Essays
Page 68
‘There are nine and sixty ways
Of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right.’
He attributes these lines to Thackeray. This is probably what is known as a ‘Freudian error’. A civilized person would prefer not to quote Kipling – i.e. would prefer not to feel that it was Kipling who had expressed his thought for him. [Author’s footnote 1945.]
15. Looking Back on the Spanish War
1. Homage to Catalonia.
16. W.B. Yeats
1. The Development of William Butler Yeats by V. K. Narayana Menon.
2. The last three lines actually read:
“Aye, to some frenzy of the mind
For all that we have done’s undone
Our speculation but as the wind.’
17. Poetry and the Microphone
1. The Army Bureau of Current Affairs.
19. Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali
1. The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Dial Press, New York.
2. Dali mentions L’Age d’Or and adds that its first public showing was broken up by hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about. According to Henry Miller’s account of it, it showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman defecating. [Author’s footnote.]
20. Raffles and Miss Blandish
1. Raffles, A Thief in the Night and Mr Justice Raffles by E. W. Hornung. The third of these is definitely a failure, and only the first has the true Raffles atmosphere. Hornung wrote a number of crime stories, usually with a tendency to take the side of the criminal. A successful book in rather the same vein as Raffles is Stingaree. [Author’s footnote.]
2. Marylebone Cricket Club.
3. Actually Raffles does kill one man and is more or less consciously responsible for the death of two others. But all three of them are foreigners and have behaved in a very reprehensible manner. He also, on one occasion, contemplates murdering a blackmailer. It is however, a fairly well-established convention in crime stories that murdering a blackmailer ‘doesn’t count’. [Author’s footnote, 1945.]
4. Another reading of the final episode is possible. It may mean merely that Miss Blandish is pregnant. But the interpretation I have given above seems more in keeping with the general brutality of the book. [Author’s footnote, 1945.]
5. They are said to have been imported into this country as ballast, which accounted for their low price and crumpled appearance. Since the war the ships have been ballasted with something more useful, probably gravel. [Author’s footnote.]
22. Antisemitism in Britain
1. It is interesting to compare the ‘Jew joke’ with that other stand-by of the music halls, the ‘Scotch joke’, which superficially it resembles. Occasionally a story is told (e.g. the Jew and the Scotsman who went into a pub together and both died of thirst) which puts both races on an equality, but in general the Jew is credited merely with cunning and avarice while the Scotsman is credited with physical hardihood as well. This is seen, for example, in the story of the Jew and the Scotsman who go together to a meeting which has been advertised as free. Unexpectedly there is a collection, and to avoid this the Jew faints and the Scotsman carries him out. Here the Scotsman performs the athletic feat of carrying the other. It would seem vaguely wrong if it were the other way about. [Author’s footnote.]
23. In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse
1. Assignment to Berlin by Harry W. Flannery. [Author’s footnote.]
2. John Amery(1912–45), right-wing politician and son of Leo Amery, who was a Conservative and patriotic M.P. and Secretary for India 1940–45. John Amery was an ardent admirer of Hitler, and had broadcast from Germany during the war urging British subjects in captivity to fight for Germany against England and Russia, and also made public speeches throughout occupied Europe on behalf of the German régime. He was executed for treason by the British in December 1945
3. ‘P. G. Wodehouse’ by John Hayward. (The Saturday Book, 1942.) I believe this is the only full-length critical essay on Wodehouse. [Author’s footnote.]
24. Notes on Nationalism
1. Nations, and even vaguer entities such as the Catholic Church or the proletariat, are commonly thought of as individuals and often referred to as ‘she’. Patently absurd remarks such as ‘Germany is naturally treacherous’ are to be found in any newspaper one opens, and reckless generalizations about national character (‘The Spaniard is a natural aristocrat’ or ‘Every Englishman is a hypocrite’) are uttered by almost everyone. Intermittently these generalizations are seen to be unfounded, but the habit of making them persists, and people of professedly international outlook, e.g. Tolstoy or Bernard Shaw, are often guilty of them. [Author’s footnote.]
2. A few writers of conservative tendency, such as Peter Drucker, foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia, but they expected an actual alliance or amalgamation which would be permanent. No Marxist or other left-wing writer, of whatever colour, came anywhere near foretelling the Pact. [Author’s footnote.]
3. The military commentators of the popular press can mostly be classified as pro-Russian or anti-Russian, pro-Blimp or anti-Blimp. Such errors as believing the Maginot Line impregnable, or predicting that Russia would conquer Germany in three months, have (ailed to shake their reputation, because they were always saying what their own particular audience wanted to hear. The two military critics most favoured by the intelligentsia are Captain Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller, the first of whom teaches that the defence is stronger than the attack, and the second that the attack is stronger than the defence. This contradiction has not prevented both of them from being accepted as authorities by the same public. The secret reason for their vogue in left-wing circles is that both of them are at odds with the War Office. [Author’s footnote.]
