Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

and Dali's fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay of

  capitalist civilisation. But what he clearly needs is diagnosis. The

  question is not so much WHAT he is as WHY he is like that. It ought not

  to be in doubt that his is a diseased intelligence, probably not much

  altered by his alleged conversion, since genuine penitents, or people who

  have returned to sanity, do not flaunt their past vices in that

  complacent way. He is a symptom of the world's illness. The important

  thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to

  defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out

  WHY he exhibits that particular set of aberrations.

  The answer is probably discoverable in his pictures, and those I myself

  am not competent to examine. But I can point to one clue which perhaps

  takes one part of the distance. This is the old-fashioned, over-ornate

  Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to revert when he is not

  being Surrealist. Some of Dali's drawings are reminiscent of D�rer, one

  (p. 113) seems to show the influence of Beardsley, another (p. 269) seems

  to borrow something from Blake. But the most persistent strain is the

  Edwardian one. When I opened the book for the first time and looked at

  its innumerable marginal illustrations, I was haunted by a resemblance

  which I could not immediately pin down. I fetched up at the ornamental

  candlestick at the beginning of Part I (p. 7). What did this remind me

  of? Finally I tracked it down. It reminded me of a large vulgar,

  expensively got-up edition of Anatole France (in translation) which must

  have been published about 1914. That had ornamental chapter headings and

  tailpieces after this style. Dali's candlestick displays at one end a

  curly fish-like creature that looks curiously familiar (it seems to be

  based on the conventional dolphin), and at the other is the burning

  candle. This candle, which recurs in one picture after another, is a very

  old friend. You will find it, with the same picturesque gouts of wax

  arranged on its sides, in those phoney electric lights done up as

  candlesticks which are popular in sham-Tudor country hotels. This candle,

  and the design beneath it, convey at once an intense feeling of

  sentimentality. As though to counteract this, Dali has spattered a

  quillful of ink all over the page, but without avail. The same

  impression keeps popping up on page after page. The sign at the bottom of

  page 62, for instance, would nearly go into PETER PAN. The figure on page

  224, in spite of having her cranium elongated in to an immense

  sausage-like shape, is the witch of the fairy-tale books. The horse on

  page 234 and the unicorn on page 218 might be illustrations to James

  Branch Cabell. The rather pansified drawings of youths on pages 97, 100

  and elsewhere convey the same impression. Picturesqueness keeps breaking

  in. Take away the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones and other

  paraphernalia, and every now and again you are back in the world of

  Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany and WHERE THE RAINBOW ENDS.

  Curiously, enough, some of the naughty-naughty touches in Dali's

  autobiography tie up with the same period. When I read the passage I

  quoted at the beginning, about the kicking of the little sister's head, I

  was aware of another phantom resemblance. What was it? Of course!

  RUTHLESS RHYMES FOR HEARTLESS HOMES, by Harry Graham. Such rhymes were

  very popular round about 1912, and one that ran:

  Poor little Willy is crying so sore,

  A sad little boy is he,

  For he's broken his little sister's neck

  And he'll have no jam for tea,

  might almost have been founded on Dali's anecdote. Dali, of course, is

  aware of his Edwardian leanings, and makes capital out of them, more or

  less in a spirit of pastiche. He professes an especial affection for the

  year 1900, and claims that every ornamental object of 1900 is full of

  mystery, poetry, eroticism, madness, perversity, et. Pastiche, however,

  usually implies a real affection for the thing parodied. It seems to be,

  if not the rule, at any rate distinctly common for an intellectual bent

  to be accompanied by a non-rational, even childish urge in the same

  direction. A sculptor, for instance, is interested in planes and curves,

  but he is also a person who enjoys the physical act of mucking about with

  clay or stone. An engineer is a person who enjoys the feel of tools, the

  noise of dynamos and smell of oil. A psychiatrist usually has a leaning

  toward some sexual aberration himself. Darwin became a biologist partly

  because he was a country gentleman and fond of animals. It may be

  therefore, that Dali's seemingly perverse cult of Edwardian things (for

  example, his 'discovery' of the 1900 subway entrances) is merely the

  symptom of a much deeper, less conscious affection. The innumerable,

  beautifully executed copies of textbook illustrations, solemnly labelled

  LE ROSSIGNOL, UNE MONTRE and so on, which he scatters all over his

  margins, may be meant partly as a joke. The little boy in knickerbockers

  playing with a diabolo on page 103 is a perfect period piece. But perhaps

  these things are also there because Dali can't help drawing that kind of

  thing because it is to that period and that style of drawing that he

  really belongs.

  If so, his aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of

  assuring himself that he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali

  unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism.

  'At seven', he says in the first paragraph of his book, 'I wanted to be

  Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.' This is

  worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially

  true. Such feelings are common enough. 'I knew I was a genius', somebody

  once said to me, 'long before I knew what I was going to be a genius

  about.' And suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a

  dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your real gift

  is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real

  M�TIER to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you

  become Napoleon?

