Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

years. Some of the early detective stories do not even contain a murder.

  The Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance, are not all murders, and some

  of them do not even deal with an indictable crime. So also with the John

  Thorndyke stories, while of the Max Carrados stories only a minority are

  murders. Since 1918, however, a detective story not containing a murder

  has been a great rarity, and the most disgusting details of dismemberment

  and exhumation are commonly exploited. Some of the Peter Wimsey stories,

  for instance, display an extremely morbid interest in corpses. The

  Raffles stories, written from the angle of the criminal, are much less

  anti-social than many modern stories written from the angle of the

  detective. The main impression that they leave behind is of boyishness.

  They belong to a time when people had standards, though they happened to

  be foolish standards. Their key-phrase is 'not done'. The line that they

  draw between good and evil is as senseless as a Polynesian taboo, but at

  least, like the taboo, it has the advantage that everyone accepts it.

  So much for RAFFLES. Now for a header into the cesspool. NO ORCHIDS FOR

  MISS BLANDISH, by James Hadley Chase, was published in 1939, but seems to

  have enjoyed its greatest popularity in 1940, during the Battle of

  Britain and the blitz. In its main outlines its story is this:

  Miss Blandish, the daughter of a millionaire, is kidnapped by some

  gangsters who are almost immediately surprised and killed off by a larger

  and better organized gang. They hold her to ransom and extract half a

  million dollars from her father. Their original plan had been to kill her

  as soon as the ransom-money was received, but a chance keeps her alive.

  One of the gang is a young man named Slim, whose sole pleasure in life

  consists in driving knives into other people's bellies. In childhood he

  has graduated by cutting up living animals with a pair of rusty scissors.

  Slim is sexually impotent, but takes a kind of fancy to Miss Blandish.

  Slim's mother, who is the real brains of the gang, sees in this the

  chance of curing Slim's impotence, and decides to keep Miss Blandish in

  custody till Slim shall have succeeded in raping her. After many efforts

  and much persuasion, including the flogging of Miss Blandish with a

  length of rubber hosepipe, the rape is achieved. Meanwhile Miss

  Blandish's father has hired a private detective, and by means of bribery

  and torture the detective and the police manage to round up and

  exterminate the whole gang. Slim escapes with Miss Blandish and is killed

  after a final rape, and the detective prepares to restore Miss Blandish

  to her family. By this time, however, she has developed such a taste for

  Slim's caresses [Note, below] that she feels unable to live without him,

  and she jumps, out of the window of a sky-scraper.

  Several other points need noticing before one can grasp the full

  implications of this book. To begin with, its central story bears a very

  marked resemblance to William Faulkner's novel, Sanctuary. Secondly, it

  is not, as one might expect, the product of an illiterate hack, but a

  brilliant piece of writing, with hardly a wasted word or a jarring note

  anywhere. Thirdly, the whole book, r�cit as well as dialogue, is written

  in the American language; the author, an Englishman who has (I believe)

  never been in the United States, seems to have made a complete mental

  transference to the American underworld. Fourthly, the book sold,

  according to its publishers, no less than half a million copies.

  I have already outlined the plot, but the subject-matter is much more

  sordid and brutal than this suggests. The book contains eight full-dress

  murders, an unassessable number of casual killings and woundings, an

  exhumation (with a careful reminder of the stench), the flogging of Miss

  Blandish, the torture of another woman with red-hot cigarette-ends, a

  strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of unheard-of cruelty and much else

  of the same kind. It assumes great sexual sophistication in its readers

  (there is a scene, for instance, in which a gangster, presumably of

  masochistic tendency, has an orgasm in the moment of being knifed), and

  it takes for granted the most complete corruption and self-seeking as the

  norm of human behaviour. The detective, for instance, is almost as great

  a rogue as the gangsters, and actuated by nearly the same motives. Like

  them, he is in pursuit of 'five hundred grand'. It is necessary to the

  machinery of the story that Mr. Blandish should be anxious to get his

  daughter back, but apart from this, such things as affection, friendship,

  good nature or even ordinary politeness simply do not enter. Nor, to any

  great extent does normal sexuality. Ultimately only one motive is at work

  throughout the whole story: the pursuit of power.

  [Note: Another reading of the final episode is possible. It may mean

  merely that Miss Blandish is pregnant. But the interpretation I have

  given above seems more in keeping with the general brutality of the book.

  (Author's footnote, 1945)]

  It should be noticed that the book is not in the ordinary sense

  pornography. Unlike most books that deal in sexual sadism, it lays the

  emphasis on the cruelty and not on the pleasure. Slim, the ravisher of

  Miss Blandish, has 'wet slobbering lips': this is disgusting, and it is

  meant to be disgusting. But the scenes describing cruelty to women are

  comparatively perfunctory. The real high-spots of the book are cruelties

  committed by men upon other men; above all, the third-degreeing of the

  gangster, Eddie Schultz, who is lashed into a chair and flogged on the

  windpipe with truncheons, his arms broken by fresh blows as he breaks

  loose. In another of Mr. Chase's books, HE WON'T NEED IT NOW, the hero,

  who is intended to be a sympathetic and perhaps even noble character, is

  described as stamping on somebody's face, and then, having crushed the

  man's mouth in, grinding his heel round and round in it. Even when

  physical incidents of this kind are not occurring, the mental atmosphere

  of these books is always the same. Their whole theme is the struggle for

  power and the triumph of the strong over the weak. The big gangsters wipe

  out the little ones as mercilessly as a pike gobbling up the little fish

  in a pond; the police kill off the criminals as cruelly as the angler

  kills the pike. If ultimately one sides with the police against the

  gangsters, it is merely because they are better organized and more

  powerful, because, in fact, the law is a bigger racket than crime. Might

  is right: vae victis.

