What, on a point of historical interest, were or was the British Way and Purpose?
I'm not sure. It seems to have been divided, even schizophrenic. Or perhaps the Way and the Purpose were not easily compatible. Much of the material provided was embarrassingly diehard, with its glorification of a colonial system already in process of being dismantled, but articulate members of service audiences were at liberty, during the weekly session, to denounce imperialism and influence comrades who had hardly known that a British Empire existed. Other material was about the building of the Welfare State, with a unified national insurance scheme borrowed from Bismarck's Germany by Lord Beveridge, the Liberal, and known as the Beveridge Plan. I think the British Way was democratic and the British Purpose to establish a sort of cautious egalitarianism wherever possible. I don't know. I do know that some reactionary colonels refused to allow either ABCA or BWP sessions in their battalions, saying that it was all 'socialism'.
Were there any revolutionary colonels?
Not in the British Army. There were plenty of revolutionaries in the rank and file, though, and the odd lieutenant from the London School of Economics. Generally speaking, however, the British class system found its most grotesque expression in the British Army. The professional officers of high rank imposed traditional modes of speech and social behaviour: an officer had to be a gentleman, whatever a gentleman was. Certainly there was, to say the least, a general antipathy on the part of the troops towards their officers, a great gulf of manners, speech, social values, a chasm between those who had to lead and those who did not want to be led. Thirty-odd years after demobilization, there are many former other ranks who enjoy a dream of avenging old insults, injustices, nuances of upper-class disdain. There remains something still in the memory of the 'officer voice' - the reedy vowels of Field-Marshal Lord Montgomery, for instance - which arouses a hopeless fury. The structure of the army was a kind of gross parody of the structure of pre-war civilian society. If a man entered the army as a mild radical, he approached the 1945 election as a raging one. A Welsh sergeant summed it up for me: 'When I joined up I was red. Now I'm bloody purple.' If the British Communist Party had fielded more candidates, the make-up of that first post-War Parliament might have been very interesting indeed.
And this was all it was? The British troops put the Labour Party in because they didn't like Churchill and didn't like the way the services were run?
No, there was much more than that. Along with the radical emotions there was a kind of utopianism necessary to fighting men. They had to believe they were struggling for something more than the mere defeat of an enemy. They weren't defending a good cause against a bad but a bad cause against a worse. Modern war disrupts civilian society and makes it easier to rebuild than to reconstitute. Rebuilding from scratch to secure long-delayed social justice - that had been a dream of the 1914-18 war, with its slogan, 'A country fit for heroes to live in,' but the dream had not been fulfilled. Discharged soldiers in slums or casualty wards, jobless and hopeless, wished they'd been killed on the Somme. It was not to happen again, the British said, and in fact it did not. In 1945, perhaps for the first time in history, the ordinary British people got what they asked for.
Did Orwell get what he asked for?
Orwell was a good Socialist and was delighted to see a Socialist government in power at last.
But his response was to write a terrifying novel in which English Socialism is far worse than either the Nazi or the Russian variety. Why? What went wrong?
I don't know. The English Socialism that came to power in 1945 had nothing of Ingsoc about it. There was power-seeking there, of course, as well as corruption, inefficiency, a love of control for its own sake, a dour pleasure in prolonging 'austerity'. British radicalism has never been able to rid itself of its Puritan origins, and perhaps it hasn't wished to. A typical figure of the post-War Socialist Government was Sir Stafford Cripps, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was a sour devotee of progress without pleasure, of whom Winston Churchill once said: 'There but for the grace of God goes God.' He was treated by the common people as something of a joke. Potato crisps were metathesized in his honour, and men in pubs would ask for a packet of 'Sir Staffs'. But he was no joke, and British Puritanism has been too obdurate a strain to laugh off. The Puritanism of 1984, which goes to the limit - not even Sir Stafford Cripps could abolish sex - owes a lot to 1948. Along with the austerity went an insolent bureaucracy, as I've said, and it was the more insolent the closer it was to the ordinary citizen, as in the local Food Office, but there was no Big Brother. Among the first readers in America of Orwell's book there were many who assumed that here was a bitter satire on Labour Britain; even a few of the stupider British Tories rubbed their hands gleefully at what Orwell seemed to be doing for the Tory vote. None of these seemed to know, what was available for the knowing, that Orwell was a committed Socialist and was to remain so till his death. The paradox of an English Socialism appalled by English Socialism remains to be resolved, and the resolution is an intricate business.
