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One striking fact about English literature during the present century is the extent to which it has been dominated by foreigners — for example, Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats, Pound and Eliot. Still, if you chose to make this a matter of national prestige and examine our achievement in the various branches of literature, you would find that England made a fairly good showing until you came to what may be roughly described as political writing, or pamphleteering. I mean by this the special class of literature that has arisen out of the European political struggle since the rise of Fascism. Under this heading novels, autobiographies, books of ‘reportage’, sociological treatises and plain pamphlets can all be lumped together, all of them having a common origin and to a great extent the same emotional atmosphere.

Some of the outstanding figures in this school of writers are Silone, Malraux, Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koestler himself. Some of these are imaginative writers, some not, but they are all alike in that they are trying to write contemporary history, but unofficial history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied about in the newspapers. Also they are all alike in being continental Europeans. It may be an exaggeration, but it cannot be a very great one, to say that whenever a book dealing with totalitarianism appears in this country, and still seems worth reading six months after publication, it is a book translated from some foreign language. English writers, over the past dozen years, have poured forth an enormous spate of political literature, but they have produced almost nothing of aesthetic value, and very little of historical value either. The Left Book Club, for instance, has been running ever since 1936. How many of its chosen volumes can you even remember the names of? Nazi Germany, Soviet Russian, Spain, Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia — all that these and kindred subjects have produced, in England, are slick books of reportage, dishonest pamphlets in which propaganda is swallowed whole and then spewed up again, half digested, and a very few reliable guide books and text-books. There has been nothing resembling, for instance, Fontamara or Darkness at Noon, because there is almost no English writer to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside. In Europe, during the past decade and more, things have been happening to middle-class people which in England do not even happen to the working class. Most of the European writers I mentioned above, and scores of others like them, have been obliged to break the law in order to engage in politics at all; some of them have thrown bombs and fought in street battles, many have been in prison or the concentration camp, or fled across frontiers with false names and forged passports. One cannot imagine, say, Professor Laski indulging in activities of that kind. England is lacking, therefore, in what one might call concentration-camp literature. The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion, torture, and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved of, but it has made very little emotional impact. One result of this is that there exists in England almost no literature of disillusionment about the Soviet Union. There is the attitude of ignorant disapproval, and there is the attitude of uncritical admiration, but very little in between. Opinion on the Moscow sabotage trials, for instance, was divided, but divided chiefly on the question of whether the accused were guilty. Few people were able to see that, whether justified or not, the trials were an unspeakable horror. And English disapproval of the Nazi outrages has also been an unreal thing, turned on and off like a tap according to political expediency. To understand such things one has to be able to imagine oneself as the victim, and for an Englishman to write Darkness at Noon would be as unlikely an accident as for a slave-trader to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Koestler’s published work really centres about the Moscow trials. His main theme is the decadence of revolutions owing to the corrupting effects of power, but the special nature of the Stalin dictatorship has driven him back into a position not far removed from pessimistic Conservatism. I do not know how many books he has written in all. He is a Hungarian whose earlier books were written in German, and five books have been published in England: Spanish Testament, The Gladiators, Darkness at Noon, Scum of the Earth, and Arrival and Departure. The subject-matter of all of them is similar, and none of them ever escapes for more than a few pages from the atmosphere of nightmare. Of the five books, the action of three takes place entirely or almost entirely in prison.

In the opening months of the Spanish Civil War Koestler was the News Chronicle‘s correspondent in Spain, and early in 1937 he was taken prisoner when the Fascists captured Malaga. He was nearly shot out of hand, then spent some months imprisoned in a fortress, listening every night to the roar of rifle fire as batch after batch of Republicans was executed, and being most of the time in acute danger of execution himself. This was not a chance adventure which ‘might have happened to anybody’, but was in accordance with Koestler’s life-style. A politically indifferent person would not have been in Spain at that date, a more cautious observer would have got out of Malaga before the Fascists arrived, and a British or American newspaper man would have been treated with more consideration. The book that Koestler wrote apart about this, Spanish Testament, has remarkable passages, but apart from the scrappiness that is usual in a book of reportage, it is definitely false in places. In the prison scenes Koestler successfully establishes the nightmare atmosphere which is, so to speak, his patent, but the rest of the book is too much coloured by the Popular Front orthodoxy of the time. One or two passages even look as though they had been doctored for the purposes of the Left Book Club. At that time Koestler still was, or recently had been, a member of the Communist Party, and the complex politics of the civil war made it impossible for any Communist to write honestly about the internal struggle on the Government side. The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onward is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian. In 1937 Koestler already knew this, but did not feel free to say so. He came much nearer to saying it — indeed, he did say it, though he put on a mask to do so — in his next book, The Gladiators, which was published about a year before the war and for some reason attracted very little attention.

The Gladiators is in some ways an unsatisfactory book. It is about Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator who raised a slaves’ rebellion in Italy round about 65 B.C., and any book on such a subject is handicapped by challenging comparison with Salammbô. In our own age it would not be possible to write a book like Salammbô, even if one had the talent. The great thing about Salammbô, even more important than its physical detail, is this utter mercilessness. Flaubert could think himself into the stony cruelty of antiquity, because in the mid-nineteenth century one still had peace of mind. One had time to travel in the past. Nowadays the present and the future are too terrifying to be escaped from, and if one bothers with history it is in order to find modern meanings there. Koestler makes Spartacus into an allegorical figure, a primitive version of the proletarian dictator. Whereas Flaubert has been able, by a prolonged effort of the imagination, to make his mercenaries truly pre-Christian, Spartacus is a modern man dressed up. But this might not matter if Koestler were fully aware of what his allegory means. Revolutions always go wrong — that is the main theme. It is on the question of why they go wrong that he falters, and his uncertainty enters into the story and makes the central figures enigmatic and unreal.

