On the whole the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the
opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics. For any writer
who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is
sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up. It
is, of course, possible to toe the line and go on writing--after a
fashion. Any Marxist can demonstrate with the greatest of ease that
'bourgeois' liberty of thought is an illusion. But when he has finished
his demonstration there remains the psychological FACT that without this
'bourgeois' liberty the creative powers wither away. In the future a
totalitarian literature may arise, but it will be quite different from
anything we can now imagine. Literature as we know it is an individual
thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship. And this is
even truer of prose than of verse. It is probably not a coincidence that
the best writers of the thirties have been poets. The atmosphere of
orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely
ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. How
many Roman Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one could
name have usually been bad Catholics. The novel is practically a
Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the
autonomous individual. No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has
been so barren of imaginative prose as the nineteen-thirties. There have
been good poems, good sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but
practically no fiction of any value at all. From 1933 onwards the mental
climate was increasingly against it. Anyone sensitive enough to be
touched by the ZEITGEIST was also involved in politics. Not everyone, of
course, was definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone
was on its periphery and more or less mixed up in propaganda campaigns
and squalid controversies. Communists and near-Communists had a
disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It was a time
of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments you were expected
to lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies; at the best a
sort of voluntary censorship ('Ought I to say this? Is it pro-Fascist?')
was at work in nearly everyone's mind. It is almost inconceivable that
good novels should be written in such an atmosphere. 'Good novels are not
written by by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken
about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are NOT
FRIGHTENED. This brings me back to Henry Miller.
III
If this were a likely, moment for the launching of 'schools' literature,
Henry Miller might be the starting-point of a new 'school'. He does at
any rate mark an unexpected swing of the pendulum. In his books one gets
right away from the 'political animal' and back to a viewpoint not only
individualistic but completely passive--the view-point of a man who
believes the world-process to be outside his control and who in any case
hardly wishes to control it.
I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris
on my way to Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he
felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in
forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an
idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish
motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such
things FROM A SENSE OBLIGATION was sheer stupidity. In any case my Ideas
about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all
baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by
something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human--a
prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is
implicit throughout his work. Everywhere there is the sense of the
approaching cataclysm, and almost everywhere the implied belief that it
doesn't matter. The only political declaration which, so far as I know,
he has ever made in print is a purely negative one. A year or so ago an
American magazine, the MARXIST QUARTERLY, sent out a questionnaire to
various American writers asking them to define their attitude on the
subject of war. Miller replied in terms of extreme pacifism, an
individual refusal to fight, with no apparent wish to convert others to
the same opinion--practically, in fact, a declaration of
irresponsibility.
However, there is more than one kind of irresponsibility. As a rule,
writers who do not wish to identify themselves with the historical
process at the moment either ignore it or fight against if. If they can
ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can understand it well enough
to want to fight against it, they probably have enough vision to realize
that they cannot win. Look, for instance, at a poem like 'The Scholar
Gipsy', with its railing against the 'strange disease of modern life' and
its magnificent defeatist simile is the final stanza. It expresses one of
the normal literary attitudes, perhaps actually the prevailing attitude
during the last hundred years. And on the other hand there are the
'progressives', the yea-sayers, the Shaw-Wells type, always leaping
forward to embrace the ego-projections which they mistake for the future.
On the whole the writers of the twenties took the first line and the
writers of the thirties the second. And at any given moment, of course,
there is a huge tribe of Barries and Deepings and Dells who simply don't
notice what is happening. Where Miller's work is symptomatically
important is in its avoidance of any of these attitudes. He is neither
pushing the world-process forward nor trying to drag it back, but on the
other hand he is by no means ignoring it. I should say that he believes
in the impending ruin of Western Civilization much more firmly than the
majority of 'revolutionary' writers; only he does not feel called upon to
do anything about it. He is fiddling While Rome is burning, and, unlike
the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face
towards the flames.
In MAX AND THE WHITE PHAGOCYTES there is one of those revealing passages
in which a writer tells you a great deal about himself while talking
about somebody else. The book includes a long essay on the diaries of
Anais Nin, which I have never read, except for a few fragments, and which
I believe have not been published. Miller claims that they are the only
true feminine writing that has ever appeared, whatever that may mean. But
the interesting passage is one in which he compares Anais Nin--evidently
a completely subjective, introverted writer--to Jonah in the whale's
belly. In passing he refers to an essay that Aldous Huxley wrote some
years ago about El Greco's picture, The Dream of Philip the Second.