I think I can resolve it.
How?
Listen to this extract from The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell was looking from the window of a train into the backyard of a Northern slum:
A young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden wastepipe. I had time to see everything about her - her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face . . . and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. . . . What I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her - understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold . . . poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.
The same image comes in Nineteen EightyFour, you remember. Mrs Parsons, in the first part of the book. Her wastepipe's blocked up and Winston Smith unblocks it for her. It's a kind of Sisyphus image. The hopelessness of the working-woman's lot. Orwell saw that the allegiance of a good Socialist was to the woman struggling with the wastepipe, not to the big men of the Party. And yet how could you help her without putting the Party in power? The Party's in power, but the wastepipe remains clogged. It's the disparity between the reality of life and the abstraction of Party doctrine - that's what sickened Orwell.
That's part of it. But put it another way. One of the troubles with political commitment is that no political party can tell the whole truth about man's needs in society. If it could, it wouldn't be a political party. And yet the honest man who wants to work for the improvement of his country has to belong to a party, which means - somewhat hopelessly - accepting what amounts to a merely partial truth. Only the vicious or stupid can accord total loyalty to a party. Orwell was a Socialist because he could see no future in a continuance of traditional laissez faire. But it's very difficult to sustain a kind of wobbly liberal idiosyncratic socialism of your own in the face of the real Socialists - those who want to push Socialism, with impeccable logic, to the utter limit.
You mean Orwell's Socialism was pragmatic rather than doctrinaire?
Look at it this way. When he worked for the leftwing paper Tribune, he had to withstand the rebukes of more orthodox readers who didn't like his writing about literature that seemed to hinder rather than help the 'cause' - the poems of the Royalist Anglican Tory T. S. Eliot, for instance, or the in-grown verbal experiments of James Joyce. He almost had to apologize for bidding his readers go and look at the first daffodils in the park instead of spending yet another Saturday distributing leftwing pamphlets. He knew what Marxism was about. He'd fought alongside Marxists in Spain, but he wasn't, like the redder British Socialists, prepared to blind himself to what Russia was doing in the name of Marxism. His radicalism was of a nineteenthcentury kind, with a strong tinge of something older - the dissenting spirit of Defoe and the humane anger of Swift. Swi
ft he declared to be the writer he admired with least reserve, and that Swift was Dean of St Patrick's in Dublin didn't offend his agnosticism. There's a bad but touching poem Orwell wrote - he sees himself in an earlier incarnation as a country rector, meditating in his garden, watching his walnuts grow.
There was more English than Socialism in his English Socialism.
Very neat, and there's some truth in it. He loved his country more than his party. He didn't like the tendency in more orthodox Socialists to inhabit a world of pure doctrine and ignore the realities of an inherited national tradition. Orwell prized his English inheritance - the language, the wild flowers, church architecture, Cooper's Oxford marmalade, the innocent obscenity of seaside picture postcards, Anglican hymns, bitter beer, a good strong cup of tea. His tastes were bourgeois, and they veered towards the working class.
But he couldn't identify himself with the workers. It's horrible that he should seem to blame the workers for his inability to join them. I mean, that total condemnation of the proles in Nineteen EightyFour. . . .