For several years the rebellious slaves are uniformly successful. Their numbers swell to a hundred thousand, they over-run great areas of Southern Italy, they defeat one punitive expedition after another, they ally themselves with the pirates who at that time were the masters of the Mediterranean, and finally they set to work to build a city of their own, to be named the City of the Sun. In this city human beings are to be free and equal, and above all, they are to be happy: no slavery, no hunger, no injustice, no floggings, no executions. It is the dream of a just society which seems to haunt the human imagination ineradicably and in all ages, whether it is called the Kingdom of Heaven or the classless society, or whether it is thought of as a Golden Age which once existed in the past and from which we have degenerated. Needless to say, the slaves fail to achieve it. No sooner have they formed themselves into a community than their way of life turns out to be as unjust, laborious and fear-ridden as any other. Even the cross, symbol of slavery, has to be revived for the punishment of malefactors. The turning-point comes when Spartacus finds himself obliged to crucify twenty of his oldest and most faithful followers. After that the City of the Sun is doomed, the slaves split up and are defeated in detail, the last fifteen thousand of them being captured and crucified in one batch.

The serious weakness of this story is that the motives of Spartacus himself are never made clear. The Roman lawyer Fulvius, who joins the rebellion and acts as its chronicler, sets forth the familiar dilemma of ends and means. You can achieve nothing unless you are willing to use force and cunning, but in using them you pervert your original aims. Spartacus, however, is not represented as power hungry, nor, on the other hand, as a visionary. He is driven onwards by some obscure force which he does not understand, and he is frequently in two minds as to whether it would not be better to throw up the whole adventure and flee to Alexandria while the going is good. The slaves’ republic is in any case wrecked rather by hedonism than by the struggle for power. The slaves are discontented with their liberty because they still have to work, and the final break-up happens because the more turbulent and less civilized slaves, chiefly Gauls and Germans, continue to behave like bandits after the republic has been established. This may be a true account of events — naturally we know very little about the slave rebellions of antiquity — but by allowing the Sun City to be destroyed because Crixus the Gaul cannot be prevented from looting and raping, Koestler has faltered between allegory and history. If Spartacus is the prototype of the modern revolutionary — and obviously he is intended as that — he should have gone astray because of the impossibility of combining power with righteousness. As it is, he is an almost passive figure, acted upon rather than acting, and at times not convincing. The story partly fails because the central problem of revolution has been avoided or, at least, has not been solved.

It is again avoided in a subtler way in the next book, Koestler’s masterpiece, Darkness at Noon. Here, however, the story is not spoiled, because it deals with individuals and its interest is psychological. It is an episode picked out from a background that does not have to be questioned. Darkness at Noon describes the imprisonment and death of an Old Bolshevik, Rubashov, who first denies and ultimately confesses to crimes which he is well aware he has not committed. The grown-upness, the lack of surprise or denunciation, the pity and irony with which the story is told, show the advantage, when one is handling a theme of this kind, of being a European. The book reaches the stature of tragedy, whereas an English or American writer could at most have made it into a polemical tract. Koestler has digested his material and can treat it on the aesthetic level. At the same time his handling of it has a political implication, not important in this case but likely to be damaging in later books.

Naturally the whole book centres round one question: Why did Rubashov confess? He is not guilty — that is, not guilty of anything except the essential crime of disliking the Stalin régime. The concrete acts of treason in which he is supposed to have engaged are all imaginary. He has not even been tortured, or not very severely. He is worn down by solitude, toothache, lack of tobacco, bright lights glaring in his eyes, and continuous questioning, but these in themselves would not be enough to overcome a hardened revolutionary. The Nazis have previously done worse to him without breaking his spirit. The confessions obtained in the Russian state trials are capable of three explanations:

1. That the accused were guilty.
2. That they were tortured, and perhaps blackmailed by threats to relatives and friends.
3. That they were actuated by despair, mental bankruptcy and the habit of loyalty to the Party.

For Koestler’s purpose in Darkness at Noon 1 is ruled out, and though this is not the place to discuss the Russian purges, I must add that what little verifiable evidence there is suggests that the trials of the Bolsheviks were frame-ups. If one assumes that the accused were not guilty — at any rate, not guilty of the particular things they confessed to — then 2 is the common-sense explanation. Koestler, however, plumps for 3, which is also accepted by the Trotskyist Boris Souvarine, in his pamphlet Cauchemar en U.R.S.S.. Rubashov ultimately confesses because he cannot find in his own mind any reason for not doing so. Justice and objective truth have long ceased to have any meaning for him. For decades he has been simply the creature of the Party, and what the Party now demands is that he shall confess to non-existent crimes. In the end, though he had to be bullied and weakened first, he is somewhat proud of his decision to confess. He feels superior to the poor Czarist officer who inhabits the next cell and who talks to Rubashov by tapping on the wall. The Czarist officer is shocked when he learns that Rubashov intends to capitulate. As he sees it from his ‘bourgeois’ angle, everyone ought to stick to his guns, even a Bolshevik. Honour, he says, consists in doing what you think right. ‘Honour is to be useful without fuss,’ Rubashov taps back; and he reflects with a certain satisfaction that he is tapping with his pince-nez while the other, the relic of the past, is tapping with a monocle. Like Bukharin, Rubashov is ‘looking out upon black darkness’. What is there, what code, what loyalty, what notion of good and evil, for the sake of which he can defy the Party and endure further torment? He is not only alone, he is also hollow. He has himself committed worse crimes than the one that is now being perpetrated against him. For example, as a secret envoy of the Party in Nazi Germany, he has got rid of disobedient followers by betraying them to the Gestapo. Curiously enough, if he has any inner strength to draw upon, it is the memories of this boyhood when he was the son of a landowner. The last thing he remembers, when he is shot from behind, is the leaves of poplar trees on his father’s estate. Rubashov belongs to the older generation of Bolsheviks that was largely wiped out in the purges. He is aware of art and literature, and of the world outside Russia. He contrasts sharply with Gletkin, the young G.P.U. man who conducts his interrogation, and who is the typical ‘good party man’, completely without scruples or curiosity, a thinking gramophone. Rubashov, unlike Gletkin, does not have the Revolution as his starting-point. His mind was not a blank sheet when the Party got hold of it. His superiority to the other is finally traceable to his bourgeois origin.

