A Collection of Essays

  The other important political development during these past months has been the growth of Common Wealth, Sir Richard Acland's party. I mentioned this in earlier letters but underrated its importance. It is now a movement to be seriously reckoned with and is hated by all the other parties alike.

  Acland's programme, which is set forth almost in baby language in many leaflets and pamphlets, could be described as Socialism minus the class war and with the emphasis on the moral instead of the economic motive. It calls for nationalization of all major resources, immediate independence (not Dominion status) for India, pooling of raw materials as between "have" and "have not" countries, international administration of backward areas, and a composite army drawn from as many countries as possible to keep the peace after the war is done. All in all this programme is not less drastic than that of the extremist parties of the Left, but it has some unusual features which are worth noticing, since they explain the advance Common Wealth has made during the past few months.

  In the first place the whole class-war ideology is scrapped. Though all property-owners are to be expropriated, they are to receive fractional compensation -- in effect, the bourgeois is to be given a small life-pension instead of a firing-squad. The idea of "proletarian dictatorship" is specifically condemned: the middle class and the working class are to amalgamate instead of fighting one another. The Party's literature is aimed chiefly at winning over the middle class, both the technical middle class and the "little man" (farmers, shopkeepers, etc.). Secondly, the economic side of the programme lays the emphasis on increasing production rather than equalizing consumption. Thirdly, an effort is made to synthesize patriotism with an internationalist outlook. Stress is laid on the importance of following British tradition and "doing things in our own way". Parliament, apparently, is to be preserved in much its present form, and nothing is said against the Monarchy. Fourthly, Common Wealth does not describe itself as "Socialist" and carefully avoids Marxist phraseology. It declares itself willing to collaborate with any other party whose aims are sufficiently similar. (With the Labour Party the test is that the L.P. shall break the electoral truce.) Fifthly -- and perhaps most important of all -- Common Wealth propaganda has a strong ethical tinge. Its best-known poster consists simply of the words "Is it expedient?" crossed out and replaced by "Is it right?" Anglican priests are much to the fore in the movement though the Catholics seem to be opposing it.

  Whether this movement has a future I am still uncertain, but its growth since I last wrote to you has been very striking. Acland's candidates are fighting by-elections all over the country. Although they have only won two so far, they have effected a big turnover of votes against Government candidates, and what is perhaps more significant, the whole poll seems to rise wherever a Common Wealth candidate appears. The I.L.P. has been conducting a distant flirtation with Common Wealth, but the other Left parties are hostile and perhaps frightened. The usual criticism is that Common Wealth is only making progress because of the electoral truce -- in other words, because the Labour Party is what it is. In addition it is said that the membership of the party is wholly middle class. Acland himself claims to have a good nucleus of followers in the factories and still more in the forces. The Communists, of course, have labelled Common Wealth as Fascist. They and the Conservatives now work together at by-elections.

  The programme I have roughly outlined has elements both of demagogy and of Utopianism, but it takes very much better account of the actual balance of forces than any of the older Left parties have done. It might have a chance of power if another revolutionary situation arises, either through military disaster or at the end of the war. Some who know Acland declare that he has a "fuehrer complex" and that if he saw the movement growing beyond his control he would split it sooner than share authority. I don't believe this to be so, but neither do I believe that Acland by himself could bring a nationwide movement into being. He is not a big enough figure, and not in any way a man of the people. Although of aristocratic and agricultural background (he is a fifteenth baronet) he has the manners and appearance of a civil servant, with a typical upper-class accent. For a popular leader in England it is a serious disability to be a gentleman, which Churchill, for instance, is not. Cripps is a gentleman, but to offset this he has his notorious "austerity", the Gandhi touch, which Acland just misses, in spite of his ethical and religious slant. I think this movement should be watched with attention. It might develop into the new Socialist party we have all been hoping for, or into something very sinister: it has some rather doubtful followers already.

  Finally a word about antisemitism, which could not be said to have reached the stature of a "problem". I said in my last letter that it was not increasing, but I now think it is. The danger signal, which is also a safeguard, is that everyone is very conscious of it and it is discussed interminably in the press.

  Although Jews in England have always been socially looked down on and debarred from a few professions (I doubt whether a Jew would be accepted as an officer in the navy, for instance), antisemitism is primarily a working-class thing, and strongest among Irish labourers. I have had some glimpses of working-class antisemitism through being three years in the Home Guard -- which gives a good cross-section of society -- in a district where there are a lot of Jews. My experience is that middle-class people will laugh at Jews and discriminate against them to some extent, but only among working people do you find the full-blown belief in the Jews as a cunning and sinister race who live by exploiting the Gentiles. After all that has happened in the last ten years it is a fearful thing to hear a working man saying, "Well, I reckon 'Itler done a good job when 'e turned 'em all out," but I have heard just that, and more than once. These people never seem to be aware that Hitler has done anything to the Jews except "turned 'em all out"; the pogroms, the deportations, etc. have simply escaped their notice. It is questionable, however, whether the Jew is objected to as a Jew or simply as a foreigner. No religious consideration enters. The English Jew, who is often strictly orthodox but entirely anglicized in his habits, is less disliked than the European refugee who has probably not been near a synagogue for thirty years. Some people actually object to the Jews on the ground that Jews are Germans!

