Fifty Orwell Essays
Page 55
on books. I smoke six ounces a week, at half-a-crown an ounce, making
nearly �40 a year. Even before the war when the same tobacco cost 8d. an
ounce, I was spending over �10 a year on it: and if I also averaged a
pint of beer a day, at sixpence, these two items together will have cost
me close on �20 a year. This was probably not much above the national
average. In 1938 the people of this country spent nearly �10 per head per
annum on alcohol and tobacco: however, 20 per cent of the population were
children under fifteen and another 40 per cent were women, so that the
average smoker and drinker must have been spending much more than
�10. In 1944, the annual expenditure per head on these items was no less
than �23. Allow for the women and children as before, and �40 is a
reasonable individual figure. Forty pounds a year would just about pay
for a packet of Woodbines every day and half a pint of mild six days
a week--not a magnificent allowance. Of course, all prices are now
inflated, including the price of books: still, it looks as though the
cost of reading, even if you buy books instead of borrowing them and
take in a fairly large number of periodicals, does not amount to more
than the combined cost of smoking and drinking.
It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books
and the value one gets out of them. "Books" includes novels, poetry, text
books, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and
length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if one
habitually buys books second-hand. You may spend ten shillings on a
poem of 500 lines, and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which
you consult at odd moments over a period of twenty years. There are
books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of
the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life,
books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads
at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost, in terms
of money, may be the same in each case. But if one regards reading
simply as a recreation, like going to the pictures, then it is possible
to make a rough estimate of what it costs. If you read nothing but novels
and "light" literature, and bought every book that you read, you would
be spending-allowing eight shillings as the price of a book, and four
hours as the time spent in reading it-two shillings an hour. This is
about what it costs to sit in one of the more expensive seats in the
cinema. If you concentrated on more serious books, and still bought
everything that you read, your expenses would be about the same.
The books would cost more but they would take longer to read. In either
case you would still possess the books after you had read them, and
they would be saleable at about a third of their purchase price. If
you bought only second-hand books, your reading expenses would, of
course, be much less: perhaps sixpence an hour would be a fair estimate.
And on the other hand if you don't buy books, but merely borrow them
from the lending library, reading costs you round about a halfpenny an
hour: if you borrow them from the public library, it costs you next door
to nothing.
I have said enough to show that reading is one of the cheaper recreations:
after listening to the radio probably THE cheapest. Meanwhile, what is
the actual amount that the British public spends on books? I cannot
discover any figures, though no doubt they exist. But I do know that
before the war this country was publishing annually about 15,000 books,
which included reprints and school books. If as many as 10,000 copies
of each book were sold--and even allowing for the school books, this
is probably a high estimate-the average person was only buying, directly
or indirectly, about three books a year. These three books taken together
might cost �1, or probably less.
These figures are guesswork, and I should be interested if someone
would correct them for me. But if my estimate is anywhere near right,
it is not a proud record for a country which is nearly 100 per cent
literate and where the ordinary man spends more on cigarettes than an
Indian peasant has for his whole livelihood. And if our book consumption
remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because
reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures
or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too
expensive.
CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK REVIEWER
In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and
half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-gown sits at a
rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of
dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers away because
the wastepaper basket is already overflowing, and besides, somewhere
among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills it is possible that there
is a cheque for two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay
into the bank. There are also letters with addresses which ought to be
entered in his address book. He has lost his address book, and the
thought of looking for it, or indeed of looking for anything, afflicts
him with acute suicidal impulses.
He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears
spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically
lost. If things are normal with him he will be suffering from
malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be
suffering from a hangover. At present it is half-past eleven in the
morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two
hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would
have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone
bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the
street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up and down the
stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post,
which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red.