One cannot, I think, argue that Darkness at Noon is simply a story dealing with the adventures of an imaginary individual. Clearly it is a political book, founded on history and offering an interpretation of disputed events. Rubashov might be called Trotsky, Bukharin Rakovky or some other relatively civilized figure among the Old Bolsheviks. If one writes about the Moscow trials one must answer the question, ‘Why did the accused confess?’ and which answer one makes is a political decision. Koestler answers, in effect, ‘Because these people had been rotted by the Revolution which they served’, and in doing so he comes near to claiming that revolutions are of their nature bad. If one assumes that the accused in the Moscow trials were made to confess by means of some kind of terrorism, one is only saying that one particular set of revolutionary leaders has gone astray. Individuals, and not the situation, are to blame. The implication of Koestler’s book, however, is that Rubashov in power would be no better than Gletkin: or rather, only better in that his outlook is still partly pre-revolutionary. Revolution, Koestler seems to say, is a corrupting process. Really enter into the Revolution and you must end up as either Rubashov or Gletkin. It is not merely that ‘power corrupts’: so also do the ways of attaining power. Therefore, all efforts to regenerate society by violent means lead to the cellars of the O.G.P.U., Lenin leads to Stalin, and would have come to resemble Stalin if he had happened to survive.

Of course, Koestler does not say this explicitly, and perhaps is not altogether conscious of it. He is writing about darkness, but it is darkness at what ought to be noon. Part of the time he feels that things might have turned out differently. The notion that so-and-so has ‘betrayed’, that things have only gone wrong because of individual wickedness, is ever present in left-wing thought. Later, in Arrival and Departure, Koestler swings over much further towards the anti-revolutionary position, but in between these two books there is another, Scum of the Earth, which is straight autobiography and has only an indirect bearing upon the problems raised by Darkness at Noon. True to his life-style, Koestler was caught in France by the outbreak of war and, as a foreigner and a known anti-Fascist, was promptly arrested and interned by the Daladier Government. He spent the first nine months of war mostly in a prison camp, then, during the collapse of France, escaped and travelled by devious routes to England, where he was once again thrown into prison as an enemy alien. This time he was soon released, however. The book is a valuable piece of reportage, and together with a few other scraps of honest writing that happened to be produced at the time of the débâcle, it is a reminder of the depths that bourgeois democracy can descend to. At this moment, with France newly liberated and the witch-hunt after collaborators in full swing, we are apt to forget that in 1940 various observers on the spot considered that about forty per cent of the French population was either actively pro-German or completely apathetic. Truthful war books are never acceptable to non-combatants, and Koestler’s book did not have a very good reception. Nobody came well out of it — neither the bourgeois politicians, whose idea of conducting an anti-Fascist war was to jail every left-winger they could lay their hands on, nor the French Communists, who were effectively pro-Nazi and did their best to sabotage the French war effort, nor the common people, who were just as likely to follow mountebanks like Doriot as responsible leaders. Koestler records some fantastic conversations with fellow victims in the concentration camp, and adds that till then, like most middle-class Socialists and Communists, he had never made contact with real proletarians, only with the educated minority. He draws the pessimistic conclusion: ‘Without education of the masses, no social progress; without social progress, no education of the masses.’ In Scum of the Earth Koestler ceases to idealize the common people. He has abandoned Stalinism, but he is not a Trotskyist either. This is the book’s real link with Arrival and Departure, in which what is normally called a revolutionary outlook is dropped, perhaps for good.

Arrival and Departure is not a satisfactory book, the pretence that it is a novel is very thin; in effect it is a tract purporting to show that revolutionary creeds are rationalizations of neurotic impulses. With all too neat a symmetry, the book begins and ends with the same action — a leap into a foreign country. A young ex-Communist who has made his escape from Hungary jumps ashore in Portugal, where he hopes to enter the service of Britain, at that time the only power fighting against Germany. His enthusiasm is somewhat cooled by the fact that the British Consulate is uninterested in him and almost ignores him for a period of several months, during which his money runs out and other astuter refugees escape to America. He is successively tempted by the World in the form of a Nazi propagandist, the Flesh in the form of a French girl, and — after a nervous breakdown — the Devil in the form of a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst drags out of him the fact that his revolutionary enthusiasm is not founded on any real belief in historical necessity, but on a morbid guilt complex arising from an attempt in early childhood to blind his baby brother. By the time that he gets an opportunity of serving the Allies he has lost all reason for wanting to do so, and he is on the point of leaving for America when his irrational impulses seize hold of him again. In practice he cannot abandon the struggle. When the book ends, he is floating down in a parachute over the dark landscape of his native country, where he will be employed as a secret agent of Britain.

