Fifty Orwell Essays

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Fifty Orwell Essays Page 47

by George Orwell


  To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt

  about the continuity of civilisation. For one has to remember that it is

  not only Germany that has been blitzed. The same desolation extends, at

  any rate in considerable patches, all the way from Brussels to

  Stalingrad. And where there has been ground fighting, the destruction is

  even more thorough. In the 300 miles or so between the Marne and the

  Rhine there is not such a thing as a bridge or a viaduct that has not

  been blown up.

  Even in England we are aware that we need three million houses, and that

  the chances of getting them within measurable time seem rather slender.

  But how many houses will Germany need, or Poland or the USSR, or Italy?

  When one thinks of the stupendous task of rebuilding hundreds of European

  cities, one realises that a long period must elapse before even the

  standards of living of 1939 can be re-established.

  We do not yet know the full extent of the damage that has been done to

  Germany but judging from the areas that have been overrun hitherto, it is

  difficult to believe in the power of the Germans to pay any kind of

  reparations, either in goods or in labour. Simply to re-house the German

  people, to set the shattered factories working, and to keep German

  agriculture from collapsing after the foreign workers have been

  liberated, will use up all the labour that the Germans are likely to

  dispose of.

  If, as is planned, millions of them are to be deported for reconstruction

  work, the recovery of Germany itself will be all the slower. After the

  last war, the impossibility of obtaining substantial money reparations

  was finally grasped, but it was less generally realised that the

  impoverishment of any one country reacts unfavourably on the world as a

  whole. It would be no advantage to turn Germany into a kind of rural

  slum.

  GOOD BAD BOOKS

  Not long ago a publisher commissioned me to write an introduction for a

  reprint of a novel by Leonard Merrick. This publishing house, it appears,

  is going to reissue a long series of minor and partly-forgotten novels of

  the twentieth century. It is a valuable service in these bookless days,

  and I rather envy the person whose job it will be to scout round the

  threepenny boxes, hunting down copies of his boyhood favourites.

  A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which

  flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

  centuries, is what Chesterton called the "good bad book": that is, the

  kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable

  when more serious productions have perished. Obviously outstanding books

  in this line are RAFFLES and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which have kept

  their place when innumerable "problem novels", "human documents" and

  "terrible indictments" of this or that have fallen into deserved

  oblivion. (Who has worn better, Conan Doyle or Meredith?) Almost in the

  same class as these I, put R. Austin Freeman's earlier stories--"The

  Singing Bone" "The Eye of Osiris" and others--Ernest Bramah's MAX

  CARRADOS, and, dropping the standard a bit, Guy Boothby's Tibetan

  thriller, DR NIKOLA, a sort of schoolboy version of Hue's TRAVELS IN

  TARTARY, which would probably make a real visit to Central Asia seem a

  dismal anticlimax.

  But apart from thrillers, there were the minor humorous writers of the

  period. For example, Pett Ridge-but I admit his full-length books no

  longer seem readable--E. Nesbit (THE TREASURE SEEKERS), George

  Birmingham, who was good so long as he kept off politics, the

  pornographic Binstead ("Pitcher" of the PINK 'UN), and, if American books

  can be included, Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories. A cut above most of

  these was Barry Pain. Some of Pain's humorous writings are, I suppose,

  still in print, but to anyone who comes across it I recommend what must

  now be a very rare book--THE OCTAVE OF CLAUDIUS, a brilliant exercise in

  the macabre. Somewhat later in time there was Peter Blundell, who wrote

  in the W.W. Jacobs vein about Far Eastern seaport towns, and who seems to

  be rather unaccountably forgotten, in spite of having been praised in

  print by H.G. Wells.

  However, all the books I have been speaking of are frankly "escape"

  literature. They form pleasant patches in one's memory, quiet corners

  where the mind can browse at odd moments, but they hardly pretend to have

  anything to do with real life. There is another kind of good bad book

  which is more seriously intended, and which tells us, I think, something

  about the nature of the novel and the reasons for its present decadence.

  During the last fifty years there has been a whole series of writers--some

  of them are still writing--whom it is quite impossible to call "good" by

  any strictly literary standard, but who are natural novelists and who

  seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good

  taste. In this class I put Leonard Merrick himself, W.L. George, J.D.

  Beresford, Ernest Raymond, May Sinclair, and--at a lower level than the

  others but still essentially similar--A.S.M. Hutchinson.

  Most of these have been prolific writers, and their output has naturally

  varied in quality. I am thinking in each case of one or two outstanding

  books: for example, Merrick's CYNTHIA, J.D. Beresford's A CANDIDATE FOR

  TRUTH, W.L. George's CALIBAN, May Sinclair's THE COMBINED MAZE and Ernest

  Raymond's WE, THE ACCUSED. In each of these books the author has been

  able to identify himself with his imagined characters, to feel with them

  and invite sympathy on their behalf, with a kind of abandonment that

  cleverer people would find it difficult to achieve. They bring out the

  fact that intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a

  story-teller, as it would be to a music-hall comedian.

