Orwell
Page 13
This golden tranquility was shattered forever by the kind of modern war that Bowling experienced in Flanders and Orwell fought in Spain. The unrefrigerated backyard of the Binfield butcher “smelt like a battlefield”; the ravaged landscape of “tincans, turds, mud, weeds, clumps of rusty barbed wire” (81) is exactly like the catalogue of the Aragon front; both Orwell and Bowling try to escape war by fishing; and the description of Bowling's explosive wound derives from that day at Huesca when Orwell was shot through the throat. Bowling believes that if war did not kill you it was bound to make you think about the kind of world that would emerge from the ruins, and some aspects of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four already exist in Coming Up: the blunt razor-blades, the nasty gusts of wind, the vision of the seedy smashed streets. Bowling finds a severed leg at a bomb site just as Winston Smith finds a severed hand; and, like Winston, the cringing victims in the housing estate lick the hand that wallops them. The red-armed and fertile-bellied prole washerwoman is foreshadowed by Bowling's peaceful glimpse of the roofs where the women hang out the washing, and the “Two Minutes of Hate” is anticipated by the enraged anti-Fascist (a nice touch) lecturer at the Left Book Club. Bowling fears the postwar totalitarian State even more than the cataclysmic war, and the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four is foreshadowed in Coming Up: “It's all going to happen. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries.
The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows” (223–224).
Orwell's apocalyptic belief is similar to Henry Miller's, who told Orwell that “Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human…. Everywhere there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm.” Miller made a powerful impression on Orwell, and his astonishing indifference and passivity about the impending doom was both fascinating and deeply attractive. Miller, perhaps more than any other modern writer, totally rejects Orwell's concept of decency, his vague but important term for the synthesis of the traditional English virtues that he describes in “England Your England”: gentleness, fairness, integrity, unselfishness, comradeship, patriotism, respect for legality, belief in justice, liberty and truth. In the world of modern power politics, especially as Orwell describes it, these qualities barely survive: they exist in Wiltshire perhaps, but not in Whitehall. One of his major weaknesses is that he puts too much faith in this ineffectual and disappearing decency, for decent men seldom achieve political power, and if they do, they rarely remain decent. Yet Orwell feels the need to believe in something—“The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final”—and there is nothing else left to believe in but decency.
Miller's extreme immorality and sensuality and his imaginative intensity are precisely the qualities that Orwell lacks, and his social radicalism is characteristically American just as Orwell's conservatism is typically English. Orwell's profound and ambiguous attraction (revealed in his long essay and three enthusiastic book reviews on Miller) to someone who could remain so oblivious and insulated, illuminates Orwell's strange ambivalence about preserving the past and about his intense commitment to the concept of decency.
Like Miller, James Joyce also rejects decency and remains supremely indifferent to modern politics. As Orwell says, Joyce wrote “Ulysses in Switzerland, with an Austrian passport and a British pension, during the 1914–18 war, to which he paid as nearly as possible no attention.” Orwell is extremely enthusiastic about Ulysses, studies it carefully and writes about it frequently. In a letter of 1933 he says, “Joyce interests me so much that I can't stop talking about him once I start”; and the following year he makes a witty comparison between himself and the author of Ulysses in a Joycean sexual-musical image: “When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.” Orwell's novel has several Joycean echoes. The firm of Wilson & Bloom builds houses on Bowling's street; Orwell's epigraph, “He's dead, but he won't lie down,” recalls the song “Finnegan's Wake”; and Bowling reads Molly's favorite author, Paul de Kock.
Orwell's many statements about Ulysses illuminate the central theme of his own novel—the lost world of childhood and the fearful despair of ordinary people in the modern world—as well as the personality and character of Bowling, who is modeled on Leopold Bloom:
Here is a whole world of stuff which you have lived with since childhood, stuff which you supposed to be of its nature incommunicable and somebody has managed to communicate it. The effect is to break down, at any rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human being lives. When you read certain passages in Ulysses you feel that Joyce's mind and your mind are one, that he knows all about you though he has never heard your name, that there exists some world outside time and space in which you and he are together. And though he does not resemble Joyce in other ways, there is a touch of this quality in Henry Miller.
[Ulysses] sums up better than any book I know the fearful despair that is almost normal in modern times.
Books about ordinary people behaving in an ordinary manner are extremely rare, because they can only be written by someone who is capable of standing both inside and outside the ordinary man, as Joyce for instance stands inside and outside Bloom.
[Bloom has] a streak of intellectual curiosity…. [He] is a rather exceptionally sensitive specimen of the man in the street, and I think the especial interest of this is that the cultivated man and the man in the street so rarely meet in modern literature.