As a political statement (and the book is not much more), this is insufficient. Of course it is true in many cases, and it may be true in all cases, that revolutionary activity is the result of personal maladjustment. Those who struggle against society are, on the whole, those who have reason to dislike it, and normal healthy people are no more attracted by violence and illegality than they are by war. The young Nazi in Arrival and Departure makes the penetrating remark that one can see what is wrong with the left-wing movement by the ugliness of its women. But after all, this does not invalidate the Socialist case. Actions have results, irrespective of their motives. Marx’s ultimate motives may well have been envy and spite, but this does not prove that his conclusions were false. In making the hero of Arrival and Departure take his final decision from a mere instinct not to shirk action and danger, Koestler is making him suffer a sudden loss of intelligence. With such a history as he has behind him, he would be able to see that certain things have to be done, whether our reasons for doing them are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics. In Arrival and Departure Peter’s idols are overthrown one after the other. The Russian Revolution has degenerated, Britain, symbolized by the aged consul with gouty fingers, is no better, the international class-conscious proletariat is a myth. But the conclusion (since, after all, Koestler and his hero ‘support’ the war) ought to be that getting rid of Hitler is still a worth-while objective, a necessary bit of scavenging in which motives are almost irrelevant.

To take a rational political decision one must have a picture of the future. At present Koestler seems to have none, or rather to have two which cancel out. As an ultimate objective he believes in the Earthly Paradise, the Sun State which the Gladiators set out to establish, and which has haunted the imagination of Socialists, Anarchists and religious heretics for hundreds of years. But his intelligence tells him that the Earthly Paradise is receding into the far distance and that what is actually ahead of us is bloodshed, tyranny and privation. Recently he described himself as a ‘short-term pessimist’. Every kind of horror is blowing up over the horizon, but somehow it will all come right in the end. This outlook is probably gaining ground among thinking people: it results from the very great difficulty, once one has abandoned orthodox religious belief, of accepting life on earth as inherently miserable, and on the other hand, from the realization that to make life liveable is a much bigger problem than it recently seemed. Since about 1930 the world has given no reason for optimism whatever. Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred, cruelty and ignorance, and beyond our present troubles loom vaster ones which are only now entering into the European consciousness. It is quite possible that man’s major problems will never be solved. But it is also unthinkable! Who is there who dares to look at the world of today and say to himself, ‘It will always be like this: even in a million years it cannot get appreciably better?’ So you get the quasi-mystical belief that for the present there is no remedy, all political action is useless, but that somewhere in space and time human life will cease to be the miserable brutish thing it now is.

The only easy way out is that of the religious believer, who regards this life merely as a preparation for the next. But few thinking people now believe in life after death, and the number of those who do is probably diminishing. The Christian churches would probably not survive on their own merits if their economic basis were destroyed. The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final. Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. It is most unlikely, however, that Koestler would accept this. There is a well-marked hedonistic strain in his writings, and his failure to find a political position after breaking with Stalinism is a result of this.

The Russian Revolution, the central event in Koestler’s life, started out with high hopes. We forget these things now, but a quarter of a century ago it was confidently expected that the Russian Revolution would lead to Utopia. Obviously this has not happened. Koestler is too acute not to see this, and too sensitive not to remember the original objective. Moreover, from his European angle he can see such things as purges and mass deportations for what they are; he is not, like Shaw or Laski, looking at them through the wrong end of the telescope. Therefore he draws the conclusion: This is what revolutions lead to. There is nothing for it except to be a ‘Short-term pessimist’, i. e. to keep out of politics, make a sort of oasis within which you and your friends can remain sane, and hope that somehow things will be better in a hundred years. At the basis of this lies his hedonism, which leads him to think of the Earthy Paradise as desirable. Perhaps, however, whether desirable or not, it isn’t possible. Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure. It is his unwillingness to admit this that has led Koestler’s mind temporarily into a blind alley and that makes Arrival and Departure seem shallow compared to the earlier books.

Written September 1944 – first published in Critical Essays, February 1946

Further reading

• Masha Karp: Arthur Koestler – 20th century man (openDemocracy)
• Robert McCrum: The double life of Arthur Koestler, intellectual and sexual adventurer (The Observer)
• Will Skidelsky: Arthur Koestler – flawed crusader (The Observer)
• Will Skidelsky: The extraordinary Arthur Koestler (The Guardian)

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. 

It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling’s poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge that Kipling is a ‘Fascist’, he falls into the opposite error of defending him where he is not defensible. It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct – on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

And yet the ‘Fascist’ charge has to be answered, because the first clue to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that he was not a Fascist. He was further from being one than the most humane or the most ‘progressive’ person is able to be nowadays. An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line from ‘Recessional’, ‘Lesser breeds without the Law’. This line is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the ‘lesser breeds’ are ‘natives’, and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite of this. The phrase ‘lesser breeds’ refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are ‘without the Law’ in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a denunciation of power politics, British as well as German. Two stanzas are worth quoting (I am quoting this as politics, not as poetry):

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law – Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word – Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Much of Kipling’s phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in the second stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: ‘Except the lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ It is not a text that makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no ‘Law’, there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with the age they are living in. Kipling’s outlook is pre-fascist. He still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish hubris. He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their psychological results.

But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling’s jingoism and brutality? No, one is merely saying that the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern gangster outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to the period 1885-1902. The Great War and its aftermath embittered him, but he shows little sign of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer War. He was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase (even more than his poems, his solitary novel, The Light That Failed, gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the unofficial historian of the British Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its shape in 1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang out of limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.

Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’, and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese. The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who despises the ‘box-wallah’ and often lives a lifetime without realizing that the ‘box-wallah’ calls the tune.

But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators, soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is sometimes assumed. He had travelled very widely while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate people who did things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India with that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could have achieved nothing, could not have maintained themselves in power for a single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had been that of, say, E.M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling’s is the only literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and he could only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did not greatly resemble the people he admired. I know from several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were Kipling’s contemporaries did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that he knew nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was from their point of view too much of a highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with ‘the wrong’ people, and because of his dark complexion he was wrongly suspected of having a streak of Asiatic blood. Much in his development is traceable to his having been born in India and having left school early. With a slightly different background he might have been a good novelist or a superlative writer of music-hall songs. But how true is it that he was a vulgar flag-waver, a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes? It is true, but it is not true that he was a yes-man or a time-server. After his early days, if then, he never courted public opinion. Mr. Eliot says that what is held against him is that he expressed unpopular views in a popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that ‘unpopular’ means unpopular with the intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling’s ‘message’ was one that the big public did not want, and, indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the people, in the nineties as now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic. Kipling’s official admirers are and were the ‘service’ middle class, the people who read Blackwood’s. In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as ‘If’, were given almost biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot. As a rule it is the British working class that he is attacking, but not always. That phrase about ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket and the muddied oafs at the goal’ sticks like an arrow to this day, and it is aimed at the Eton and Harrow match as well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of the verses he wrote about the Boer War have a curiously modern ring, so far as their subject-matter goes. ‘Stellenbosch’, which must have been written about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry officer was saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter.

Kipling’s romantic ideas about England and the Empire might not have mattered if he could have held them without having the class-prejudices which at that time went with them. If one examines his best and most representative work, his soldier poems, especially Barrack-Room Ballads, one notices that what more than anything else spoils them is an underlying air of patronage. Kipling idealizes the army officer, especially the junior officer, and that to an idiotic extent, but the private soldier, though lovable and romantic, has to be a comic. He is always made to speak in a sort of stylized Cockney, not very broad but with all the aitches and final ‘g’s’ carefully omitted. Very often the result is as embarrassing as the humorous recitation at a church social. And this accounts for the curious fact that one can often improve Kipling’s poems, make them less facetious and less blatant, by simply going through them and transplanting them from Cockney into standard speech. This is especially true of his refrains, which often have a truly lyrical quality. Two examples will do (one is about a funeral and the other about a wedding):

So it’s knock out your pipes and follow me!
And it’s finish up your swipes and follow me!
Oh, hark to the big drum calling,
Follow me – follow me home!

and again:

Cheer for the Sergeant’s wedding – Give them one cheer more!
Grey gun-horses in the lando,
And a rogue is married to a whore!

Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have known better. He ought to have seen that the two closing lines of the first of these stanzas are very beautiful lines, and that ought to have overridden his impulse to make fun of a working-man’s accent. In the ancient ballads the lord and the peasant speak the same language. This is impossible to Kipling, who is looking down a distorting class-perspective, and by a piece of poetic justice one of his best lines is spoiled – for ‘follow me ‘ome’ is much uglier than ‘follow me home’. But even where it makes no difference musically the facetiousness of his stage Cockney dialect is irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud than read on the printed page, and most people instinctively make the necessary alterations when they quote him.

Can one imagine any private soldier, in the nineties or now, reading Barrack-Room Ballads and feeling that here was a writer who spoke for him? It is very hard to do so. Any soldier capable of reading a book of verse would notice at once that Kipling is almost unconscious of the class war that goes on in an army as much as elsewhere. It is not only that he thinks the soldier comic, but that he thinks him patriotic, feudal, a ready admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen. Of course that is partly true, or battles could not be fought, but ‘What have I done for thee, England, my England?’ is essentially a middle-class query. Almost any working man would follow it up immediately with ‘What has England done for me?’ In so far as Kipling grasps this, he simply sets it down to ‘the intense selfishness of the lower classes’ (his own phrase). When he is writing not of British but of ‘loyal’ Indians he carries the ‘Salaam, sahib’ motif to sometimes disgusting lengths. Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the ‘liberals’ of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards. ‘I came to realize’, he says in his posthumous memoirs, ‘the bare horrors of the private’s life, and the unnecessary torments he endured’. He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so, but not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had never been in battle, but his vision of war is realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or what is happening except in his own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other troops, frequently run away:

I ‘eard the knives be’ind me, but I dursn’t face my man,
Nor I don’t know where I went to, ’cause I didn’t stop to see,
Till I ‘eard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as ‘e ran,
An’ I thought I knew the voice an’ – it was me!

Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of one of the debunking war books of the nineteen-twenties. Or again:

An’ now the hugly bullets come peckin’ through the dust,
An’ no one wants to face ’em, but every beggar must;
So, like a man in irons, which isn’t glad to go,
They moves ’em off by companies uncommon stiff an’ slow.

Compare this with:

Forward the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismayed?
No! though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.

If anything, Kipling overdoes the horrors, for the wars of his youth were hardly wars at all by our standards. Perhaps that is due to the neurotic strain in him, the hunger for cruelty. But at least he knows that men ordered to attack impossible objectives are dismayed, and also that fourpence a day is not a generous pension.

