Fifty Orwell Essays Read online

trivialities are so engrossing? Simply because the whole atmosphere is

  deeply familiar, because you have all the while the feeling that these

  things are happening to YOU. And you have this feeling because somebody

  has chosen to drop the Geneva language of the ordinary novel and drag the

  REAL-POLITIK of the inner mind into the open. In Miller's case it is not

  so much a question of exploring the mechanisms of the mind as of owning

  up to everyday facts and everyday emotions. For the truth is that many

  ordinary people, perhaps an actual majority, do speak and behave in just

  the way that is recorded here. The callous coarseness with which the

  characters in TROPIC OF CANCER talk is very rare in fiction, but it is

  extremely common in real life; again and again I have heard just such

  conversations from people who were not even aware that they were talking

  coarsely. It is worth noticing that TROPIC OF CANCER is not a young man's

  book. Miller was in his forties when it was published, and though since

  then he has produced three or four others, it is obvious that this first

  book had been lived with for years. It is one of those books that are

  slowly matured in poverty and obscurity, by people who know what they

  have got to do and therefore are able to wait. The prose is astonishing,

  and in parts of BLACK SPRING is even better. Unfortunately I cannot

  quote; unprintable words occur almost everywhere. But get hold of TROPIC

  OF CANCER, get hold of BLACK SPRING and read especially the first hundred

  pages. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late

  date, with English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken

  language, but spoken WITHOUT FEAR, i.e. without fear of rhetoric or of

  the unusual or poetical word. The adjective has come back, after its ten

  years' exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in

  it, something quite different from the flat cautious statements and

  snack-bar dialects that are now in fashion.

  When a book like TROPIC OF CANCER appears, it is only natural that the

  first thing people notice should be its obscenity. Given our current

  notions of literary decency, it is not at all easy to approach an

  unprintable book with detachment. Either one is shocked and disgusted, or

  one is morbidly thrilled, or one is determined above all else not to be

  impressed. The last is probably the commonest reaction, with the result

  that unprintable books often get less attention than they deserve. It is

  rather the fashion to say that nothing is easier than to write an obscene

  book, that people only do it in order to get themselves talked about and

  make money, etc., etc. What makes it obvious that this is not the case is

  that books which are obscene in the police-court sense are distinctly

  uncommon. If there were easy money to be made out of dirty words, a lot

  more people would be making it. But, because 'obscene' books do not

  appear very frequently, there is a tendency to lump them together, as a

  rule quite unjustifiably. TROPIC OF CANCER has been vaguely associated

  with two other books, ULYSSES and VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT, but in

  neither case is there much resemblance. What Miller has in common with

  Joyce is a willingness to mention the inane, squalid facts of everyday

  life. Putting aside differences of technique, the funeral scene in

  ULYSSES, for instance, would fit into TROPIC OF CANCER; the whole chapter

  is a sort of confession, an expos� of the frightful inner callousness of

  the human being. But there the resemblance ends. As a novel, TROPIC OF

  CANCER is far inferior to ULYSSES. Joyce is an artist, in a sense in

  which Miller is not and probably would not wish to be, and in any case he

  is attempting much more. He is exploring different states of

  consciousness, dream, reverie (the 'bronze-by-gold' chapter),

  drunkenness, etc., and dovetailing them all into a huge complex pattern,

  almost like a Victorian 'plot'. Miller is simply a hard-boiled person

  talking about life, an ordinary American businessman with intellectual

  courage and a gift for words. It is perhaps significant that he looks

  exactly like everyone's idea of an American businessman. As for the

  comparison with VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT, it is even further from the

  point. Both books, use unprintable words, both are in some sense

  autobiographical, but that is all. VOYAGE AU BEUT DE LA NUIT is a

  book-with-a-purpose, and its purpose is to protest against the horror and

  meaninglessness of modern life--actually, indeed, of LIFE. It is a cry

  of unbearable disgust, a voice from the cesspool. TROPIC OF CANCER is

  almost exactly the opposite. The thing has become so unusual as to seem

  almost anomalous, but it is the book of a man who is happy. So is BLACK

  SPRING, though slightly less so, because tinged in places with nostalgia.

  With years of lumpen-proletarian life behind him, hunger, vagabondage,

  dirt, failure, nights in the open, battles with immigration officers,

  endless struggles for a bit of cash, Miller finds that he is enjoying

  himself. Exactly the aspects of life that feel C�line with horror are the

  ones that appeal to him. So far from protesting, he is ACCEPTING. And the

  very word 'acceptance' calls up his real affinity, another American, Walt

  Whitman.

  But there is something rather curious in being Whitman in the

  nineteen-thirties. It is not certain that if Whitman himself were alive

  at the moment he would write anything in the least degree resembling

  LEAVES OF GRASS. For what he is saying, after all, is 'I accept', and

  there is a radical difference between acceptance now and acceptance then.