4. Certain Americans have expressed dissatisfaction because ‘Anglo-American’ is the normal form of combination of these two words. It has been proposed to substitute ‘Americo-British’. [Author’s footnote.]
5. The News Chronicle advised its readers to visit the news film at which the entire execution could be witnessed, with close-ups. The Star published with seeming approval photographs of nearly naked female collaborationists being baited by the Paris mob. These photographs had a marked resemblance to the Nazi photographs of Jews being baited by the Berlin mob. [Author’s footnote.]
6. An example is the Russo-German Pact, which is being effaced as quickly as possible from public memory. A Russian correspondent informs me that mention of the Pact is already being omitted from Russian year-books which table recent political events. [Author’s footnote.]
7. A good example is the sunstroke superstition. Until recently it was believed that the white races were much more liable to sunstroke than the coloured, and that a white man could not safely walk about in tropical sunshine without a pith helmet. There was no evidence whatever for this theory, but it served the purpose of accentuating the difference between ‘natives’ and Europeans. During the present war the theory has been quietly dropped and whole armies manoeuvre in the tropics without pith helmets. So long as the sunstroke superstition survived, English doctors in India appear to have believed in it as firmly as laymen. [Author’s footnote.]
26. The Sporting Spirit
1. The Moscow Dynamos, a Russian football team, toured Britain in the autumn of 1945 playing against leading British clubs.
27. Nonsense Poetry
2. The Lear Omnibus edited by R. L. Megroz.
28. The Prevention of Literature
1.It is fair to say that the PEN Club celebrations, which lasted a week or more, did not always stick at quite the same level. I happened to strike a bad day. But an examination of the speeches (printed under the title Freedom of Expression) shows that almost nobody in our own day is able to speak out as roundly in favour of intellectual liberty as Milton could do three hundred years ago – and this in spite of the fact that Milton was writing in a period of civil war. [Author’s footn
ote.]
2. Ministry of Information
30. Decline of the English Murder
1. The Cleft Chin Murder by R.Alwyn Raymond.
2. The V1, an unmanned aircraft developed by the Germans and used by them to bomb London from June 1944: they were nicknamed ‘doodlebugs’ by the Londoners.
3. The V2, a rocket bomb used by the Germans on London from September 1944.
31. Politics and the English Language
1. An interesting illustration of this is the Way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific. [Author’s footnote. ]
2. Example: ‘Comfort’s catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness… Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bullseyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation. (Poetry Quarterly.) [Author’s footnote.]
3. One can cure onself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field. [Author’s footnote.]
35. Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels
1. Houyhnhnms too old to walk are described as being carried in ‘sledges’ or in ‘a kind of vehicle, drawn like a sledge’. Presumably these had no wheels. [Author’s footnote.]
2. The physical decadence which Swift claims to have observed may have been a reality at that date. He attributes it to syphilis, which was a new disease in Europe and may have been more virulent than it is now. Distilled liquors, also, were a novelty in the seventeenth century and must have led at first to a great increase in drunkenness. [Author’s footnote.]
3. Tower. [Author’s footnote.]
4. At the end of the book, as typical specimens of human folly and viciousness, Swift names ‘a Lawyer, a Pickpocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a Politician, a Whore-master, a Physician, an Evidence, a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traitor, or the like’. One sees here the irresponsible violence of the powerless. The list lumps together those who break the conventional code, and those who keep it. For instance, if you automatically condemn a colonel, as such, on what grounds do you condemn a traitor? Or again, if you want to suppress pickpockets, you must have laws, which means that you must have lawyers. But the whole closing passage, in which the hatred is so authentic, and the reason given for it so inadequate, is somehow unconvincing. One has the feeling that personal animosity is at work. [Author’s footnote.]
37. Riding Down from Bangor
1. Helen’s Babies by John Habberton, first published in 1876.
38. Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool
1. Shakespeare and the Drama. Written about 1903 as an introduction to another pamphlet, Shakespeare and the Working Classes, by Ernest Crosby. [Author’s footnote.]
39. Such, Such Were the Joys
1. In the version of this piece already published in the United States, St Cyprian’s was called ‘Crossgates’. Other old boys writing of the school followed Cyril Connolly and called it ‘St Wulfric’s’, the name it was first given in Enemies of Promise. The text printed here is of Orwell’s original typescript, but the names of his school fellows and the assistant masters have been changed.
41. Reflections on Gandhi
1. The Story of my Experiments with Truth by M. K. Gandhi, translated from the Gujarati by Mahadev Desai.