Shooting an Elephant Read online

  'The Lady's Dressing Room': one might add the kindred poem, 'Upon a Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed'. Which is truer, the

  viewpoint expressed in these poems, or the viewpoint implied in Blake's phrase, 'The naked female human form divine'? No doubt

  Blake is nearer the truth, and yet who can fail to feel a sort of pleasure in seeing that fraud, feminine delicacy, exploded

  for once? Swift falsifies his picture of the whole world by refusing to see anything in human life except dirt, folly and

  wickedness, but the part which he abstracts from the whole does exist, and it is something which we all know about while shrinking

  from mentioning it. Part of our minds - in any normal person it is the dominant part - believes that man is a noble animal

  and life is worth living: but there is also a sort of inner self which at least intermittently stands aghast at the horror

  of existence. In the queerest way, pleasure and disgust are linked together. The human body is beautiful: it is also repulsive

  and ridiculous, a fact which can be verified at any swimming pool. The sexual organs are objects of desire and also of loathing,

  so much so that in many languages, if not in all languages, their names are used as words of abuse. Meat is delicious, but

  a butcher's shop makes one feel sick: and indeed all our food springs ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things

  which of all others seem to us the most horrible. A child, when it is past the infantile stage but still looking at the world

  with fresh eyes, is moved by horror almost as often as by wonder - horror of snot and spittle, of the dogs' excrement on the

  pavement, the dying toad full of maggots, the sweaty smell of grown-ups, the hideousness of old men, with their bald heads and bulbous noses. In his endless harping on disease, dirt and deformity, Swift is not actually inventing anything, he is merely leaving something out. Human

  behaviour, too, especially in politics, is as he describes it, although it contains other more important factors which he

  refuses to admit. So far as we can see, both horror and pain are necessary to the continuance of life on this planet, and

  it is therefore open to pessimists like Swift to say: 'If horror and pain must always be with us, how can life be significantly

  improved?' His attitude is in effect the Christian attitude, minus the bribe of a 'next world' - which, however, probably

  has less hold upon the minds of believers than the conviction that this world is a vale of tears and the grave is a place

  of rest. It is, I am certain, a wrong attitude, and one which could have harmful effects upon behaviour; but something in

  us responds to it, as it responds to the gloomy words of the burial service and the sweetish smell of corpses in a country

  church.

  It is often argued, at least by people who admit the importance of subject-matter, that a book cannot be 'good' if it expresses a palpably false view of life. We are told that in our own age, for instance, any book that has genuine literary merit will

  also be more or less 'progressive' in tendency. This ignores the fact that throughout history a similar struggle between the

  progress and reaction has been raging, and that the best books of any one age have always been written from several different

  viewpoints, some of them palpably more false than others. In so far as the writer is a propagandist, the most one can ask

  of him is that he shall genuinely believe in what he is saying, and that it shall not be something blazingly silly. Today,

  for example, one can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, a Pacifist, an Anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative: one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The views that a

  writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what

  we ask of him is talent, which is probably another name for conviction. Swift did not possess ordinary wisdom, but he did

  possess a terrible intensity of vision, capable of picking out a single hidden truth and then magnifying it and distorting

  it. The durability of Gulliver's Travels goes to show that if the force of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art.

  1946

  How the Poor Die

  In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the Hopital X, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris. The clerks put me through the usual third-degree at the reception desk, and indeed I was kept answering questions for some twenty minutes before they would let me in. If you have ever had to fill up forms in a Latin country you will know

  the kind of questions I mean. For some days past I have been unequal to translating Reaumur into Fahrenheit, but I know that

  my temperature was round about 103, and by the end of the interview I had some difficulty in standing on my feet. At my back

  a resigned little knot of patients, carrying bundles done up in coloured handkerchiefs, waiting their turn to be questioned.

  After the questioning came the bath - a compulsory routine for all newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse.

  My clothes were taken away from me, and after I had sat shivering for some minutes in five inches of warm water I was given

  a linen nightshirt and a short blue flannel dressing-gown - no slippers, they had none big enough for me, they said - and

  led out into the open air. This was a night in February and I was suffering from pneumonia. The ward we were going to was

  200 yards away and it seemed that to get to it you had to cross the hospital grounds. Someone stumbled in front of me with a lantern. The gravel path was frosty underfoot, and the wind whipped the nightshirt round my bare calves.