Huxley remarks that the people in El Greco's pictures always look as
though they were in the bellies of whales, and professes to find
something peculiarly horrible in the idea of being in a 'visceral
br />
prison'. Miller retorts that, on the contrary, there are many worse
things than being swallowed by whales, and the passage makes it dear that
he himself finds the idea rather attractive. Here he is touching upon
what is probably a very widespread fantasy. It is perhaps worth noticing
that everyone, at least every English-speaking person, invariably speaks
of Jonah and the WHALE. Of course the creature that swallowed Jonah was a
fish, and was so described in the Bible (Jonah i. 17), but children
naturally confuse it with a whale, and this fragment of baby-talk is
habitually carried into later life--a sign, perhaps, of the hold that
the Jonah myth has upon our imaginations. For the fact is that being
inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought. The
historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to escape, but
in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of
course, quite obvious why. The whale's belly is simply a womb big enough
for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly
fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to
keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what
HAPPENS. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would
hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale's own movements would
probably be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface
waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile
deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the
difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of
irresponsibility. And however it may be with Anais Nin, there is no
question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most
characteristic passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing
Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted--quite the contrary. In his
case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to
alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the
essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining
passive, ACCEPTING.
It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism,
implying either complete unbelief or else a degree of belief amounting to
mysticism. The attitude is 'JE M'EN FOUS' or 'Though He slay me, yet will
I trust in Him', whichever way you like to look at it; for practical
purposes both are identical, the moral in either case being 'Sit on your
bum'. But in a time like ours, is this a defensible attitude? Notice that
it is almost impossible to refrain from asking this question. At the
moment of writing, we are still in a period in which it is taken for
granted that books ought always to be positive, serious, and
'constructive'. A dozen years ago this idea would have been greeted with
titters. ('My dear aunt, one doesn't write about anything, one just
WRITES.') Then the pendulum swung away from the frivolous notion that art
is merely technique, but it swung a very long distance, to the point of
asserting that a book can only be 'good' if it is founded on a 'true'
vision of life. Naturally the people who believe this also believe that
they are in possession of the truth themselves. Catholic critics, for
instance, tend to claim that books arc only 'good' when they are of
Catholic tendency. Marxist critics make the same claim more boldly for
Marxist books. For instance, Mr Edward Upward ('A Marxist Interpretation
of Literature,' in the MIND IN CHAINS):
Literary criticism which aims at being Marxist must...proclaim that no
book written at the present time can be 'good' unless it is written from
a Marxist or near-Marxist viewpoint.
Various other writers have made similar or comparable statements. Mr
Upward italicizes 'at the present time' because, he realizes that you
cannot, for instance, dismiss HAMLET on the ground that Shakespeare was
not a Marxist. Nevertheless his interesting essay only glances very
shortly at this difficulty. Much of the literature that comes to us out
of the past is permeated by and in fact founded on beliefs (the belief in
the immortality of the soul, for example) which now seem to us false and
in some cases contemptibly silly. Yet if is 'good' literature, if
survival is any test. Mr Upward would no doubt answer that a belief which
was appropriate several centuries ago might be inappropriate and
therefore stultifying now. But this does not get one much farther,
because it assumes that in any age there will be ONE body of belief which
is the current approximation to truth, and that the best literature of
the time will be more or less in harmony with it. Actually no such
uniformity has ever existed. In seventeenth-century England, for
instance, there was a religious and political cleavage which distinctly
resembled the left-right antagonism of to-day. Looking back, most modern
people would feel that the bourgeois-Puritan viewpoint was a better
approximation to truth than the Catholic-feudal one. But it is certainly
not the case that all or even a majority of the best writers of the time
were puritans. And more than this, there exist 'good' writers whose
world-view would in any age be recognized false and silly. Edgar Allan
Poe is an example. Poe's outlook is at best a wild romanticism and at
worst is not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense. Why is
it, then that stories like The Black Cat, The Tell-tale Heart, The Fall
of the House of Usher and so forth, which might very nearly have been
written by a lunatic, do not convey a feeling of falsity? Because they
are true within a certain framework, they keep the rules of their own
peculiar world, like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to write
successfully about such a world you have got to believe in it. One sees
the difference immediately if one compares Poe's TALES with what is, in
my opinion, an insincere attempt to work up a similar atmosphere, Julian
Green's MINUIT. The thing that immediately strikes one about MINUIT is
that there is no reason why any of the events in it should happen.