How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the long-service, mercenary army of the late nineteenth century? One must say of this, as of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century Anglo-India, that it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we have. He has put on record an immense amount of stuff that one could otherwise only gather from verbal tradition or from unreadable regimental histories. Perhaps his picture of army life seems fuller and more accurate than it is because any middle-class English person is likely to know enough to fill up the gaps. At any rate, reading the essay on Kipling that Mr. Edmund Wilson has just published or is just about to publish [1], I was struck by the number of things that are boringly familiar to us and seem to be barely intelligible to an American. But from the body of Kipling’s early work there does seem to emerge a vivid and not seriously misleading picture of the old pre-machine-gun army – the sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or Lucknow, the red coats, the pipeclayed belts and the pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of oats and horsepiss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody skirmishes, invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the cholera-stricken camps, the ‘native’ concubines, the ultimate death in the workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a patriotic music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola’s gorier passages, but from it future generations will be able to gather some idea of what a long-term volunteer army was like. On about the same level they will be able to learn something of British India in the days when motor-cars and refrigerators were unheard of. It is an error to imagine that we might have had better books on these subjects if, for example, George Moore, or Gissing, or Thomas Hardy, had had Kipling’s opportunities. That is the kind of accident that cannot happen. It was not possible that nineteenth-century England should produce a book like War and Peace, or like Tolstoy’s minor stories of army life, such as Sebastopol or The Cossacks, not because the talent was necessarily lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write such books would ever have made the appropriate contacts. Tolstoy lived in a great military empire in which it seemed natural for almost any young man of family to spend a few years in the army, whereas the British Empire was and still is demilitarized to a degree which continental observers find almost incredible. Civilized men do not readily move away from the centres of civilization, and in most languages there is a great dearth of what one might call colonial literature. It took a very improbable combination of circumstances to produce Kipling’s gaudy tableau, in which Private Ortheris and Mrs. Hauksbee pose against a background of palm trees to the sound of temple bells, and one necessary circumstance was that Kipling himself was only half civilized.

Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language. The phrases and neologisms which we take over and use without remembering their origin do not always come from writers we admire. It is strange, for instance, to hear the Nazi broadcasters referring to the Russian soldiers as ‘robots’, thus unconsciously borrowing a word from a Czech democrat whom they would have killed if they could have laid hands on him. Here are half a dozen phrases coined by Kipling which one sees quoted in leaderettes in the gutter press or overhears in saloon bars from people who have barely heard his name. It will be seen that they all have a certain characteristic in common:

East is East, and West is West.
The white man’s burden.
What do they know of England who only England know?
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Somewhere East of Suez.
Paying the Dane-geld.

There are various others, including some that have outlived their context by many years. The phrase ‘killing Kruger with your mouth’, for instance, was current till very recently. It is also possible that it was Kipling who first let loose the use of the word ‘Huns’ for Germans; at any rate he began using it as soon as the guns opened fire in 1914. But what the phrases I have listed above have in common is that they are all of them phrases which one utters semi-derisively (as it might be ‘For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May’), but which one is bound to make use of sooner or later. Nothing could exceed the contempt of the New Statesman, for instance, for Kipling, but how many times during the Munich period did the New Statesman find itself quoting that phrase about paying the Dane-geld?[2] The fact is that Kipling, apart from his snack-bar wisdom and his gift for packing much cheap picturesqueness into a few words (‘palm and pine’ – ‘east of Suez’ – ‘the road to Mandalay’), is generally talking about things that are of urgent interest. It does not matter, from this point of view, that thinking and decent people generally find themselves on the other side of the fence from him. ‘White man’s burden’ instantly conjures up a real problem, even if one feels that it ought to be altered to ‘black man’s burden’. One may disagree to the middle of one’s bones with the political attitude implied in ‘The Islanders’, but one cannot say that it is a frivolous attitude. Kipling deals in thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent. This raises the question of his special status as a poet, or verse-writer.

Mr. Eliot describes Kipling’s metrical work as ‘verse’ and not ‘poetry’, but adds that it is ‘great verse’, and further qualifies this by saying that a writer can only be described as a ‘great verse-writer’ if there is some of his work ‘of which we cannot say whether it is verse or poetry’. Apparently Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in which case it was a pity that Mr. Eliot did not specify these poems by name. The trouble is that whenever an aesthetic judgement on Kipling’s work seems to be called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able to speak plainly. What he does not say, and what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face, and yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as:

For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,
‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’

and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as ‘Felix Randal’ or ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ are poetry. One can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily than by juggling with the words ‘verse’ and ‘poetry’, if one describes him simply as a good bad poet. He is as a poet what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a novelist. And the mere existence of work of this kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to be vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the age we live in.

There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should say, subsequent to 1790. Examples of good bad poems – I am deliberately choosing diverse ones – are ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, ‘When all the world is young, lad’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, Bret Harte’s ‘Dickens in Camp’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’, ‘Jenny Kissed Me’, ‘Keith of Ravelston’, ‘Casabianca’. All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet – not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting.

It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, ‘good’ poetry can have any genuine popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts. Perhaps that statement needs a certain amount of qualification. True poetry can sometimes be acceptable to the mass of the people when it disguises itself as something else. One can see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still possesses, certain nursery rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and the songs that soldiers make up, including the words that go to some of the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a civilization in which the very word ‘poetry’ evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word ‘God’. If you are good at playing the concertina you could probably go into the nearest public bar and get yourself an appreciative audience within five minutes. But what would be the attitude of that same audience if you suggested reading them Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance? Good bad poetry, however, can get across to the most unpromising audiences if the right atmosphere has been worked up beforehand. Some months back Churchill produced a great effect by quoting Clough’s ‘Endeavour’ in one of his broadcast speeches. I listened to this speech among people who could certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them. But not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much better than this.