  Take, for example, Ernest Raymond's WE, THE ACCUSED--a peculiarly sordid

  and convincing murder story, probably based on the Crippen case. I think

  it gains a great deal from the fact that the author only partly grasps

  the pathetic vulgarity of the people he is writing about, and therefore

  does not despise them. Perhaps it even--like Theodore Dreiser's An

  AMERICAN TRAGEDY--gains something from the clumsy long-winded manner in

  which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at

  selection, and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is

  slowly built up. So also with A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH. Here there is not

  the same clumsiness, but there is the same ability to take seriously the

  problems of commonplace people. So also with CYNTHIA and at any rate the

  earlier part of Caliban. The greater part of what W.L. George wrote was

  shoddy rubbish, but in this particular book, based on the career of

  Northcliffe, he achieved some memorable and truthful pictures of

  lower-middle-class London life. Parts of this book are probably

  autobiographical, and one of the advantages of good bad writers is their

  lack of shame in writing autobiography. Exhibitionism and self-pity are

  the bane of the novelist, and yet if he is
too frightened of them his

  creative gift may suffer.

  The existence of good bad literature--the fact that one can be amused or

  excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to

  take seriously--is a reminder that art is not the same thing as

  cerebration. I imagine that by any test that could be devised, Carlyle

  would be found to be a more intelligent man than Trollope. Yet Trollope

  has remained readable and Carlyle has not: with all his cleverness he had

  not even the wit to write in plain straightforward English. In novelists,

  almost as much as in poets, the connection between intelligence and

  creative power is hard to establish. A good novelist may be a prodigy of

  self-discipline like Flaubert, or he may be an intellectual sprawl like

  Dickens. Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been

  poured into Wyndham Lewis's so-called novels, such as TARR or SNOOTY

  BARONET. Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books

  right through. Some indefinable quality, a sort of literary vitamin,

  which exists even in a book like IF WINTER COMES, is absent from them.

  Perhaps the supreme example of the "good bad" book is UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.

  It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous

  melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially

  true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other. But

  UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, after all, is trying to be serious and to deal

  with the real world. How about the frankly escapist writers, the

  purveyors of thrills and "light" humour? How about SHERLOCK HOLMES, VICE

  VERSA, DRACULA, HELEN'S BABIES or KING SOLOMON'S MINES? All of these are

  definitely absurd books, books which one is more inclined to laugh AT

  than WITH, and which were hardly taken seriously even by their authors;

  yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do so. All one can

  say is that, while civilisation remains such that one needs distraction

  from time to time, "light" literature has its appointed place; also that

  there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have

  more survival value than erudition or intellectual power. There are

  music-hall songs which are better poems than three-quarters of the stuff

  that gets into the anthologies:

  Come where the booze is cheaper,

  Come where the pots hold more,

  Come where the boss is a bit of a sport,

  Come to the pub next door!

  Or again:

  Two lovely black eyes

  Oh, what a surprise!

  Only for calling another man wrong,

  Two lovely black eyes!

  I would far rather have written either of those than, say, "The Blessed

  Damozel" or "Love in the Valley". And by the same token I would back

  UNCLE TOM'S CABIN to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or

  George Moore, though I know of no strictly literary test which would show

  where the superiority lies.

  IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE (1945)

  When the Germans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the early

  summer of 1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse,

  who had been living throughout the early part of the war in his villa at

  Le Touquet, and seems not to have realised until the last moment that he

  was in any danger. As he was led away into captivity, he is said to have

  remarked, "Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book." He was

  placed for the time being under house arrest, and from his subsequent

  statements it appears that he was treated in a fairly friendly way,

  German officers in the neighbourhood frequently "dropping in for a bath

  or a party".

  Over a year later, on 25th June 1941, the news came that Wodehouse had

  been released from internment and was living at the Adlon Hotel in

  Berlin. On the following day the public was astonished to learn that he

  had agreed to do some broadcasts of a "non-political" nature over the

  German radio. The full texts of these broadcasts are not easy to obtain

  at this date, but Wodehouse seems to have done five of them between 26th

  June and 2nd July, when the Germans took him off the air again. The first

  broadcast, on 26th June, was not made on the Nazi radio but took the form

  of an interview with Harry Flannery, the representative of the Columbia

  Broadcasting System, which still had its correspondents in Berlin.

  Wodehouse also published in the SATURDAY EVENING POST an article which he

  had written while still in the internment camp.

  The article and the broadcasts dealt mainly with Wodehouse's experiences

  in internment, but they did include a very few comments on the war. The

  following are fair samples:

  "I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work up any kind

  of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel belligerent about some

  country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any

  fighting thoughts or feelings."

