Shooting an Elephant Read online

  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 without 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.

  1945

  The Prevention of Literature

  About a year ago I attended a meeting of the PEN Club, the occasion being the tercentenary of Milton's Areopagitica - a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defence of freedom of the press. Milton's famous phrase about the sin of 'killing'

  a book was printed on the leaflets, advertising the meeting, which had been circulated beforehand.

  There were four speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech which did deal with the freedom of the press, but only in relation to India; another said, hesitantly, and in very general terms, that liberty was a good thing; a third delivered an attack on the laws relating to obscenity in literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a defence of the Russian purges. Of the speeches from the body of the hall, some reverted to the question of obscenity and the laws that deal with

  it, others were simply eulogies of Soviet Russia. Moral liberty - the liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print -

  seemed to be generally approved, but political liberty was not mentioned. Out of this concourse of several hundred people,

  perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was there any mention of the various books that have been 'killed' in this country and the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favour of censorship.1

  There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions.

  On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical

  enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the

  general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public

  to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hack work, the encroachment of official bodies like the MOI2 and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed to him from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against his fate he gets no help from his own side: that is, there is no large body

  of opinion which will assure him that he is in the right. In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the

  idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic - political, moral, religious, or aesthetic - was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the words of the Revivalist hymn:

  Dare to be a Daniel,

  Dare to stand alone;

  Dare to have a purpose firm,

  Dare to make it known.

  To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a 'Don't' at the beginning of each line. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. 'Daring to stand alone' is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous.

  The independence of the writer and the artist is eaten away by vague economic forces, and at the same time it is undermined

  by those who should be its defenders. It is with the second process that I am concerned here.

  Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about. Anyone who has experience of lecturing and debating knows them off backwards. Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of antisocial selfishness. Although other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at the bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue

  is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers. In saying this I may seem to be saying that straightforward 'reportage' is the only branch of literature that matters: but I will try to show later that at

  every literary level, and probably in every one of the arts, the same issue arises in more or less subtilized forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies in which this controversy is usually wrapped up.

  The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who

  refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself

  up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current

  of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges. The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an

  opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that 'the truth' has already been revealed, and

  that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of 'the truth'
and merely resists it out of selfish motives.

  In Communist literature the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked by oratory about 'petty-bourgeois individualism', 'the illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism', etc., and backed up by words of abuse such as 'romantic' and 'sentimental', which, since they do not have any agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. In this way the controversy is manoeuvred away from its

  real issue. One can accept, and most enlightened people would accept, the Communist thesis that pure freedom will only exist in a classless society, and that one is more nearly free when one is working to bring such a society about. But slipped in

  with this is the quite unfounded claim that the Communist Party is itself aiming at the establishment of the classless society, and that in the USSR this aim is actually on the way to being realized. If the first claim is allowed to entail the second,

  there is almost no assault on common sense and common decency that cannot be justified. But meanwhile, the real point has

  been dodged. Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged

  to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings. The familiar tirades against 'escapism', 'individualism', 'romanticism' and so

  forth, are merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the perversion of history seem respectable.

  Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent - for they were not of great importance in England - against Fascists. Today one has to defend it against Communists and 'fellow-travellers'. One ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of the small English Communist Party,

  but there can be no question about the poisonous effect of the Russian mythos on English intellectual life. Because of it, known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written. Let me give just one instance out of the hundreds that could be cited. When Germany collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of Soviet Russians - mostly, no doubt, from nonpolitical motives - had changed sides and were fighting for the Germans. Also, a small but not negligible proportion of the Russian prisoners and Displaced Persons refused to go back to the USSR, and some of them, at least, were

  repatriated against their will. These facts, known to many journalists on the spot, went almost unmentioned in the British

  press, while at the same time russophile publicists in England continued to justify the purges and deportations of 1936-8

  by claiming that the USSR, 'had no quislings'. The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish Civil War, Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any

  writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic to the USSR - sympathetic, that is, in the way the Russians themselves would

  want him to be - does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues. I have before me what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinov in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev, Kamenev and others. What could be the attitude of even

  the most intellectually scrupulous Communist towards such a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of saying that it

  is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it were decided to issue a garbled version of the

  pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful to his Party could protest.

  Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen,

  but that even when they are known about they provoke no reaction from the leftwing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the truth would be 'inopportune' or would 'play into the hands of ' somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books.

  The organized lying practised by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an underground legend to

  the effect that although the Russian Government is obliged now to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth,

  it is secretly recording the true facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that

  this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal historian who believes that the

  past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it

  is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or

  that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then, again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revaluation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead

  to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country

  tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that

  all historical records are biassed and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modern physics has proved that what seems to

  us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set us a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws

  of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the

  historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific text-book, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that

  totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the

  writers to line up behind their respective governments.

  To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay; that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but

  that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom

  of all. It may seem that all this time I have been talking about the effects of censorship, not on literature as a whole,

  but merely on one department of political journalism. Granted that Soviet Russia constitutes a sort of forbidden area in the British press, granted that issues like Poland, the Spanish Civil War, the Russo-German Pact, and so forth, are debarred from serious discussion, and that if you possess information that conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy you are expected to distort it

  or to keep quiet about it - granted all this, why should literature in th
e wider sense be affected? Is every writer a politician, and is every book necessarily a work of straightforward 'reportage'? Even under the tightest dictatorship, cannot the individual writer remain free inside his own mind and distil or disguise his unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will

  be too stupid to recognize them? And in any case, if the writer himself is in agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy, why

  should it have a cramping effect on him? Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to flourish in societies in which

  there are no major conflicts of opinion and no sharp distinction between the artist and his audience? Does one have to assume that every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is an exceptional person?

  Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims of totalitarianism, one meets with these arguments in one form or another. They are based on a complete misunderstanding of what literature is, and how - one should perhaps

  rather say why - it comes into being. They assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal hack who can

  switch from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an organ-grinder changing tunes. But after all, how is it that

  books ever come to be written? Above a quite low level, literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one's contemporaries by recording experience. And so far as freedom of expression is concerned, there is not much difference between a mere journalist and the most 'unpolitical' imaginative writer. The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to

  him important news: the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point