A Collection of Essays
5. How aggressive and articulate is big-business reaction today (not Mosley's Blackshirts, but the more solid and serious forces of big capital)? You mention a political swing to the right in the Churchill Government of late months. Does this mean the forces of organized business are climbing back into the saddle?
I don't know what is going on behind the scenes and can only answer this question very generally, thus: laissez-faire capitalism is dead in England and can't revive unless the war ends within the next few months. Centralized ownership and planned production are bound to come. The whole question is who is to be in control. The recent rightward swing means that we are being regimented by wealthy men and aristocrats rather than by representatives of the common people. They will use their power to keep the structure of government on a class basis, manipulate taxation and rationing in their own favour, and avoid a revolutionary war strategy; but not to return to capitalism of the old chaotic kind. The swing of the past six months hasn't meant more economic freedom or profits for the individual businessman -- quite the contrary; but it has meant that you are less likely to get an important job unless you have been to one of the right schools. I have given elsewhere my reasons for thinking that this tendency will change, but that has been the tendency since last autumn.
6. Would you say that Bevin and Morrison still command the support of the British working class? Are there any other Labour Party politicians who have taken on new dimensions in the course of the war -- assuming those two have? Is the shop-steward movement still growing?
I know very little of industrial matters. I should say that Bevin does command working-class support and Morrison probably not. There is a widespread feeling that the Labour Party as a whole has simply abdicated. The only other Labour man whose reputation has grown is Cripps. If Churchill should go, Cripps and Bevin are tipped as the likeliest men for the premiership, with Bevin evidently favourite.
7. How do you explain what, over here, seems to be the remarkable amount of democracy and civil liberties preserved during the war? Labour pressure? British tradition? Weakness of the upper classes?
"British tradition" is a vague phrase, but I think it is the nearest answer. I suppose I shall seem to be giving myself a free advert, but may I draw attention to a recent book of mine, The Lion and the Unicorn (I believe copies have reached the U.S.A.)? In it I pointed out that there is in England a certain feeling of family loyalty which cuts across the class system (also makes it easier for the class system to survive, I am afraid) and checks the growth of political hatred. There could, I suppose, be a civil war in England, but I have never met any English person able to imagine one. At the same time one ought not to overrate the amount of freedom of the intellect existing here. The position is that in England there is a great respect for freedom of speech but very little for freedom of the press. During the past twenty years there has been much tampering, direct and indirect, with the freedom of the press, and this has never raised a flicker of popular protest. This is a lowbrow country and it is felt that the printed word doesn't matter greatly and that writers and such people don't deserve much sympathy. On the other hand the sort of atmosphere in which you daren't talk politics for fear that the Gestapo may be listening isn't thinkable in England. Any attempt to produce it would be broken not so much by conscious resistance as by the inability of ordinary people to grasp what was wanted of them. With the working classes, in particular, grumbling is so habitual that they don't know when they are grumbling. Where unemployment can be used as a screw, men are often afraid of expressing "red" opinions which might get round to the overseer or the boss, but hardly anyone would bother, for instance, about being overheard by a policeman. I believe that an organization now exists for political espionage in factories, pubs, etc. and of course in the army, but I doubt whether it can do more than report on the state of public opinion and occasionally victimize some individual held to be dangerous. A foolish law was passed some time back making it a punishable offence to say anything "likely to cause alarm and despondency" (or words to that effect). There have been prosecutions under it, a few score I should say, but it is practically a dead letter and probably the majority of people don't know of its existence. You can hardly go into a pub or railway carriage without hearing it technically infringed, for obviously one can't discuss the war seriously without making statements which might cause alarm. Possibly at some time a law will be passed forbidding people to listen in to foreign radio stations, but it will never be enforceable.
The British ruling class believe in democracy and civil liberty in a narrow and partly hypocritical way. At any rate they believe in the letter of the law and will sometimes keep to it when it is not to their advantage. They show no sign of developing a genuinely Fascist mentality. Liberty of every kind must obviously decline as a result of war, but given the present structure of society and social atmosphere there is a point beyond which the decline cannot go. Britain may be fascized from without or as a result of some internal revolution, but the old ruling class can't, in my opinion, produce a genuine totalitarianism of their own. Not to put it on any other grounds, they are too stupid. It is largely because they have been unable to grasp the first thing about the nature of Fascism that we are in this mess at all.