  When we got into the ward I was aware of a strange feeling of familiarity whose origin I did not succeed in pinning down till

  later in the night. It was a long, rather low, ill-lit room, full of murmuring voices and with three rows of beds surprisingly

  close together. There was a foul smell, faecal and yet sweetish. As I lay down I saw on a bed nearly opposite me a small,

  round-shouldered, sandy-haired man sitting half naked while a doctor and a student performed some strange operation on him.

  First the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen small glasses like wine glasses, then the student burned a match inside

  each glass to exhaust the air, then the glass was popped on to the man's back or chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow

  blister. Only after some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something called cupping, a treatment which

  you can read about in old medical text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of those things they do to

  horses.

  The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I watched this barbarous remedy with detachment and even a certain amount of amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without

  a word began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered

  got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started

  on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you

  without speaking to you, or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew out about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by

  the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they
would leave me alone. But no, not a bit of it. There

  was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses

  had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait jacket while some men who were

  wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later

  that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for

  a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don't happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice

  is buckled at the back and you can't get it off. This is the period the onlookers most enjoy. During the last five minutes,

  I noted a sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust

  beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep and to the best of my knowledge this was the only night of my life -

  I mean the only night spent in bed - in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.

  During my first hour in the Hopital X, I had had a whole series of different and contradictory treatments, but this was misleading, for in general you got very little treatment at all, either good or bad, unless you were ill in some interesting and instructive way. At five in the morning the nurses came round, woke the patients and took their temperatures, but did not wash them. If you were well enough you washed yourself, otherwise you depended on the kindness of some walking patient. It was generally patients, too, who carried the bed-bottles and the

  grim bed-pan, nicknamed la casserole. At eight breakfast arrived, called army fashion la soupe. It was soup, too, a thin vegetable soup with slimy hunks of bread floating about in it. Later in the day the tall, solemn, black-bearded doctor made his rounds, with an interne and a troop of students following at his heels, but there were about sixty of us in the ward and it was evident that he had other wards to attend to as well. There were many beds past which he walked day after day, sometimes followed by imploring

  cries. On the other hand if you had some disease with which the students wanted to familiarize themselves you got plenty of

  attention of a kind. I myself, with an exceptionally fine specimen of a bronchial rattle, sometimes had as many as a dozen

  students queueing up to listen to my chest. It was a queer feeling - queer, I mean, because of their intense interest in learning their job, together with a seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human beings. It is strange to relate, but

  sometimes as some young student stepped forward to take his turn at manipulating you he would be actually tremulous with excitement, like a boy who has at last got his hands on some expensive piece of machinery. And then ear after ear - ears of young men,

  of girls, of Negroes - pressed against your back, relays of fingers solemnly but clumsily tapping, and not from any one of

  them did you get a word of conversation or a look direct in your face. As a non-paying patient, in the uniform nightshirt,

  you were primarily a specimen, a thing I did not resent but could never quite get used to.

  After some days I grew well enough to sit up and study the surrounding patients. The stuffy room, with its narrow beds so close together that you could easily touch your neighbour's hand, had every sort of disease in it except, I suppose, acutely

  infectious cases. My right-hand neighbour was a little red-haired cobbler with one leg shorter than the other, who used to

  announce the death of any other patient (this happened a number of times, and my neighbour was always the first to hear of

  it) by whistling to me, exclaiming 'Numero 43! ' (or whatever it was) and flinging his arms above his head. This man had not much wrong with him, but in most of the other beds within my angle of vision some squalid tragedy or some plain horror was being enacted. In the bed that was foot to foot

  with mine there lay, until he died (I didn't see him die - they moved him to another bed), a little weazened man who was suffering from I do not know what disease, but something that made his whole body so intensely sensitive that any movement from side

  to side, sometimes even the weight of the bed-clothes, would make him shout out with pain. His worst suffering was when he

  urinated, which he did with the greatest difficulty. A nurse would bring him the bed-bottle and then for a long time stand

  beside his bed, whistling, as grooms are said to do with horses, until at last with an agonized shriek of 'Je pisse! ' he would get started. In the bed next to him the sandy-haired man whom I had seen being cupped used to cough up blood-streaked mucus at all hours. My left-hand neighbour was a tall, flaccid-looking young man who used periodically to have a tube inserted

  into his back and astonishing quantities of frothy liquid drawn off from some part of his body. In the bed beyond that a veteran of the war of 1870 was dying, a handsome old man with a white imperial, round whose bed, at all hours when visiting was allowed, four elderly female relatives dressed all in black sat exactly like crows, obviously scheming for some pitiful legacy. In the bed opposite me in the further row was an old bald-headed man with drooping

  moustaches and greatly swollen face and body, who was suffering from some disease that made him urinate almost incessantly.