He was sick, remember, and hopeless. He tried to love the workers but couldn't. After all, he was born on the fringe of the ruling class, he went to Eton, he spoke with a patrician accent. When he called on his fellow middle-class intellectuals to take a step downward and embrace the culture of miners and factory workers, he said: 'You have nothing to lose but your aitches.' But those were just what he could not lose. He had at heart the cause of working-class justice, but he couldn't really accept the workers as real people. They were animals - noble and powerful, like Boxer the horse in Animal Farm, but essentially of a different substance from himself. He fought against his inability to love them by desperate acts of dispossession - making himself down and out in Paris and London, spending the season in hell which produced the Wigan Pier book. He pitied the workers, or animals. He also feared them. There was a strong element of nostalgia in him - for the working-class life he couldn't have. Nostalgia has come to mean frustrated home-sickness. This got itself mixed up with another nostalgia.
You mean for the past. A vague and irrecoverable English past. Dickensian. That vitiated his Socialism. Socialism ought to reject the past as evil. Its eyes ought to be wholly on the future.
You're right. Orwell imagines a kind of impossibly cosy past - the past as a sort of farmhouse kitchen with hams hanging from the rafters, a smell of old dog. As a Socialist he should have been wary of the past. Once you start to yearn for kindly policemen, clean air, noisy free speech in pubs, families sticking together, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, the fug of the old music hall you end up by touching your forelock to the squire. You oppose to that past a present full of political dogma, policemen with guns, adulterated beer, fear of being overheard, fish sausages. You remember the hero of Coming Up for Air. He bites into one of these horrors and says it's like biting into the modern world. There's a part of Orwell which fears the future. Even when it's Socialist, progressive, just, egalitarian. He wants to oppose the past to it, as though the past were a real world of solid objects.
It's the future that's supposed to be subversive. Yet Winston Smith has his subversiveness all in the past.
Well, the past is subversive in the sense that it opposes pragmatic values to doctrinaire ones. The human and not the abstract. Take even the least considerable and most neutral-seeming areas - like, for instance, weights and measures. Nineteen EightyFour is genuinely prophetic in presenting a Britain that's yielded to the metric system. At the end of the war there hadn't as yet been any official proposal to replace the traditional units with the Cartesian abstractions of France, but everybody felt sure the change was on its way. Inches and feet and yards were top much based on thumbs and limbs to be acceptable in a truly rational world. A prole beer-drinker whom Winston Smith encounters complains of having to drink in litres or half-litres: he wants the traditional pint. But despite the protests of traditionalists, Britain had to be given a decimal coinage. Orwell knew this was going to happen: he puts dollars and cents into Winston's pocket. As the British know, the reality is the heavy dollar still called the pound, with a hundred new pence or p in it - shameful liquidation - but the dehumanization remains. Americans have a monetary system that carries an aura of revolutionary necessity, and they'll never understand how the loss of the old shillings and half-crowns and guineas wounded British hearts. For the whole point of the traditional system was that it sprang out of empirical common sense, not abstract rationality. You could divide by any number - 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. If you try to divide by 3 now you get a recurring decimal.
7 and 9?
Yes. You added a shilling to a pound and that gave you a guinea. A seventh of a guinea was three shillings. A ninth of a guinea was two shillings and fourpence, or a Malayan dollar. So long as there were seven days in a week, four weeks in a month, twelve months in a year, and an hour divisible by 3 and its multiples, the old system made sense. But it had to go: it was too reasonable, too human. It also committed the grave error of keeping ancient folk traditions alive. 'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's. You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martin's.' This old song is a mysterious link between Big Brother's London and the ancient buried one of churches and chimes and liberty of conscience. But in 1984 nobody knows what a farthing is. Everybody began to cease to know in 1960. 'Sing a song of sixpence' - it means nothing. Nor does Falstaff's reckoning at the Boar's Head - a capon, 2s 2d; sauce, 4d; sack, two gallons, 5s 8d; anchovies and sack after supper, 2s 6d; bread 1/2d.
Why does Orwell make Winston Smith wake up with the name Shakespeare on his lips?