  "A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the right idea;

  at least they sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And I have been there

  forty-two weeks. There is a good deal to be said for internment. It keeps

  you out of the saloon and helps you to keep up with your reading. The

  chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a long time.

  When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to

  be on the safe side."

  "In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an

  Englishman, but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or

  repository of Englishmen I am not so sure... The only concession I want

  from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of bread, tells the gentlemen

  with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves the rest

  to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of

  my books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on

  a radiator. This offer holds good till Wednesday week."

  The first extract quoted above caused great offence. Wodehouse was also

  censured for using (in the interview with Flannery) the phrase "whether

  Britain wins the war or not," and he did not make things better by

  describing in another broadcast the filthy habits of some Belgian

  prisoners among whom he was interned. The Germans recorded this broadcast

  and repeated it a number of times. They seem to have supervised his talks

  very lightly, and they allowed him not only to be funny about the

  discomforts of internment but to remark that "the internees at Trost camp

  all fervently believe that Britain will eventually win." The general

  upshot of the talks, however, was that he had not been ill treated and

  bore no malice.

  These broadcasts caused an immediate uproar in England. There were

  questions in Parliament, angry editorial comments in the press, and a

  stream of letters from fellow-authors, nearly all of them disapproving,

  though one or two suggested that it would be better to suspend judgment,

  and several pleaded that Wodehouse probably did not realise what he was

  doing. On 15th July, the Home Service of the B.B.C. carried an extremelyr />
  violent Postscript by "Cassandra" of the DAILY MIRROR, accusing Wodehouse

  of "selling his country." This postscript made free use of such

  expressions as "Quisling" and "worshipping the F�hrer". The main charge

  was that Wodehouse had agreed to do German propaganda as a way of buying

  himself out of the internment camp.

  "Cassandra's" Postscript caused a certain amount of protest, but on the

  whole it seems to have intensified popular feeling against Wodehouse. One

  result of it was that numerous lending libraries withdrew Wodehouse's

  books from circulation. Here is a typical news item:

  "Within twenty-four hours of listening to the broadcast of Cassandra, the

  DAILY MIRROR columnist, Portadown (North Ireland) Urban District Council

  banned P. G. Wodehouse's books from their public library. Mr. Edward

  McCann said that Cassandra's broadcast had clinched the matter. Wodehouse

  was funny no longer." (DAILY MIRROR.)

  In addition the B.B.C. banned Wodehouse's lyrics from the air and was

  still doing so a couple of years later. As late as December 1944 there

  were demands in Parliament that Wodehouse should be put on trial as a

  traitor.

  There is an old saying that if you throw enough mud some of it will

  stick, and the mud has stuck to Wodehouse in a rather peculiar way. An

  impression has been left behind that Wodehouse's talks (not that anyone

  remembers what he said in them) showed him up not merely as a traitor but

  as an ideological sympathiser with Fascism. Even at the time several

  letters to the press claimed that "Fascist tendencies" could be detected

  in his books, and the charge has been repeated since. I shall try to

  analyse the mental atmosphere of those books in a moment, but it is

  important to realise that the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of

  anything worse than stupidity. The really interesting question is how and

  why he could be so stupid. When Flannery met Wodehouse (released, but

  still under guard) at the Adlon Hotel in June 1941, he saw at once that

  he was dealing with a political innocent, and when preparing him for

  their broadcast interview he had to warn him against making some

  exceedingly unfortunate remarks, one of which was by implication slightly

  anti-Russian. As it was, the phrase "whether England wins or not" did get

  through. Soon after the interview Wodehouse told him that he was also

  going to broadcast on the Nazi radio, apparently not realising that this

  action had any special significance. Flannery comments [ASSIGNMENT TO

  BERLIN by Harry W. Flannery.]:

  "By this time the Wodehouse plot was evident. It was one of the best Nazi

  publicity stunts of the war, the first with a human angle...Plack

  (Goebbels's assistant) had gone to the camp near Gleiwitz to see

  Wodehouse, found that the author was completely without political sense,

  and had an idea. He suggested to Wodehouse that in return for being

  released from the prison camp he write a series of broadcasts about his

  experiences; there would be no censorship and he would put them on the

  air himself. In making that proposal Plack showed that he knew his man.

  He knew that Wodehouse made fun of the English in all his stories and

  that he seldom wrote in any other way, that he was still living in the

  period about which he wrote and had no conception of Nazism and all it

  meant. Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster."

  The striking of an actual bargain between Wodehouse and Plack seems to be

  merely Flannery's own interpretation. The arrangement may have been of a

  much less definite kind, and to judge from the broadcasts themselves,

  Wodehouse's main idea in making them was to keep in touch with his public

  and--the comedian's ruling passion--to get a laugh. Obviously they are

  not the utterances of a Quisling of the type of Ezra Pound or John Amery,

  nor, probably, of a person capable of understanding the nature of

  Quislingism. Flannery seems to have warned Wodehouse that it would be

 

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