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In many languages, it is said, there is no nonsense poetry, and there is not a great deal of it even in English. The bulk of it is in nursery rhymes and scraps of folk poetry, some of which may not have been strictly nonsensical at the start, but have become so because their original application has been forgotten. For example, the rhyme about Margery Daw:

See-saw, Margery Daw,
Dobbin shall have a new master.
He shall have but a penny a day
Because he can’t go any faster.

Or the other version that I learned in Oxfordshire as a little boy:

See-saw, Margery Daw,
Sold her bed and lay upon straw.
Wasn’t she a silly slut
To sell her bed and lie upon dirt?

It may be that there was once a real person called Margery Daw, and perhaps there was even a Dobbin who somehow came into the story. When Shakespeare makes Edgar in King Lear quote ‘Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill’, and similar fragments, he is uttering nonsense, but no doubt these fragments come from forgotten ballads in which they once had a meaning. The typical scrap of folk poetry which one quotes almost unconsciously is not exactly nonsense but a sort of musical comment on some recurring event, such as ‘One a penny, two a penny, Hot-Cross buns’, or ‘Polly, put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea’. Some of these seemingly frivolous rhymes actually express a deeply pessimistic view of life, the churchyard wisdom of the peasant. For instance:

Solomon Grundy,
Born on Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
And that was the end of Solomon Grundy.

which is a gloomy story, but remarkably similar to yours or mine.

Until Surrealism made a deliberate raid on the unconscious, poetry that aimed at being nonsense, apart from the meaningless refrains of songs, does not seem to have been common. This gives a special position to Edward Lear, whose nonsense rhymes have just been edited by Mr R. L. Megroz[1], who was also responsible for the Penguin edition a year or two before the war. Lear was one of the first writers to deal in pure fantasy, with imaginary countries and made-up words, without any satirical purposes. His poems are not all of them equally nonsensical; some of them get their effect by a perversion of logic, but they are all alike in that their underlying feeling is sad and not bitter. They express a kind of amiable lunacy, a natural sympathy with whatever is weak and absurd. Lear could fairly be called the originator of the limerick, though verses in almost the same metrical form are to be found in earlier writers, and what is sometimes considered a weakness in his limericks — that is, the fact that the rhyme is the same in the first and last lines — is part of their charm. The very slight change increases the impression of ineffectuality, which might be spoiled if there were some striking surprise. For example:

There was a young lady of Portugal
Whose ideas were excessively nautical;
She climbed up a tree
To examine the sea,
But declared she would never leave Portugal.

It is significant that almost no limericks since Lear’s have been both printable and funny enough to seem worth quoting. But he is really seen at his best in certain longer poems, such as ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ or ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’:

On the Coast of Coromandel,
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
Two old chairs, and half a candle
One old jug without a handle
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,
These were all the worldly goods
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

Later there appears a lady with some white Dorking hens, and an inconclusive love affair follows. Mr Megroz thinks, plausibly enough, that this may refer to some incident in Lear’s own life. He never married, and it is easy to guess that there was something seriously wrong in his sex life. A psychiatrist could no doubt find all kinds of significance in his drawings and in the recurrence of certain made-up words such as “runcible”. His health was bad, and as he was the youngest of twenty-one children in a poor family, he must have known anxiety and hardship in very early life. It is clear that he was unhappy and by nature solitary, in spite of having good friends.

Aldous Huxley, in praising Lear’s fantasies as a sort of assertion of freedom, has pointed out that the ‘They’ of the limericks represent common sense, legality and the duller virtues generally. ‘They’ are the realists, the practical men, the sober citizens in bowler hats who are always anxious to stop you doing anything worth doing. For instance:

There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,
Who danced a quadrille with a raven;
But they said, ‘It’s absurd
To encourage this bird!’
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.