  But in somewhat different forms antisemitism is now spreading among the middle class as well. The usual formula is "Of course I don't want you to think I'm antisemitic, but --" and here follows a catalogue of Jewish misdeeds. Jews are accused of evading military service, infringing the food laws, pushing their way to the front of queues, etc. etc. More thoughtful people point out that the Jewish refugees use this country as a temporary asylum but show no loyalty towards it. Objectively this is true, and the tactlessness of some of the refugees is almost incredible. (For example, a remark by a German Jewess overheard during the Battle of France: "These English police are not nearly so smart as our S.S. men.") But arguments of this kind are obviously rationalizations of prejudice. People dislike the Jews so much that they do not want to remember their sufferings, and when you mention the horrors that are happening in Germany or Poland, the answer is always "Oh yes, of course that's dreadful, but --" and out comes the familiar list of grievances. Not all of the intelligentsia are immune from this kind of thing. Here the get-out is usually that the refugees are all "petty bourgeois"; and so the abuse of Jews can proceed under a respectable disguise. Pacifists and others who are antiwar sometimes find themselves forced into antisemitism.

  One should not exaggerate the danger of this kind of thing. To begin with, there is probably less antisemitism in England now than there was thirty years ago. In the minor novels of that date you find it taken for granted far oftener than you would nowadays that a Jew is an inferior or a figure of fun. The "Jew joke" has disappeared from the stage, the radio and the comic papers since 1934. Secondly, there is a great awareness of the prevalence of antisemitism and a conscious effort to struggle against it. But the thing remains, and perhaps it is one of the inevitable neuroses of war. I am not particularl
y impressed by the fact that it does not take violent forms. It is true that no one wants to have pogroms and throw elderly Jewish professors into cesspools, but then there is very little crime or violence in England anyway. The milder form of antisemitism prevailing here can be just as cruel in an indirect way, because it causes people to avert their eyes from the whole refugee problem and remain uninterested in the fate of the surviving Jews of Europe. Because two days ago a fat Jewess grabbed your place on the bus, you switch off the wireless when the announcer begins talking about the ghettoes of Warsaw; that's how people's minds work nowadays.

  That is all the political news I have. Life goes on much as before. I don't notice that our food is any different, but the food situation is generally considered to be worse. The war hits one a succession of blows in unexpected places. For a long time razor blades were unobtainable, now it is boot polish. Books are being printed on the most villainous paper and in tiny print, very trying to the eyes. A few people are wearing wooden-soled shoes. There is an alarming amount of drunkenness in London. The American soldiers seem to be getting on better terms with the locals, perhaps having become more resigned to the climate etc. Air raids continue, but on a pitiful scale. I notice that many people feel sympathy for the Germans now that it is they who are being bombed -- a change from 1940, when people saw their houses tumbling about them and wanted to see Berlin scraped off the map.

  George Orwell

  Partisan Review, July-August 1943

  47. Literature and the Left

  "When a man of true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by this infallible Sign, that all the Dunces are in Conspiracy against him." So wrote Jonathan Swift, two hundred years before the publication of Ulysses.

  If you consult any sporting manual or yearbook you will find many pages devoted to the hunting of the fox and the hare, but not a word about the hunting of the highbrow. Yet this, more than any other, is the characteristic British sport, in season all the year round and enjoyed by rich and poor alike, with no complications from either class-feeling or political alignment.

  For it should be noted that in its attitude towards "highbrows" -- that is, towards any writer or artist who makes experiments in technique -- the Left is no friendlier than the Right. Not only is "highbrow" almost as much a word of abuse in the Daily Worker as in Punch, but it is exactly those writers whose work shows both originality and the power to endure that Marxist doctrinaires single out for attack. I could name a long list of examples, but I am thinking especially of Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence and Eliot. Eliot, in particular, is damned in the leftwing press almost as automatically and perfunctorily as Kipling -- and that by critics who only a few years back were going into raptures over the already forgotten masterpieces of the Left Book Club.

  Is you ask a "good party man" (and this goes for almost any party of the Left) what he objects to in Eliot, you get an answer that ultimately reduces to this. Eliot is a reactionary (he has declared himself a royalist, an Anglo-Catholic, etc.), and he is also a "bourgeois intellectual", out of touch with the common man: therefore he is a bad writer. Contained in this statement is a half-conscious confusion of ideas which vitiates nearly all politico-literary criticism.

  To dislike a writer's politics is one thing. To dislike him because he forces you to think is another, not necessarily incompatible with the first. But as soon as you start talking about "good" and "bad" writers you are tacitly appealing to literary tradition and thus dragging in a totally different set of values. For what is a "good" writer? Was Shakespeare "good"? Most people would agree that he was. Yet Shakespeare is, and perhaps was even by the standards of his own time, reactionary in tendency; and he is also a difficult writer, only doubtfully accessible to the common man. What, then, becomes of the notion that Eliot is disqualified, as it were, by being an Anglo-Catholic royalist who is given to quoting Latin?