  Whitman was writing in a time of unexampled prosperity, but more than

  that, he was writing in a country where freedom was something more than a

  word. The democracy, equality, and comradeship that he is always talking

  about arc not remote ideals, but something that existed in front of his

  eyes. In mid-nineteenth-century America men felt themselves free and

  equal, WERE free and equal, so far as that is possible outside-a society

  of pure communism. There was poverty and there were even class

  distinctions, but except for the Negroes there was no permanently

  submerged class. Everyone had inside him, like a kind of core, the

  knowledge that he could earn a decent living, and earn it without

  bootlicking. When you read about Mark Twain's Mississippi raftsmen and

  pilots, or Bret Harte's Western gold-miners, they seem more remote than

  the cannibals of the Stone Age. The reason is simply that they are free

  human beings. But it is the same even with the peaceful domesticated

  America of the Eastern states, the America of the LITTLE WOMEN, HELEN'S

  BABIES, and RIDING DOWN FROM BANGOR. Life has a buoyant, carefree quality

  that you can feel as you read, like a physical sensation in your belly.

  If is this that Whitman is celebrating, though actually he does it very

  badly, because he is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to

  feel instead of making you feel it. Luckily for his beliefs, perhaps, he

  died too early to see the deterioration in American life that came with

  the rise of la
rge-scale industry and the exploiting of cheap immigrant

  labour.

  Millers outlook is deeply akin to that of Whitman, and nearly everyone

  who has read him has remarked on this. TROPIC OF CANCER ends with an

  especially Whitmanesque passage, in which, after the lecheries, the

  swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts, and the imbecilities, he simply

  sits down and watches the Seine flowing past, in a sort of mystical

  acceptance of thing-as-it-is. Only, what is he accepting? In the first

  place, not America, but the ancient bone-heap of Europe, where every

  grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies. Secondly, not

  an epoch of expansion and liberty, but an epoch of fear, tyranny, and

  regimentation. To say 'I accept' in an age like our own is to say that

  you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons. Hitler, Stalin, bombs,

  aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux

  belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, PROVOCATEURS, press censorship,

  secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders. Not

  only those things, of course, but, those things among-others. And on the

  whole this is Henry Miller's attitude. Not quite always, because at

  moments he shows signs of a fairly ordinary kind of literary nostalgia.

  There is a long passage in the earlier part of BLACK SPRING, in praise of

  the Middle Ages, which as prose must be one of the most remarkable pieces

  of writing in recent years, but which displays an attitude not very

  different from that of Chesterton. In MAX AND THE WHITE PHAGOCYTES there

  is an attack on modern American civilization (breakfast cereals,

  cellophane, etc.) from the usual angle of the literary man who hates

  industrialism. But in general the attitude is 'Let's swallow it whole'.

  And hence the seeming preoccupation with indecency and with the

  dirty-handkerchief side of life. It is only seeming, for the truth is

  that ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors than

  writers of fiction usually care to admit. Whitman himself 'accepted' a

  great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not

  only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes

  the shattered skull of the suicide, the 'grey sick faces of onanists',

  etc, etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe,

  is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was

  writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a SHRINKING world. The 'democratic

  vistas' have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and

  growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and

  more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as

  it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous

  attitude and become a passive attitude--even 'decadent', if that word

  means anything.

  But precisely because, in one sense, he is passive to experience. Miller

  is able to get nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more

  purposive writers. For the ordinary man is also passive. Within a narrow

  circle (home life, and perhaps the trade union or local politics) he

  feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as

  helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to influence

  the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. During the

  past ten years literature has involved itself more and more deeply in

  politics, with the result that there is now less room in it for the

  ordinary man than at any time during the past two centuries. One can see

  the change in the prevailing literary attitude by comparing the books

  written about the Spanish civil war with those written about the war of

  1914-18. The immediately striking thing about the Spanish war books, at

  any rate those written in English, is their shocking dullness and

  badness. But what is more significant is that almost all of them,

  right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure

  partisans telling you what to think, whereas the books about the Great

  War were written by common soldiers or junior officers who did not even

  pretend to understand what the whole thing was about. Books like ALL

  QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, LE FEU, A FAREWELL TO ARMS, DEATH OF A HERO,

  GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT, MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER, and A SUBALTERN ON

  THE SOMME were written not by propagandists but by VICTIMS. They are

  saying in effect, 'What the hell is all this about? God knows. All we can

  do is to endure.' And though he is not writing about war, nor, on the

  whole, about unhappiness, this is nearer to Miller's attitude than the

  omniscience which is now fashionable. The BOOSTER, a short-lived

  periodical of which he was part-editor, used to describe itself in its

  advertisements as 'non-political, non-educational, non-progressive,

  non-co-operative, non-ethical, non-literary, non-consistent,

  non-contemporary', and Miller's own work could be described in nearly the

  same terms. It is a voice from the crowd, from the underling, from the

  third-class carriage, from the ordinary, non-political, non-moral,

  passive man.