  As I have mentioned already, NO ORCHIDS enjoyed its greatest vogue in

  1940, though it was successfully running as a play till some time later.

  It was, in fact, one of the things that helped to console people for the

  boredom of being bombed. Early in the war the NEW YORKER had a picture of

  a little man approaching a news-stall littered with paper with such

  headlines as 'Great Tank Battles in Northern France', 'Big Naval Battle

  in the North Sea', 'Huge Air Battles over the Channel', etc., etc. The

  little man is saying 'ACTION STORIES,
please'. That little man stood for

  all the drugged millions to whom the world of the gangster and the

  prize-ring is more 'real', more 'tough', than such things as wars,

  revolutions, earthquakes, famines and pestilences. From the point of view

  of a reader of ACTION STORIES, a description of the London blitz, or of

  the struggles of the European underground parties, would be 'sissy

  stuff'. On the other hand, some puny gun-battle in Chicago, resulting in

  perhaps half a dozen deaths, would seem genuinely 'tough'. This habit of

  mind is now extremely widespread. A soldier sprawls in a muddy trench,

  with the machine-gun bullets crackling a foot or two overhead, and whiles

  away his intolerable boredom by reading an American gangster story. And

  what is it that makes that story so exciting? Precisely the fact that

  people are shooting at each other with machine-guns! Neither the soldier

  nor anyone else sees anything curious in this. It is taken for granted

  that an imaginary bullet is more thrilling than a real one.

  The obvious explanation is that in real life one is usually a passive

  victim, whereas in the adventure story one can think of oneself as being

  at the centre of events. But there is more to it than that. Here it is

  necessary to refer again to the curious fact of NO ORCHIDS being

  written--with technical errors, perhaps, but certainly with considerable

  skill--in the American language.

  There exists in America an enormous literature of more or less the same

  stamp as NO ORCHIDS. Quite apart from books, there is the huge array of

  'pulp magazines', graded so as to cater for different kinds of fantasy,

  but nearly all having much the same mental atmosphere. A few of them go

  in for straight pornography, but the great majority are quite plainly

  aimed at sadists and masochists. Sold at threepence a copy under the

  title of Yank Mags, [Note, below] these things used to enjoy considerable

  popularity in England, but when the supply dried up owing to the war, no

  satisfactory substitute was forthcoming. English imitations of the 'pulp

  magazine' do now exist, but they are poor things compared with the

  original. English crook films, again, never approach the American crook

  film in brutality. And yet the career of Mr. Chase shows how deep the

  American influence has already gone. Not only is he himself living a

  continuous fantasy-life in the Chicago underworld, but he can count on

  hundreds of thousands of readers who know what is meant by a 'clipshop'

  or the 'hotsquat', do not have to do mental arithmetic when confronted by

  'fifty grand', and understand at sight a sentence like 'Johnny was a

  rummy and only two jumps ahead of the nut-factory'. Evidently there are

  great numbers of English people who are partly Americanized in language

  and, one ought to add, in moral outlook. For there was no popular protest

  against NO ORCHIDS. In the end it was withdrawn, but only

  retrospectively, when a later work, MISS CALLAGHAN COMES TO GRIEF,

  brought Mr. Chase's books to the attention of the authorities. Judging by

  casual conversations at the time, ordinary readers got a mild thrill out

  of the obscenities of NO ORCHIDS, but saw nothing undesirable in the book

  as a whole. Many people, incidentally, were under the impression that it

  was an American book reissued in England.

  [Note: They are said to have been imported into this country as ballast

  which accounted for their low price and crumped appearance. Since the war

  the ships have been ballasted with something more useful, probably

  gravel. (Author's footnote)]

  The thing that the ordinary reader OUGHT to have objected to--almost

  certainly would have objected to, a few decades earlier--was the

  equivocal attitude towards crime. It is implied throughout NO ORCHIDS

  that being a criminal is only reprehensible in the sense that it does not

  pay. Being a policeman pays better, but there is no moral difference,

  since the police use essentially criminal methods. In a book like HE

  WON'T NEED IT NOW the distinction between crime and crime-prevention

  practically disappears. This is a new departure for English sensational

  fiction, in which till recently there has always been a sharp distinction

  between right and wrong and a general agreement that virtue must triumph

  in the last chapter. English books glorifying crime (modern crime, that

  is--pirates and highwaymen are different) are very rare. Even a book

  like RAFFLES, as I have pointed out, is governed by powerful taboos, and

  it is clearly understood that Raffles's crimes must be expiated sooner or

  later. In America, both in life and fiction, the tendency to tolerate

  crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is success, is very much

  more marked. It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude that has made it

  possible for crime to flourish upon so huge a scale. Books have been

  written about Al Capone that are hardly different in tone from the books

  written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe and all the rest of

  the 'log cabin to White House' brigade. And switching back eighty years,

  one finds Mark Twain adopting much the same attitude towards the

  disgusting bandit Slade, hero of twenty-eight murders, and towards the

  Western desperadoes generally. They were successful, they 'made good',

  therefore he admired them.

