You've heard His Nibs decanting year by year
The dim productions of his bulldog brain,
While homes and factories sit still to hear
The same old drivel dished up once again --
You heard the Churches' cartwheels to explain
That bombs are Christian when the English drop them --
The Union bosses scrapping over gain
While no one's the temerity to stop them
Or have the racketeers who try to bleed 'em
Flogged, like the Indians for demanding freedom.
They found you poets -- quite a decent gallery
Of painters who don't let their chances slip;
And writers who prefer a regular salary
To steer their writings by the Party Whip --
Hassall's been tipped to have Laureateship:
Morton is following Goebbels, not St Paul.
There's Elton's squeaky pump still gives a drip,
And Priestley twists his proletarian awl
Cobbling at shoes that Mill and Rousseau wore
And still the wretched tool contrives to bore.
They found you critics -- an astounding crowd:
(Though since their work's living, I won't say
Who howled at Eliot, hooted Treece, were loud
In kicking Auden when he slipped away
Out of the looney-bin to find, they say,
A quiet place where men with minds could write:
But since Pearl Harbour, in a single day
The same old circus chase him, black is white,
And once again by day and night he feels
The packs of tripehounds yelling at his heels).
I say, they found you artists, well selected,
Whom we export to sell the British case:
We keep our allied neighbours well protected
From those who give the thing a different face --
One man's in jail, one in a "medical place";
Another working at a farm with pigs on:
We take their leisure, close their books, say grace,
And like that bus-conducting lad Geoff Grigson
We beat up every buzzard, kite and vulture,
And dish them out to you as English Culture.
Once in a while, to every Man and Nation,
There comes, as Lowell said, a sort of crisis
Between the Ministry of Information
And what your poor artistic soul advises:
They catch the poets, straight from Cam or Isis:
"Join the brigade, or be for ever dumb --
Either cash in your artistic lysis
Or go on land work if you won't succumb:
Rot in the Army, sickened and unwilling":
So you can wonder that they draw their shilling?
You met them all. You don't require a list
Of understrapping ghosts who once were writers --
Who celebrate the size of Britain's fist,
Write notes for sermons, dish out pep to mitres,
Fake letters from the Men who Fly our Fighters.
Cheer when we blast some enemy bungalows --
Think up atrocities, the artful blighters,
To keep the grindstone at the public's nose --
Combining moral uplift and pornography,
Produced with arty paper and typography.
They find their leisure to fulfil their promise,
Their work is praised, funguntur vice cotis,
And Buddy Judas cracks up Doubting Thomas.
Their ways are paved with favourable notice
(Look how unanimous the Tory vote is).
They write in papers and review each other,
You'd never guess how bloody full the boat is;
I shan't forgive MacNeice his crippled brother
Whom just a year ago on New Year's Day
The Germans murdered in a radio play.
O for another Dunciad -- a POPE
To purge this dump with his gigantic boot --
Drive fools to water, aspirin or rope --
Make idle lamp-posts bear their fitting fruit:
Private invective's far too long been mute --
O for another vast satiric comet
To blast this wretched tinder, branch and root.
The servile stuff that makes a true man vomit --
Suck from the works to which they cling like leeches,
Those resurrection-puddings, Churchill's speeches.
God knows -- for there is libel -- I can't name
How many clammy paws of these you've shaken,
Been told our English spirit is the same
From Lord Vansittart back to pseudo-Bacon --
Walked among licensed writers, and were taken
To Grub Street, Malet Street, and Portland Place,
Where every question that you ask will waken
The same old salesman's grin on every face
Among the squads of columbines and flunkeys,
Set on becoming Laureate of Monkeys.
We do not ask, my friend, that you'll forget
The squirts and toadies when you were presented,
The strength-through-joy brigades you will have met
Whose mouths are baggy and whose hair is scented --
Only recall we were not represented.
We wrote our own refusals, and we meant them.
Our work is plastered and ourselves resented --
Our heads are bloody, but we have not bent them.
We hold no licences, like ladies' spaniels;
We live like lions in this den of Daniels.
O friend and writer, deafened by the howls
That dying systems utter, mad with fear
In darkness, with a sinking of the bowels,
Where all the devils of old conscience leer --
Forget the gang that met you on the pier,
Grinning and stuffed with all the old excuses
For starving Europe, and the crocodile tear
Turned on for visitors who have their uses.
We know the capers of the simian crew.
We send our best apologies to you.
Tribune, 4 June 1943
As One Non-Combatant to Another (A Letter to "Obadiah Hornbooke")
O poet strutting from the sandbagged portal
Of that small world where barkers ply their art,
And each new "school" believes itself immortal,
Just like the horse that draws the knacker's cart:
O captain of a clique of self-advancers,
Trained in the tactics of the pamphleteer,
Where slogans serve for thoughts and sneers for answers --
You've chosen well your moment to appear
And hold your nose amid a world of horror
Like Dr Bowdler walking through Gomorrah.
