Fifty Orwell Essays

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Fifty Orwell Essays Page 49

by George Orwell

novelist, which seems to have been inspired by the factional struggle

  then raging in the U.S.S.R. But the references in it to the Soviet system

  are entirely frivolous and, considering the date, not markedly hostile.

  That is about the extent of Wodehouse's political consciousness, so far

  as it is discoverable from his writings. Nowhere, so far as I know, does

  he so much as use the word "Fascism" or "Nazism." In left-wing circles,

  indeed in "enlightened" circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi

  radio, to have any truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just

  as shocking an action before the war as during it. But that is a habit of

  mind that had been developed during nearly a decade of ideological

  struggle against Fascism. The bulk of the British people, one ought to

  remember, remained anaesthetic to that struggle until late into 1940.

  Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia--the long series of

  crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their consciousness or were

  dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners and "not our

  business." One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the

  ordinary Englishman thought of "Fascism" as an exclusively Italian thing

  and was bewildered when the same word was applied to Germany. And there

  is nothing in Wodehouse's writings to suggest that he was better

  informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of his

  readers.

  The other thing one must remember is that Wodehouse happened to be taken

  prisoner at just the moment when the war reached its desperate phase. We

  forget these things now, but until that time feelings about the war had

  been noticeably tepid. There was hardly any fighting, the Chamberlain

  Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting that we should

  make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour

  Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions.

  Afterwards, of course, things changed. The Army was with difficulty

  extricated from Dunkirk, France collapsed, Britain was alone, the bombs

  rained on London, Goebbels announced that Britain was to be "reduced to

  degradation and poverty". By the middle of 1941 the British people knew

  what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far fiercer

  than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment,

  and his captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed

  the turning-point of the war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms

  of 1939. He was not alone in this. On several occasions about this time

  the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the microphone, and some

  of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse's. They attracted

  no attention, however. And even an outright Quisling like John Amery was

  afterwards to arouse much less indignation than Wodehouse had done.

  But why? Why should a few rather silly but harmless remarks by an elderly

  novelist have provoked such an outcry? One has to look for the probable

  answer amid the dirty requirements of propaganda warfare.

  There is one point about the Wodehouse broadcasts that is almost

  certainly significant--the date. Wodehouse was released two or three

  days before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and at a time when the higher

  ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion was imminent.

  It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as

  possible, and in fact, about this time, the German attitude towards the

  U.S.A. did become more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans

  could hardly hope to defeat Russia, Britain and the U.S.A. in

  combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly--and presumably

  they expected to do so--the Americans might never intervene. The release

  of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to

  the American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and

  he was--or so the Germans calculated--popular with the Anglophobe

  public as a caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with

  his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he could be trusted to

  damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release would

  demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat

  their enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though

  the fact that Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests

  that he did not come up to expectations.

  But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at

  work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale depended

  largely upon the feeling that this was not only a war for democracy but a

  war which the common people had to win by their own efforts. The upper

  classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the disasters

  of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place.

  Patriotism and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind,

  and numerous able journalists were at work to tie the association

  tighter. Priestley's 1940 broadcasts, and "Cassandra's" articles in the

  DAILY MIRROR, were good examples of the demagogic propaganda flourishing

  at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy.

  For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse--as

  "Cassandra" vigorously pointed out in his broadcast--was a rich man.

  But he was the kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and

  without risking any damage to the structure of society. To denounce

  Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say, Beaverbrook. A mere novelist,

  however large his earnings may happen to be, is not OF the possessing

  class. Even if his income touches �50,000 a year he has only the outward

  semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who has fluked into a

  fortune--usually a very temporary fortune--like the winner of the

  Calcutta Derby Sweep. Consequently, Wodehouse's indiscretion gave a good

  propaganda opening. It was a chance to "expose" a wealthy parasite

  without drawing attention to any of the parasites who really mattered.

  In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry

  at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years

  later--and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with

  conscious treachery--is not excusable. Few things in this war have been

  more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and

  Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the

  guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats--police officials,

  penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers--are

  hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape. In

  England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by

  Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who

  were advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the wretched

  Wodehouse--just because success and expatriation had allowed him to

  remain mentally in the Edwardian age--became the CORPUS VILE in a

  propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to
regard the

  incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American

  authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a

  poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we

  drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British

  citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves.

