A Collection of Essays Read online

  5. Radio sets. Every Local Defence Volunteer headquarters should be in possession of a radio receiving set, so that if necessary it can receive its orders over the air. It is fatal to rely on the telephone in a moment of emergency. As with weapons, the Government should not hesitate to requisition what it needs.

  All of these are things that could be done within the space of a very few days. Meanwhile, let us go on repeating arm the people, in the hope that more and more voices will take it up. For the first time in decades we have a Government with imagination,14 and there is at least a chance that they will listen.

  14. On 10 May the Chamberlain Government had fallen and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister at the head of a Coalition Government.

  I am, etc.

  George Orwell

  Time and Tide, 22 June 1940

  10. Letter to John Lehmann

  18 Dorset Chambers

  Chagford Street

  Ivor Place NW1

  6 July 1940

  Dear Lehmann,15

  Thanks for your two letters, which arrived in one envelope. I am very sorry I have written nothing for you after promising I would. I began something, then the war started to get serious. I just can't write with this kind of thing going on. I have written nothing except book reviews etc. for a long time past, and also my time has been rather filled up with helping with the L.D.V.16 What is so terrible about this kind of situation is to be able to do nothing. The govt won't use me in any capacity, not even a clerk, and I have failed to get into the army because of my lungs. It is a terrible thing to feel oneself useless and at the same time on every side to see halfwits and profascists filling important jobs. However, things are moving a little. I was informed at the W.O.17 that it is no longer held against a man to have fought in the Spanish civil war. Of course you can use the elephant sketch18 again if you like. Two guineas would be very handsome. As to the photo referred to in your other letter, does it have to be a real portrait or will a snap do? I don't photograph well as a rule. The enclosed was taken for a carte d'identite or something and is a very good likeness, but I don't know whether it would enlarge. In case I have to be properly photographed my address is as above, at any rate for the next week or so. I have been living in London because I am now doing theatre criticism for Time & Tide.

  15. John Lehmann (1907- ), poet, critic and publisher. Founder and editor of New Writing, a literary magazine committed to anti-Fascism, 1936-46, and later first editor of the London Magazine, 1954.

  16. The Local Defence Volunteers, which later became the Home Guard, consisted of civilians formed into military detachments against the possibility of invasion.

  17. War Office.

  18. "Shooting an Elephant". See I, 88.

  Yours

  George Orwell

  11. Prophecies of Fascism

  The reprinting of Jack London's The Iron Heel brings within general reach a book which has been much sought after during the years of Fascist aggression. Like others of Jack London's books it has been widely read in Germany, and it has had the reputation of being an accurate forecast of the coming of Hitler. In reality it is not that. It is merely a tale of capitalist oppression, and it was written at a time when various things that have made Fascism possible -- for instance, the tremendous revival of nationalism -- were not easy to foresee.

  Where London did show special insight, however, was in realizing that the transition to Socialism was not going to be automatic or even easy. The capitalist class was not going to "perish of its own contradictions" like a flower dying at the end of the season. The capitalist class was quite clever enough to see what was happening, to sink its own differences and counterattack against the workers; and the resulting struggle would be the most bloody and unscrupulous the world had ever seen.

  It is worth comparing The Iron Heel with another imaginative novel of the future which was written somewhat earlier and to which it owes something, H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Wakes. By doing so one can see both London's limitations and also the advantage to be enjoyed in not being, like Wells, a fully civilized man. As a book, The Iron Heel is hugely inferior. It is clumsily written, it shows no grasp of scientific possibilities, and the hero is the kind of human gramophone who is now disappearing even from Socialist tracts. But because of his own streak of savagery London could grasp something that Wells apparently could not, and that is that hedonistic societies do not endure.

  Everyone who has ever read The Sleeper Wakes remembers it. It is a vision of a glittering, sinister world in which society has hardened into a caste system and the workers are permanently enslaved. It is also a world without purpose in which the upper castes for whom the workers toil are completely soft, cynical and faithless. There is no consciousness of any object in life, nothing corresponding to the fervour of the revolutionary or the religious martyr.

  In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a sort of postwar parody of the Wellsian Utopia, these tendencies are immensely exaggerated. Here the hedonistic principle is pushed to its utmost, the whole world has turned into a Riviera hotel. But though Brave New World was a brilliant caricature of the present (the present of 1930), it probably casts no light on the future. No society of that kind would last more than a couple of generations, because a ruling class which thought principally in terms of a "good time" would soon lose its vitality. A ruling class has got to have a strict morality, a quasi-religious belief in itself, a mystique. London was aware of this, and though he describes the caste of plutocrats who rule the world for seven centuries as inhuman monsters, he does not describe them as idlers or sensualists. They can only maintain their position while they honestly believe that civilization depends on themselves alone, and therefore in a different way they are just as brave, able and devoted as the revolutionaries who oppose them.

