Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

finds in R. Austin Freeman's detective stories or Lieutenant-Commander

  Gould's collections of curiosities--the charm of useless knowledge.

  Reade was a man of what one might call penny-encyclopaedic learning. He

  possessed vast stocks of disconnected information which a lively

  narrative gift allowed him to cram into books which would at any rate

  pass as novels. If you have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in

  dates, lists, catalogues, concrete details, descriptions of processes,

  junk-shop windows and back numbers of the EXCHANGE AND MART, the sort of

  mind that likes knowing exactly how a medieval catapult worked or just

  what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then you

  can hardly help enjoying Reade. He himself, of course, did not see his

  work in quite this light. He prided himself on his accuracy and compiled

  his books largely from newspaper cuttings, but the strange facts which he

  collected were subsidiary to what he would have regarded as his

  'purpose'. For he was a social reformer in a fragmentary way, and made

  vigorous attacks on such diverse evils as blood-letting, the treadmill,

  private asylums, clerical celibacy and tight-lacing.

  My own favourite has always been FOUL PLAY, which as it happens is not an

  attack on anything in particular. Like most nineteenth-century novels

  FOUL PLAY is too complicated to be summarized, but its central story is

  that of a young clergyman, Robert Penfold, who is unjustly convicted of

  forgery, is transported to Australia, absconds in disguise, and is

  wrecked on a desert island together with the heroine. Here, of course,

  Reade is in his element. Of all men who ever lived, he was the best

  fitted to write a desert-island story. Some desert-island stories, of

  course, are worse than others, but none is altogether bad when it sticks

  to the actual concrete details of the struggle to keep alive. A list of

  the objects in a shipwrecked man's possession is probably the surest

  winner in fiction, surer even than a trial scene. Nearly thirty years

  after reading the book I can still remember more or less exactly what

  things the three heroes of Ballantyne's CORAL ISLAND possessed between

  them. (A telescope, six yards of whipcord, a penknife, a brass ring and a

  piece of hoop iron.) Even a dismal book like ROBINSON CRUSOE, so

  unreadable as a whole that few people even know that the second part

  exists, becomes interesting when it describes Crusoe's efforts to make a

  table, glaze earthenware and grow a patch of wheat. Reade, however, was

  an expert on desert islands, or at any rate he was very well up in the

  geography textbooks of the time. Moreover he was the kind of man who

  would have been at home on a desert island himself. He would never, like

  Crusoe, have been stumped by such an easy problem as that of leavening

  bread and, unlike Ballantyne, he knew that civilized men cannot make fire

  by rubbing sticks together.

  The hero of FOUL PLAY, like most of Reade's heroes, is a kind of

  superman. He is hero, saint, scholar, gentleman, athlete, pugilist,

  navigator, physiologist, botanist, blacksmith and carpenter all rolled

  into one, the sort of compendium of all the talents that Reade honestly

  imagined to be the normal product of an English university. Needless to

  say, it is only a month or two before this wonderful clergyman has got

  the desert island running like a West End hotel. Even before reaching the

  island, when the last survivors of the wrecked ship are dying of thirst

  in an open boat, he has shown his ingenuity by constructing a distilling

  apparatus with a jar, a hot-water bottle and a piece of tubing. But his

  best stroke of all is the way in which he contrives to leave the island.

  He himself, with a price on his head, would be glad enough to remain, but

  the heroine, Helen Rollestone, who has no idea that he is a convict, is

  naturally anxious to escape. She asks Robert to turn his 'great mind' to

  this problem. The first difficulty, of course, is to discover exactly

  where the island is. Luckily, however, Helen is still wearing her watch,

  which is still keeping Sydney time. By fixing a stick in the ground and

  watching its shadow Robert notes the exact moment of noon, after which it

  is a simple matter to work out the longitude--for naturally a man of his

  calibre would know the longitude of Sydney. It is equally natural that he

  can determine the latitude within a degree or two by the nature of the

  vegetation. But the next difficulty is to send a message to the outside

  world. After some thought Robert writes a series of messages on pieces of

  parchment made from seals' bladders, with ink obtained from cochineal

  insects. He has noticed that migrant birds often use the island as a

  stopping-place, and he fixes on ducks as the likeliest messengers,

  because every duck is liable to be shot sooner or later. By a stratagem

  often used in India he captures a number of ducks, ties a message to each

  of their legs and lets them go. Finally, of course, one of the ducks

  takes refuge on a ship, and the couple are rescued, but even then the

  story is barely half finished. There follow enormous ramifications, plots

  and counterplots, intrigues, triumphs and disasters, ending with the

  vindication of Robert, and wedding bells.

  In any of Reade's three best books, FOUL PLAY, HARD CASH and IT IS NEVER

  TOO LATE TO MEND, it is not fair to say that the sole interest is in the

  technical detail. His power of descriptive writing, especially of

  describing violent action, is also very striking, and on a serial-story

  level he is a wonderful contriver of plots. Simply as a novelist it is

  impossible to take him seriously, because he has no sense whatever of

  character or of probability, but he himself had the advantage of

  believing in even the absurdest details of his own stories. He wrote of

  life as he saw it, and many Victorians saw it in the same way: that is,

  as a series of tremendous melodramas, with virtue triumphant every time.