  Meanwhile, if we really want to punish the people who weakened national

  morale at critical moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home

  and better worth chasing.

  NONSENSE POETRY

  In many languages, it is said, there is no nonsense poetry, and there is

  not a great deal of it even in English. The bulk of it is in nursery

  rhymes and scraps of folk poetry, some of which may not have been

  strictly nonsensical at the start, but have become so because their

  original application has been forgotten. For example, the rhyme about

  Margery Daw:

  See-saw, Margery Daw,

  Dobbin shall have a new master.

  He shall have but a penny a day

  Because he can't go any faster.

  Or the other version that I learned in Oxfordshire as a little boy:

  See-saw, Margery Daw,

  Sold her bed and lay upon straw.

  Wasn't she a silly slut

  To sell her bed and lie upon dirt?

  It may be that there was once a real person called Margery Daw, and

  perhaps there was even a Dobbin who somehow came into the story. When

  Shakespeare makes Edgar in KING LEAR quote "Pillicock sat on Pillicock

  hill", and similar fragments, he is uttering nonsense, but no doubt these

  fragments come from forgotten ballads in which they once had a meaning.

  The typical scrap of folk poetry which one quotes almost unconsciously is

  not exactly nonsense but a sort of musical comment on some recurring

  event, such as "One a penny, two a penny, Hot-Cross buns", or "Polly, put

  the kettle on, we'll all have tea". Some of these seemingly frivolous

  rhymes actually express a deeply pessimistic view of life, the churchyard

  wisdom of the peasant. For instance:

  Solomon Grundy,

  Born on Monday,

  Christened on Tuesday,

  Married on Wednesday,

  Took ill on Thursday,

  Worse on Friday,

  Died on Saturday,

  Buried on Sunday,

  And that was the end of Solomon Grundy.

  which is a gloomy story, but remarkably similar to yours or mine.

  Until Surrealism made a deliberate raid on the unconscious, poetry that

  aimed at being nonsense, apart from the meaningless refrains of songs,

  does not seem to have been common. This gives a special position to

  Edward Lear, whose nonsense rhymes have just been edited by Mr R.L.

  Megroz, who was also responsible for the Penguin edition a year

  or two before the war. Lear was one of the first writers to deal

  in pure fantasy, with imaginary countries and made-up words, without

  any satirical purpose. His poems are not all of them equally

  nonsensical; some of them get their effect by a perversion

  of logic, but they are all alike in that their underlying feeling is sad

  and not bitter. They express a kind of amiable lunacy, a natural sympathy

  with whatever is weak and absurd. Lear could fairly be called the

  originator of the limerick, though verses in almost the same metrical

  form are to be found in earlier writers, and what is sometimes considered

  a weakness in his limericks--that is, the fact that the rhyme is the same

  in the first and last lines--is part of their charm. The very slight

  change increases the impression of ineffectuality, which might be spoiled

  if there were some striking surprise. For example:

  There was a young lady of Portugal

  Whose ideas were excessively nautical;

  She climbed up a tree

  To examine the sea,

  But declared she would never leave Portugal.

  It is significant that almost no limericks since Lear's have been both

  printable and funny enough to seem worth quoting. But he is really seen

  at his best in certain longer poems, such as "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat"

  or "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-B�":

  On the Coast of Coromandel,

  Where the early pumpkins blow,

  In the middle of the woods

  Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-B�.

  Two old chairs, and half a candle

  One old jug without a handle

  These were all his worldly goods:

  In the middle of the woods,

  These were all the worldly goods

  Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-B�,

  Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-B�.

  Later there appears a lady with some white Dorking hens, and an

  inconclusive love affair follows. Mr Megroz thinks, plausibly enough,

  that this may refer to some incident in Lear's own life. He never

  married, and it is easy to guess that there was something seriously wrong

  in his sex life. A psychiatrist could no doubt find all kinds of

  significance in his drawings and in the recurrence of certain made-up

  words such as "runcible". His health was bad, and as he was the youngest

  of twenty-one children in a poor family, he must have known anxiety and

  hardship in very early life. It is clear that he was unhappy and by

  nature solitary, in spite of having good friends.