To smash somebody just for dancing a quadrille with a raven is exactly the kind of thing that ‘They’ would do. Herbert Read has also praised Lear, and is inclined to prefer his verse to that of Lewis Carroll, as being purer fantasy. For myself, I must say that I find Lear funniest when he is least arbitrary and when a touch of burlesque or perverted logic makes its appearance. When he gives his fancy free play, as in his imaginary names, or in things like ‘Three Receipts for Domestic Cookery’, he can be silly and tiresome. ‘The Pobble Who Has No Toes’ is haunted by the ghost of logic, and I think it is the element of sense in it that makes it funny. The Pobble, it may be remembered, went fishing in the Bristol Channel:

And all the Sailors and Admirals cried,
When they saw him nearing the further side —
‘He has gone to fish, for his Aunt Jobiska’s
Runcible Cat with crimson whiskers!’

The thing that is funny here is the burlesque touch, the Admirals. What is arbitrary — the word ‘runcible’, and the cat’s crimson whiskers — is merely rather embarrassing. While the Pobble was in the water some unidentified creatures came and ate his toes off, and when he got home his aunt remarked:

‘It’s a fact the whole world knows,
That Pobbles are happier without their toes,’

which once again is funny because it has a meaning, and one might even say a political significance. For the whole theory of authoritarian governments is summed up in the statement that Pobbles were happier without their toes. So also with the well-known limerick:

There was an Old Person of Basing,
Whose presence of mind was amazing;
He purchased a steed,
Which he rode at full speed,
And escaped from the people of Basing.

It is not quite arbitrary. The funniness is in the gentle implied criticism of the people of Basing, who once again are ‘They’, the respectable ones, the right-thinking, art-hating majority.

The writer closest to Lear among his contemporaries was Lewis Carroll, who, however, was less essentially fantastic — and, in my opinion, funnier. Since then, as Mr Megroz points out in his Introduction, Lear’s influence has been considerable, but it is hard to believe that it has been altogether good. The silly whimsiness of present-day children’s books could perhaps be partly traced back to him. At any rate, the idea of deliberately setting out to write nonsense, though it came off in Lear’s case, is a doubtful one. Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals. As a comic draughtsman, on the other hand, Lear’s influence must have been beneficial. James Thurber, for instance, must surely owe something to Lear, directly or indirectly.

Tribune, 21 December 1945

Notes

The Lear Omnibus edited by R. L. Megroz

Further reading:

• Orwell and poetry

• Robert Gray: Orwell vs God (The Spectator)

George Orwell (Eric Blair) is not generally thought of as a religious man. His final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a tale of grim despair, hardly a message to cheer the true believer. It is both sadistic and nihilistic. And even in his famous fairy tale, Animal Farm, religion is represented cynically as ‘lies put about by Moses the tame Raven’ about a supposed animal paradise. In another novel (A Clergyman’s Daughter) he has a Satanic unfrocked priest reciting The Lord’s Prayer backwards while holding an inverted crucifix.

Yet he retained a strong religious streak and a strange affection for the Anglican Church into which he was born, an affection that persisted to the end of his life.

Blair’s paternal grandfather was Vicar of Milborne St. Andrew in Dorset.  He himself was born in Bengal in 1903 and baptised at the Anglican Church of St John in the Wilderness in Motihari. Aged four months he was brought to England, settling with his mother and elder sister at Henley-on-Thames.  Most biographers have him being first taught by Anglican nuns there, but diocesan and local records reveal that the only convent in Henley at that time was run by French Ursulines, forbidden to teach in France.

Having been educated by Catholic nuns in an all-girls school probably explains Orwell’s lifelong antipathy to the Catholic Church and perhaps also his acknowledged misogyny.  Two fleeting and sardonic references seem to evoke the shadowy Ursulines, one (in A Clergyman’s Daughter) to ‘nuns in convents, scrubbing floors and singing Ave Marias, secretly unbelieving’, the other (in a letter to a girlfriend, Brenda Salkeld) rather more subversive:

When we were children we had a story that after Robin Hood was done to death in the Priory, his men raped & murdered the nuns, & burned the priory to the ground. It seems this has no foundation in the ballads —  we must have made it up.  An instance of the human instinct for a happy ending.