  Of all the nineteenth-century novelists who have remained readable, he is

  perhaps the only one who is completely in tune with his own age. For all

  his unconventionality, his 'purpose', his eagerness to expose abuses, he

  never makes a fundamental criticism. Save for a few surface evils he sees

  nothing wrong in an acquisitive society, with its equation of money and

  virtue, its pious millionaires and erastian clergymen. Perhaps nothing

  gives one his measure better than the fact that in introducing Robert

  Penfold, at the beginning of FOUL PLAY, he mentions that he is a scholar

  and a cricketer and only thirdly and almost casually adds that he is a

  priest.

  That is not to say that Reade's social conscience was not sound so far as

  it went, and in several minor ways he probably helped to educate public

  opinion. His attack on the prison system in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND

  is relevant to this day, or was so till very recently, and in his medical

  theories he is said to have been a long way ahead of his time. What he

  lacked was any notion that the early railway age, with the special scheme

  of values appropriate to it, was not g
oing to last for ever. This is a

  little surprising when one remembers that he was the brother of Winwood

  Reade. However hastily and unbalanced Winwood Reade's MARTYRDOM OF MAN

  may seem now, it is a book that shows an astonishing width of vision, and

  it is probably the unacknowledged grandparent of the 'outlines' so

  popular today. Charles Reade might have written an 'outline' of

  phrenology, cabinet-making or the habits of whales, but not of human

  history. He was simply a middle-class gentleman with a little more

  conscience than most, a scholar who happened to prefer popular science to

  the classics. Just for that reason he is one of the best 'escape'

  novelists we have. FOUL PLAY and HARD CASH would be good books to send to

  a soldier enduring the miseries of trench warfare, for instance. There

  are no problems in them, no genuine 'messages', merely the fascination of

  a gifted mind functioning within very narrow limits, and offering as

  complete a detachment from real life as a game of chess or a jigsaw

  puzzle.

  INSIDE THE WHALE (1940)

  I

  When Henry Miller's novel, TROPIC OF CANCER, appeared in 1935, it was

  greeted with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned in some cases

  by a fear of seeming to enjoy pornography. Among the people who praised

  it were T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, John dos Passes, Ezra

  Pound--on the whole, not the writers who are in fashion at this moment.

  And in fact the subject matter of the book, and to a certain extent its

  mental atmosphere, belong to the twenties rather than to the thirties.

  TROPIC OF CANCER is a novel in the first person, or autobiography in the

  form of a novel, whichever way you like to look at it. Miller himself

  insists that it is straight autobiography, but the tempo and method of

  telling the story are those of a novel. It is a story of the American

  Paris, but not along quite the usual lines, because the Americans who

  figure in it happen to be people without money. During the boom years,

  when dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low,

  Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students,

  dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees, and plain idlers as the world has

  probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists

  must actually have outnumbered the working population--indeed, it has

  been reckoned that in the late twenties there were as many as 30,000

  painters in Paris, most of them impostors. The populace had grown so

  hardened to artists that gruff-voiced lesbians in corduroy breeches and

  young men in Grecian or medieval costume could walk the streets without

  attracting a glance, and along the Seine banks Notre Dame it was almost

  impossible to pick one's way between the sketching-stools. It was the age

  of dark horses and neglected genii; the phrase on everybody's lips was

  'QUAND JE SERAI LANC�'. As it turned out, nobody was 'LANC�', the slump

  descended like another Ice Age, the cosmopolitan mob of artists vanished,

  and the huge Montparnasse caf�s which only ten years ago were filled till

  the small hours by hordes of shrieking poseurs have turned into darkened

  tombs in which there arc not even any ghosts. It is this

  world--described in, among other novels, Wyndham Lewis's TARR--that

  Miller is writing about, but he is dealing only with the under side of

  it, the lumpen-proletarian fringe which has been able to survive the

  slump because it is composed partly of genuine artists and partly of

  genuine scoundrels. The neglected genii, the paranoiacs who art always

  'going to' write the novel that will knock Proust into a cocked hat, are

  there, but they are only genii in the rather rare moments when they are

  not scouting about for the next meal. For the most part it is a story of

  bug-ridden rooms in working-men's hotels, of fights, drinking bouts,

  cheap brothels, Russian refugees, cadging, swindling, and temporary

  jobs. And the whole atmosphere of the poor quarters of Paris as a

  foreigner sees them--the cobbled alleys, the sour reek of refuse, the

  bistros with their greasy zinc counters and worn brick floors, the green

  waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks of the Republican Guard, the

  crumbling iron urinals, the peculiar sweetish smell of the Metro

  stations, the cigarettes that come to pieces, the pigeons in the

  Luxembourg Gardens--it is all there, or at any rate the feeling of it is

  there.