  I have been using the phrase 'ordinary man' rather loosely, and I have

  taken it for granted that the 'ordinary man' exists, a thing now denied

  by some people. I do not mean that the people Miller is writing about

  constitute a majority, still less that he is writing about proletarians.

  No English or American novelist has as yet seriously attempted that. And

  again, the people in TROPIC OF CANCER fall short of being ordinary to the

  extent that they are idle, disreputable, and more or less 'artistic'. As

  I have said already, this a pity, but it is the necessary result of

  expatriation. Miller's 'ordinary man' is neither the manual worker nor

  the suburban householder, but the derelict, the D�CLASS�, the adventurer,

  the American intellectual without roots and without money. Still, the

  experiences even of this type overlap fairly widely with those of more

  normal people. Milter has been able to get the most out of his rather

  limited material because he has had the courage to identify with it. The

  ordinary man, the 'average sensual man', has been given the power of

  speech, like Balaam's ass.

  It will be seen that this is something out of date, or at any rate out of

  fashion. The average sensual man is out of fashion. Preoccupation with

  sex and truthfulness about the inner life are out of fashion. American

  Paris is out of fashion. A book like TROPIC OF CANCER, published at such

  a time, must be either a tedious preciosity or something unusual, and I

  think a majority of the people who have read it would agree that it is

  not the first. It is worth trying to discover just what, this escape from

  the current literary fashion means. But to do that one has got to see it

  against its background--that is, against the general development of

  English literature in the twenty years since the Great War.

  II

  When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means

  that he is admired by people under thirty. At the beginning of
the period

  I am speaking of, the years during and immediately after the war, the

  writer who had the deepest hold upon the thinking young was almost

  certainly Housman. Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910-25,

  Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now not at all easy

  to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the

  whole of the SHROPSHIRE LAD by heart. I wonder how much impression the

  SHROPSHIRE LAD makes at this moment on a boy of the same age and more or

  less the same cast of mind? No doubt he has heard of it and even glanced

  into it; it might strike him as cheaply clever--probably that would be

  about all. Yet these are the poems that I and my contemporaries used to

  recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy, just as earlier

  generations had recited Meredith's 'Love in a Valley', Swinburne's

  'Garden of Proserpine' etc., etc.

  With rue my heart is laden

  For golden friends I had,

  For many a roselipt maiden

  And many a lightfoot lad.

  By brooks too broad for leaping

  The lightfoot boys are laid;

  The roselipt girls arc sleeping

  In fields Where roses fade.

  It just tinkles. But it did not seem to tinkle in 1920. Why does the

  bubble always burst? To answer that question one has to take account of

  the EXTERNAL conditions that make certain writers popular at certain

  times. Housman's poems had not attracted much notice when they were first

  published. What was there in them that appealed so deeply to a single

  generation, the generation born round about 1900?

  In the first place, Housman is a 'country' poet. His poems are full of

  the charm of buried villages, the nostalgia of place-names, Clunton and

  Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow, 'on Wenlock Edge', 'in summer time on

  Bredon', thatched roofs and the jingle of smithies, the wild jonquils in

  the pastures, the 'blue, remembered hills'. War poems apart, English

  verse of the 1910-25 period is mostly 'country'. The reason no doubt was

  that the RENTIER-professional class was ceasing once and for all to have

  any real relationship with the soil; but at any rate there prevailed

  then, far more than now, a kind of snobbism of belonging to the country

  and despising the town. England at that time was hardly more an

  agricultural country than it is now, but before the light industries

  began to spread themselves it was easier to think of it as one. Most

  middle-class boys grew up within sight of a farm, and naturally it was

  the picturesque side of farm life that appealed to them--the ploughing,

  harvesting, stack-thrashing and so forth. Unless he has to do it himself

  a boy is not likely to notice the horrible drudgery of hoeing turnip,

  milking cows with chapped teats at four o'clock in the morning, etc.,

  etc. Just before, just after, and for that matter, during the war was the

  great age of the 'Nature poet', the heyday of Richard Jefferies and W. H.

  Hudson. Rupert Brooke's 'Grantchester', the star poem of 1913, is nothing

  but an enormous gush of 'country' sentiment, a sort of accumulated vomit

  from a stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem

  'Grantchester' is something worse than worthless, but as an illustration

  of what the thinking middle-class young of that period FELT it is a

  valuable document.

  Housman, however, did not enthuse over the rambler roses in the

  week-ending spirit of Brooke and the others. The 'country' motif is there

  all the time, but mainly as a background. Most of the poems have a

  quasi-human subject, a kind of idealized rustic, in reality Strephon or

  Corydon brought up to date. This in itself had a deep appeal. Experience

  shows that overcivilized people enjoy reading about rustics (key-phrase,

  'close to the soil') because they imagine them to be more primitive and

  passionate than themselves. Hence the 'dark earth' novel of Sheila

  Kaye-Smith, etc. And at that time a middle-class boy, with his 'country'