Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

  On the whole the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the

  opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics. For any writer

  who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is

  sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up. It

  is, of course, possible to toe the line and go on writing--after a

  fashion. Any Marxist can demonstrate with the greatest of ease that

  'bourgeois' liberty of thought is an illusion. But when he has finished

  his demonstration there remains the psychological FACT that without this

  'bourgeois' liberty the creative powers wither away. In the future a

  totalitarian literature may arise, but it will be quite different from

  anything we can now imagine. Literature as we know it is an individual

  thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship. And this is

  even truer of prose than of verse. It is probably not a coincidence that

  the best writers of the thirties have been poets. The atmosphere of

  orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely

  ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. How

  many Roman Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one could

  name have usually been bad Catholics. The novel is practically a

  Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the

  autonomous individual. No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has

  been so barren of imaginative prose as the nineteen-thirties. There have

  been good poems, good sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but

  practically no fiction of any value at all. From 1933 onwards the mental

  climate was increasingly against it. Anyone sensitive enough to be

  touched by the ZEITGEIST was also involved in politics. Not everyone, of

  course, was definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone

  was on its periphery and more or less mixed up in propaganda campaigns

  and squalid controversies. Communists and near-Communists had a

  disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It was a time

  of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments you were expected

  to lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies; at the best a

  sort of voluntary censorship ('Ought I to say this? Is it pro-Fascist?')

  was at work in nearly everyone's mind. It is almost inconceivable that

  good novels should be written in such an atmosphere. 'Good novels are not

  written by by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken

  about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are NOT

  FRIGHTENED. This brings me back to Henry Miller.

  III

  If this were a likely, moment for the launching of 'schools' literature,

  Henry Miller might be the starting-point of a new 'school'. He does at

  any rate mark an unexpected swing of the pendulum. In his books one gets

  right away from the 'political animal' and back to a viewpoint not only

  individualistic but completely passive--the view-point of a man who

  believes the world-process to be outside his control and who in any case

  hardly wishes to control it.

  I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris

  on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he

  felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in

  forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an

  idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish

  motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such

  things FROM A SENSE OBLIGATION was sheer stupidity. In any case my Ideas

  about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all

  baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by

  something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human--a

  prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is

  implicit throughout his work. Everywhere there is the sense of the

  approaching cataclysm, and almost everywhere the implied belief that it

  doesn't matter. The only political declaration which, so far as I know,

  he has ever made in print is a purely negative one. A year or so ago an

  American magazine, the MARXIST QUARTERLY, sent out a questionnaire to

  various American writers asking them to define their attitude on the

  subject of war. Miller replied in terms of extreme pacifism, an

  individual refusal to fight, with no apparent wish to convert others to

  the same opinion--practically, in fact, a declaration of

  irresponsibility.

  However, there is more than one kind of irresponsibility. As a rule,

  writers who do not wish to identify themselves with the historical

  process at the moment either ignore it or fight against if. If they can

  ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can understand it well enough

  to want to fight against it, they probably have enough vision to realize

  that they cannot win. Look, for instance, at a poem like 'The Scholar

  Gipsy', with its railing against the 'strange disease of modern life' and

  its magnificent defeatist simile is the final stanza. It expresses one of

  the normal literary attitudes, perhaps actually the prevailing attitude

  during the last hundred years. And on the other hand there are the

  'progressives', the yea-sayers, the Shaw-Wells type, always leaping

  forward to embrace the ego-projections which they mistake for the future.

  On the whole the writers of the twenties took the first line and the

  writers of the thirties the second. And at any given moment, of course,

  there is a huge tribe of Barries and Deepings and Dells who simply don't

  notice what is happening. Where Miller's work is symptomatically

  important is in its avoidance of any of these attitudes. He is neither

  pushing the world-process forward nor trying to drag it back, but on the

  other hand he is by no means ignoring it. I should say that he believes

  in the impending ruin of Western Civilization much more firmly than the

  majority of 'revolutionary' writers; only he does not feel called upon to

  do anything about it. He is fiddling While Rome is burning, and, unlike

  the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face

  towards the flames.

  In MAX AND THE WHITE PHAGOCYTES there is one of those revealing passages

  in which a writer tells you a great deal about himself while talking

  about somebody else. The book includes a long essay on the diaries of

  Anais Nin, which I have never read, except for a few fragments, and which

  I believe have not been published. Miller claims that they are the only

  true feminine writing that has ever appeared, whatever that may mean. But

  the interesting passage is one in which he compares Anais Nin--evidently

  a completely subjective, introverted writer--to Jonah in the whale's

  belly. In passing he refers to an essay that Aldous Huxley wrote some

  years ago about El Greco's picture, The Dream of Philip the Second.

