollection of writing it. Then he added: “Maybe it was true.”
What, then, is the truth? Frankford said Lesser got him out of prison and he was certainly in a position to do so. Frankford's arrest gave the Communists an opportunity to smear the POUM and helped justify their extermination. Lesser, Barcelona correspondent of the Daily Worker, must have written that lying story. He was, it seems, both Frankford's benefactor and betrayer.
Frankford's accusations, refuted by Orwell, were certainly false. Brockway's account of Frankford's remorse (witnessed by McNair) is convincing. Why then did Frankford “stick to his story” and repeat his lies to Crick, yet retract essential parts of his statement—as he did long ago in Spain—and claim to be a cynical realist when he was really a disillusioned fantasist? Was it stubbornness, pride, bravado or bitterness?
His uneasy recantation on television, reinforced by his guilt-ridden pleas when I interviewed him, seemed inspired by bad conscience. Was he a victim,manipulated and humiliated by the Communists he still believed in, or a Communist agent, planted in POUM to discredit the militia? My interviews with Frankford and Lesser reveal that the political battle-lines of the 1930s have endured into the 1990s. Hard-liners still believe it's ethical to lie in the service of Communism—even when the system has withered and supporters like Frankford have begun to crack. They continue to repeat what Orwell in 1940 called “the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”
THE ART
EIGHT
ORWELL'S APOCALYPSE
Coming Up for Air
This essay, the first devoted entirely to Coming Up for Air, appeared in the special Orwell issue of Modern Fiction Studies when I was guest editor. I argued that this synthetic and seminal novel recapitulates the themes of the 1930s and foreshadows the political satires of the 1940s. It also portrays an apocalyptic vision that destroys the possibility of recapturing one's childhood. I concluded with an extended comparison of Joyce's Leopold Bloom and Orwell's George Bowling.
“They were born after 1914 and are therefore incapable of happiness.”
—Bertrand Russell
Coming Up for Air (1939), Orwell's central transitional work, is both a synthetic and seminal book, gathering the themes that had been explored in the poverty books of the thirties and anticipating the cultural essays and political satires of the next decade. The location and central symbol of the novel appear as early as Down and Out when Orwell describes tramping in Lower Binfield and fishing in the Seine; but the novel has much closer affinities to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for Gordon Comstock's belief that our civilization is dying and the whole world will soon be blown up is very like Bowling's. Similarly, Comstock's fulmination against marriage and his dreadful vision of a million fearful slaves groveling before the throne of money are repeated in the later novel. Comstock's fellow lodger and sometime friend, the traveling salesman Flaxman, has the same good humor, stout physique and mild vanity of Bowling; and he, too, uses some extra money to escape from his wife.
The dull, shabby, dead-alive Comstock family, who depressingly dwell in an atmosphere of semi-genteel failure, resemble the decayed middle-class family of Hilda Bowling, whose vitality has been sapped by poverty. Like the Oxford don Porteous, whose name suggests old wine and Latin, they live “inside the whale,” entirely in the dead world of the past. When everything else has changed for the worse, only Hilda's fossilized Anglo-Indian family and the eternally classical Porteous have stayed the same, and their political vacuum has been filled by the hateful Left Book Club lecturer. “All the decent people are paralysed. Dead men and live gorillas”:1 “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
The Road to Wigan Pier satirizes many of the same targets as this novel: drab and soulless estate housing; mild and mindless Socialists; the crankish fruit-juice drinker, nudist and sandal-wearer of Pixy Glen; and the difficulty of finding unpolluted streams with live fish in them. And one of the most striking images of working-class life in Wigan Pier is repeated in Coming Up. The decrepit woman who had “the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery”2 becomes Bowling's boyhood nursemaid: “A wrinkled-up hag of a woman, with her hair coming down and a smokey face, looking at least fifty years old…. It was Katie, who must have been twenty-seven” (41). As in Wigan Pier, the deterioration and decay of the natural landscape is paralleled by a similar decline that Bowling observes in people. In the early twenties, Hilda Bowling was a “pretty, delicate girl … and within only about three years she's settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump” (136). When he returns to Binfield in the thirties, Elsie, his first love, “with her milkywhite skin and red mouth and kind of dull-gold hair, had turned into this great round-shouldered hag, shambling along on twisted heels” (204).
Finally, Orwell's idealization of domestic life in Wigan Pier is repeated in the novel when Bowling's parents read the Sunday newspaper: “A Sunday afternoon—summer, of course, always summer—a smell of roast pork and greens still floating in the air, and Mother on one side of the fireplace, starting off to read the latest murder but gradually falling asleep with her mouth open, and Father on the other, in slippers and spectacles, working his way slowly through yards of smudgy print … and myself under the table with the B.O.P. [Boys’ Own Paper], making believe that the tablecloth is a tent” (46). This Dickensian description of sentimental and soporific, cozy and mindless domestic dullness would be used satirically by most modern writers, but Orwell portrays the scene from the point of view of a secure and protected child.