As he saw it, the Catholic Inquisition provided the model for both fascist and communist totalitarianism, and gauleiters and commissars were just the priests and emissaries of a new and cruel religion of power.  In Coming Up For Air he wrote, ‘You never read about a Spanish Inquisitor or one of these higher‑ups in the Russian Ogpu without being told that in private life he was such a good kind man, best of husbands and fathers, devoted to his tame canary and so forth.’ The parallel is more fully and closely drawn by O’Brien, Big Brother’s inquisitor, in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

After an unhappy prep school education in Eastbourne, he won a scholarship to Eton, where he was finally prepared for confirmation by the headmaster, King George’s chaplain, Cyril Alington.  In the chapel at Eton in November 1918, he was confirmed by Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford.  However, by this time, according to his friend Cyril Connolly, he had renounced not just God, but Empire, Kipling, Sussex, and Character, reading Butler and Shaw and embracing atheistic socialism in true Shavian style.  At Eton he became known as ‘the College Cynic’, a type denounced from the Chapel pulpit as ‘a real stinker’.

In true ‘Orwellian’ fashion he satirized his tutors, claiming, ‘There are at least six masters on the staff who are making a very good living out of the Crucifixion.’ And, telling a green young Colleger that he was collecting the religions of new boys, he asked, ‘Are you Cyrenaic, Sceptic, Epicurean, Cynic, Neoplatonist, Confucian or Zoroastrian?’  ‘I’m a Christian,’ came the reply. ‘Oh,’ said Blair, ‘We haven’t had that before.’

His Aunt Nellie, a Suffragette friend of Emmeline Pankhurst, ran a literary salon in Notting Hill, and there he met such left-wing luminaries as G.K. Chesterton and the children’s author, E. Nesbitt.  One friend made through Aunt Nellie was Conrad Noel, then a curate in Paddington, but famous later as the ‘Red’ Vicar of Thaxted who flew the Red Flag from his church tower.  Interestingly enough, Noel spent his spare time visiting the ‘spikes’ and lodging-houses used by London’s down-and-outs, a practise for which ‘George Orwell’ was to become famous in the 30s.

From 1922 to 1927 he worked as an Imperial Policeman in Burma, finally resigning, sickened by the violence he was required to use to keep the native population in its place.  In search of expiation, he descended into the Lower Depths, and joined the tramps and down-and-outs who congregated around London.

Gradually he got started as a writer, supplementing his income by teaching and afterwards by working in a bookshop.  Interestingly enough, wherever he was — with his family in Suffolk, teaching at a school in Middlesex, or running a village store in Hertfordshire — he invariably made friends with the local clergy.  They, after all, were often the most educated members of the community, and, according to Orwell, vicarages had some of the best libraries in England.

In 1932, while teaching in Hayes and researching A Clergyman’s Daughter, his second novel, he became friendly with the curate of St Mary’s (Ernest Parker — ‘High Anglican but not a creeping Jesus,’ he told Eleanor Jaques). He organized a school play at the Church Hall and helped refurbish some church statuary, all of which found its way into his novel.

In October that year, he told Brenda Salkeld, ‘I take in the Church Times regularly now & like it more every week.  I do so like to see that there is life in the old dog yet — I mean in the poor old C. of E.  I shall have to go to Holy Communion soon, hypocritical tho’ it is, because my curate friend is bound to think it funny if I always go to Church but never communicate. What is the procedure? I have almost forgotten it…You have to go fasting, do you not? And what about being in mortal sin? I wish you would prompt me. It seems rather mean to go to H.C. when one doesn’t believe, but I have passed myself off for pious & there is nothing for it but to keep up the deception.’

In those pre-war years religion exercised him a great deal, and he especially enjoyed taunting Catholic apologists.  Reviewing Karl Adam’s The Spirit of Catholicism in June 1932, he wrote, ‘The contrast between the Catholic who simply believes, and the convert who must for ever be justifying his conversion, is like the contrast between a Buddha and a performing fakir.’  Afterwards, he told a girlfriend, ‘It was the first time I had been able to lay the bastinado on a professional R.C. at any length.’  By comparison with what he considered a cruelly-repressive and unforgiving Catholicism, he saw Anglicanism as a kinder, gentler more liberating faith.  He spoke of ‘the poor old inoffensive Church of England’, identified himself strongly with the sixteenth century Anglican martyrs and attributed the emergence of the novel (the highest manifestation of the liberated imagination, he thought) to the Protestant Reformation.

