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Fifty Orwell Essays

Page 55

by George Orwell

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 thatr />
  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

 

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