  A huge glass receptable stood always beside his bed. One day his wife and daughter came to visit him. At the sight of them

  the old man's bloated face lit up with a smile of surprising sweetness, and as his daughter, a pretty girl of about twenty,

  approached the bed I saw that his hand was slowly working its way from under the bed-clothes. I seemed to see in advance the

  gesture that was coming - the girl kneeling beside the bed, the old man's hand laid on her head in his dying blessing. But

  no, he merely handed her the bed-bottle, which she promptly took from him and emptied into the receptacle.

  About a dozen beds away from me was numero 57 - I think that was his number - a cirrhosis of the liver case. Everyone in the ward knew him by sight because he was sometimes the subject of a medical lecture. On two afternoons a week the tall, grave doctor would lecture in the ward to a party of

  students, and on more than one occasion old numero 57 was wheeled on a sort of trolley into the middle of the ward, where the doctor would roll back his nightshirt, dilate with his fingers a huge flabby protuberance on the man's belly - the diseased liver, I suppose - and explain solemnly that this

  was a disease attributable to alcoholism, commoner in the wine-drinking countries. As usual he neither spoke to his patient

  nor gave him a smile, a nod or any kind of recognition. While he talked, very grave and upright, he would hold the wasted

  body beneath his two hands, sometimes giving it a gentle roll to and fro, in just the attitude of a woman handling a rolling-pin. Not that numero 57 minded this kind of thing. Obviously he was an old hospital inmate, a regular exhibit at lectures, his liver long since marked down for a bottle in some pathological museum. Utterly uninterested in what was said about him, he would lie with his colourless eyes gazing at nothing, while the doctor showed him off like a piece of antique china. He was a man of about sixty, astonishingly shrunken. His face, pale as vellum, had shrunken away till it seemed no bigger than a doll's.

  One morning my cobbler neighbour woke me by plucking at my pillow before the nurses arrived. 'Numero 57! '- he flung his arms above his head. There was a light in the ward, enough to see by. I could see old numero 57 lying crumpled up on his side, his face sticking out over the side of the bed, and towards me. He had died some time during the night, nobody knew when. When the nurses came they received the news of his death indifferently and went about their work.

  After a long time, an ho
ur or more, two other nurses marched in abreast like soldiers, with a great clumping of sabots, and

  knotted the corpse up in the sheets, but it was not removed till some time later. Meanwhile, in the better light, I had time

  for a good look at numero 57. Indeed I lay on my side to look at him. Curiously enough he was the first dead European I had seen. I had seen dead men before, but always Asiatics and usually people who had died violent deaths. Numero 57's eyes were still open, his mouth also open, his small face contorted into an expression of agony. What most impressed me however was the whiteness of his face. It had been pale before, but now it was little darker than the sheets. As I gazed at

  the tiny, screwed-up face it struck me that this disgusting piece of refuse, waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab

  in the dissecting room, was an example of 'natural' death, one of the things you pray for in the Litany. There you are, then, I thought, that's what is waiting for you, twenty, thirty, forty years hence: that is how the lucky ones die, the ones who live to be old. One wants to live,

  of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought then, that it's better

  to die violently and not too old. People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches

  in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful.

  Even at that, it makes a difference if you can achieve it in your own home and not in a public institution. This poor old

  wretch who had just flickered out like a candle-end was not even important enough to have anyone watching by his deathbed.

  He was merely a number, then a 'subject' for the students' scalpels. And the sordid publicity of dying in such a place! In

  the Hopital X the beds were very close together and there were no screens. Fancy, for instance, dying like the little man

  whose bed was for a while foot to foot with mine, the one who cried out when the bed-clothes touched him! I dare say Je pisse! were his last recorded words. Perhaps the dying don't bother about such things - that at least would be the standard answer: nevertheless dying people are often more or less normal in their minds till within a day or so of the end.