  Huxley remarks that the people in El Greco's pictures always look as

  though they were in the bellies of whales, and professes to find

  something peculiarly horrible in the idea of being in a 'visceral<
br />
  prison'. Miller retorts that, on the contrary, there are many worse

  things than being swallowed by whales, and the passage makes it dear that

  he himself finds the idea rather attractive. Here he is touching upon

  what is probably a very widespread fantasy. It is perhaps worth noticing

  that everyone, at least every English-speaking person, invariably speaks

  of Jonah and the WHALE. Of course the creature that swallowed Jonah was a

  fish, and was so described in the Bible (Jonah i. 17), but children

  naturally confuse it with a whale, and this fragment of baby-talk is

  habitually carried into later life--a sign, perhaps, of the hold that

  the Jonah myth has upon our imaginations. For the fact is that being

  inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought. The

  historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to escape, but

  in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of

  course, quite obvious why. The whale's belly is simply a womb big enough

  for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly

  fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to

  keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what

  HAPPENS. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would

  hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale's own movements would

  probably be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface

  waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile

  deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the

  difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of

  irresponsibility. And however it may be with Anais Nin, there is no

  question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most

  characteristic passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing

  Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted--quite the contrary. In his

  case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to

  alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the

  essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining

  passive, ACCEPTING.

  It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism,

  implying either complete unbelief or else a degree of belief amounting to

  mysticism. The attitude is 'JE M'EN FOUS' or 'Though He slay me, yet will

  I trust in Him', whichever way you like to look at it; for practical

  purposes both are identical, the moral in either case being 'Sit on your

  bum'. But in a time like ours, is this a defensible attitude? Notice that

  it is almost impossible to refrain from asking this question. At the

  moment of writing, we are still in a period in which it is taken for

  granted that books ought always to be positive, serious, and

  'constructive'. A dozen years ago this idea would have been greeted with

  titters. ('My dear aunt, one doesn't write about anything, one just

  WRITES.') Then the pendulum swung away from the frivolous notion that art

  is merely technique, but it swung a very long distance, to the point of

  asserting that a book can only be 'good' if it is founded on a 'true'

  vision of life. Naturally the people who believe this also believe that

  they are in possession of the truth themselves. Catholic critics, for

  instance, tend to claim that books arc only 'good' when they are of

  Catholic tendency. Marxist critics make the same claim more boldly for

  Marxist books. For instance, Mr Edward Upward ('A Marxist Interpretation

  of Literature,' in the MIND IN CHAINS):

  Literary criticism which aims at being Marxist must...proclaim that no

  book written at the present time can be 'good' unless it is written from

  a Marxist or near-Marxist viewpoint.

  Various other writers have made similar or comparable statements. Mr

  Upward italicizes 'at the present time' because, he realizes that you

  cannot, for instance, dismiss HAMLET on the ground that Shakespeare was

  not a Marxist. Nevertheless his interesting essay only glances very

  shortly at this difficulty. Much of the literature that comes to us out

  of the past is permeated by and in fact founded on beliefs (the belief in

  the immortality of the soul, for example) which now seem to us false and

  in some cases contemptibly silly. Yet if is 'good' literature, if

  survival is any test. Mr Upward would no doubt answer that a belief which

  was appropriate several centuries ago might be inappropriate and

  therefore stultifying now. But this does not get one much farther,

  because it assumes that in any age there will be ONE body of belief which

  is the current approximation to truth, and that the best literature of

  the time will be more or less in harmony with it. Actually no such

  uniformity has ever existed. In seventeenth-century England, for

  instance, there was a religious and political cleavage which distinctly

  resembled the left-right antagonism of to-day. Looking back, most modern

  people would feel that the bourgeois-Puritan viewpoint was a better

  approximation to truth than the Catholic-feudal one. But it is certainly

  not the case that all or even a majority of the best writers of the time

  were puritans. And more than this, there exist 'good' writers whose

  world-view would in any age be recognized false and silly. Edgar Allan

  Poe is an example. Poe's outlook is at best a wild romanticism and at

  worst is not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense. Why is

  it, then that stories like The Black Cat, The Tell-tale Heart, The Fall

  of the House of Usher and so forth, which might very nearly have been

  written by a lunatic, do not convey a feeling of falsity? Because they

  are true within a certain framework, they keep the rules of their own

  peculiar world, like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to write

  successfully about such a world you have got to believe in it. One sees

  the difference immediately if one compares Poe's TALES with what is, in

  my opinion, an insincere attempt to work up a similar atmosphere, Julian

  Green's MINUIT. The thing that immediately strikes one about MINUIT is

  that there is no reason why any of the events in it should happen.

  Everything is completely arbitrary; there is no emotional sequence. But

  this is exactly what one does NOT feel with Poe's stories. Their maniacal

  logic, in its own setting, is quite convincing. When, for instance, the

  drunkard seizes the black cat and cuts its eye out with his penknife, one

  knows exactly WHY he did it, even to the point of feeling that one would

  have done the same oneself. It seems therefore that for a creative writer

  possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

  Even Mr Upward would not claim that a writer needs nothing beyond a

  Marxist training. He also needs a talent. But talent, apparently, is a

  matter of being able to care, of really BELIEVING in your beliefs,

  whether they are true or false. The difference between, for instance,

  C�line and Evelyn Waugh is a difference of emotional intensity. It is the

  difference between genuine despair and a despair that is at least partly

  a pretence. And with this there go
es another consideration which is

  perhaps less obvious: that there are occasions when an 'untrue' belief is

  more likely to be sincerely held than a 'true' one.

  If one looks at the books of personal reminiscence written about the war

  of 1914-18, one notices that nearly all that have remained readable after

  a lapse of time are written from a passive, negative angle. They are the

  records of something completely meaningless, a nightmare happening in a

  void. That was not actually the truth about the war, but it was the truth

  about the individual reaction. The soldier advancing into a machine-gun

  barrage or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that here

  was an appalling experience in which he was all but helpless. He was

  likelier to make a good book out of his helplessness and his ignorance

  than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in perspective. As

  for the books that were written during the war itself, the best of them

  were nearly all the work of people who simply turned their backs and

  tried not to notice that the war was happening. Mr E. M. Forster has

  described how in 1917 he read Prufrock and other of Eliot's early poems,

  and how it heartened him at such a time to get hold of poems that were

  'innocent of public-spiritedness':

  They sang of private disgust and diffidence, and of people who seemed

  genuine because they were unattractive or weak...Here was a protest,

  and a feeble one, and the more congenial for being o feeble...He who

  could turn aside to complain of ladies and drawing rooms preserved a tiny

  drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human heritage.

  That is very well said. Mr MacNeice, in the book I have referred to

  already, quotes this passage and somewhat smugly adds:

  Ten years later less feeble protests were to be made by poets and the

  human heritage carried on rather differently...The contemplation of a

  world of fragments becomes boring and Eliot's successors are more

  interested in tidying it up.

  Similar remarks are scattered throughout Mr MacNeice's book. What he

  wishes us to believe is that Eliot's 'successors' (meaning Mr MacNeice

  and his friends) have in some way 'protested' more effectively than Eliot

  did by publishing Prufrock at the moment when the Allied armies were

  assaulting the Hindenburg Line. Just where these 'protests' are to be

  found I do not know. But in the contrast between Mr Forster's comment and

  Mr MacNeice's lies all the difference between a man who knows what the

  1914-18 war was like and a man who barely remembers it. The truth is that

  in 1917 there was nothing that a thinking and a sensitive person could

  do, except to remain human, if possible. And a gesture of helplessness,

  even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had been a

  soldier fighting in the Great War, I would sooner have got hold of

  Prufrock than THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND or Horatio Bottomley's LETTERS

  TO THE BOYS IN THE TRENCHES. I should have felt, like Mr Forster, that by

  simply standing aloof and keeping touch with pre-war emotions, Eliot was

  carrying on the human heritage. What a relief it would have been at such

  a time, to read about the hesitations of a middle-aged highbrow with a

  bald spot! So different from bayonet-drill! After the bombs and the

  food-queues and the recruiting-posters, a human voice! What a relief!

  But, after all, the war of 1914-18 was only a heightened moment in an

  almost continuous crisis. At this date it hardly even needs a war to

  bring home to us the disintegration of our society and the increasing

  helplessness of all, decent people. It is for this reason that I think

  that the passive, non-co-operative attitude implied in Henry Miller's

  work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people

  OUGHT to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they

  DO feel. Once again it is the human voice among the bomb-explosions, a

  friendly American voice, 'innocent of public-spiritedness'. No sermons,