Needless to say this person is a writer. He might be a poet, a novelist,
or a writer of film scripts or radio features, for all literary people
are very much alike, but let us say that he is a book reviewer. Half
hidden among the pile of papers is a bulky parcel containing five volumes
which his editor has sent with a note suggesting that they "ought to go
well together". They arrived four days ago, but for 48 hours the reviewer
was prevented by moral paralysis from opening the parcel. Yesterday in a
resolute moment he ripped the string off it and found the five volumes to
be PALESTINE AT THE CROSS ROADS, SCIENTIFIC DAIRY FARMING, A SHORT
HISTORY OF EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY (this one is 680 pages and weighs four
pounds), TRIBAL CUSTOMS IN PORTUGUESE EAST AFRICA, and a novel, IT'S
NICER LYING DOWN, probably included by mistake. His review--800 words,
say--has got to be "in" by midday tomorrow.
Three of these books deal with subjects of which he is so ignorant that
he will have to read at least 50 pages if he is to avoid making some
howler which will betray him not merely to the author (who of course
knows all about the habits of book reviewers), but even to the general
reader. By four in the afternoon he will have taken the books out of
their wrapping paper but will still be suffering from a nervous inability
to open them. The prospect of having to read them, and even the smell of
the paper, affects him like the prospect of eating cold ground-rice
pudding flavoured with castor oil. And yet curiously enough his copy will
get to the office in time. Somehow it always does get there in time. At
about nine p.m. his mind will grow relatively clear, and until the small
hours he will sit in a room which grows colder and colder, while the
cigarette smoke grows thicker and thicker, skipping expertly through one
book after another and laying each down with the final comment, "God,
what tripe!" In the morning, blear-eyed, surly and unshaven, he will gaze
for an hour or two at a blank sheet of paper until the menacing finger of
the clock frightens him into action. Then suddenly he will snap into it.
All the stale old phrases--"a book that no one should miss", "something
memorable on every page", "of special value are the chapters dealing
with, etc etc"--will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the
magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with
just about three minutes to go. Meanwhile another wad of ill-assorted,
unappetising books will have arrived by post. So it goes on. And yet with
what high hopes this down-trodden, nerve-racked creature started his
career, only a few years ago.
Do I seem to exaggerate? I ask any regular reviewer--anyone who reviews,
say, a minimum of 100 books a year--whether he can deny in honesty that
his habits and character are such as I have described. Every writer, in
any case, is rather that kind of person, but the prolonged,
indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless,
irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash--though
it does involve that, as I will show in a moment--but constantly INVENTING
reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings
whatever. The reviewer, jaded though he may be, is professionally
interested in books, and out of the thousands that appear annually, there
are probably fifty or a hundred that he would enjoy writing about. If he
is a top-notcher in his profession he may get hold of ten or twenty of
them: more probably he gets hold of two or three. The rest of his work,
however conscientious he may be in praising or damning, is in essence
humbug. He is pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at
a time.
The great majority of reviews give an inadequate or misleading account of
the book that is dealt with. Since the war publishers have been less able
than before to twist the tails of literary editors and evoke a paean of
praise for every book that they produce, but on the other hand the
standard of reviewing has gone down owing to lack of space and other
inconveniences. Seeing the results, people sometimes suggest that the
solution lies in getting book reviewing out of the hands of hacks. Books
on specialised subjects ought to be dealt with by experts, and on the
other hand a good deal of reviewing, especially of novels, might well be
done by amateurs. Nearly every book is capable of arousing passionate
feeling, if it is only a passionate dislike, in some or other reader,
whose ideas about it would surely be worth more than those of a bored
professional. But, unfortunately, as every editor knows, that kind of
thing is very difficult to organise. In practice the editor always finds
himself reverting to his team of hacks--his "regulars", as he calls them.
None of this is remediable so long as it is taken for granted that every
book deserves to be reviewed. It is almost impossible to mention books in
bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them. Until one
has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not
discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases
out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be "This book is
worthless", while the truth about the reviewer's own reaction would
probably be "This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not
write about it unless I were paid to." But the public will not pay to
read that kind of thing. Why should they? They want some kind of guide to
the books they are asked to read, and they want some kind of evaluation.