  In an intellectual way London accepted the conclusions of Marxism, and he imagined that the "contradictions" of capitalism, the unconsumable surplus and so forth, would persist even after the capitalist class had organized themselves into a single corporate body. But temperamentally he was very different from the majority of Marxists. With his love of violence and physical strength, his belief in "natural aristocracy", his animal-worship and exaltation of the primitive, he had in him what one might fairly call a Fascist strain. This probably helped him to understand just how the possessing class would behave when once they were seriously menaced.

  It is just here that Marxian Socialists have usually fallen short. Their interpretation of history has been so mechanistic that they have failed to foresee dangers that were obvious to people who had never heard the name of Marx. It is sometimes urged against Marx that he failed to predict the rise of Fascism. I do not know whether he predicted it or not -- at that date he could only have done so in very general terms -- but it is at any rate certain that his followers failed to see any danger in Fascism until they themselves were at the gate of the concentration camp. A year or more after Hitler had risen to power official Marxism was still proclaiming that Hitler was of no importance and "Social Fascism" (i.e. democracy) was the real enemy. London would probably not have made this mistake. His instincts would have warned him that Hitler was dangerous. He knew that economic laws do not operate in the same way as the law of gravity, that they can be held up for long periods by people who, like Hitler, believe in their own destiny.

  The Iron Heel and The Sleeper Wakes are both written from the popular standpoint. Brave New World, though primarily an attack on hedonism, is also by implication an attack on totalitarianism and caste rule. It is interesting to compare them with a less well-known Utopia which treats the class struggle from the upper or rather the middle-class point of view, Ernest Bramah's The Secret of the League.

  The Secret of the League was written in 1907, when the growth of the labour movement was beginning to terrify the middle class, who wrongly imagined that they were menaced from below and not from above. As a political forecast it is trivial, but it is of great interest for the light it casts on t
he mentality of the struggling middle class.

  The author imagines a Labour government coming into office with so huge a majority that it is impossible to dislodge them. They do not, however, introduce a full Socialist economy. They merely continue to operate capitalism for their own benefit by constantly raising wages, creating a huge army of bureaucrats and taxing the upper classes out of existence. The country is therefore "going to the dogs" in the familiar manner; moreover in their foreign politics the Labour Government behave rather like the National Government between 1931 and 1939. Against this there arises a secret conspiracy of the middle and upper classes, the manner of their revolt is very ingenious, provided that one looks upon capitalism as something internal: it is the method of the consumers' strike. Over a period of two years the upper-class conspirators secretly hoard fuel-oil and convert coal-burning plant to oil-burning; then they suddenly boycott the principal British industry, the coal industry. The miners are faced with a situation in which they will be able to sell no coal for two years. There is vast unemployment and distress, ending in civil war, in which (thirty years before General Franco!) the upper classes receive foreign aid. After their victory they abolish the trade unions and institute a "strong" non-parliamentary regime -- in other words a regime that we should now describe as Fascist. The tone of the book is good-natured, as it could afford to be at that date, but the trend of thought is unmistakable.

  Why should a decent and kindly writer like Ernest Bramah find the crushing of the proletariat a pleasant vision? It is simply the reaction of a struggling class which felt itself menaced not so much in its economic position as in its code of conduct and way of life. One can see the same purely social antagonism to the working class in an earlier writer of much greater calibre, George Gissing. Time, and Hitler, have taught the middle classes a great deal, and perhaps they will not again side with their oppressors against their natural allies. But whether they do so or not depends partly on how they are handled, and the stupidity of Socialist propaganda, with its constant baiting of the "petty bourgeois", has a lot to answer for.

  Tribune, 12 July 1940

  12. Letter to James Laughlin

  18 Dorset Chambers

  Chagford Street

  Ivor Place NW1

  16 July 1940

  Dear Mr Laughlin,19

  Many thanks for your letter, which I have only just received. Yes, you may certainly reprint the Henry Miller essay.20 I'm not sure how my contract with my publisher stands, and I have written to him, but I know he won't object. When I've heard from him I'll send you another line confirming this. I trust neither letter will be torpedoed on the way.

  19. James Laughlin, American publisher of New Directions books, editor and writer.

  20. "Inside the Whale" from the book of this title. See I, 164.

  I wonder whether by any chance you know where Henry Miller is. I haven't heard from him since about the beginning of 1939. When this book came out he asked me through someone in England to send him a copy at some American address, and I did so, but never heard whether it got there. His friend Alfred Perles is over here and has joined the British army. As you say, all these projects about books may be blown to pieces by the war. Hitler entered Paris a week or two before a book of mine was due to be reprinted there, and comically enough a few days later I got a demand for income tax which I had been counting on this reprint to pay. I have practically given up writing except for journalism. I can't write with this sort of business going on, and in a few months there is going to be such a severe paper shortage that very few books will be published. In any case I feel that literature as we have known it is coming to an end. Things look rather black at the moment. We are all on our toes waiting for an invasion which quite possibly won't happen. Personally I am much more afraid of Hitler mopping up north Africa and the near East and then making a peace offer. I actually rather hope that the invasion will happen. The local morale is extremely good, and if we are invaded we shall at any rate get rid once and for all of the gang who had got us into this mess. However, I expect you are better informed about European affairs than I am. I will send the confirmation of this letter within a few days. Thanks for writing.