In the Left Book Club days you wisely lay low,
But when "Stop Hitler!" lost its old attraction
You bounded forward in a Woolworth's halo
To cash in on antiwar reaction;
You waited till the Nazis ceased from frightening,
Then, picking a safe audience, shouted "Shame!"
Like a Prometheus you defied the lightning,
But didn't have the nerve to sign your name.5
You're a true poet, but as saint and martyr
You're a mere fraud, like the Atlantic Charter.
5. In a footnote to Orwell's reply the Editor of Tribune stated: "In fairness to 'Mr Hornbooke' it should be stated that he was willing to sign his name if we insisted, but preferred a pseudonym."
Your hands are clean, and so were Pontius Pilate's,
But as for "bloody heads", that's just a metaphor;
The bloody heads are on Pacific islets
Or Russian steppes or Libyan sands -- it's better for
The health to be a C.O. than a fighter,
To chalk a pavement doesn't need much guts,
>
It pays to stay at home and be a writer
While other talents wilt in Nissen huts;
"We live like lions" -- yes, just like a lion,
Pensioned on scraps in a safe cage of iron.
For while you write the warships ring you round
And flights of bombers drown the nightingales,
And every bomb that drops is worth a pound
To you or someone like you, for your sales
Are swollen with those of rivals dead or silent,
Whether in Tunis or the B.B.C.,
And in the drowsy freedom of this island
You're free to shout that England isn't free;
They even chuck you cash, as bears get buns,
For crying "Peace!" behind a screen of guns.
In 'seventeen to snub the nosing bitch
Who slipped you a white feather needed cheek,
But now, when every writer finds his niche
Within some mutual-admiration clique,
Who cares what epithets by Blimps are hurled?
Who'd give a damn if handed a white feather?
Each little mob of pansies is a world,
Cosy and warm in any kind of weather;
In such a world it's easy to "object",
Since that's what both your friends and foes expect.
At times it's almost a more dangerous deed
Not to object; I know, for I've been bitten.
I wrote in nineteen-forty that at need
I'd fight to keep the Nazis out of Britain;
And Christ! how shocked the pinks were! Two years later
I hadn't lived it down; one had the effrontery
To write three pages calling me a "traitor",
So black a crime it is to love one's country.
Yet where's the pink that would have thought it odd of me
To write a shelf of books in praise of sodomy?
Your game is easy, and its rules are plain:
Pretend the war began in 'thirty-nine,
Don't mention China, Ethiopia, Spain,
Don't mention Poles except to say they're swine;
Cry havoc when we bomb a German city,
When Czechs get killed don't worry in the least,
Give India a perfunctory squirt of pity
But don't inquire what happens further East;
Don't mention Jews -- in short, pretend the war is
Simply a racket "got up" by the Tories.
Throw in a word of "anti-Fascist" patter
From time to time, by way of reinsurance,
And then go on to prove it makes no matter
If Blimps or Nazis hold the world in durance;
And that we others who "support" the war
Are either crooks or sadists or flag-wavers
In love with drums and bugles, but still more
Concerned with cadging Brendan Bracken's favours;
Or fools who think that bombs bring back the dead,
A thing not even Harris ever said.
If you'd your way we'd leave the Russians to it
And sell our steel to Hitler as before;
Meanwhile you save your soul, and while you do it,
Take out a long-term mortgage on the war.
For after war there comes an ebb of passion,
The dead are sniggered at -- and there you'll shine,
You'll be the very bull's-eye of the fashion,
You almost might get back to 'thirty-nine,
Back to the dear old game of scratch-my-neighbour
In sleek reviews financed by coolie labour.
But you don't hoot at Stalin -- that's "not done" --
Only at Churchill; I've no wish to praise him,
I'd gladly shoot him when the war is won,
Or now, if there was someone to replace him.
But unlike some, I'll pay him what I owe him;
There was a time when empires crashed like houses,
And many a pink who'd titter at your poem
Was glad enough to cling to Churchill's trousers.
Christ! how they huddled up to one another
Like day-old chicks about their foster-mother!
I'm not a fan for "fighting on the beaches",
And still less for the "breezy uplands" stuff,
I seldom listenin to Churchill's speeches,
But I'd far sooner hear that kind of guff
Than your remark, a year or so ago,
That if the Nazis came you'd knuckle under
And peaceably "accept the status quo".
Maybe you would! But I've a right to wonder
Which will sound better in the days to come,
"Blood, toil and sweat" or "Kiss the Nazi's bum".
But your chief target is the radio hack,
The hired pep-talker -- he's a safe objective,
Since he's unpopular and can't hit back.
