Fifty Orwell Essays Read online

big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very

  often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside

  the books he asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment

  he had gone. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books away

  without paying for them; merely to order them was enough--it gave them,

  I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real money.

  Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold

  second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps--used stamps, I

  mean. Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all

  ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the

  peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also

  sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have

  foretold the Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I

  never opened one of them myself, but the people who bought them often

  came back and told us how 'true' their horoscopes had been. (Doubtless

  any horoscope seems 'true' if it tells you that you are highly attractive

  to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.) We did a good

  deal of business in children's books, chiefly 'remainders'. Modern books

  for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in

  the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petronius

  Arbiter than PETER PAN, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome

  compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we spent a

  feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which

  are tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It

  used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian

  sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms used to

  come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase from one of

  their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: '2 doz. Infant Jesus with

  rabbits'.

  But our principal sideline was a lending library--the usual 'twopenny

  no-deposit' library of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the

  book thieves must love those libraries! It is the easiest crime in the

  world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence, remove the label and

  sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers

  generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books

  stolen (we used to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers

  away by demanding a deposit.

  Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town,

  and we were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors.

  Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London's

  reading public. It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in

  our library the one who 'went out' the best was--Priestley? Hemingway?

  Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second

  and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are

  read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one

  might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of

  tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true

  that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly

  speaking, what one might call the AVERAGE novel--the ordinary, good-bad,

  Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel--seems

  to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to

  respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories

  is terrific. One of our subscribers to my knowledge read four or five

  detective stories every week for over a year, besides others which he got

  from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read

  the same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of

  trash (the pages read every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three

  quarters of an acre) was stored for ever in his memory. He took no notice

  of titles or author's names, but he could tell by merely glancing into a

  book whether be had 'had it already'.

  In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended

  ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the 'classical'

  English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put

  Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending

  library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century

  novel people say, 'Oh, but that's OLD!' and shy away immediately. Yet it

  is always fairly easy to SELL Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell

  Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are 'always

  meaning to' read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand.

  People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar and that Mr Micawber

  had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was found in a

  basket of bulrushes and saw the 'back parts' of the Lord. Another thing

  that is very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books.

  And another--the publishers get into a stew about this every two or

  three years--is the unpopularity of short stories. The kind of person

  who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly always starts by

  saying 'I don't want short stories', or 'I do not desire little stories',

  as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they

  sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of

  characters with every story; they like to 'get into' a novel which

  demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe, though,

  that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern

  short stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless,

  far more so than most novels. The short stories which are stories are

  popular enough, VIDE D. H. Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular

  as his novels.

  Would I like to be a bookseller DE M�TIER? On the whole--in spite of my

  employer's kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop--no.

  Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person

  ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless

  one goes in for 'rare' books it is not a difficult trade to learn, and

  you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of

  books. (Most booksellers don't. You can get their measure by having a

  look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don't

  see an ad. for Boswell's DECLINE AND FALL you are pretty sure to see one

  for THE MILL ON THE FLOSS by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade

  which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The

  combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of

  existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours

  of work are very long--I was only a part-time employee, but my employer

  put in a seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours

  to buy books--and it is an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is

  horribly
cold in winter, because if it is too warm the windows get misted

  over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more and

  nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of

  a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.

  But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for

  life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has

  to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still

  worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to

  and fro. There was a time when I really did love books--loved the sight

  and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more

  years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them

  for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about

  the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection:

  minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of

  forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies' magazines of the sixties. For

  casual reading--in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you

  are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before

  lunch--there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper.

  But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books.

  Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and

  even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if

  it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk.

  The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too

  closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead

  bluebottles.

  SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1936)

  In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people--the

  only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen

  to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an

  aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one

  had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the

  bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As

  a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it

  seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football

  field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd

  yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end

  the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the

  insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my

  nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were

  several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have

  anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

  All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already

  made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I

  chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically--and

  secretly, of course--I was all for the Burmese and all against their

  oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more

  bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the

  dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling

  in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the

  long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged

  with bamboos--all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.

  But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated

  and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is

  imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the

  British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal

  better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew

  was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage

  against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job

  impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an

  unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, IN SAECULA SAECULORUM,

  upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the

  greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist

  priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of

  imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off

  duty.

  One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It

  was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had

  had before of the real nature of imperialism--the real motives for which

  despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police

  station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that

  an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something

  about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was

  happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an

  old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought

  the noise might be useful IN TERROREM. Various Burmans stopped me on the

  way and told me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a

  wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must." It had been chained

  up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must" is due, but

  on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout,

  the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set

  out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve

  hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly

  reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were

  quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo

  hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock;

  also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped

  out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted

  violences upon it.

  The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me

  in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor

  quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palm-leaf,

  winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy,

  stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the

  people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any

  definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story

  always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the

  scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the

  elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in

  another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had

  almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we

  heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of

  "Go away, child! Go away this instant!" and an old woman with a switch in

  her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd<
br />
  of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and

  exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to

  have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the

  mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he

  could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant

  had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with

  its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This

  was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a

  trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly

  with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was

  coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an

  expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the

  dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The

  friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as

  neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an

  orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had

  already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and

  throw me if it smelt the elephant.

  The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges,

  and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was

  in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started

  forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of

  the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting

  excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much

  interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it

  was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to

  them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat.

  It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant--I

  had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary--and it is

  always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill,

  looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an

  ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you

  got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry

  waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy

  from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was

  standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not

  the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches

  of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them

  into his mouth.

  I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with

  perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter

  to shoot a working elephant--it is comparable to destroying a huge and

  costly piece of machinery--and obviously one ought not to do it if it can

  possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the

  elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think

  now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he

  would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and

  caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided

  that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not

  turn savage again, and then go home.

  But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It

  was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute.

  It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the

  sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited

  over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot.

  They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a