Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

night to the roar of rifle fire as batch after batch of Republicans was

  executed, and being most of the time in acute danger of execution

  himself. This was not a chance adventure which "might have happened to

  anybody", but was in accordance with Koestler's life-style. A

  politically indifferent person would not have been in Spain at that

  date, a more cautious observer would have got out of Malaga before the

  Fascists arrived, and a British or American newspaper man would have

  been treated with more consideration. The book that Koestler wrote about

  this, SPANISH TESTAMENT, has remarkable passages, but apart from the

  scrappiness that is usual in a book of reportage, it is definitely false

  in places. In the prison scenes Koestler successfully establishes the

  nightmare atmosphere which is, so to speak, his patent, but the rest of

  the book is too much coloured by the Popular Front orthodoxy of the

  time. One or two passages even look as though they had been doctored for

  the purposes of the Left Book Club. At that time Koestler still was, or

  recently had been, a member of the Communist Party, and the complex

  politics of the civil war made it impossible for any Communist to write

  honestly about the internal struggle on the Government side. The sin of

  nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be

  anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian. In 1937 Koestler already

  knew this, but did not feel free to say so. He came much nearer to

  saying it--indeed, he did say it, though he put on a mask to do so--in

  his next book, THE GLADIATORS, which was published about a year before

  the war and for some reason attracted very little attention.

  THE GLADIATORS is in some ways an unsatisfactory book. It is about

  Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator who raised a slaves' rebellion in

  Italy round about 65 BC, and any book on such a subject is handicapped

  by challenging comparison with SALAMMB�. In our own age it would not be

  possible to write a book like SALAMMB� even if one had the talent. The

  great thing about Salammb�, even more important than its physical

  detail, is its utter mercilessness. Flaubert could think himself into

  the stony cruelty of antiquity, because in the mid-nineteenth century

  one still had peace of mind. One had time to travel in the past.

  Nowadays the present and the future are too terrifying to be escaped

  from, and if one bothers with history it is in order to find modern

  meanings there. Koestler makes Spartacus into an allegorical figure, a

  primitive version of the proletarian dictator. Whereas Flaubert has been

  able, by a prolonged effort of the imagination, to make his mercenaries

  truly pre-Christian, Spartacus is a modern man dressed up. But this

  might not matter if Koestler were fully aware of what his allegory

  means. Revolutions always go wrong--that is the main theme. It is on the

  question of WHY they go wrong that he falters, and his uncertainty

  enters into the story and makes the central figures enigmatic and unreal.

  For several years the rebellious slaves are uniformly successful. Their

  numbers swell to a hundred thousand, they overrun great areas of

  Southern Italy, they defeat one punitive expedition after another, they

  ally themselves with the pirates who at that time were the masters of

  the Mediterranean, and finally they set to work to build a city of their

  own, to be named the City of the Sun. In this city human beings are to

  be free and equal, and above all, they are to be happy: no slavery, no

  hunger, no injustice, no floggings, no executions. It is the dream of a

  just society which seems to haunt the human imagination ineradicably and

  in all ages, whether it is called the Kingdom of Heaven or the classless

  society, or whether it is thought of as a Golden Age which once existed

  in the past and from which we have degenerated. Needless to say, the

  slaves fail to achieve it. No sooner have they formed themselves into a

  community than their way of life turns out to be as unjust, laborious

  and fear-ridden as any other. Even the cross, symbol of slavery, has to

  be revived for the punishment of malefactors. The turning-point comes

  when Spartacus finds himself obliged to crucify twenty of his oldest and

  most faithful followers. After that the City of the Sun is doomed, the

  slaves split up and are defeated in detail, the last fifteen thousand of

  them being captured and crucified in one batch.

  The serious weakness of this story is that the motives of Spartacus

  himself are never made clear. The Roman lawyer Fulvius, who joins the

  rebellion and acts as its chronicler, sets forth the familiar dilemma of

  ends and means. You can achieve nothing unless you are willing to use

  force and cunning, but in using them you pervert your original aims.