In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been and probably still is popular. In his own lifetime some of his poems travelled far beyond the bounds of the reading public, beyond the world of school prize-days, Boy Scout sing-songs, limp-leather editions, poker-work and calendars, and out into the yet vaster world of the music halls. Nevertheless, Mr. Eliot thinks it worthwhile to edit him, thus confessing to a taste which others share but are not always honest enough to mention. The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form – for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things – some emotion which very nearly every human being can share. The merit of a poem like ‘When all the world is young, lad’ is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is ‘true’ sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious. One example from Kipling will do:

White hands cling to the bridle rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel;
Tenderest voices cry ‘Turn again!’
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel:
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but at any rate it is a thought that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you will have occasion to feel that he travels the fastest who travels alone, and there the thought is, ready made and, as it were, waiting for you. So the chances are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it.

One reason for Kipling’s power as a good bad poet I have already suggested – his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not witty, not ‘daring’, has no wish to épater les bourgeois. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the ‘enlightened’ utterances of the same period, such as Wilde’s epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of Man and Superman.

Orwell’s notes

There are nine and sixty ways
Of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right.

He attributes these lines to Thackeray. This is probably what is known as a ‘Freudian error.’ A civilized person would prefer not to quote Kipling – i.e. would prefer not to feel that it was Kipling who had expressed his thought for him.

Published in Horizon, September 1941

Further reading:

• Douglas Kerr: Orwell, Kipling and Empire
• Oxford 2011: Orwell vs Kipling (video)

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. 

About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion being the tercentenary of Milton’s Areopagitica — a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defence of freedom of the press. Milton’s famous phrase about the sin of ‘killing’ a book was printed on the leaflets advertising the meeting which had been circulated beforehand.

There were four speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech which did deal with the freedom of the press, but only in relation to India; another said, hesitantly, and in very general terms, that liberty was a good thing; a third delivered an attack on the laws relating to obscenity in literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a defense of the Russian purges. Of the speeches from the body of the hall, some reverted to the question of obscenity and the laws that deal with it, others were simply eulogies of Soviet Russia. Moral liberty — the liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print — seemed to be generally approved, but political liberty was not mentioned. Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was there any mention of the various books which have been ‘killed’ in England and the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favour of censorship.

There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he’s in the right. In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic — political, moral, religious, or aesthetic — was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the words of the Revivalist hymn:

Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known

To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a ‘Don’t’ at the beginning of each line. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. ‘Daring to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. The independence of the writer and the artist is eaten away by vague economic forces, and at the same time it is undermined by those who should be its defenders. It is with the second process that I am concerned here.

Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about. Anyone who has experience of lecturing and debating knows them off backwards. Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. Although other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers. In saying this I may seem to be saying that straightforward ‘reportage’ is the only branch of literature that matters: but I will try to show later that at every literary level, and probably in every one of the arts, the same issue arises in more or less subtilized forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies in which this controversy is usually wrapped up.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege. The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that ‘the truth’ has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of ‘the truth’ and merely resists it out of selfish motives. In Communist literature the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked by oratory about ‘petty-bourgeois individualism’, ‘the illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism’, etc., and backed up by words of abuse such as ‘romantic’ and ‘sentimental’, which, since they do not have any agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. In this way the controversy is maneuvered away from its real issue. One can accept, and most enlightened people would accept, the Communist thesis that pure freedom will only exist in a classless society, and that one is most nearly free when one is working to bring such a society about. But slipped in with this is the quite unfounded claim that the Communist Party is itself aiming at the establishment of the classless society, and that in the U.S.S.R. this aim is actually on the way to being realized. If the first claim is allowed to entail the second, there is almost no assault on common sense and common decency that cannot be justified. But meanwhile, the real point has been dodged. Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings. The familiar tirades against ‘escapism’ and ‘individualism’, ‘romanticism’, and so forth, are merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the perversion of history seem respectable.

Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent — for they were not of great importance in England — against Fascists. Today one has to defend it against Communists and ‘fellow-travelers’. One ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of the small English Communist Party, but there can be no question about the poisonous effect of the Russian mythos on English intellectual life. Because of it known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written. Let me give just one instance out of the hundreds that could be cited. When Germany collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of Soviet Russians — mostly, no doubt, from non-political motives — had changed sides and were fighting for the Germans. Also, a small but not negligible portion of the Russian prisoners and displaced persons refused to go back to the U.S.S.R., and some of them, at least, were repatriated against their will. These facts, known to many journalists on the spot, went almost unmentioned in the British press, while at the same time Russophile publicists in England continued to justify the purges and deportations of 1936-38 by claiming that the U.S.S.R. ‘had no quislings’. The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R. — sympathetic, that is, in the way the Russians themselves would want him to be — does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues. I have before me what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. What could be the attitude of even the most intellectually scrupulous Communist towards such a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of saying that it is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it were decided to issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful to his party could protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen, but that, even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books.

The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an underground legend to the effect that although the Russian government is obliged now to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording the true facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.