  In a book like NO ORCHIDS one is not, as in the old-style crime story,

  simply escaping from dull reality into an imaginary world of action.

  One's escape is essentially into cruelty and sexual perversion. No

  Orchids is aimed at the power-instinct, which RAFFLES or the Sherlock

  Holmes stories are not. At the same time the English attitude towards

  crime is not so superior to the American as I may have seemed to imply.

  It too is mixed up with power-worship, and has become more noticeably so

  in the last twenty years. A writer who is worth examining is Edgar

  Wallace, especially in such typical books as THE ORATOR and the Mr. J. G.

  Reeder stories. Wallace was one of the first crime-story writers to break

  away from the old tradition of the private detective and make his central

  figure a Scotland Yard official. Sherlock Holmes is an amateur, solving

  his problems without the help and even, in the earlier stories, against

  the opposition of the police. Moreover, like Lupin, he is essentially an

  intellectual, even a scientist. He reasons logically from observed fact,

  and his intellectuality is constantly contrasted with the routine methods

  of the police. Wallace objected strongly to this slur, as he considered

  it, on Scotland Yard, and in several newspaper articles he went out of

  his way to denounce Holmes byname. His own ideal was the

  detective-inspector who catches criminals not because he is

  intellectually brilliant but because he is part of an all-powerful

  organization. Hence the curious fact that in Wallace's most

  characteristic stories the 'clue' and the 'deduction' play no part. The

  criminal is always defeated by an incredible coincidence, or because in

  some unexplained manner the police know all about the crime beforehand.

  The tone of the stories makes it quite clear that W
allace's admiration

  for the police is pure bully-worship. A Scotland Yard detective is the

  most powerful kind of being that he can imagine, while the criminal

  figures in his mind as an outlaw against whom anything is permissible,

  like the condemned slaves in the Roman arena. His policemen behave much

  more brutally than British policemen do in real life--they hit people

  with out provocation, fire revolvers past their ears to terrify them and

  so on--and some of the stories exhibit a fearful intellectual sadism.

  (For instance, Wallace likes to arrange things so that the villain is

  hanged on the same day as the heroine is married.) But it is sadism after

  the English fashion: that is to say, it is unconscious, there is not

  overtly any sex in it, and it keeps within the bounds of the law. The

  British public tolerates a harsh criminal law and gets a kick out of

  monstrously unfair murder trials: but still that is better, on any

  account, than tolerating or admiring crime. If one must worship a bully,

  it is better that he should be a policeman than a gangster. Wallace is

  still governed to some extent by the concept of 'not done.' In NO ORCHIDS

  anything is 'done' so long as it leads on to power. All the barriers are

  down, all the motives are out in the open. Chase is a worse symptom than

  Wallace, to the extent that all-in wrestling is worse than boxing, or

  Fascism is worse than capitalist democracy.

  In borrowing from William Faulkner's SANCTUARY, Chase only took the plot;

  the mental atmosphere of the two books is not similar. Chase really

  derives from other sources, and this particular bit of borrowing is only

  symbolic. What it symbolizes is the vulgarization of ideas which is

  constantly happening, and which probably happens faster in an age of

  print. Chase has been described as 'Faulkner for the masses', but it

  would be more accurate to describe him as Carlyle for the masses. He is a

  popular writer--there are many such in America, but they are still

  rarities in England--who has caught up with what is now fashionable to

  call 'realism', meaning the doctrine that might is right. The growth of

  'realism' has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our

  own age. Why this should be so is a complicated question. The

  interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power-worship,

  nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have

  barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat

  indelicate. To take merely the first example that comes to mind, I

  believe no one has ever pointed out the sadistic and masochistic element

  in Bernard Shaw's work, still less suggested that this probably has some

  connexion with Shaw's admiration for dictators. Fascism is often loosely

  equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in

  the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the

  countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not

  different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or

  Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts who preached 'punch', 'drive',

  'personality' and 'learn to be a Tiger man' in the nineteen-twenties, nor

  from that older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey and the

  rest of them, who bowed down before German militarism. All of them are

  worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that

  the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and

  wickedness FOR THEIR OWN SAKES. A tyrant is all the more admired if he

  happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and 'the end justifies the

  means' often becomes, in effect, 'the means justify themselves provided

  they are dirty enough'. This idea colours the outlook of all sympathizers

  with totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive

  delight with which many English intellectuals greeted the Nazi-Soviet

  pact. It was a step only doubtfully useful to the U.S.S.R., but it was