It doesn't need the eye of a detective
To look down Portland Place and spot the whores,
But there are men (I grant, not the most heeded)
With twice your gifts and courage three times yours
Who do that dirty work because it's needed;
Not blindly, but for reasons they can balance,
They wear their seats out and lay waste their talents.
All propaganda's lying, yours or mine;
It's lying even when its facts are true;
That goes for Goebbels or the "party line",
Or for the Primrose League or P.P.U.
But there are truths that smaller lies can serve,
And dirtier lies that scruples can gild over;
To waste your brains on war may need more nerve
Than to dodge facts and live in mental clover;
It's mean enough when other men are dying,
But when you lie, it's much to know you're lying.
That's thirteen stanzas, and perhaps you're puzzled
To know why I've attacked you -- well, here's why:
Because your enemies all are dead or muzzled,
You've never picked on one who might reply.
You've hogged the limelight and you've aired your virtue,
While chucking sops to every dangerous faction,
The Left will cheer you and the Right won't hurt you;
What did you risk? Not even a libel action.
If you would show what saintly stuff you're made of,
Why not attack the cliques you are afraid of?
Denounce Joe Stalin, jeer at the Red Army,
Insult the Pope -- you'll get some come-back there;
It's honourable, even if it's barmy,
To stamp on corns all round and never care.
But for the halfway saint and cautious hero,
Whose head's unbloody even if "unbowed",
My admiration's somewhere near to zero;
So my last words would be: Come off that cloud,
Unship those wings that hardly dared to flitter,
And spout your halo for a pint of bitter.
George Orwell
Tribune, 18 June 1943
49. Letter to Alex Comfort
10a Mortimer Crescent
London NW6
Sunday [11? July 1943]
Dear Comfort,
Very many thanks for sending me the copy of New Road.6 I am afraid I was rather rude to you in our Tribune set-to,7 but you yourself weren't altogether polite to certain people. I was only making a political and perhaps moral reply, and as a piece of verse your contribution was immensely better, a thing most of the people who spoke to me about it hadn't noticed. I think no one noticed that your stanzas had the same rhyme going right the way through. There is no respect for virtuosity nowadays. You ought to write something longer in that genre, something like the "Vision of Judgement". I believe there could be a public for that kind of thing again nowadays.
6. New Road: New Directions in European Art and Letters, 1943-9, an occasional anthology of
prose and verse, whose first two numbers were edited by Alex Comfort and John Bayliss.
7. Letter to an American Visitor by "Obadiah Hornbooke" and Orwell's reply.
As to New Road. I am much impressed by the quantity and the general level of the verse you have got together. I should think half the writers were not known to me before. Apropos of Aragon and others, I have thought over what you said about the reviving effect of defeat upon literature and also upon national life. I think you may well be right, but it seems to me that such a revival is only against something, i.e. against foreign oppression, and can't lead beyond a certain point unless that oppression is ultimately to be broken, which must be by military means. I suppose however one might accept defeat in a mystical belief that it will ultimately break down of its own accord. The really wicked thing seems to me to wish for a "negotiated" peace, which means back to 1939 or even 1914. I have written a long article on this for Horizon apropos of Fielden's8 book on India, but I am not certain Connolly will print it.9
8. Lionel Fielden (1896- ), author of Beggar My Neighbour and The Natural Bent; went to India in 1935; Controller of Broadcasting in India 1935-40 which became A.I.R. (All India Radio); returned to the B.B.C. London, 1940, as Indian News Editor.
9. See 51.
I am going to try to get Forster to talk about New Road, together with the latest number of New Writing, in one of his monthly book talks to India. If he doesn't do it this month he might next. There is no sales value there, but it extends your publicity a little and by talking about these things on the air in wartime one has the feeling that one is keeping a tiny lamp alight somewhere. You ought to try to get a few copies of the book to India. There is a small public for such things among people like Ahmed Ali10 and they are starved for books at present. We have broadcast quite a lot of contemporary verse to India, and they are now doing it to China with a commentary in Chinese. We also have some of our broadcasts printed as pamphlets in India and sold for a few annas, a thing that could be useful but is terribly hard to organize in the face of official inertia and obstruction. I saw you had a poem by Tambimuttu.11 If you are bringing out other numbers you ought to get some of the other Indians to write for you. There are several quite talented ones and they are very embittered because they think people snub them and won't print their stuff. It is tremendously important from several points of view to try to promote decent cultural relations between Europe and Asia. Nine tenths of what one does in this direction is simply wasted labour, but now and again a pamphlet or a broadcast or something gets to the person it is intended for, and this does more good than fifty speeches by politicians. William Empson has worn himself out for two years trying to get them to broadcast intelligent stuff to China, and I think has succeeded to some small extent. It was thinking of people like him that made me rather angry about what you said of the B.B.C., though God knows I have the best means of judging what a mixture of whoreshop and lunatic asylum it is for the most part.