  There is always one escape: INTO WICKEDNESS. Always do the thing that

  will shock and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge,

  strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break his

  spectacles--or, at any rate, dream about doing such things. Twenty years

  later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along

  those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it

  pays! It is much less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the

  probable suppressions in Dali's autobiography, it is clear that he had

  not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would have done in an

  earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties,

  when sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital

  swarmed with aristocrats and RENTIERS who had given up sport and

  politics and taken to patronising the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at

&nbs
p; people, they threw money back. A phobia for grasshoppers--which a few

  decades back would merely have provoked a snigger--was now an

  interesting 'complex' which could be profitably exploited. And when that

  particular world collapsed before the German Army, America was waiting.

  You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one

  hop and without a shadow of repentance from the fashionable SALONS of

  Paris to Abraham's bosom.

  That, perhaps is the essential outline of Dali's history. But why his

  aberrations should be the particular ones they were, and why it should be

  so easy to 'sell' such horrors as rotting corpses to a sophisticated

  public--those are questions for the psychologist and the sociological

  critic. Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as

  Surrealism. They are 'bourgeois decadence' (much play is made with the

  phrases 'corpse poisons' and 'decaying RENTIER class'), and that is

  that. But though this probably states a fact, it does not establish a

  connection. One would still like to know WHY Dali's leaning was towards

  necrophilia (and not, say, homosexuality), and WHY the RENTIERS and the

  aristocrats would buy his pictures instead of hunting and making love

  like their grandfathers. Mere moral disapproval does not get one any

  further. But neither ought one to pretend, in the name of 'detachment',

  that such pictures as 'Mannequin rotting in a taxicab' are morally

  neutral. They are diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to

  start out from that fact.

  RAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISH (1944)

  Nearly half a century after his first appearance, Raffles, 'the amateur

  cracksman', is still one of the best-known characters in English

  fiction. Very few people would need telling that he played cricket for

  England, had bachelor chambers in the Albany and burgled the Mayfair

  houses which he also entered as a guest. Just for that reason he and his

  exploits make a suitable background against which to examine a more

  modern crime story such as NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH. Any such choice

  is necessarily arbitrary--I might equally well have chosen ARS�NE LUPIN

  for instance--but at any rate NO ORCHIDS and the Raffles books [Note,

  below] have the common quality of being crime stories which play the

  limelight on the criminal rather than the policeman. For sociological

  purposes they can be compared. NO ORCHIDS is the 1939 version of

  glamorized crime, RAFFLES the 1900 version. What I am concerned with

  here is the immense difference in moral atmosphere between the two

  books, and the change in the popular attitude that this probably

  implies.

  [Note: 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 STIUGAREE. (Author's footnote.)]

  At this date, the charm of RAFFLES is partly in the period atmosphere and

  partly in the technical excellence of the stories. Hornung was a very

  conscientious and on his level a very able writer. Anyone who cares for

  sheer efficiency must admire his work. However, the truly dramatic thing,

  about Raffles, the thing that makes him a sort of byword even to this day

  (only a few weeks ago, in a burglary case, a magistrate referred to the

  prisoner as 'a Raffles in real life'), is the fact that he is a

  GENTLEMAN. Raffles is presented to us and this is rubbed home in

  countless scraps of dialogue and casual remarks--not as an honest man

  who has gone astray, but as a public-school man who has gone astray. His

  remorse, when he feels any, is almost purely social; he has disgraced

  'the old school', he has lost his right to enter 'decent society', he has

  forfeited his amateur status and become a cad. Neither Raffles nor Bunny

  appears to feel at all strongly that stealing is wrong in itself, though

  Raffles does once justify himself by the casual remark that 'the

  distribution of property is all wrong anyway'. They think of themselves

  not as sinners but as renegades, or simply as outcasts. And the moral

  code of most of us is still so close to Raffles' own that we do feel his

  situation to be an especially ironical one. A West End club man who is

  really a burglar! That is almost a story in itself, is it not? But how if

  it were a plumber or a greengrocer who was really a burglar? Would there

  be anything inherently dramatic in that? No although the theme of the

  'double life', of respectability covering crime, is still there. Even

  Charles Peace in his clergyman's dog-collar, seems somewhat less of a

  hypocrite than Raffles in his Zingari blazer.