8. From over here, it looks as though there had been a very rapid advance towards a totalitarian war economy in the last few months -- rationing spreading wider, Bevin's conscription of certain classes of workers, extension of government controls over business. Is this impression correct? Is the tempo growing more or less rapid? How does the man in the street feel about the efficiency of the war effort? How much does he feel in his daily life the effect of these measures?
Yes, the thing is already happening at great speed and will accelerate enormously in the coming months. In a very little while we shall all be in uniform or doing some kind of compulsory labour, and probably eating communally. I don't believe it will meet with much opposition so long as it hits all classes equally. The rich will squeal, of course -- at present they are manifestly evading taxation, and the rationing hardly affects them -- but they will be brought to heel if the predicament is really desperate. I don't believe that the ordinary man cares a damn about the totalitarianization of our economy, as such. People like small manufacturers, farmers and shopkeepers seem to accept their transition from small capitalists to State employees without much protest, provided that their livelihood is safeguarded. People in England hate the idea of a Gestapo, and there has been a lot of opposition, some of it successful, to official snooping and persecution of political dissidents, but I don't believe economic liberty has much appeal any longer. The changeover to a centralized economy doesn't seem to be altering people's way of life nearly so much as the shift of population, and mingling of classes, consequent on conscription and the bombing. But this may be less true in the industrial North, where on the whole people are working much harder in more trying conditions, and unemployment has practically ceased. What the reaction will be when we begin to experience hunger, as we may within the next few months, I don't prophesy. Apart from the bombing, and the overworking of certain categories of workers, one cannot honestly say that this war has caused much hardship as yet. The people still have more to eat than most European peoples would have in peacetime.
9. What war aims does the left-and-labour movement now agree on? How sanguine are you about these aims being carried out? How much pressure is there now on the Government to proclaim Socialist war aims? On the question of war aims, of policy towards Europe and Germany in the event of victory, does there seem to be any radical difference between the Labour and Tory members of the Churchill Government? How definite are the plans for the "social rebuilding" of England after the war?
I haven't space to answer this question properly, but I think you can take it that the Labour Party, as such, has now no policy genuinely independent of the Government. Some people even think that the Left Conservatives (Eden, and possibly Churchill) are more likely to adopt
a Socialist policy than the Labour men. There are constant appeals to the Government to declare its war aims, but these come from individuals and are not the official act of the Labour Party. There is no sign that the Government has any detailed or even general postwar plan. Nevertheless the feeling that after the war "things will be different" is so widespread that though, of course, the future England may be worse than that of the past, a return to Chamberlain's England is not thinkable even if it is technically possible.
10. Would you say that the masses, working-class and middle-class, are more or less enthusiastically behind the present Government than in May 1940? Are they more or less behind the war effort in general?
So far as the Government goes, less enthusiastically, but not very greatly so. This Government came in with a degree of popular support which is quite unusual. In its home policy it has disappointed expectations, but not so grossly as governments usually do. Churchill's personal popularity will have waned somewhat, but he still has a bigger following than any premier of the last twenty years. As to the war, I don't believe there is much variation. People are fed up, but nothing to what one might expect. But one can't speak with certainty of this till after the coming crisis, which will be of a different nature, less intelligible, perhaps harder to bear, than that of a year ago.
I hope that answers your questions. It is a bit over the length you allowed me, I am afraid. All well here, or fairly well. We had hell's own bombing last night, huge fires raging all over the place and a racket of guns that kept one awake half the night. But it doesn't matter, the hits were chiefly on theatres and fashionable shops, and this morning it is a beautiful spring day, the almond trees are in blossom, postmen and milk carts wandering to and fro as usual, and down at the corner the inevitable pair of fat women gossiping beside the pillar-box. The best of luck to you all.
Postscript (15 May 1941)
The chief events since I wrote on 15 April have been the British defeats in Libya and Greece, and the general worsening of the situation in the Middle East, with Iraq in revolt, Stalin evidently preparing to go into closer partnership with Hitler, and Darlan getting ready to let German troops into Syria. There has also, within the last two days, been the mysterious arrival of Hess, which has caused much amusement and speculation but which it is too early to comment on.