  Aldous Huxley, in praising Lear's fantasies as a sort of assertion of

  freedom, has pointed out that the "They" of the limericks represent

  common sense, legality and the duller virtues generally. "They" are the

  realists, the practical men, the sober citizens in bowler hats who are

  always anxious to stop you doing anything worth doing. For instance:

  There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,

  Who danced a quadrille with a raven;

  But they said, "It's absurd

  To encourage this bird!"

  So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.

  To smash somebody just for dancing a quadrille with a raven is exactly

  the kind of thing that "They" would do. Herbert Read has also praised

  Lear, and is inclined to prefer his verse to that of Lewis Carroll, as

  being purer fantasy. For myself, I must say that I find Lear funniest

  when he is least arbitrary and when a touch of burlesque or perverted

  logic makes its appearance. When he gives his fancy free play, as in his

  imaginary names, or in things like "Three Receipts for Domestic Cookery",

  he can be silly and tiresome. "The Pobble Who Has No Toes" is haunted by

  the ghost of logic, and I think it is the element of sense in it that

  makes it funny. The Pobble, it may be remembered, went fishing in the

  Bristol Channel:

  And all the Sailors and Admirals cried,

  When they saw him nearing the further side--

  "He has gone to fish, for his Aunt Jobiska's

  Runcible Cat with crimson whiskers!"

  The thing that is funny here is the burlesque touch, the Admirals. What

  is arbitrary--the word "runcible", and the cat's crimson whiskers--is

  merely rather embarrassing. While the Pobble was in the water some

  unidentified creatures came and ate his toes off, and when he got home

  his aunt remarked:

  "It's a fact the whole world knows,

  That Pobbles are happier w
ithout their toes,"

  which once again is funny because it has a meaning, and one might even

  say a political significance. For the whole theory of authoritarian

  governments is summed up in the statement that Pobbles were happier

  without their toes. So also with the well-known limerick:

  There was an Old Person of Basing,

  Whose presence of mind was amazing;

  He purchased a steed,

  Which he rode at full speed,

  And escaped from the people of Basing.

  It is not quite arbitrary. The funniness is in the gentle implied

  criticism of the people of Basing, who once again are "They", the

  respectable ones, the right-thinking, art-hating majority.

  The writer closest to Lear among his contemporaries was Lewis Carroll,

  who, however, was less essentially fantastic--and, in my opinion, funnier.

  Since then, as Mr Megroz points out in his Introduction, Lear's influence

  has been considerable, but it is hard to believe that it has been

  altogether good. The silly whimsiness of present-day children's books

  could perhaps be partly traced back to him. At any rate, the idea of

  deliberately setting out to write nonsense, though it came off in Lear's

  case, is a doubtful one. Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced

  gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals. As

  a comic draughtsman, on the other hand, Lear's influence must have been

  beneficial. James Thurber, for instance, must surely owe something to

  Lear, directly or indirectly.

  NOTES ON NATIONALISM (1945)

  Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word LONGEUR, and

  remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the WORD,

  we have the THING in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a

  habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on

  nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the

  nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word 'nationalism', but it

  will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary

  sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always

  attach itself to what is called a nation--that is, a single race or a

  geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may

  work in a merely negative sense, AGAINST something or other and without

  the need for any positive object of loyalty.

  By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human

  beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions

  or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or

  'bad'.[See note, below] But secondly--and this is much more important--I

  mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other

  unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than

  that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with

  patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any

  definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction

  between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved.

  By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular

  way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no

  wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive,

  both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is

  inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every

  nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, NOT for himself

  but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own

  individuality.

  [Note: Nations, and even vaguer entities such as Catholic Church or the

  proleteriat, are commonly thought of as individuals and often referred to

  as 'she'. Patently absurd remarks such as 'Germany is naturally

  treacherous' are to be found in any newspaper one opens and reckless

  generalization about national character ('The Spaniard is a natural

  aristocrat' or 'Every Englishman is a hypocrite') are uttered by almost

 

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