  On the face of it no material could be less promising. When TROPIC OF

  CANCER was published the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and

  Hitler's concentration camps were already bulging. The intellectual foci

  of the world were Rome, Moscow, and Berlin. It did not seem to be a

  moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be written

  about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter. Of course

  a novelist is not obliged to write directly about contemporary history,

  but a novelist who simply disregards the major public events of the

  moment is generally either a footler or a plain idiot. From a mere

  account of the subject matter of TROPIC OF CANCER most people would

  probably assume it to be no more than a bit of naughty-naughty left over

  from the twenties. Actually, nearly everyone who read it saw at once that

  it was nothing of the kind, but a very remarkable book. How or why

  remarkable? That question is never easy to answer. It is better to begin

  by describing the impression that TROPIC OF CANCER has left on my own

  mind.

  When I first opened TROPIC OF CANCER and saw that it was full of

  unprintable words, my immediate reaction was a refusal to be impressed.

  Most people's would be the same, I believe. Nevertheless, after a lapse

  of time the atmosphere of the book, besides innumerable details, seemed

  to linger in my memory in a peculiar way. A year later Miller's second

  book, BLACK SPRING, was published. By this time? TROPIC OF CANCER was much

  more vividly present in my mind than it had been when I first read it. My

  first feeling about BLACK SPRING was that it showed a falling-off, and it

  is a fact that it has not the same unity as the other book. Yet after

  another year there were many passages in BLACK SPRING that had also

  rooted themselves in my memory. Evidently these books are of the sort to

  leave a flavour behind them--books that 'create a world of their own',

  as the saying goes. The books that do this are not necessarily good

  books, they may be good bad books like RAFFLES or the SHERLOCK HOLMES

  stories, or perverse and morbid books like WUTHERING HEIGHTS or THE HOUSE

  WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS. But now and again there appears a novel which

  opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing

  what is familiar. The truly remarkable thing about ULYSSES, for instance,

  is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in

  ULYSSES than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an

  elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar

  on to paper. He dared--for it is a matter of DARING just as much as of

  technique--to expose the imbecilities
of the inner mind, and in doing so

  he discovered an America which was under everybody's nose. Here is a

  whole world of 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 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. Not

  everywhere, because his work is very uneven, and sometimes, especially in

  BLACK SPRING, tends to slide away into more verbiage or into the squashy

  universe of the surrealists. But read him for five pages, ten pages, and

  you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as

  from being UNDERSTOOD. 'He knows all about me,' you feel; 'he wrote this

  specially for me'. It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to

  you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose,

  merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike. For the moment you

  have got away from the lies and simplifications, the stylized,

  marionette-like quality of ordinary fiction, even quite good fiction, and

  are dealing with the recognizable experiences of human beings.

  But what kind of experience? What kind of human beings? Miller is writing

  about the man in the street, and it is incidentally rather a pity that it

  should be a street full of brothers. That is the penalty of leaving your

  native land. It means transferring your roots into shallower soil. Exile

  is probably more damaging to a novelist than to a painter or even a poet,

  because its effect is to take him out of contact with working life and

  narrow down his range to the street, the cafe, the church, the brothel

  and the studio. On the whole, in Miller's books you are reading about

  people living the expatriate life, people drinking, talking, meditating,

  and fornicating, not about people working, marrying, and bringing up

  children; a pity, because he would have described the one set of

  activities as well as the other. In BLACK SPRING there is a wonderful

  flashback of New York, the swarming Irish-infested New York of the O.

  Henry period, but the Paris scenes are the best, and, granted their utter

  worthlessness as social types, the drunks and dead-beats of the cafes are

  handled with a feeling for character and a mastery of technique that are

  unapproached in any at all recent novel. All of them are not only

  credible but completely familiar; you have the feeling that all their

  adventures have happened to yourself. Not that they are anything very

  startling in the way of adventures. Henry gets a job with a melancholy

  Indian student, gets another job at a dreadful French school during a

  cold snap when the lavatories are frozen solid, goes on drinking bouts in

  Le Havre with his friend Collins, the sea captain, goes to the brothels

  where there are wonderful Negresses, talks with his friend Van Norden,

  the novelist, who has got the great novel of the world in his head but

  can never bring himself to begin writing it. His friend Karl, on the

  verge of starvation, is picked up by a wealthy widow who wishes to marry

  him. There are interminable Hamlet-like conversations in which Karl tries

  to decide which is worse, being hungry or sleeping with an old woman. In

  great detail he describes his visits to the widow, how he went to the

  hotel dressed in his best, how before going in he neglected to urinate,

  so that the whole evening was one long crescendo of torment etc., etc.

  And after all, none of it is true, the widow doesn't even exist--Karl

  has simply invented her in order to make himself seem important. The

  whole book is in this vein, more or less. Why is it that these monstrous