Orwell
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Another distasteful aspect of American culture, which Orwell also discusses in his comparison of English and American detective novels, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” is the gratuitous violence. For Orwell, the Raoul Walsh gangster film High Sierra represents the ne plus ultra of sadism, bully worship and gunplay, repugnantly combined with sentimentality and perverse morality: “Humphrey Bogart is the Big Shot who smashes people in the face with the butt of his pistol and watches fellow gangsters burn to death with the casual comment, ‘They were only small-town guys,’ but is kind to dogs and is supposed to be deeply touching when he is smitten with a ‘pure’ affection for a crippled girl, who knows nothing of his past. In the end he is killed, but we are evidently expected to sympathise with him and even to admire him.”
By contrast, he praises Henry Hathaway's unusual and more ambitious film Brigham Young, because “the heroism of the Mormon pioneers is well brought out and Brigham Young's own spiritual struggles are taken seriously.” Orwell, who notes that the Mormons claimed divine inspiration, preached polygamy and were persecuted in the nineteenth century, states “The film is an interesting example of the way in which important events lose their moral colour as they drop backwards into history. It is more or less pro-Mormon, the polygamy [Young had nineteen wives and fifty-six children] being played down as much as possible and the methods by which the Mormons secured their extra wives ignored.”
Orwell finds that the cinematic representations of English social life and history are also highly idealized. He notes that the portrayal of “county” society in Anthony Asquith's Quiet Wedding, “a charming little film, which kept the jaded press audience laughing rapturously,” ignores the fact that the English gentry have lost contact with agriculture and live mainly on dividends. Yet he admires the deep charm of country life, its casualness and lack of ceremony with the feudally familiar servants; and says the film is chiefly interesting as a record of vanished time: “for it ignores the war and seems to belong to some period before Hitler definitely filled the horizon.” The nostalgic longing for a world of peace, and the desire to establish a continuity between the England of the past and of the present, were the dominant themes of Orwell's most recent novel, Coming Up For Air (1939).
This England, a historical pageant, also sustains the myth that England is an agricultural country and that its inhabitants—who could not tell a turnip from a broccoli if they saw them growing in a field—“derive their patriotism from a passionate love of the English soil.” Yet he affirms that such films are probably good for morale in wartime and patriotically states (as he does in his essay on Kipling) that “many of the events which the jingo history-books make the most noise about are things to be proud of.” Orwell believes that propaganda films are a major weapon in war and that it is vital to learn how to rouse resentment against the enemy. He criticizes two British propaganda films for their amateurishness, their use of the dreadful BBC voice “which antagonises the whole English-speaking world” and their failure to realize that most people are more disturbed by the destruction of a house than of a church. (“Surely we can find something more effective to say than that the Germans have a spite against Gothic architecture?”)
Orwell is fascinated by the effect of war on the cinema. He notes a welcome change from the tinge of isolationist feeling in Escape to Glory to the sudden outbreak of Anglophilia in Nice Girl? He remarks that Tony, the Californian grape-grower in They Knew What They Wanted, is “one of those big-hearted, child-like Italians who were favourites on the American screen before Mussolini lined up with Hitler.” He is pleased to see, in Mitchell Leisen's Arise, My Love, that the refusal to deal with reality and the rigid pattern of the American happy ending were finally breaking down under the intense pressure of contemporary events. Foreign politics, wars and assassinations are no longer treated—as they had been in England during the 1930s—as a fantastic joke, or as material for a news “scoop.” At the end of this film Ray Milland and Claudette Colbert survive a shipwreck and “decide to stay in Europe and work for the defeat of Fascism. So, somewhat less rosily and more credibly than is usual in a film intended as a popular success, the story ends.”
So Ends Our Night, an adaptation of Erich Remarque's novel about the sacrificial death of a German refugee, directed by John Cromwell, also reveals a welcome development of political consciousness: “Two years ago this anti-Nazi film … would have been impossibly highbrow and dangerously ‘left.’ It can now be safely assumed that ‘S.A.,’ ‘S.S.,’ ‘Ogpu,’ ‘Gestapo,’ etc., will convey approximately the right meanings and that the average filmgoer is somewhat ahead of the magistrate who remarked recently to a German refugee, ‘You must have done something wrong or they wouldn't have put you in the concentration camp.’”
Orwell's critique of another anti-Nazi film, Escape, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, foreshadows with extraordinary clarity the even more dehumanized and dangerous world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. He believes the film fails because of its unwillingness to be too “political,” and has rather unrealistic expectations of what a film might hope to portray: “It makes play, fairly effectively, with the horror of the Gestapo, but as to why the Gestapo exists, how Hitler reached his present position, what he is trying to achieve, it utters not a word.” Though the end of the film degenerates into absurdity, the first part, which includes Bonita Granville as “one of those spying and eavesdropping children whom all the totalitarian States specialise in producing,” captures “the nightmare atmosphere of a totalitarian country, the utter helplessness of the ordinary person, the complete disappearance of the concepts of justice and objective truth.” The “nightmare” of Nineteen Eighty-Four—which he saw in films like Escape—realistically portrayed the political terrorism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, transposed into the austere landscape of wartime London.