He equated the extremes of Catholicism with those of Communism, and the bold attacks on Catholicism in which he took so much pleasure, demonstrated how focussed and intense this antipathy had become.  Jon Kimche, who worked with him at the Booklover’s Corner bookshop in 1935, recalled that Orwell’s conversation at that time were little more than diatribes against Roman Catholicism.  This antipathy at time bordered on paranoia, and he told his flatmate, Rayner Heppenstall, that ‘Vatican spies are everywhere’.  This fear of being spied upon was later transferred to the Communists — with good cause, it transpired.

Later, he complained about the Times’s attacks on Bertrand Russell over birth control and its eulogizing of a certain Anglo-Catholic poet.  In 1936 he wrote mockingly in a book review: ‘The editorial staff of the “Church Times” gnash their false teeth and quake in their galoshes at the mention of “modern” (i.e., post-Tennysonian) poetry, but strange to say they make an exception of T. S. Eliot’ — its ‘spoiled darling’.  By 1943, however, he was applauding the paper, which had, he said, ‘for some years past been a mildly leftwing paper and politically quite intelligent’ — a plaudit indeed from one of the twentieth century’s shrewdest political commentators.

In June 1936, he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy at St Mary’s Church at Wallington in Hertfordshire.  Eileen, an Oxford graduate who had been taught by J.R.R. Tolkien and had been Head Girl at the Sunderland Church High School for Girls, arranged for the clergyman she had known as a child in South Shields (John Woods, then Vicar of St Mark’s) to conduct the marriage ceremony.  To Orwell’s surprise, she had also arranged for the ceremony to be doctored so that she was not required to ‘obey’ her new husband. After marrying, they settled down to run the Wallington village store.

He found the Church a continual source of amusement.  In August 1937 just after returning wounded from fighting with the anti-clerical Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, he wrote to an old comrade, ‘This afternoon Eileen and I had a visit from the vicar [Vernon Rossborough], who doesn’t at all approve of our having been on the Government side.  Of course we had to own up that it was true about the burning of the churches, but he cheered up a lot on hearing they were only Roman Catholic churches.’

Orwell’s main argument against religion was that it turned individuals into pawns, hampered progress towards socialism, and opened the way to dictatorship.  ‘As long as supernatural beliefs persist, men can be exploited by cunning priests and oligarchs, and the technical progress which is the prerequisite of a just society cannot be achieved.’ Belief in God, he thought, was all too easily replaced by belief in a Stalin, a Hitler or Mussolini. Once the belief in an afterlife was lost, the alternative hope for an earthly Utopia played directly into the hands of cruel dictators. The omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Big Brother is the very symbolic of such a manufactured Deity.  He targeted other false gods, of course, including nationalism and racism, imperialism and, inevitably, capitalism.  Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a full-frontal assault on what he calls ‘the money-god and all its swinish priesthood’.

Possessed of an acute social conscience, Orwell agonized over the proper basis for a modern morality.  He stressed what he thought was the highest moral value, human decency, sympathizing with Swift — ‘His attitude is in effect the Christian attitude, minus the bribe of a “next world”‘ — and citing Marx, who did not simply say that ‘Religion is the opium of the people’, but also that it was ‘the sigh of the soul in a soulless world’.  The idea of a soulless, meaningless, entirely materialist world, he found unacceptable.  ‘We have got to be the children of God,’ he concluded, ‘even though the God of the Prayer Book no longer exists.’

His second marriage to Sonia Brownell was sadly a deathbed marriage. It was conducted three months before his death, ‘according to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Established Church of England’ in his private ward at London’s University College Hospital by the hospital chaplain, William Braine.  The cynical Malcolm Muggeridge observed ‘George had developed TB in order to be married by a clergyman which otherwise he’d never have had the face to do.’