  Spartacus, however, is not represented as power hungry, nor, on the

  other hand, as a visionary. He is driven onwards by some obscure force

  which he does not understand, and he is frequently in two minds as to

  whether it would not be better to throw up the whole adventure and flee

  to Alexandria while the going is good. The slaves' republic is in any

  case wrecked rather by hedonism than by the struggle for power. The

  slaves are discontented with their liberty because they still have to

  work, and the final break-up happens because the more turbulent and less

  civilised slaves, chiefly Gauls and Germans, continue to behave like

  bandits after the republic has been established. This may be a true

  account of events--naturally we know very little about the slave

  rebellions of antiquity--but by allowing the Sun City to be destroyed

  because Crixus the Gaul cannot be prevented from looting and raping,

  Koestler has faltered between allegory and history. If Spartacus is the

  prototype of the modern revolutionary--and obviously he is intended as

  that--he should have gone astray because of the impossibility of

  combining power with righteousness. As it is, he is an almost passive

  figure, acted upon rather than acting, and at times not convincing. The

  story partly fails because the central problem of revolution has been

  avoided or, at least, has not been solved.

  It is again avoided in a subtler way in the next book, Koestler's

  masterpiece, DARKNESS AT NOON. Here, however, the story is not spoiled,

  because it deals with individuals and its interest is psychological. It

  is an episode picked out from a background that does not have to be

  questioned. DARKNESS AT NOON describes the imprisonment and death of an

  Old Bolshevik, Rubashov, who first denies and ultimately confesses to

  crimes which he is well aware he has not committed. The grown-upness,

  the lack of surprise or denunciation, the pity and irony with which the

  story is told, show the advantage, when one is handling a theme of this

  kind, of being a European. The book reaches the stature of tragedy,

  whereas an English or American writer could at most have made it into a

  polemical tract. Koestler has digested his material and can treat it on

  the aesthetic level. At the same time his handling of it has a political

  implication, not important in this case but lik
ely to be damaging in

  later books.

  Naturally the whole book centres round one question: Why did Rubashov

  confess? He is not guilty--that is, not guilty of anything except the

  essential crime of disliking the Stalin r�gime. The concrete acts of

  treason in which he is supposed to have engaged are all imaginary. He

  has not even been tortured, or not very severely. He is worn down by

  solitude, toothache, lack of tobacco, bright lights glaring in his eyes,

  and continuous questioning, but these in themselves would not be enough

  to overcome a hardened revolutionary. The Nazis have previously done

  worse to him without breaking his spirit. The confessions obtained in

  the Russian state trials are capable of three explanations:

  1. That the accused were guilty.

  2. That they were tortured, and perhaps blackmailed by threats to

  relatives and friends.

  3. That they were actuated by despair, mental bankruptcy and the habit

  of loyalty to the Party.