Bowling's prophetic fears about the destruction of his childhood England by bombs follow inevitably from Orwell's ambivalent thoughts in the final paragraph of Homage to Catalonia as he returns to England: “Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens … all sleeping the deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.” Orwell says that “the phrase that Hilter coined for the Germans, ‘a sleep-walking people,’ would have been better applied to the English,” and the somnolence of this pleasant pastoral nostalgia is clearly related to the drowsy numbness of mother and father at the fireplace.3
Coming Up for Air is about an apocalyptic vision that destroys a nostalgic dream of childh
ood. Bowling is in a prophetic mood in which he foresees the end of the world and can feel things cracking and collapsing under his feet. The war that will decide the destiny of Europe is due in 1941, and it seems to Bowling (as it did to Orwell at the end of Homage) that he “could see the whole of England, and all the people in it, and all the things that will happen to all of them” (224). Bowling, caught in a brief intense moment between the destructive future and the nostalgic past, seeks, like Winston Smith, to escape the painful modern realities by recapturing his idealized childhood memories. Orwell's metaphor of escape in both works (people trapped in a sinking ship is the symbol of man's fate in Nineteen Eighty-Four) is “coming up for air,” “like the big sea-turtles when they come paddling up to the surface, stick their noses out and fill their lungs with a great gulp before they sink down again among the seaweed and octopuses” (168). But escape is impossible for Bowling, who has the archetypal experience of returning home to discover that the lost Eden of childhood is irrecoverable: “What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist. Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin we're in reaches up to the stratosphere” (216).
The childhood passages of Coming Up have the same affectionate and nostalgic tone as Orwell's “As I Please” column and his major essays on English popular culture, like “Boys’ Weeklies.” These essays, which develop and illuminate the themes of the novel, were written against the background of the Second World War. In one of these cultural essays, “The Art of Donald McGill” (1941), Orwell lists the conventions of the comic postcard jokes—all women plot marriage, which only benefits women; all husbands are henpecked; middle-aged men are drunkards; nudism is comical; Air Raid precautions are ludicrous; illegitimate babies and old maids are always funny—and nearly every one of them appears in Coming Up. Actually, Bowling's colloquial humor is far superior to these conventional jokes. He “baptizes” his new false teeth in a pub, compares Hilda's constriction to that of an “average zenana,” says that one old lady thought the Left Book Club had to do with books left in railway carriages, and observes that he got fat “so suddenly that it was as if a cannon ball had hit me and got stuck inside.” Orwell's description of Bowling guarding the tins of bully-beef in Cornwall, and especially his satire on Hilda's (and his own) Anglo-Indian family and on Porteous, both mummified relics of the past, is well done. Coming Up, like Gem, Magnet and the Raffles stories (all three are mentioned in the novel), comic postcards, Helen's Babies, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, and “Good Bad Books,” recreates a decent, stable, familiar but nonexistent world.
In each of his essays on popular culture, Orwell favorably compares the static old-fashioned view expressed in these works with that of their harsher and crueler successors: the schoolboy atmosphere of the Raffles stories and “Boys’ Weeklies” with the torture and corruption of No Orchids for Miss Blandish and the “Yank mags,” the classic perfect poison murder with the modern bloody “Cleft Chin Murder.” (The closing paragraphs of Orwell's “Raffles” and “Decline” are nearly identical.) All these popular works are Orwell's boyhood favorites, have a strictly prewar outlook, and never mention contemporary politics. Popular books like Helen's Babies and Little Women “have something that is perhaps best described as integrity, or good morale.” Their world, like that of Lower Binfield at the turn of the century, was more class-ridden and more impoverished than the modern world, but did not have an oppressive sense of helplessness. As Orwell says in an unpublished BBC talk, “What you are not likely to find in the mind of anyone in the year 1900, is a doubt about the continuity of civilisation. If the world as people saw it then was rather harsh, simple and slow-moving, it was also secure. Things would continue in a more or less recognisable pattern; life might not get appreciably more pleasant, but at any rate barbarism wouldn't return.”4
This opposition between past and present is symbolized by the house in Binfield that is cleaved by the accidental bomb: “What was extraordinary was that in the upstairs rooms nothing had been touched … but the lower rooms had caught the force of the explosion. There was a frightful smashedup mess” (221). Both the prewar past and the warlike present have rather obvious contrasting characteristics. In old Lower Binfield there was no rush and no fear, in West Bletchley everyone is “scared stiff”; in the past the airplane was “a flimsy, rickety-looking thing,” in the present threatening bombers constantly fly overhead; in the prewar world fish swim in the pond, in the modern world, writes John Wain, “fish is the stuff they put into sausages instead of meat”:5 “Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that they were making sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I'd bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of…. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your [false] teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that's what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth” (27).
The explosive and perverse phallic image emphasizes the corruption and sterility of Lower Binfield. Orwell frequently protests against “the instinctive horror which all sensitive people feel at the progressive mechanization of life”; and in one of his rare poems, “On a Ruined Farm Near the His Master's Voice Gramophone Factory,” he grieves that “The acid smoke has soured the fields, / And browned the few and windworn flowers.” These lines echo the tradition that goes back to Blake and that has been voiced most powerfully in the modern age by Lawrence (in Lady Chatterley's Lover) and by Forster, whose views in Abinger Pageant (1934) are similar to Orwell's: “Houses and bungalows, hotels, restaurants and flats, arterial roads, bypasses, petrol pumps and pylons—are these going to be England? Are these man's final triumph? Or is there another England, green and eternal, which will outlast them?”6
Orwell's symbol of England's green and pleasant land is fishing, “the opposite of war,” and so much of the novel is concerned with fishing that Orwell might have subtitled his book, which takes place near Walton, The Compleat Angler. Yet it remains an effective symbol: “The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool—and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside—belongs to the time before the war. There's a kind of peacefulness even in the names of English coarse fish…. They're solid kinds of names” (74). The ideal fishing pool is the secret one behind Binfield House where enormous carp, perhaps a hundred years old, sun themselves near the tranquil surface of the water. When Bowling finally returns there, he finds the Thames crowded and polluted and the sacred pool a drained cavern half full of tin cans.
Isaac Rosenfeld's shrewed observation that Orwell “was a radical in politics and a conservative in feeling,”7 both a socialist and a man in love with the past, explains why Orwell is so deeply ambivalent about the prewar period. He criticizes the English for “obstinately clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance,” but creates an ideal pub, “The Moon under Water,” in which “everything has the solid comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.” He praises the postcards of Donald McGill, for “there is no sign in them of any attempt to induce an outlook acceptable to the ruling class,” but he calls “Boys’ Weeklies” “sodden in the worst illusions of 1910” because they inculcate pernicious social and political attitudes: the boys “get what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them.” In “England Your England,” he states that both the common people and the intellectuals must and do oppose the existing social order, yet he also attacks the prewar world of “Boys’ Weeklies” that is very similar in mood to his description of Lower Binfield: “The year is 1910…. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound…. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.”
Since Orwell believes “one of the dominant facts in English life during
the past three-quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class” and since all the peace and serenity of prewar England depends on the leisure of the few and the labor of the many, he admires the working, lower-middle and middle-class aspects of the prewar world but attacks the upper-middle and upper-class characteristics. In “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Orwell both criticizes and cherishes the decent but rather decadent “age of The Merry Widow, Saki's novels and Peter Pan” and describes the “atmosphere, as it were, of eating everlasting strawberry ices on green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song. The extraordinary thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that this oozing, bulging wealth of the English upper and upper-middle classes would last forever, and was part of the order of things. After 1918 it was never quite the same again.” In Coming Up, Pixy Glen, like Wendy's Tea Shoppe, represents a spurious attempt by the lower-middle classes to climb upwards by returning to the artificiality of Barrie's prewar world.
“I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood,” writes Orwell; and when in the summer of 1940 he escaped into the country with his dog, Marx, and had two glorious days at Wallington, in Hertfordshire, “the whole thing took me straight back to my childhood, perhaps the last bit of that kind of life that I shall ever have.” Though Orwell yearns to return to his boyhood years, it is rather difficult to reconcile his childhood nostalgia with the grim tortures of “Such, Such Were the Joys.” It would seem that this ideal childhood existed only in Orwell's imagination and that his works represent a fairly consistent attempt to recreate and perpetuate this myth.
Orwell has a keen desire to establish a continuity between the England of the past and the present and is particularly attracted to writers who, like T. S. Eliot, carry on the human heritage by “keeping in touch with prewar emotions.” The most perfect embodiment of the prewar myth of eternal ease and blue summer skies is Brooke's “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (1912). In “The Captain's Doll,” Lawrence also writes with retrospective nostalgia about these peaceful years which “seemed lovely, almost like before the war: almost the same feeling of eternal holiday, as if the world was made for man's everlasting holiday.”8 Reviewing Edmund Blunden's Cricket Country, Orwell states “the essential thing in this book, as in nearly everything that Mr. Blunden writes, is his nostalgia for the golden age before 1914, when the world was peaceful as it has never since been”; and he says almost the same thing about H. G. Wells, whose greatest gift “was his power to convey the atmosphere of the golden years between 1890 and 1914.”9 Wells’ The History of Mr. Polly (1910) has a strong effect on Bowling and, as Orwell says of Coming Up in a letter to Julian Symons, “Of course the book was bound to suggest Wells watered down. I have a great admiration for Wells as a writer, and he was a very early influence on me.”