While writing Coming Up, Orwell describes Bowling as being, like Bloom, “rather thoughtful and fairly well-educated, even slightly bookish.” Though Bloom and Bowling (their names are similar though Bowling suggests the bourgeois bowler hat) are not comparable in depth of characterization (the bass and the eunuch), and Bowling is more brash and hardened, they both are intelligent, curious, perceptive, sympathetic, good natured, humorous and vulgar, and both are nostalgic about a happier past. Both characters are “ordinary middling chaps,” and both are salesmen, though Bowling is more successful and feels superior to the two newspaper canvassers (Bloom's job) whom he meets on the train to London. Both know many obscure “scientific” facts; Bowling's mind, like Bloom's, “goes in jerks”; and the thought of the Albanian King Zog “starts memories” of King Og of Bashan and transports Bowling back to his “incommunicable” childhood through a Joycean “stream of consciousness” that attempts to capture the past: “The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago…. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past” (30).
In 1948 Orwell responded to Julian Symons’ criticism of Coming Up and said: “Of course you are perfectly right about my own character constantly intruding on that of the narrator. I am not a real novelist anyway, and that particular vice is inherent in writing a novel in the first person, which one should never do.” This frank admission of his lack of imaginative power (and his need to write for money) explains why Orwell's books have so much in common and why his novels are so often nourished by his essays. It also explains his eager receptivity to the influence of Joyce and of D. H. Lawrence, to whom he also alludes in this novel.
A man named Mellors gives Bowling the racing tip that provides his escape money; and like Lawrence's Mellors, Bowling rises to the officer class during the war and becomes, temporarily, a gentleman. Lawrence's story “The Thorn in the Flesh” is referred to in the novel, and Bowling enjoys reading Sons and Lovers. More significantly, the
mood of Coming Up, and, indeed, of many of Orwell's works of the Thirties, is close to the opening sentences of Lady Chatterley's Lover—“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins”—and to the dark prophecies of Lawrence's letters: “I am so sad, for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collapsing, that it is hard to live. So much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming … the winter stretches ahead, where all vision is lost and all memory dies out.”10
A disintegrating civilization on the verge of an annihilating war has been the subject of the greatest novels of our time—Women in Love, Remembrance of Things Past, The Magic Mountain—and Coming Up belongs thematically with these books. Written a generation later, the novel conveys many of the modes of thought and feeling characteristic of Orwell's age—the uncertainty, fear and despair that is expressed in Spengler's Decline of the West and Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” in Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Auden's “September 1, 1939.” As Leonard Woolf writes in his autobiography: “In 1914 in the background of one's life and one's mind there were light and hope; by 1918 one had unconsciously accepted a perpetual public menace and darkness and had admitted in the privacy of one's mind or soul an iron fatalistic acquiescence in insecurity and barbarism.”11
While working on Coming Up, Orwell wrote to Cyril Connolly in Gadarene imagery: “Everything one writes now is overshadowed by this ghastly feeling that we are rushing towards a precipice and, though we shan't actually prevent ourselves or anyone else from going over, must put up some sort of fight.” Despite the grim prognostications, Bowling opposes the threatening cataclysm. His imaginative preservation of the past is the positive core in the novel that survives the present horrors and ultimately conveys the most powerful effect in the book. As Bowling says, “I'm fat but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man [the past] inside every fat man [the present]?” (23). This preservation of the past in the free minds of helpless yet resisting men was one of Orwell's central concerns in both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
NINE
ORWELL AS FILM CRITIC
This was the first (and perhaps the only) essay to be published on Orwell in Sight and Sound. It explored a little known aspect of his career, and showed that his film criticism was strongly influenced by the overwhelming Nazi victories in Europe in 1940–41. Orwell disliked escapist entertainment, criticized the low intellectual level of American movies and had no interest in film as art. He concentrated, instead, on the political and propagandistic content, and particularly liked Chaplin's The Great Dictator.
Between October 1940 and August 1941 George Orwell wrote twenty-six film review columns—which were omitted from the four volumes of his Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters—for Time and Tide. This politically independent weekly magazine was edited by the lively Lady Rhondda, the plump and curly-haired daughter of a Welsh coal magnate. Most of the films Orwell reviewed were undistinguished escapist entertainment, which he mostly disapproved of and disliked. But they also included minor works by major directors: Rene Clair's The Flame of New Orleans and Fritz Lang's Western Union; and a few which he took more seriously: the Mormon epic Brigham Young, the anti-Nazi melodrama Escape and, most notably, Chaplin's The Great Dictator.