Many were surprised that in his will, signed just before his death from tuberculosis in January 1950, he asked to be buried according to the rites of the Church of England.  However, as he approached the Great Unknown, he could have been closer to his Creator than anyone imagined.  In late 1949, in a letter from his hospital bed to Malcolm Muggeridge, he enclosed a newspaper advertisement which had, he said, upset him. It was for Wolsey socks, and read, ‘Wolsey socks — Fit for the gods.’  Wasn’t  that blasphemous? he asked.   It is just conceivable that for Orwell, the atheist and Old Etonian Cynic, his relationship with the Almighty had suddenly mellowed.  One of his last hospital visitors noticed that he was reading the first volume of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

His friends Muggeridge and Anthony Powell arranged a public funeral service for him at Christ Church, Albany Street.  Most of his friends who attended were unbelievers and the service was somewhat ragged, by all accounts.  There were readings from Ecclesiastes and the hymns, ‘All people that on earth do dwell’, ‘Guide me, O thou great Jehovah’, and ‘Ten thousand times ten thousand’, Orwell’s favourites, were sung.  Powell found the occasion ‘very harrowing’, and, because Orwell was so tall and the coffin therefore very long, Muggeridge thought it extremely poignant.

David Astor, the Observer editor and close friend of Orwell’s, tried to have him buried at a church at Clivedon, his family seat, but the vicar refused him as an unbeliever.  Astor had better luck at Sutton Courtenay where he was a regular worshipper.  The vicar, Gordon Dunstan, however, felt that he must first consult his church wardens.  Initially, one, a farmer, was a bit reluctant until Dunstan showed him a copy of Animal Farm, and he agreed immediately.

Now came the funeral of Eric Blair, the mystery man behind the famous name.  Only a handful attended, and he was duly interred between Herbert Asquith, the great Liberal Prime Minister and a family of local gypsies — a fitting resting place for a man who mingled with the poor and despised and yet whose writing was to make such a great political impact.

On his gravestone is written the simple inscription, ‘Eric Blair 1903-1950’, but he wrote his own epitaph in a poem which seems to say more about his relationship with the Anglican Church than anything else he wrote, and reflects the fact that during ‘the low dishonest decade’ of the 1930s it became difficult for a man of conscience like Orwell to remain detached from the political fray.

A happy vicar I might have been

Two hundred years ago,

To preach upon eternal doom

And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,

I missed that pleasant haven,

For the hair has grown on my upper lip

And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

© Gordon Bowker 2003. Revised 2011. This is a modified version of an article originally published by the Church Times, and is reproduced by kind permission of the author.

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate. The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere. 

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious – i.e. seriously intended ­– writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ – a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake’s ‘Tiger, Tiger’. At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. I also, about twice, attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d’occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed – at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week – and helped to edit school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous “story” about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my “story” ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a matchbox, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf,’ etc., etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost –

So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee,

which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in ­– at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful business men – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature – taking your ‘nature’ to be the state you have attained when you are first adult – I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma:

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago,
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girls’ bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them;
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. ‘Why did you put in all that stuff?’ he said. ‘You’ve turned what might have been a good book into journalism.’ What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

Gangrel, No. 4, Summer 1946

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Hawkins I have always doubted if there is such a thing as proletarian literature — or ever could be.[1] The first question is what people mean by it. What do you mean by it? You would expect it to mean literature written specifically for the proletariat, and read by them, but does it?

Orwell No, obviously not. In that case the most definitely proletarian literature would be some of our morning papers. But you can see by the existence of publications like New Writing, or the Unity Theatre, for instance, that the term has a sort of meaning, though unfortunately there are several different ideas mixed up in it. What people mean by it, roughly speaking, is a literature in which the viewpoint of the working class, which is supposed to be completely different from that of the richer classes, gets a hearing. And that, of course, has got mixed up with Socialist propaganda. I don’t think the people who throw this expression about mean literature written by proletarians. W. H. Davies was a proletarian, but he would not be called a proletarian writer. Paul Potts would be called a proletarian writer, but he is not a proletarian. The reason why I am doubtful of the whole conception is that I don’t believe the proletariat can create an independent literature while they are not the dominant class. I believe that their literature is and must be bourgeois literature with a slightly different slant. After all, so much that is supposed to be new is simply the old standing on its head. The poems that were written about the Spanish Civil War, for instance, were simply a deflated version of the stuff that Rupert Brooke and Co. were writing in 1914.