  Yours sincerely

  George Orwell

  13. Charles Reade

  Since Charles Reade's books are published in cheap editions one can assume that he still has his following, but it is unusual to meet anyone who has voluntarily read him. In most people his name seems to evoke, at most, a vague memory of "doing" The Cloister and the Hearth as a school holiday task. It is his bad luck to be remembered by this particular book, rather as Mark Twain, thanks to the films, is chiefly remembered by A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Reade wrote several dull books, and The Cloister and the Hearth is one of them. But he also wrote three novels which I personally would back to outlive the entire works of Meredith and George Eliot, besides some brilliant long-short stories such as A Jack of All Trades and The Autobiography of a Thief.

  What is the attraction of Reade? At bottom it is the same charm as one finds in R. Austin Freeman's detective stories or Lieutenant-Commander Gould's collections of curiosities -- the charm of useless knowledge. Reade was a man of what one might call penny-encyclopaedic learning. He possessed vast stocks of disconnected information which a lively narrative gift allowed him to cram into books which would at any rate pass as novels. If you have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in dates, lists, catalogues, concrete details, descriptions of processes, junk-shop windows and back numbers of the Exchange and Mart, the sort of mind that likes knowing exactly how a medieval catapult worked or just what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then you can hardly help enjoying Reade. He himself, of course, did not see his work in quite this light. He prided himself on his accuracy and compiled his books largely from newspaper cuttings, but the strange facts which he collected were subsidiary to what he would have regarded as his "purpose". For he was a social reformer in a fragmentary way, and made vigorous attacks on such diverse evils as blood-letting, the treadmill, private asylums, clerical celibacy and tight-lacing.

  My own favourite has always been Foul Play, which as it happens is not an attack on anything in particular. Like most nineteenth-century novels Foul Play is too complicated to be summarized, but its central story is that of a young clergyman, Robert Penfold, who is unjustly convicted of forgery, is transported to Australia, absconds in disguise, and is wrecked on a desert island together with the heroine. Here, of course, Reade is in his element. Of all men who ever lived, he was the best fitted to write a desert-island story. Some desert-island stories, of course, are worse than others, but none is altogether bad when it sticks to the actual concrete details of the struggle to keep alive. A list of the objects in a shipwrecked man's possession is probably the surest winner in fiction, surer even than a trial scene. Nearly thirty years after reading the book I can still remember more or less exactly what things the three heroes of Ballantyne's Coral Island possessed between them. (A telescope, six yards of whipcord, a penknife, a brass ring and a piece of hoop iron.) Even a dismal book like Robinson Crusoe, so unreadable as a whole that few people even know that the second part exists, becomes interesting when it describes Crusoe's efforts to make a table, glaze earthenware and grow a patch of wheat. Reade, however, was an expert on desert islands, or at any rate he was very well up in the geography textbooks of the time. Moreover he was the kind of man who would have been at home on a desert island himself. He would never, like Crusoe, have been stumped by such an easy problem as that of leavening bread and, unlike Ballantyne, he knew that civilized men cannot make fire by rubbing sticks together.

  The hero of Foul Play, like most of Reade's heroes, is a kind of superman. He is hero, saint, scholar, gentleman, athlete, pugilist, navigator, physiologist, botanist, blacksmith and carpenter all rolled into one, the sort of compendium of all the talents that Reade honestly imagined to be the normal product of an English university. Needless to say
, it is only a month or two before this wonderful clergyman has got the desert island running like a West End hotel. Even before reaching the island, when the last survivors of the wrecked ship are dying of thirst in an open boat, he has shown his ingenuity by constructing a distilling apparatus with a jar, a hot-water bottle and a piece of tubing. But his best stroke of all is the way in which he contrives to leave the island. He himself, with a price on his head, would be glad enough to remain, but the heroine, Helen Rollestone, who has no idea that he is a convict, is naturally anxious to escape. She asks Robert to turn his "great mind" to this problem. The first difficulty, of course, is to discover exactly where the island is. Luckily, however, Helen is still wearing her watch, which is still keeping Sydney time. By fixing a stick in the ground and watching its shadow Robert notes the exact moment of noon, after which it is a simple matter to work out the longitude -- for naturally a man of his calibre would know the longitude of Sydney. It is equally natural that he can determine the latitude within a degree or two by the nature of the vegetation. But the next difficulty is to send a message to the outside world. After some thought Robert writes a series of messages on pieces of parchment made from seals' bladders, with ink obtained from cochineal insects. He has noticed that migrant birds often use the island as a stopping-place, and he fixes on ducks as the likeliest messengers, because every duck is liable to be shot sooner or later. By a stratagem often used in India he captures a number of ducks, ties a message to each of their legs and lets them go. Finally, of course, one of the ducks takes refuge on a ship, and the couple are rescued, but even then the story is barely half finished. There follow enormous ramifications, plots and counterplots, intrigues, triumphs and disasters, ending with the vindication of Robert, and wedding bells.