  Raffles, of course, is good at all games, but it is peculiarly fitting

  that his chosen game should be cricket. This allows not only of endless

  analogies between his cunning as a slow bowler and his cunning as a

  burglar, but also helps to define the exact nature of his crime. Cricket

  is not in reality a very popular game in England--it is nowhere so

  popular as football, for instance--but it gives expression to a

  well-marked trait in the English character, the tendency to value 'form'

  or 'style' more highly than success. In the eyes of any true

  cricket-lover it is possible for an innings of ten runs to be 'better'

  (i.e. more elegant) than an innings of a hundred runs: cricket is also

  one of the very few games in which the amateur can excel the

  professional. It is a game full of forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic

  changes of fortune, and its rules are so defined that their

  interpretation is partly an ethical business. When Larwood, for instance,

  practised bodyline bowling in Australia he was not actually breaking any

  rule: he was merely doing something that was 'not cricket'. Since

  cricket takes up a lot of time and is rather an expensive game to play,

  it is predominantly an upper-class game, but for the whole nation it is

  bound up with such concepts as 'good form', 'playing the game', etc., and

  it has declined in popularity just as the tradition of 'don't hit a man

  when he's down' has declined. It is not a twentieth-century game, and

  nearly all modern-minded people dislike it. The Nazis, for instance, were

  at pains to discourage cricket, which had gained a certain footing in

  Germany before and after the last war. In making Raffles a cricketer as

  well as a burglar, Hornung was not merely providing him with a plausible

  disguise; he was also drawing the sharpest moral contrast that he was

  able to imagine.

  RAFFLES, no less than GREAT EXPECTATIONS or LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR, is a

  story of snobbery, and it gains a great deal from the precariousness of

  Raffles's social position. A cruder writer would have made the 'gentleman

  burglar' a member of the peerage, or at least a baronet. Raffles,

  however, is of upper-middle-class origin and is only accepted by the

  aristocracy because of his personal charm. 'We were in Society but not of

  it', he says to Bunny towards the end of the book; and 'I was asked
about

  for my cricket'. Both he and Bunny accept the values of 'Society'

  unquestioningly, and would settle down in it for good if only they could

  get away with a big enough haul. The ruin that constantly threatens them

  is all the blacker because they only doubtfully 'belong'. A duke who has

  served a prison sentence is still a duke, whereas a mere man about town,

  if once disgraced, ceases to be 'about town' for evermore. The closing

  chapters of the book, when Raffles has been exposed and is living under

  an assumed name, have a twilight of the gods feeling, a mental atmosphere

  rather similar to that of Kipling's poem, 'Gentleman Rankers':

  Yes, a trooper of the forces--Who has run his own six horses! etc.

  Raffles now belongs irrevocably to the 'cohorts of the damned'. He can

  still commit successful burglaries, but there is no way back into

  Paradise, which means Piccadilly and the M.C.C. According to the

  public-school code there is only one means of rehabilitation: death in

  battle. Raffles dies fighting against the Boers (a practised reader would

  foresee this from the start), and in the eyes of both Bunny and his

  creator this cancels his crimes.

  Both Raffles and Bunny, of course, are devoid of religious belief, and

  they have no real ethical code, merely certain rules of behaviour which

  they observe semi-instinctively. But it is just here that the deep moral

  difference between RAFFLES and NO ORCHIDS becomes apparent. Raffles and

  Bunny, after all, are gentlemen, and such standards as they do have are

  not to be violated. Certain things are 'not done', and the idea of doing

  them hardly arises. Raffles will not, for example, abuse hospitality. He

  will commit a burglary in a house where he is staying as a guest, but the

  victim must be a fellow-guest and not the host. He will not commit

  murder [Note, below], and he avoids violence wherever possible and prefers

  to carry out his robberies unarmed. He regards friendship as sacred, and

  is chivalrous though not moral in his relations with women. He will take

  extra risks in the name of 'sportsmanship', and sometimes even for

  aesthetic reasons. And above all, he is intensively patriotic. He

  celebrates the Diamond Jubilee ('For sixty years, Bunny, we've been ruled

  over by absolutely the finest sovereign the world has ever seen') by

  dispatching to the Queen, through the post, an antique gold cup which he

  has stolen from the British Museum. He steals, from partly political

  motives, a pearl which the German Emperor is sending to one of the

  enemies of Britain, and when the Boer War begins to go badly his one

  thought is to find his way into the fighting line. At the front he

  unmasks a spy at the cost of revealing his own identity, and then dies

  gloriously by a Boer bullet. In this combination of crime and patriotism

  he resembles his near-contemporary Ars�ne Lupin, who also scores off the

  German Emperor and wipes out his very dirty past by enlisting in the

  Foreign Legion.

  [Note: 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.)]

  It is important to note that by modern standards Raffles's crimes are

  very petty ones. Four hundred pounds worth of jewellery seems to him an

  excellent haul. And though the stories are convincing in their physical

  detail, they contain very little sensationalism--very few corpses,

  hardly any blood, no sex crimes, no sadism, no perversions of any kind.

  It seems to be the case that the crime story, at any rate on its higher

  levels, has greatly increased in blood-thirstiness during the past twenty