Hawkins Still, I think one must admit that the cult of proletarian literature — whether the theory is right or not — has had some effect. Look at writers like James Hanley, for instance, or Jack Hilton, or Jack Common. They have something new to say — something at any rate that could not quite be said by anyone who had the ordinary middle-class upbringing. Of course there was a tremendous amount of cant about proletarian literature in the years after the Slump, when Bloomsbury went all Marxist, and Communism became fashionable. But the thing had really started earlier. I should say it started just before the last war, when Ford Madox Ford, the editor of the English Review, met D. H. Lawrence and saw in him the portent of a new class finding expression in literature. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers really did break new ground. It recorded a kind of experience that simply had not got into print before. And yet it was an experience that had been shared by millions of people. The question is why it had never been recorded earlier. Why would you say there had been no books like Sons and Lovers before that time?

Orwell I think it is simply a matter of education. After all, though Lawrence was the son of a coal miner he had had an education that was not very different from that of the middle class. He was a university graduate, remember. Before a certain date — roughly speaking, before the nineties, when the Education Act began to take effect — very few genuine proletarians could write: that is, write with enough facility to produce a book or a story. On the other hand the professional writers knew nothing about proletarian life. One feels this even with a really radical writer like Dickens. Dickens does not write about the working class; he does not know enough about them. He is for the working class, but he feels himself completely different from them — far more different than the average middle-class person would feel nowadays.

Hawkins Then, after all, the appearance of the proletariat as a class capable of producing books means a fresh development of literature — completely new subject-matter, and a new slant on life?

Orwell Yes, except in so far as the experience of all classes in society tends to become more and more alike. I maintain that the class distinctions in a country like England are now so unreal that they cannot last much longer. Fifty years ago or even twenty years ago a factory worker and a small professional man, for instance, were very different kinds of creature. Nowadays they are very much alike, though they may not realize it. They see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes, and they wear very similar clothes and live in very similar houses. What used to be called a proletarian — what Marx would have meant by a proletarian — only exists now in the heavy industries and on the land. All the same, there’s no doubt that it was a big step forward when the facts of working-class life were first got onto paper. I think it has done something to push fiction back towards realities and away from the over-civilized stuff that Galsworthy and so forth used to write. I think possibly the first book that did this was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists; which has always seemed to me a wonderful book, although it is very clumsily written. It recorded things that were everyday experience but which simply had not been noticed before — just as, so it is said, no one before AD 1800 ever noticed that the sea was blue. And Jack London was another pioneer in the same line.

Hawkins And how about language and technique? Cyril Connolly, you may remember, said last week that the great innovations in literature have been made in technique rather than in content. As an example, he said that there is nothing new in Joyce except his technique. But surely these revolutionary proletarians have not shown much interest in technique? Some of them seem to be little different in manner from the pious moralizing lady novelists of the last century. Their revolt is entirely in content, in theme — is that so?

Orwell I think in the main that’s true. It’s a fact that written English is much more colloquial now than it was twenty years ago, and that’s all to the good. But we’ve borrowed much more from America than from the speech of the English working class. As for technique, one of the things that strikes one about the proletarian writers, or the people who are called proletarian writers, is how conservative they are. We might make an exception of Lionel Britton’s [2] Hunger and Love. But if you look through a volume of New Writing or the Left Review you won’t find many experiments.

Hawkins Then we come back to this: that what is called proletarian literature stands or falls by its subject-matter. The mystique behind these writers, I suppose, is the class war, the hope of a better future, the struggle of the working class against miserable living conditions.

Orwell Yes, proletarian literature is mainly a literature of revolt. It can’t help being so.

Hawkins And my quarrel with it has always been that it is too much dominated by political considerations. I believe politicians and artists do not go well together. The goal of a politician is always limited, partial, short-term, over-simplified. It has to be, to have any hope of realization. As a principle of action, it cannot afford to consider its own imperfections and the possible virtues of its opponents. It cannot afford to dwell on the pathos and the tragedy of all human endeavour. In short, it must exclude the very things that are valuable in art. Would you agree therefore that when proletarian literature becomes literature it ceases to be proletarian — in the political sense? Or that when it becomes propaganda it ceases to be literature?