Everything is completely arbitrary; there is no emotional sequence. But
this is exactly what one does NOT feel with Poe's stories. Their maniacal
logic, in its own setting, is quite convincing. When, for instance, the
drunkard seizes the black cat and cuts its eye out with his penknife, one
knows exactly WHY he did it, even to the point of feeling that one would
have done the same oneself. It seems therefore that for a creative writer
possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
Even Mr Upward would not claim that a writer needs nothing beyond a
Marxist training. He also needs a talent. But talent, apparently, is a
matter of being able to care, of really BELIEVING in your beliefs,
whether they are true or false. The difference between, for instance,
C?line and Evelyn Waugh is a difference of emotional intensity. It is the
difference between genuine despair and a despair that is at least partly
a pretence. And with this there go
es another consideration which is
perhaps less obvious: that there are occasions when an 'untrue' belief is
more likely to be sincerely held than a 'true' one.
If one looks at the books of personal reminiscence written about the war
of 1914-18, one notices that nearly all that have remained readable after
a lapse of time are written from a passive, negative angle. They are the
records of something completely meaningless, a nightmare happening in a
void. That was not actually the truth about the war, but it was the truth
about the individual reaction. The soldier advancing into a machine-gun
barrage or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that here
was an appalling experience in which he was all but helpless. He was
likelier to make a good book out of his helplessness and his ignorance
than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in perspective. As
for the books that were written during the war itself, the best of them
were nearly all the work of people who simply turned their backs and
tried not to notice that the war was happening. Mr E. M. Forster has
described how in 1917 he read Prufrock and other of Eliot's early poems,
and how it heartened him at such a time to get hold of poems that were
'innocent of public-spiritedness':
They sang of private disgust and diffidence, and of people who seemed
genuine because they were unattractive or weak...Here was a protest,
and a feeble one, and the more congenial for being o feeble...He who
could turn aside to complain of ladies and drawing rooms preserved a tiny
drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human heritage.
That is very well said. Mr MacNeice, in the book I have referred to
already, quotes this passage and somewhat smugly adds:
Ten years later less feeble protests were to be made by poets and the
human heritage carried on rather differently...The contemplation of a
world of fragments becomes boring and Eliot's successors are more
interested in tidying it up.
Similar remarks are scattered throughout Mr MacNeice's book. What he
wishes us to believe is that Eliot's 'successors' (meaning Mr MacNeice
and his friends) have in some way 'protested' more effectively than Eliot
did by publishing Prufrock at the moment when the Allied armies were
assaulting the Hindenburg Line. Just where these 'protests' are to be
found I do not know. But in the contrast between Mr Forster's comment and
Mr MacNeice's lies all the difference between a man who knows what the
1914-18 war was like and a man who barely remembers it. The truth is that
in 1917 there was nothing that a thinking and a sensitive person could
do, except to remain human, if possible. And a gesture of helplessness,
even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had been a
soldier fighting in the Great War, I would sooner have got hold of
Prufrock than THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND or Horatio Bottomley's LETTERS
TO THE BOYS IN THE TRENCHES. I should have felt, like Mr Forster, that by
simply standing aloof and keeping touch with pre-war emotions, Eliot was
carrying on the human heritage. What a relief it would have been at such
a time, to read about the hesitations of a middle-aged highbrow with a
bald spot! So different from bayonet-drill! After the bombs and the
food-queues and the recruiting-posters, a human voice! What a relief!
But, after all, the war of 1914-18 was only a heightened moment in an
almost continuous crisis. At this date it hardly even needs a war to
bring home to us the disintegration of our society and the increasing
helplessness of all, decent people. It is for this reason that I think
that the passive, non-co-operative attitude implied in Henry Miller's
work is justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people
OUGHT to feel, it probably comes somewhere near to expressing what they
DO feel. Once again it is the human voice among the bomb-explosions, a
friendly American voice, 'innocent of public-spiritedness'. No sermons,