  Leftwing literary criticism has not been wrong in insisting on the importance of subject-matter. It may not even have been wrong, considering the age we live in, in demanding that literature shall be first and foremost propaganda. Where it has been wrong is in making what are ostensibly literary judgements for political ends. To take a crude example, what Communist would dare to admit in public that Trotsky is a better writer than Stalin -- as he is, of course? To say "X is a gifted writer, but he is a political enemy and I shall do my best to silence him" is harmless enough. Even if you end by silencing him with a tommy-gun you are not really sinning against the intellect. The deadly sin is to say "X is a political enemy: therefore he is a bad writer." And if anyone says that this kind of thing doesn't happen, I answer merely: look up the literary pages of the leftwing press, from the News Chronicle to the Labour Monthly, and see what you find.

  There is no knowing just how much the Socialist movement has lost by alienating the literary intelligentsia. But it has alienated them, partly by confusing tracts with literature, and partly by having no room in it for a humanistic culture. A writer can vote Labour as easily as anyone else, but it is very difficult for him to take part in the Socialist movement as a writer. Both the book-trained doctrinaire and the practical politician will despise him as a "bourgeois intellectual", and will lose no opportunity of telling him so. They will have much the same attitude towards his work as a golfing stockbroker would have. The illiteracy of politicians is a special feature of our age -- as G. M. Trevelyan put it, "In the seventeenth century Members of Parliament quoted the Bible, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the classics, and in the twentieth century nothing" -- and its corollary is the [political] impotence of writers. In the years following the last war the best English writers were reactionary in tendency, though most of them took no direct part in politics. After them, about 1930, there came a generation of writers who tried very hard to be actively useful in the leftwing movement. Numbers of them joined the Communist Party, and got there exactly the same reception as they would have got in the Conservative Party. That is, they were first regarded with patronage and suspicion, and then, when it was found that they would not or could not turn themselves into gramophone records, they were thrown out on their ears. Most of them retreated into individualism. No doubt they still vote Labour, but their talents are lost to the movement; and -- a more sinister development -- after them there comes a new generation of writers who, without being strictly non-political, are outside the Socialist movement from the start. Of the very young writers who are now beginning their careers, the most gifted are pacifists; a few may even have a leaning towards Fascism. There is hardly one to whom the mystique of the Socialist movement appears to mean anything. The ten-year-long struggle against Fascism seems to them meaningless and uninteresting, and they say so frankly. One could explain this in a number of ways, but the contemptuous attitude of the Left towards "bourgeois intellectuals" is likely to be part of the reason.

  Gilbert Murray relates somewhere or other that he once lectured on Shakespeare to a Socialist debating society. At the end he called for questions in the usual way, to receive as the sole question asked: "Was Shakespeare a capitalist?" The depressing thing about this story is that it might well be true. Follow up its implications, and you perhaps get a glimpse of the reason why Celine wrote Mea Culpa and Auden is watching his navel in America.

  Tribune, 4 June 1943

  48. Letter to an American Visitor, by Obadiah Hornbooke4

  4. Pseudonym of Alex Comfort.

  Columbian poet, whom we've all respected

  From a safe distance for a year or two,

  Since first your magnum opus was collected --

  It seems a pity no one welcomed you

  Except the slippery professional few,

  Whose news you've read, whose posters you've inspected;

  Who gave America Halifax, and who

  Pay out to scribes and painters they've selected

  Doles which exceed a fraction of the debts

  Of all our pimps in hardware coronets.

  You've seen the ruins, hea
rd the speeches, swallowed

  The bombed-out hospitals and cripples' schools --

  You've heard (on records) how the workers hollowed

  And read in poker-work GIVE US THE TOOLS:

  You know how, with the steadfastness of mules,

  The Stern Determination of the People

  Goes sailing through a paradise of fools

  Like masons shinning up an endless steeple --

  A climb concluding after many days

  In a brass weathercock that points all ways.

  The land sprouts orators. No doubt you've heard

  How every buffer, fool and patrioteer

  Applies the Power of the Spoken Word

  And shoves his loud posterior in your ear;

  So Monkey Hill competes with Berkeley Square --

  The B.B.C. as bookie, pimp and vet

  Presenting Air Vice-Marshals set to cheer

  Our raided towns with vengeance (though I've yet

  To hear from any man who lost his wife

  Berlin or Lubeck brought her back to life).

  You've heard of fighting on the hills and beaches

  And down the rabbit holes with pikes and bows

  You've heard the Baron's bloody-minded speeches

  (Each worth a fresh Division to our foes)

  That smell so strong of murder that the crows

  Perch on the Foreign Office roof and caw

  For German corpses laid in endless rows,

  "A Vengeance such as Europe never saw" --

  The maniac Baron's future contribution

  To peace perpetual through retribution. . .