Orwell I think that’s putting it too crudely. I have always maintained that every artist is a propagandist. I don’t mean a political propagandist. If he has any honesty or talent at all he cannot be that. Most political propaganda is a matter of telling lies, not only about the facts but about your own feelings. But every artist is a propagandist in the sense that he is trying, directly or indirectly, to impose a vision of life that seems to him desirable. I think we are broadly agreed about the vision of life that proletarian literature is trying to impose. As you said just now, the mystique behind it is the class war. That is something real; at any rate, it is something that is believed in. People will die for it as well as write about it. Quite a lot of people died for it in Spain. My point about proletarian literature is that though it has been important and useful so far as it went, it isn’t likely to be permanent or to be the beginning of a new age in literature. It is founded on the revolt against capitalism, and capitalism is disappearing. In a Socialist state, a lot of our left-wing writers — people like Edward Upward, Christopher Caudwell, Alec Brown, Arthur Calder-Marshall and all the rest of them — who have specialized in attacking the society they live in, would have nothing to attack. Just to revert for a moment to a book I mentioned above, Lionel Brittain’s Hunger and Love. This was an outstanding book and I think in a way it is representative of proletarian literature. Well, what is it about? It is about a young proletarian who wishes he wasn’t a proletarian. It simply goes on and on about the intolerable conditions of working-class life, the fact that the roof leaks and the sink smells and all the rest of it. Now, you couldn’t found a literature on the fact that the sink smells. As a convention it isn’t likely to last so long as the siege of Troy. And behind this book, and lots of others like it, you can see what is really the history of a proletarian writer nowadays. Through some accident — very often it is simply due to having a long period on the dole — a young man of the working class gets a chance to educate himself. Then he starts writing books, and naturally he makes use of his early experiences, his sufferings under poverty, his revolt against the existing system, and so forth. But he isn’t really creating an independent literature. He writes in the bourgeois manner, in the middle-class dialect. He is simply the black sheep of the bourgeois family, using the old methods for slightly different purposes. Don’t mistake me. I’m not saying that he can’t be as good a writer as anyone else; but if he is, it won’t be because he is a working man but because he is a talented person who has learnt to write well. So long as the bourgeoisie are the dominant class, literature must be bourgeois. But I don’t believe that they will be dominant much longer, or any other class either. I believe we are passing into a classless period, and what we call proletarian literature is one of the signs of the change. But I don’t deny for an instant the good that it has done — the vitalizing effect of getting working-class experience and working-class values on to paper.

Hawkins And, of course, as a positive gain, it has left behind quite a lot of good books.

Orwell Oh yes, lots. Jack London’s book The Road, Jack Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks, Jim Phelan’s prison books, George Garrett’s sea stories, Private Richards’s Old Soldier Sahib, James Hanley’s Grey Children — to name just a few.

Hawkins All this time we have said nothing about the literature that the proletariat does read — not so much the daily papers, but the weeklies, the twopennies.

Orwell Yes, I should say that the small weekly press is much more representative. Papers like Home Chat or the Exchange and Mart, and Cage-Birds, for instance.

Hawkins And the literature that really comes out of the people themselves — we have said nothing about that. Take, for instance, the camp-fire ballads of the men who built the Canadian Pacific Railway; the sea shanties; Negro poems like ‘Stagolee’; and the old street broadsheets — especially the ones about executions, the sort of thing that must have inspired Kipling’s ‘Danny Deever’. And epitaphs, limericks, advertisement jingles — sticking simply to poetry, those are the special literature of the proletariat, aren’t they?

Orwell Yes, and don’t forget the jokes on the comic coloured postcards, especially Donald McGill’s. I’m particularly attached to those. And above all the songs that the soldiers made up and sang for themselves in the last war. And the army songs for bugle calls and military marches — those are the real popular poetry of our time, like the ballads in the Middle Ages. It’s a pity they are always unprintable.[3]

Hawkins Yes, but I’m afraid now we are drifting into folk literature, and it seems to me that we must keep the two things distinct. From what you say I imagine that this word ‘proletarian’ is going to be quite meaningless if you detach it from revolutionary politics.

Orwell Yes, the term ‘proletariat’ is a political term belonging solely to the industrial age.