Orwell's most substantial and significant review, which synthesizes the dominant themes of his film criticism, concerns The Great Dictator. Orwell, who is predominantly interested in the effective presentation of serious ideas, praises the “glorious scenes of fights against Storm Troopers which are not less, perhaps actually more moving because the tragedy of wrecked Jewish households is mixed up with [slapstick] humour.” He describes how the little Jewish barber is mistaken for Hynkel, the Dictator of Tomania, and says the great moment of the film occurs when the barber is surrounded by Nazi dignitaries, waiting to hear his triumphal speech: “Instead of making the speech that is expected of him, Charlie makes a powerful fighting speech in favour of democracy, tolerance, and common decency. It is really a tremendous speech, a sort of version of Lincoln's Gettysburg address done into Hollywood English, one of the strongest pieces of propaganda I have heard for a long time.” He adds, less enthusiastically, that it has almost no connection with the rest of the film, which fades out after the speech without revealing if the oration takes effect or if the Nazis shoot the impostor.
Though Orwell believes the film is technically weak, has no more unity than a pantomime and gives the “impression of being tied together with bits of string,” he finds it deeply moving because he identifies with Chaplin's peculiar gift: “His power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man, for the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West. We live in a period in which democracy is almost everywhere in retreat, super-men in control of three-quarters of the world, liberty explained away by sleek professors, Jew-baiting defended by pacifists…. The common man is wiser than the intellectuals, just as animals are wiser than men…. Chaplin's appeal lies in his power to reassert the fact, overlaid by Fascism and, ironically enough, by Socialism, that vox populi is vox Dei and giants are vermin.” Orwell adds that pro-Fascist writers like Wyndham Lewis (who also wrote for Time and Tide) have always pursued Chaplin with a venomous hatred. Lewis actually attacked Chaplin in Time and Western Man (1927) not for political reasons, but for popularizing infantile attitudes.
Orwell concludes by
affirming the propagandist value of Chaplin's films, which had been banned in Germany since Hitler (his near-twin) came to power: “If our Government had a little more imagination they would subsidise The Great Dictator heavily and would make every effort to get a few copies into Germany—a thing that ought not to be beyond human ingenuity…. The allure of power politics will be a fraction weaker for every human being who sees this film.”
Orwell's criticism is limited by the mainly uninspiring quality of the films he reviewed during 1940–41 and by his lack of interest in the theory and technique of the cinema. But his commonsensical reviews are enlivened by his exposure of Hollywood's superficiality (“Nearly all American films are intellectually pretentious…. The synopses handed out to representatives of the press ‘analyse’ their absurd subject-matter as though it were the work of Ibsen”), and strengthened by his social commitment and moral intensity. They reflect his values, especially the concern with his distillation of English virtues—the concept of decency. They clearly anticipate his acute insights about the terrifying atmosphere of totalitarianism in his two masterpieces: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
TEN
THE RELUCTANT PROPAGANDIST
These two book reviews described Orwell's work at the BBC during World War II and his movement from idealism to disillusionment. The first volume contains sixteen political and literary programs, and one hundred pages of his letters. There are also scrappy radio talks by Forster, Eliot and William Empson. Though Orwell was forced to lie and felt that this propaganda had damaged his integrity, his efforts were useless and his talks did not reach their audience. The second volume contains forty-nine news talks to India. Orwell was shocked by the massacre of Jews in Poland and by the Japanese atrocities in the Far East, and he makes a number of shrewd prophecies.
Though I'm not a conservative, I wrote fifty-five reviews for the National Review in the 1980s. It was edited by William Buckley, who always sent me encouraging notes (“good going”) and copies of his books. I stopped writing for Buckley when he spiked my criticism of his hero Evelyn Waugh and published an unfair attack on my review of Nabokov without giving me a chance to reply.
I
In the 1970s, when I studied the Orwell papers at the British Broadcasting Company archives in Reading, England, I was given a radically incomplete file. In the early 1980s the amateur scholar William J. West, searching for material on C. K. Ogden's Basic English, accidentally found that radio talks by Orwell—a producer in the Indian section from August 1941 until November 1943—had been mysteriously misfiled under the name of the Indian lady who introduced the program. This eventually led to West's astonishing discovery of many of Orwell's weekly war commentaries (to be published in a later volume), of sixteen political and literary talks and adaptations, and one hundred pages of correspondence. In 1984 West published Orwell's literary talks, with the letters to his contributors, as Orwell: The Lost Writings. Unfortunately, this impersonal, routine and repetitive correspondence could have been written by any bureaucrat.
Though Orwell was born in India and had been a policeman in Burma, he seemed too independent and outspoken for this essential but soul-destroying war work. His novel Burmese Days had been banned in India, and in “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (June 1943) he wrote: “Official war-propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy.” This volume, like his later novels, charts his progress from idealism to disillusionment.