Shakespeare, though still not proscribed by the Party, is subversive. God knows what the Newspeak version of him is like, but the Oldspeak Shakespeare is full of private lives and individual decisions. Shakespeare means the past. But note that Winston Smith evokes the past in a far more dangerous way. He buys, for 2 dollars 50, a beautiful book full of blank paper of a creamy smoothness unknown to his modern world - or, for that matter, to present-day Soviet Russia. He also buys an archaic writing instrument - a pen with a real nib. He is going to keep a diary. He feels able to do this with a modicum of safety because his writingtable is in a small alcove out of range of the telescreen. He first writes at random, and then lets his thoughts wander. He looks down at the page and finds that he's written over and over again, in total automatism, the words DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER. Mrs Parsons, the woman with the blocked-up drain, knocks on the door but, for all Winston knows, it may already be the Thought Police. Going to the door he sees that he's left the book open. 'It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.' The subversive act and the materials with which it's been performed - these have become one thing. The past is an enemy of the Party. Hence the past is real. After dealing with Mrs Parsons's problem, he comes back and writes:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone - to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink - greetings!
We can talk to the past as we can talk to the future - the time that is dead and the time that has not yet been born. Both acts are absurd, but the absurdity is necessary to freedom.
Conversely, freedom itself is thus proved to be absurd.
Yes yes. Freedom was certainly an archaic absurdity to some of Orwell's contemporaries. Britain and her allies had been fighting fascism, which was dedicated to the liquidation of personal liberty, but one of those allies was herself as repressive of freedom as the enemy. When Soviet Russia became a friend of the democracies -
A brief friend.
Yes. That was when those of tender conscience believed the war had lost its meaning. That was when it was in order for Englishmen to love Stalin and praise th
e Soviet system. There were certain British intellectuals, especially those associated with the leftwing magazine the New Statesman, who even preached totalitarianism on the Stalinist model. Kingsley Martin, its editor, for instance. Orwell summed up Martin's view of the Soviet leader something like this: Stalin has done ghastly things, but on balance they've served the cause of progress, and a few million liquidations must not be allowed to obscure that fact. Means justify the end. That's very much the modern view. It was Orwell's belief that most British intellectuals were given to totalitarianism.
He went too far.
Well, consider - it's in the nature of an intellectual to be progressive, meaning that he'll tend to support a political system that will bring rapid changes about in the commonalty, meaning a disdain for the lumbering old democratic process with its tolerance of opposition. A state machine that can pulp up the past and create a rational future. A very intellectual idea. There had been intellectuals who seemed 'fascist' to Orwell, in love with authoritarianism or at least tolerant of it - writers like Eliot, Yeats, Evelyn Waugh, Roy Campbell, even Shaw and Wells - but the intellectuals who were not fascist were usually communist, which - in terms of state power, repression, the one-party system and so on - amounted to the same thing. Terms like fascism and communism represent no true polarity, despite the war. They could both, thought Orwell, be contained in some such name as Oligarchical Collectivism.
And yet any progressive idea is an intellectual creation. Without intellectuals, with their cries for greater social justice, removal of the profit motive, equal incomes, the death of inherited privilege and so on - would there be any progress at all?
But is their talk of progress truly disinterested? Orwell knew enough, as Arthur Koestler did, of the springs of political authority in Europe. No man, it seemed to them, strove for political leadership solely out of altruism. Koestler had been sent to jail by the system he supported. Orwell fought for freedom in Spain, and he had to run for his life when Russian Communism condemned Catalonian Anarchism. Intellectuals with political ambitions had to be suspect. For, in a free society, intellectuals are among the under-privileged. What they offer - as school-teachers, university lecturers, writers - is not greatly wanted. If they threaten to withdraw their labour, nobody is going to be much disturbed. To refuse to publish a volume of free verse or take a class in structural linguistics - that's not like cutting off the power supplies or stopping the buses. They lack the power of the capitalist boss on the one hand and the power of the syndicalist boss on the other. They get frustrated. They find pure intellectual pleasures inadequate. They become revolutionaries. Revolutions are usually the work of disgruntled intellectuals with the gift of the gab. They go to the barricades in the name of the peasant or the working man. For 'Intellectuals of the world unite' is not a very inspiring slogan.
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