Hawkins Well, I think we are completely in agreement that the theory of a separate proletarian literature just doesn’t work. For all its apparent difference it comes within the framework of what you call bourgeois writing.

Orwell By ‘bourgeois’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ I don’t mean merely the people who buy and sell things. I mean the whole dominant culture of our time.

Hawkins If we agree about that, we have still got to assess the contribution that these so-called proletarian writers have made. Because it is a contribution and it would be absurd to pass that over in disposing of the theory.

Orwell I think they have made two kinds of contribution. One is that they have to some extent provided new subject-matter, which has also led other writers who are not of the working class to look at things which were under their noses, but not noticed, before. The other is that they have introduced a note of what you might call crudeness and vitality. They have been a sort of voice in the gallery, preventing people from becoming too toney and too civilized.

Hawkins And then there’s another contribution, which you yourself mentioned earlier, and that is language. T. S. Eliot stressed the importance of constantly drawing newly minted words into the language, and in recent years it is pre-eminently from the working class that new words and phrases have come. It may be from the film or the street or through any channel, but the proletarian writer deserves credit for giving modern English much of its raciness and colour.

Orwell Well, of course, the question is whether it has got much colour! But the thing you can say for the typical prose of the last ten years is that it has not got many frills or unnecessary adjectives. It’s plain. It is rather questionable whether the sort of prose that has developed in this way is suitable for expressing very subtle thoughts, but it is excellent for describing action, and it is a good antidote to the over-refined type of prose which used to be fashionable — very good in its way, of course, but tending to emasculate the language altogether.

Hawkins Well, to conclude — it looks as if the slogan of proletarian literature has made a nice rallying-point for some work that was well worth having and it has been a focus for working-class writers, whether they were revolutionary or not, either in technique or in politics or in subject. But the phrase itself as a critical term is virtually useless.

Orwell It has had a certain use as a label for a rather heterogeneous literature belonging to a transition period, but I do agree with you that for there to be what could really be called a proletarian literature the proletariat would have to be the dominant class.

Hawkins Yes, and in assuming that it would certainly have to change its character. And that still leaves open the question we have only just touched on — how far can politics be introduced into art without spoiling the art?

Notes

‘The Writer in the Witness-Box’, discussion between George Orwell and Desmond Hawkins. Broadcast on the BBC Home Service, 6 December 1940. Published in The Listener, 19 December 1940.

According to biographer D. J. Taylor, the young Orwell displayed ‘an enthusiasm for poetry that in [his] formative years seems to have been as least as strong as any desire to write fiction’. Orwell’s poetry is not among his best known – or most highly praised – work, but nonetheless shares similar concerns to (and displays the dry sense of humour present in) his prose. Mere foothills in the range of Orwell’s work perhaps – but building up to the summits later scaled.

Poems by Orwell

• A dressed man and a naked man (1933)
• A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been (1935)
• Dear Friend, allow me for a little while (c. 1927, flickr)
• Kitchener
• My Love and I (flickr)
• On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory (1934)
• Romance (1925, flickr)
• Sometimes in the middle autumn days (The Adelphi, 1933)
• St Andrew’s Day, 1935 (also published in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936)
• Suggested by a Tooth Paste Advertisement (c. 1918-1919)
• Summer-like for an instant (1933)
• The Italian Soldier Shook My Hand (1939, first published in ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, 1943)
• The Lesser Evil (1922-27, flickr)
• The Pagan (1918)
• The Photographer (1920, flickr)
• The Wounded Cricketer (not by Walt Whitman – c. 1920, flickr)
• When the Franks Have Lost Their Sway (c. 1927, flickr)

Essays by Orwell

• Nonsense Poetry (Tribune, 1945)
• Poetry and the microphone (New Saxon Pamphlet, 1945)
• W. B. Yeats (Horizon, 1943)
• Inside the Whale (1932)
• Rudyard Kipling (Horizon, 1942)
  • (In response to T.S. Eliot)

Other works by Orwell

• Voice – a magazine programme, episode 6 (BBC Indian Service, 1942)

More about Orwell and poetry

• D. J. Taylor: Orwell’s poetry (originally published by Finlay Publisher)