  For Koestler's purpose in DARKNESS AT NOON, 1 is ruled out, and though

  this is not the place to discuss the Russian purges, I must add that

  what little verifiable evidence there is suggests that the trials of the

  Bolsheviks were frame-ups. If one assumes that the accused were not

  guilty--at any rate, not guilty of the particular things they confessed

  to--then 2 is the common-sense explanation. Koestler, however, plumps

  for 3, which is also accepted by the Trotskyist Boris Souvarine, in his

  pamphlet CAUCHEMAR EN URSS. Rubashov ultimately confesses because he

  cannot find in his own mind any reason for not doing so. Justice and

  objective truth have long ceased to have any meaning for him. For

  decades he has been simply the creature of the Party, and what the Party

  now demands is that he shall confess to non-existent crimes. In the end,

  though he had to be bullied and weakened first, he is somewhat proud of

  his decision to confess. He feels superior to the poor Czarist officer

  who inhabits the next cell and who talks to Rubashov by tapping on the

  wall. The Czarist officer is shocked when he learns that Rubashov

  intends to capitulate. As he sees it from his "bourgeois" angle,

  everyone ought to stick to his guns, even a Bolshevik. Honour, he says,

  consists in doing what you think right. "Honour is to be useful without

  fuss," Rubashov taps back; and he reflects with a certain satisfaction

  that he is tapping with his pince-nez while the other, the relic of the

  past, is tapping with a monocle. Like Bukharin, Rubashov is "looking out

  upon black darkness". What is there, what code, what loyalty, what

  notion of good and evil, for the sake of which he can defy the Party and

  endure further torment? He is not only alone, he is also hollow. He has

  himself committed worse crimes than the one that is now being

  perpetrated against him. For example, as a secret envoy of the Party in

  Nazi Germany, he has got rid of disobedient followers by betraying them to

  the Gestapo. Curiously enough, if he has any inner strength to draw

  upon, it is the memories of his boyhood when he was the son of

  a landowner. The last thing he remembers, when he is shot from

  behind, is the leaves of poplar trees on his father's estate. Rubashov

  belongs to the older generation of Bolsheviks that was largely wiped out

  in the purges. He is aware of art and literature, and of the world

  outside Russia. He contrasts sharply with Gletkin, the young GPU man who

  conducts his interrogation, and who is the typical "good party man",

  completely without scruples or curiosity, a thinking gramophone.

  Rubashov, unlike Gletkin, does not have the Revolution as his

  starting-point. His mind was not a blank sheet when the Party got hold

  of it. His superiority to the other is finally traceable to his

  bourgeois origin.

  One cannot, I think, argue that DARKNESS AT NOON is simply a story

  dealing with the adventures of an imaginary individual. Clearly it is a

  political book, founded on history and offering an interpretation of

  disputed events. Rubashov might be called Trotsky, Bukharin Rakovsky or

  some other relatively civilised figure among the Old Bolsheviks. If one

  writes about the Moscow trials one must answer the question, "Why did

  the accused confess?" and which answer one makes is a political

  decision. Koestler answers, in effect, "Because these people had been

  rotted by the Revolution which they served", and in doing so he comes

  near to claiming that revolutions are of their nature bad. If one

  assumes that the accused in the Moscow trials were made to confess by

  means of some kind of terrorism, one is only saying that one particular

  set of revolutionary leaders has gone astray. Individuals, and not the

  situation, are to blame. The implication of Koestler's book, however, is

  that Rubashov in power would be no better than Gletkin: or rather, only

  better in that his outlook is still partly pre-revolutionary.

  Revolution, Koestler seems to say, is a corrupting process. Really enter

  into the Revolution and you must end up as either Rubashov or Gletkin.

  It is not merely that "power corrupts": so also do the ways of attaining

  power. Therefore, all efforts to regenerate society BY VIOLENT MEANS

  lead to the cellars of the OGPU, Lenin leads to Stalin, and would have

  come to resemble Stalin if he had happened to survive.