By 1940 Orwell had had an adventurous but not particularly successful life. He was born in India, had won a scholarship to Eton, served for five years in the Burma police, been down and out with the tramps of Paris and London, lived with the miners of Wigan, contracted tuberculosis, fought and been shot in the Spanish Civil War. He spent most of the 1930s writing prophetic books about the dangers of Communism and Fascism, and warning about the impending war. He had written three books of reportage and four novels, whose honesty and integrity earned him a respectful reputation but no money. The outbreak of war led to a period of waste and frustration. He was desperately poor, medically unfit for the army and unable to find work that would help the war effort. He published Inside the Whale, a collection of essays, in March 1940; and wrote the propagandist Lion and the Unicorn between August and October. When he completed this tract, he began reviewing films and writing the “London Letter” for the Partisan Review; but he abandoned his stopgap career as a film critic when he joined the Indian section of the BBC in August 1941.
Orwell's criticism was permeated by a battered idealism and powerfully influenced by the massive defeats of the Allied armies during 1939–41. The invasion of Poland; the occupation of Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and France; the evacuation of Dunkirk and the air raids on England; the conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece; the destruction of shipping by U-boats and the siege of Leningrad, placed all of Europe under the domination of Hitler and threatened the very existence of Britain. America had not entered the war; and the victories at Stalingrad and El Alamein were not yet in sight. Orwell's fears and hopes about the war affect all his reviews. He specifically mentions the Athenia, which was torpedoed, with fourteen hundred people aboard, two days after the war began; Russian tank battles; and Wavell's first bright triumphs in Libya and Abyssinia in February 1941. “What rot it all is!” he comments on One Night in Lisbon. “How dare anyone present the war in these colours when thousands of tanks are battling on the plains of Poland and tired workers are slinking into the tobacconist's shop to plead humbly for a small Woodbine. And yet as current films go this is a good film.”
Orwell, who rarely mentions the directors and is not interested in film as a distinct form of art, does not write brilliantly illuminating criticism, like his contemporaries James Agee and Graham Greene. He is primarily concerned with the political, social and moral content of films; their propaganda value; the way they reflect the progress of the war; and the difference between English and American cinema. His reviews are generally short and formulary: an opening comment, discussion of the plot, snap judgment on the film and remarks on the cast, with particular praise for veteran English character actors like Edmund Gwenn, C. Aubrey Smith and Eric Blore. But his wit at the expense of the more tedious films shows the engaging side of his character that was also revealed in his “As I Please” columns for Tribune. The top hat in Quiet Wedding, “symbol throughout half the world of British plutocracy, is now only worn by schoolboys, undertakers and bank messengers.” The school in Little Men is “the 1870 equivalent of Dartington Hall.” I Married Adventure, an African jungle film by Osa Johnson, is excellent for those “who are distressed by the present depleted state of the Zoo.” The horrible quality of the color in Noel Coward's Bitter Sweet makes the actors’ faces “marzipan pink, garish magenta and poisonous green.” (Orwell rather exaggerates, a year after Gone With the Wind, the general defects of color film.)
Orwell's intensely hostile response to the manifest defects of American escapist films, which make a blank cartridge fired in a studio more exciting than the bomb that drops next door, is reinforced by his anger at the isolationist position of the United States during the first two years of the war. He assumes that English and European films are more serious if less technically expert than American ones, and condemns the sheer idiocy of the absurd plot of a romantic tearjerker like Waterloo Bridge. But he is interested in the audience's response to the lively dialogue and their acceptance of the appalling banality. (He quotes a nice exchange from two women sitting behind him: “Of course, she can't marry him after that.”—“Why can't she?”—“Well, I mean to say, she couldn't.”—“Why not? I would. I just wouldn't say anything about it.”—“No, she'll kill herself. You'll see.”)
He notes that the interest in adventure films would increase enormously if in “five per cent of the cases the heroine did not escape!” He objects to the oppressive conventional morality and wryly comments that only in films do beautiful women ever starve. And in a critique of The Lady in Question, a remake of La Gribouille [The Simpleton] directed by Charles Vidor, he condemns “the intellectual contempt which American
film producers seem to feel for their audience. It is always assumed that anything demanding thought, or even suggesting thought, must be avoided like the plague. An American film actor shown reading a book always handles it in the manner of an illiterate person.” In a thriller like Tim Whelan's A Date with Destiny (“an old-fashioned murder story dolled up with a few ‘psychological’ trappings for the benefit of an audience who are assumed to have heard far-off rumours of Freud”), the producers “cannot resist denouncing the whole science of psychiatry as something sinister, wicked and probably an imposture. The moral, beloved of English-speaking audiences, is that the ‘intellectual’ is always wrong.” What disgusts him and offends his Socialist beliefs in George Cukor's film of The Gay Mrs. Trexel, “as in so many American films, is the utter lack of any decent, intelligent vision of life…. It does not seem to strike them that the whole manner of life which depends on Paris dresses, servants, riding horses, etc., etc., is futile in itself.”