Orwell complains about the desperate search for appropriate subjects, laments the poor quality of the transmissions (“it was a complete muckup and consisted largely of scratching noises”), maintains the “broadcasts are utterly useless because nobody listens to them,” notes in his diary that he is forced to lie for propaganda purposes but denies this in his letter of resignation. He is frustrated by the impossibility of getting anything done and feels like “an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot”—a brutal image that recurs in his essays and in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He must leave in order to “be near-human again and able to write something serious.” Still, the BBC was not all bad. It continued to pay Hitler royalties, during the war, for excerpts from Mein Kampf.
West's sound introduction to this small-print edition (though marred by a dozen minor errors) shows that Orwell's biographer was ignorant of the BBC background and (despite Orwell's complaints) that these years were not wasted. West usefully confirms that Basic English influenced the creation of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four; that wartime censorship inspired the portrayal of Winston Smith's work; that Senate House, the headquarters of the Ministry of Information (which controlled censorship), was the physical model for the Ministry of Truth; and that its chief, Brendan Bracken, known as “BB,” was the forerunner of Big Brother. But West's claim that Orwell's adaptation of Ignazio Silone's story “The Fox” (September 1943) “directly inspired him to write Animal Farm” is not convincing. The inspiration, as Orwell states (and West quotes), came before the war; and Silone's work, in any case, is entirely different from Orwell's.
The material in this volume is of uneven interest. The content of the broadcasts, like Comrade Napoleon's speeches to the farm animals, is extremely over-simplified. Despite the contributions of T. S. Eliot, William Empson, and E. M. Forster (whose Passage to India was broadcast to India as German propaganda), they did not deal “with political and literary matters in the highest intellectual context.” Rather, as Forster more realistically observed, they are “chatty and scrappy.”
The talk on “British Rations and the Submarine War” was spoken by an Indian as if he, rather than Orwell, had written it. Some of the nondiscussions are absurd (“orwell: The second poem is more like a ballad. empson: Actually it's a savage attack on militaristic sentiment. orwell: Possibly, but as I was saying”) or unintentionally funny: “It's a pity Wilfred Owen isn't here to read it. He was killed. But we've got Edmund Blunden here today.”
What is needed, to place these talks in their proper context, is a discussion of the war in Europe and in South Asia, and a relation of the broadcasts to Orwell's other works. When Orwell was a propagandist, the Nazis were masters of Europe from Norway to the Black Sea. There was a strong possibility that the Japanese might invade India after the fall of Burma in January 1942, or even that the Axis might win the war if Hitler broke through Russia to the Persian Gulf and India joined Japan.
Orwell's talks on Edmund Blunden, Jack London and Jonathan Swift were early versions of his review of Blunden's Cricket Country (1944), his introduction to London's Love of Life (1945) and his essay on Gulliver's Travels (1946), which meant more to him “than any other book ever written.” The third “Voice” talk on poetry reveals that David Copperfield influenced “Such, Such Were the Joys,” his essay about “education as an instrument of torture.” The first sentence of Orwell's part of a story by five different writers recalls the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four; the reluctance to kill an enemy recalls Orwell's own unwillingness, in Spain, to shoot a Fascist who was holding up his trousers and was “visibly a fellow-creature”; and his observation that Blunden's poems express “a love of the surface of the earth” exactly anticipates his famous statement in “Why I Write”: “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth.”
II
The War Commentaries, a sequel to the earlier volume, was published in 1985. It contains Orwell's forty-nine weekly news talks to India, which summarize the progress of the war from December 1941, just after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, to March 1943, when the tide had turned after the great victories at Alamein and Stalingrad. West provides an informative introduction and footnotes, though he does not compare the war commentaries to Orwell's “London Letters” to the Partisan Review. They were directed to American readers, ran from January 1941 to the summer of 1946, and used some of the same material.
Orwell's factual accounts
reveal his familiarity with the terrain of Burma, where he had been a police officer for five years; his ability to perceive the major turning points of the war: the Battle of Britain in the late summer of 1940, the petering out of the German offensive in Russia in the winter of 1941 and the entrance of Japan into the war; his skillful prophecies about military and political events (though he doubted that Singapore could be taken); and his shocked reaction in December 1942 to the systematic massacre of Jews in German-occupied Poland.
The censored parts of his talks, including an interesting paragraph on the creation of the Loyalist army in the Spanish Civil War, are printed in this volume. And a few rare passages are lively. After stating that there would soon be an official pronouncement defining the position of Admiral Darlan in French North Africa, Orwell ironically adds: “Well, it so happens that his position has been defined in another way. He is dead. He was assassinated two days ago.” It must be said, however, that these news commentaries are terribly dull.
Orwell's talks were a direct response to the lies broadcast to India on Axis radio stations, particularly by the forceful Indian nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose. Orwell hoped to win the sympathy of his Indian listeners by arguing—from examples of conquest and oppression in Korea, China, Malaya and Burma (which brought the enemy to the border of Bengal)—that there would be no freedom for India under Japanese rule, and that their victory “would postpone Indian independence far longer than the most reactionary British government would either wish or be able to do.” He stresses the Japanese atrocities—“they have held the peoples down with the club and the machine gun, they have robbed them of their crops and of their raw materials, they have crushed their national movements”—and emphasizes their intention to “pull the world down in ruins before they perish.” Though there is no indication of the specific effect of Orwell's propaganda, he did help keep India loyal to the Allies.