The question that matters is whether the disastrous turn the war has taken will lead to a further growth of democractic sentiment, as happened last year. I am afraid one must say that the chances are against this. The reason why the Dunkirk campaign and the collapse of France impressed public opinion, and did a great deal of good, was that these things were happening close at hand. There was the immediate threat of invasion, and there were the soldiers coming home in hundreds of thousands to tell their families how they had been let down. This time the thing is happening far away, in countries that the average person neither knows nor cares anything about -- the ordinary British working man hasn't the faintest notion that the Suez Canal has anything to do with his own standard of living -- and if the troops who got away from Greece have tales to tell they are telling them in Egypt and Palestine. Also, no one expected the Greek campaign to be anything but a disaster. Long before any official announcement was made it was known that we had troops in Greece, and I could find no one of whatever kind who believed that the expedition would be successful; on the other hand, nearly everyone felt that it was our duty to intervene. It is generally recognized that as yet, i.e. until we have an up-to-date army, we can't fight the Germans on the continent of Europe, but at the same time "we couldn't let the Greeks down". The English people have never been infected with power-worship and don't feel the futility of this sort of gesture as a continental people probably would. I can see no sign anywhere of any big swing of opinion. In the parliamentary debate on the Greek campaign the attack on the Government was led by envious throw-outs like Lloyd George, and instead of being a proper discussion the debate was easily twisted into a demand for a vote of confidence, which on the whole the Government deserves -- at any rate it deserves it in the sense that no alternative government is at present possible. The repercussions which are probably happening in Australia, however, may do something towards democratizing the conduct of the war. People here are beginning to say that the next leftward push must come from America. It is suggested, for instance, that Roosevelt might make it a condition of further help that the British Government do something about India. You are better able than I am to judge whether this is likely.
The air raids continue. To the ordinary people this is the part of the war that matters, in fact it is the war, but their stolidity is surprising. There was a sidelight on the popular mind which probably did not get into the American press, and which may interest you, in a recent by-election in Birmingham. A dissident Conservative who called himself a "reprisals candidate" ran against the Government's nominee. His claim was that we should concentrate on bombing German civilians to avenge what has been done here. Canon Stuart Morris, one of the leading lights in the Peace Pledge Union, also ran on a pacifist ticket. The respective slogans of the three candidates were "Bomb Berlin", "Stop the War" and "Back Churchill". The government man got about 15,000 votes and the other two about 1,500 each. The whole poll was probably low, but considering the times we live in I think these figures are encouraging.
George Orwell
Partisan Review, July-August 1941
20. The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda
I am speaking on literary criticism, and in the world in which we are actually living that is almost as unpromising as speaking about peace. This is not a peaceful age, and it is not a critical age. In the Europe of the last ten years literary criticism of the older kind -- criticism that is really judicious, scrupulous, fair-minded, treating a work of art as a thing of value in itself -- has been next door to impossible.
If we look back at the English literature of the last ten years, not so much at the literature as at the prevailing literary attitude, the thing that strikes us is that it has almost ceased to be aesthetic. Literature has been swamped by propaganda. I do not mean that all the books written during that period have been bad. But the characteristic writers of the time, people like Auden and Spender and MacNeice, have been didactic, political writers, aesthetically conscious, of course, but more interested in subject-matter than in technique. And the most lively criticism has nearly all of it been the work of Marxist writers, people like Christopher Caudwell and Philip Henderson and Edward Upward, who look on every book virtually as a political pamphlet and are far more interested in digging out its political and social implications than in its literary qualities in the narrow sense.
This is all the more striking because it makes a very sharp and sudden contrast with the period immediately before it. The characteristic writers of the nineteen-twenties -- T. S. Eliot, for instance, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf -- were writers who put the main emphasis on technique. They had their beliefs and prejudices, of course, but they were far more interested in technical innovations than in any moral or meaning or political implication that their work might contain. The best of them all, James Joyce, was a technician and very little else, about as near to being a "pure" artist as a writer can be. Even D.H. Lawrence, though he was more of a "writer with a purpose" than most of the others of his time, had not much of what we should now call social consciousness. And though I have narrowed this down to the nineteen-twenties, it had really been the same from about 1890 onwards. Throughout the whole of that period, the notion that form is more important than subject-matter, the notion of "art for art's sake", had been taken for granted. There were writers who disagreed, of course -- Bernard Shaw was one -- but that was the prevailing outlook. The most important critic of the period, George Saintsbury, was a very old man in the nineteen-twenties, but he had a powerful influence up to about 1930, and Saintsbury had always firmly upheld the technical attitude to art. He claimed that he himself could and did judge any book solely on its execution, its man
ner, and was very nearly indifferent to the author's opinions.