But as soon as values are mentioned, standards collapse. For if one
says--and nearly every reviewer says this kind of thing at least once a
week--that KING LEAR is a good play and THE FOUR JUST MEN is a good
thriller, what meaning is there in the word "good"?
The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore
the great majority of books and to give very long reviews--1,000 words is
a bare minimum--to the few that seem to matter. Short notes of a line or
two on forthcoming books can be useful, but the usual middle-length review
of about 600 words is bound to be worthless even if the reviewer genuinely
wants to write it. Normally he doesn't want to write it, and the week-in,
week-out production of snippets soon reduces him to the crushed figure in
a dressing-gown whom I described at the beginning of this article.
However, everyone in this world has someone else whom he can look down
on, and I must say, from experience of both trades, that the book
reviewer is better off than the film critic, who cannot even do his work
at home, but has to attend trade shows at eleven in the morning and, with
one or two notable exceptions, is expected to sell his honour for a glass
of inferior sherry.
DECLINE OF THE ENGLISH MURDER
It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already
asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice
long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on
your nose, and open the NEWS OF THE WORLD. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or
roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home,
as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the
right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft
underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In
these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?
Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder? If one examines the
murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British
public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost
everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and over
again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance
running through the greater number of them. Our great period in murder,
our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly
1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has s
tood the test of
time are the following: Dr. Palmer of Rugely, Jack the Ripper, Neill
Cream, Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and
Bywaters and Thompson. In addition, in 1919 or thereabouts, there was
another very celebrated case which fits into the general pattern but
which I had better not mention by name, because the accused man was
acquitted.
Of the above-mentioned nine cases, at least four have had successful
novels based on them, one has been made into a popular melodrama, and the
amount of literature surrounding them, in the form of newspaper
write-ups, criminological treatises and reminiscences by lawyers and
police officers, would make a considerable library. It is difficult to
believe that any recent English crime will be remembered so long and so
intimately, and not only because the violence of external events has made
murder seem unimportant, but because the prevalent type of crime seems to
be changing. The principal CAUSE C�L�BRE of the war years was the
so-called Cleft Chin Murder, which has now been written up in a popular
booklet; the verbatim account of the trial was published
some time last year by Messrs. Jarrolds with an introduction by
Mr. Bechhofer Roberts. Before returning to this pitiful and sordid case,
which is only interesting from a sociological and perhaps a legal point of
view, let me try to define what it is that the readers of Sunday papers
mean when they say fretfully that "you never seem to get a good murder
nowadays".
In considering the nine murders I named above, one can start by excluding
the Jack the Ripper case, which is in a class by itself. Of the other
eight, six were poisoning cases, and eight of the ten criminals belonged
to the middle class. In one way or another, sex was a powerful motive in
all but two cases, and in at least four cases respectability--the desire
to gain a secure position in life, or not to forfeit one's social
position by some scandal such as a divorce--was one of the main reasons
for committing murder. In more than half the cases, the object was to get
hold of a certain known sum of money such as a legacy or an insurance
policy, but the amount involved was nearly always small. In most of the
cases the crime only came to light slowly, as the result of careful
investigations which started off with the suspicions of neighbours or
relatives; and in nearly every case there was some dramatic coincidence,
in which the finger of Providence could be clearly seen, or one of those
episodes that no novelist would dare to make up, such as Crippen's flight
across the Atlantic with his mistress dressed as a boy, or Joseph Smith
playing "Nearer, my God, to Thee" on the harmonium while one of his wives
was drowning in the next room. The background of all these crimes, except
Neill Cream's, was essentially domestic; of twelve victims, seven were
either wife or husband of the murderer.
With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a NEWS OF
THE WORLD reader's point of view, the "perfect" murder. The murderer
should be a little man of the professional class--a dentist or a
solicitor, say--living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the
suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the
neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be
either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading
Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray
through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a
rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of
murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having
decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and
only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen
should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit