Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

degenerated, Britain, symbolised by the aged consul with gouty fingers,

  is no better, the international class-conscious proletariat is a myth.

  But the conclusion (since, after all, Koestler and his hero "support"

  the war) ought to be that getting rid of Hitler is still a worth-while

  objective, a necessary bit of scavenging in which motives are almost

  irrelevant.

  To take a rational political decision one must have a picture of the

  future. At present Koestler seems to have none, or rather to have two

  which cancel out. As an ultimate objective he believes in the Earthly

  Paradise, the Sun State which the gladiators set out to establish, and

  which has haunted the imagination of Socialists, Anarchists and

  religious heretics for hundreds of years. But his intelligence tells him

  that the Earthly Paradise is receding into the far distance and that

  what is actually ahead of us is bloodshed, tyranny and privation.

  Recently he described himself as a "short-term pessimist". Every kind of

  horror is blowing up over the horizon, but somehow it will all come

  right in the end. This outlook is probably gaining ground among thinking

  people: it results from the very great difficulty, once one has

  abandoned orthodox religious belief, of accepting life on earth as

  inherently miserable, and on the other hand, from the realisation that

  to make life liveable is a much bigger problem than it recently seemed.

  Since about 1930 the world has given no reason for optimism whatever.

  Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred, cruelty and

  ignorance, and beyond our present troubles loom vaster ones which are

  only now entering into the European consciousness. It is quite possible

  that man's major problems will NEVER be solved. But it is also

  unthinkable! Who is there who dares to look at the world of today and

  say to himself, "It will always be like this: even in a million years it

  cannot get appreciably better?" So you get the quasi-mystical belief

  that for the present there is no remedy, all political action is

  useless, but that somewhere in space and time human life will cease to

  be the miserable brutish thing it now is.

  The only easy way out is that of the religious believer, who regards

  this life merely as a preparation for the next. But few thinking people

  now believe in life after death, and the number of those who do is

  probably diminishing. The Christian churches would probably not survive

  on their own merits if their economic basis were destroyed.

  The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while

  accepting death as final. Men can only be happy when they do not assume

  that the object of life is happiness. It is most unlikely, however, that

  Koestler would accept this. There is a well-marked hedonistic strain in

  his writings, and his failure to find a political position after

  breaking with Stalinism is a result of this.

  The Russian Revolution, the central event in Koestler's fife, started

  out with high hopes. We forget these things now, but a quarter of a

  century ago it was confidently expected that the Russian Revolution

  would lead to Utopia. Obviously this has not happened. Koestler is too

  acute not to see this, and too sensitive not to remember the original

  objective. Moreover, from his European angle he can see such things as

  purges and mass deportations for what they are; he is not, like Shaw or

  Laski, looking at them through the wrong end of the telescope. Therefore

  he draws the conclusion: This is what revolutions lead to. There is

  nothing for it except to be a "short-term pessimist" i.e. to keep out of

  politics, make a sort of oasis within which you and your friends can

  remain sane, and hope that somehow things will be better in a hundred

  years. At the basis of this lies his hedonism, which leads him to think

  of the Earthly Paradise as desirable. Perhaps, however, whether

  desirable or not, it isn't possible. Perhaps some degree of suffering is

  ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a

  choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the

  world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but

  they are not all the same failure. It is his unwillingness to admit this

  that has led Koestler's mind temporarily into a blind alley and that

  makes ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE seem shallow compared with the earlier books.

  BENEFIT OF CLERGY: SOME NOTES ON SALVADOR DALI (1944)

  Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something

  disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying,

  since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

  However, even the most flagrantly dishonest book (Frank Harris's

  autobiographical writings are an example) can without intending it give a

  true picture of its author. Dali's recently published LIFE comes under

  this heading. Some of the incidents in it are flatly incredible, others

  have been rearranged and romanticised, and not merely the humiliation but

  the persistent ORDINARINESS of everyday life has been cut out. Dali is

  even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a

  strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight. But as a record of fantasy,

  of the perversion of instinct that has been made possible by the machine

  age, it has great value.

  Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dali's life, from his earliest

  years onward. Which of them are true and which are imaginary hardly

  matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have

  LIKED to do.

  When he is six years old there is some excitement over the appearance of

  Halley's comet:

  Suddenly one of my father's office clerks appeared in the drawing-room

  doorway and announced that the comet could be seen from the terrace...

  While crossing the hall I caught sight of my little three-year-old sister

  crawling unobtrusively through a doorway. I stopped, hesitated a second,

  then gave her a terrible kick in the head as though it had been a ball,

  and continued running, carried away with a 'delirious joy' induced by

  this savage act. But my father, who was behind me, caught me and led me

  down in to his office, where I remained as a punishment till dinner-time.

  A year earlier than this Dali had 'suddenly, as most of my ideas occur,'

  flung another little boy off a suspension bridge. Several other incidents

  of the same kind are recorded, including (THIS WAS WHEN HE WAS

  TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD) knocking down and trampling on a girl 'until they

  had to tear her, bleeding, out of my reach.'

  When he is about five he gets hold of a wounded bat which he puts into a

  tin pail. Next morning he finds that the bat is almost dead and is

  covered with ants which are devouring it. He puts it in his mouth, ants

  and all, and bites it almost in half.

  When he is an adolescent a girl falls desperately in love with him. He

  kisses and caresses her so as to excite her as much as possible, but

  refuses to go further. He resolves to keep this up for five years (he

  calls it his 'five-year plan'), enjoying her humiliation and
the sense of

  power it gives him. He frequently tells her that at the end of the five

  years he will desert her, and when the time comes he does so.

  Till well into adult life he keeps up the practice of masturbation, and

  likes to do this, apparently, in front of a looking-glass. For ordinary

  purposes he is impotent, it appears, till the age of thirty or so. When

  he first meets his future wife, Gala, he is greatly tempted to push her

  off a precipice. He is aware that there is something that she wants him

  to do to her, and after their first kiss the confession is made:

  I threw back Gala's head, pulling it by the hair, and trembling with

  complete hysteria, I commanded:

  'Now tell me what you want me to do with you! But tell me slowly, looking

  me in the eye, with the crudest, the most ferociously erotic words that

  can make both of us feel the greatest shame!'

  Then Gala, transforming the last glimmer of her expression of pleasure

  into the hard light of her own tyranny, answered:

  'I want you to kill me!'

  He is somewhat disappointed by this demand, since it is merely what he

  wanted to do already. He contemplates throwing her off the bell-tower of

  the Cathedral of Toledo, but refrains from doing so.

  During the Spanish Civil War he astutely avoids taking sides, and makes a

  trip to Italy. He feels himself more and more drawn towards the

  aristocracy, frequents smart SALONS, finds himself wealthy patrons, and

  is photographed with the plump Vicomte de Noailles, whom he describes as

  his 'Maecenas.' When the European War approaches he has one preoccupation

  only: how to find a place which has good cookery and from which he can

  make a quick bolt if danger comes too near. He fixes on Bordeaux, and

  duly flees to Spain during the Battle of France. He stays in Spain long

  enough to pick up a few anti-red atrocity stories, then makes for

  America. The story ends in a blaze of respectability. Dali, at

  thirty-seven, has become a devoted husband, is cured of his aberrations,

  or some of them, and is completely reconciled to the Catholic Church. He

  is also, one gathers, making a good deal of money.

  However, he has by no means ceased to take pride in the pictures of his

  Surrealist period, with titles like 'The Great Masturbator', 'Sodomy of a

  Skull with a Grand Piano', etc. There are reproductions of these all the

  way through the book. Many of Dali's drawings are simply representational

  and have a characteristic to be noted later. But from his Surrealist

  paintings and photographs the two things that stand our are sexual

  perversity and necrophilia. Sexual objects and symbols--some of them

  well known, like our old friend the high-heeled slipper, others, like the

  crutch and the cup of warm milk, patented by Dali himself--recur over

  and over again, and there is a fairly well-marked excretory motif as

  well. In his painting, Le Jeu Lugubre, he says, 'the drawers bespattered

  with excrement were painted with such minute and realistic complacency

  that the whole little Surrealist group was anguished by the question: Is

  he coprophagic or not?' Dali adds firmly that he is NOT, and that he

  regards this aberration as 'repulsive', but it seems to be only at that

  point that his interest in excrement stops. Even when he recounts the

  experience of watching a woman urinate standing up, he has to add the

  detail that she misses her aim and dirties her shoes. It is not given to

  any one person to have all the vices, and Dali also boasts that he is not

  homosexual, but otherwise he seems to have as good an outfit of

  perversions as anyone could wish for.

  However, his most notable characteristic is his necrophilia. He himself

  freely admits to this, and claims to have been cured of it. Dead faces,

  skulls, corpses of animals occur fairly frequently in his pictures, and

  the ants which devoured the dying bat make countless reappearances. One

  photograph shows an exhumed corpse, far gone in decomposition. Another

  shows the dead donkeys putrefying on top of grand pianos which formed

  part of the Surrealist film, Le Chien Andalou. Dali still looks back on

  these donkeys with great enthusiasm.

  I 'made up' the putrefaction of the donkeys with great pots of sticky

  glue which I poured over them. Also I emptied their eye-sockets and made

  them larger by hacking them out with scissors. In the same way I

  furiously cut their mouths open to make the rows of their teeth show to

  better advantage, and I added several jaws to each mouth, so that it

  would appear that although the donkeys were already rotting they were

  vomiting up a little more their own death, above those other rows of

  teeth formed by the keys of the black pianos.

  And finally there is the picture--apparently some kind of faked

  photograph--of 'Mannequin rotting in a taxicab.' Over the already

  somewhat bloated face and breast of the apparently dead girl, huge snails

  were crawling. In the caption below the picture Dali notes that these are

  Burgundy snails--that is, the edible kind.

  Of course, in this long book of 400 quarto pages there is more than I

  have indicated, but I do not think that I have given an unfair account of

  his moral atmosphere and mental scenery. It is a book that stinks. If it

  were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one

  would--a thought that might please Dali, who before wooing his future

  wife for the first time rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of

  goat's dung boiled up in fish glue. But against this has to be set the

  fact that Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to

  judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard

  worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He

  has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce

  his morals and jeer at his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken

  together, raise a question which for lack of any basis of agreement

  seldom gets a real discussion.

  The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity

  and decency; and even--since some of Dali's pictures would tend to

  poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard--on life itself.

  What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his

  outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not

  exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are

  undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong

  with it.

  Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord Elton, to

  Mr. Alfred Noyes, to THE TIMES leader writers who exult over the

  'eclipse of the highbrow'--in fact, to any 'sensible' art-hating English

  person--it is easy to imagine what kind of response you would get. They

  would flatly refuse to see any merit in Dali whatever. Such people are

  not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be

  asthetically right, but their real demand of every artist is that he

  shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought is unnecessary.

  And they can be especially dangerou
s at a time like the present, when

  the Ministry of Information and the British Council put power into their

  hands. For their impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it

  appears, but to castrate the past as well. Witness the renewed

  highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America, with

  its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even against

  T. S. Eliot.

  But if you talk to the kind of person who CAN see Dali's merits, the

  response that you get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that

  Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little scoundrel, you

  are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don't like rotting

  corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally

  diseased, it is assumed that you lack the aesthetic sense. Since

  'Mannequin rotting in a taxicab' is a good composition. And between these

  two fallacies there is no middle position, but we seldom hear much about

  it. On the one side KULTURBOLSCHEVISMUS: on the other (though the phrase

  itself is out of fashion) 'Art for Art's sake.' Obscenity is a very

  difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either

  of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to

  define the relationship between art and morals.

  It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of

  BENEFIT OF CLERGY. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that

  are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word 'Art', and

  everything is O.K.: kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film

  like L'Age d'Or is O.K. [Note, below] It is also O.K. that Dali should

  batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France

  is in danger. So long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all

  shall be forgiven you.

  [Note: 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)]

  One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime.

  In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional

  person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as

  a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should

  be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the

  artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow,

  and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little

  girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on

  the ground that he might write another KING LEAR. And, after all, the

  worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging

  necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say,

  picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one's head

  simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a

  disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense,

  affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it

  shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of

  what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall

  in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration

  camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, 'This is a good book

  or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.'

  Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the

  implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human

  being.

  Not, of course, that Dali's autobiography, or his pictures, ought to be

  suppressed. Short of the dirty postcards that used to be sold in

  Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful policy to suppress anything,