  Of course, Koestler does not say this quite explicitly, and perhaps is

  not altogether conscious of it. He is writing about darkness, but it is

  darkness at what ought to be noon. Part of the time he feels that things

  might have turned out differently. The notion that so-and-so has

  "betrayed", that things have only gone wrong because of individual

  wickedness, is ever present in left-wing thought. Later, in ARRIVAL AND

  DEPARTURE, Koestler swings over much further towards the

  anti-revolutionary position, but in between these two books there is

  another, SCUM OF THE EARTH, which is straight autobiography and has only

  an indirect bearing upon the problems raised by DARKNESS AT NOON. True

  to his life-style, Koestler was caught in France by the outbreak of war

  and, as a foreigner and a known anti-Fascist, was promptly arrested and

  interned by the Daladier Government. He spent the first nine months of

  war mostly in a prison camp, then, during the collapse of France,

  escaped and travelled by devious routes to England, where he was once

  again thrown into prison as an enemy alien. This time he was soon

  released, however. The book is a valuable piece of reportage, and

  together with a few other scraps of honest writing that happened to be

  produced at the time of the d�b�cle, it is a reminder of the depths

  that bourgeois democracy can descend to. At this moment, with France

  newly liberated and the witch-hunt after collaborators in full swing, we

  are apt to forget that in 1940 various observers on the spot considered

  that about forty per cent of the French population was either actively

  pro-German or completely apathetic. Truthful war books are never

  acceptable to non-combatants, and Koestler's book did not have a very

  good r
eception. Nobody came well out of it--neither the bourgeois

  politicians, whose idea of conducting an anti-Fascist war was to jail

  every left-winger they could lay their hands on, nor the French

  Communists, who were effectively pro-Nazi and did their best to sabotage

  the French war effort, nor the common people, who were just as likely to

  follow mountebanks like Doriot as responsible leaders. Koestler records

  some fantastic conversations with fellow victims in the concentration

  camp, and adds that till then, like most middle-class Socialists and

  Communists, he had never made contact with real proletarians, only with

  the educated minority. He draws the pessimistic conclusion: "Without

  education of the masses, no social progress; without social progress, no

  education of the masses". In SCUM OF THE EARTH Koestler ceases to

  idealise the common people. He has abandoned Stalinism, but he is not a

  Trotskyist either. This is the book's real link with ARRIVAL AND

  DEPARTURE, in which what is normally called a revolutionary outlook is

  dropped, perhaps for good.

  ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE is not a satisfactory book. The pretence that it

  is a novel is very thin; in effect it is a tract purporting to show that

  revolutionary creeds are rationalisations of neurotic impulses. With all

  too neat a symmetry, the book begins and ends with the same action--a

  leap into a foreign country. A young ex-Communist who has made his

  escape from Hungary jumps ashore in Portugal, where he hopes to enter

  the service of Britain, at that time the only power fighting against

  Germany. His enthusiasm is somewhat cooled by the fact that the British

  Consulate is uninterested in him and almost ignores him for a period of

  several months, during which his money runs out and other astuter

  refugees escape to America. He is successively tempted by the World in

  the form of a Nazi propagandist, the Flesh in the form of a French girl,

  and--after a nervous breakdown--the Devil in the form of a psychoanalyst.

  The psychoanalyst drags out of him the fact that his revolutionary

  enthusiasm is not founded on any real belief in historical necessity,

  but on a morbid guilt complex arising from an attempt in early childhood

  to blind his baby brother. By the time that he gets an opportunity of

  serving the Allies he has lost all reason for wanting to do so, and he

  is on the point of leaving for America when his irrational impulses

  seize hold of him again. In practice he cannot abandon the struggle.

  When the book ends, he is floating down in a parachute over the dark

  landscape of his native country, where he will be employed as a secret

  agent of Britain.

  As a political statement (and the book is not much more), this is

  insufficient. Of course it is true in many cases, and it may be true in

  all cases, that revolutionary activity is the result of personal

  maladjustment. Those who struggle against society are, on the whole,

  those who have reason to dislike it, and normal healthy people are no

  more attracted by violence and illegality than they are by war. The

  young Nazi in ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE makes the penetrating remark that

  one can see what is wrong with the left-wing movement by the ugliness of

  its women. But after all, this does not invalidate the Socialist case.

  Actions have results, irrespective of their motives. Marx's ultimate

  motives may well have been envy and spite, but this does not prove that

  his conclusions were false. In making the hero of ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE

  take his final decision from a mere instinct not to shirk action and

  danger, Koestler is making him suffer a sudden loss of intelligence.

  With such a history as he has behind him, he would be able to see that

  certain things have to be done, whether our reasons for doing them are

  "good" or "bad". History has to move in a certain direction, even if it

  has to be pushed that way by neurotics. In ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE Peter's

  idols are overthrown one after the other. The Russian Revolution has