To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay: that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all. It may seem that all this time I have been talking about the effects of censorship, not on literature as a whole, but merely on one department of political journalism. Granted that Soviet Russia constitutes a sort of forbidden area in the British press, granted that issues like Poland, the Spanish civil war, the Russo-German pact, and so forth, are debarred from serious discussion, and that if you possess information that conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy you are expected to either distort it or keep quiet about it — granted all this, why should literature in the wider sense be affected? Is every writer a politician, and is every book necessarily a work of straightforward ‘reportage’? Even under the tightest dictatorship, cannot the individual writer remain free inside his own mind and distill or disguise his unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will be too stupid to recognize them? And in any case, if the writer himself is in agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy, why should it have a cramping effect on him? Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to flourish in societies in which there are no major conflicts of opinion and no sharp distinction between the artist and his audience? Does one have to assume that every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is an exceptional person?

Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims of totalitarianism, one meets with these arguments in one form or another. They are based on a complete misunderstanding of what literature is, and how — one should perhaps say why — it comes into being. They assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal hack who can switch from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an organ grinder changing tunes. But after all, how is it that books ever come to be written? Above a quite low level, literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one’s contemporaries by recording experience. And so far as freedom of expression is concerned, there is not much difference between a mere journalist and the most ‘unpolitical’ imaginative writer. The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news; the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties will dry up. Nor can he solve the problem by keeping away from controversial topics. There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone’s consciousness. Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any rate a lyric poet, might possibly find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society that survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that prose literature, of the kind that has existed during the past four hundred years, must actually come to an end.

Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment’s notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or ‘fellow-traveler’ has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about ‘the horrors of Nazism’ and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word ‘Nazi’, at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o’clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an ‘age of faith’, when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is not taken too seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be possible, for large areas of one’s mind to remain unaffected by what one officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing that prose literature almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing; and the intellectual leaders of society expressed their most serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered during a thousand years.

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with, bureaucrats and other ‘practical’ men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is saying — that is, what his poem ‘means’ if translated into prose — is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and avoid uttering heresies; and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice. But above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily and individual product. Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on the other hand, very artificial verse forms, can be composed co-operatively by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and Scottish ballads were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is disputed; but at any rate they are non-individual in the sense that they constantly change in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two versions of a ballad are ever quite the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse communally. Someone begins to improvise, probably accompanying himself on a musical instrument, somebody else chips in with a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the process continues until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no identifiable author.

In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible. Serious prose, in any case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the excitement of being part of a group is actually an aid to certain kinds of versification. Verse — and perhaps good verse of its own kind, though it would not be the highest kind — might survive under even the most inquisitorial regime. Even in a society where liberty and individuality had been extinguished, there would still be a need either for patriotic songs and heroic ballads celebrating victories, or for elaborate exercises in flattery; and these are the kinds of poems that can be written to order, or composed communally, without necessarily lacking artistic value. Prose is a different matter, since the prose writer cannot narrow the range of his thoughts without killing his inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature almost disappeared during the Hitler regime, and the case was not much better in Italy. Russian literature, so far as one can judge by translations, has deteriorated markedly since the early days of the revolution, though some of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any Russian novels that it is possible to take seriously have been translated for about fifteen years. In western Europe and America large sections of the literary intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist Party or have been warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading. Orthodox Catholicism, again, seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms, especially the novel. During a period of three hundred years, how many people have been at once good novelists and good Catholics? The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition. Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice between silence or death. Prose literature as we know it is the product of rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In the future it is possible that a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may arise, but no such thing is at present imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art will perish with it.

Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.

It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.

Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.

It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed to that particular myth, would have succumbed to another of much the same kind. But at any rate the Russian myth is there, and the corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons. Writers, on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It is true that literary prostitutes like Ilya Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid huge sums of money, but the only thing which is of any value to the writer as such — his freedom of expression — is taken away from him. Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities to be enjoyed by scientists in Russia are capable of understanding this. But their reflection appears to be: ‘Writers are persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer.’ They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.

For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.

But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and architecture, it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes ossified. At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.

Polemic, January 1946.

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James Burnham’s book, The Managerial Revolution, made a considerable stir both in the United States and in this country at the time when it was published, and its main thesis has been so much discussed that a detailed exposition of it is hardly necessary. As shortly as I can summarize it, the thesis is this:-

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of ‘managers’. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

In his next published book, The Machiavellians, Burnham elaborates and also modifies his original statement. The greater part of the book is an exposition of the theories of Machiavelli and of his modern disciples, Mosca, Michels, and Pareto: with doubtful justification, Burnham adds to these the syndicalist writer, Georges Sorel. What Burnham is mainly concerned to show is that a democratic society has never existed and so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud. Burnham does not deny that ‘good’ motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else. All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia, or ‘the classless society’, or ‘the Kingdom of Heaven on earth’, are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way into power. The English Puritans, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, were in each case simply power seekers using the hopes of the masses in order to win a privileged position for themselves. Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority. In each great revolutionary struggle the masses are led on by vague dreams of human brotherhood, and then, when the new ruling class is well established in power, they are thrust back into servitude. This is practically the whole of political history, as Burnham sees it.

Where the second book departs from the earlier one is in asserting that the whole process could be somewhat moralized if the facts were faced more honestly. The Machiavellians is sub-titled Defenders of Freedom. Machiavelli and his followers taught that in politics decency simply does not exist, and, by doing so, Burnham claims, made it possible to conduct political affairs more intelligently and less oppressively. A ruling class which recognized that its real aim was to stay in power would also recognize that it would be more likely to succeed if it served the common good, and might avoid stiffening into a hereditary aristocracy. Burnham lays much stress on Pareto’s theory of the ‘circulation of the élites’. If it is to stay in power a ruling class must constantly admit suitable recruits from below, so that the ablest men may always be at the top and a new class of power-hungry malcontents cannot come into being. This is likeliest to happen, Burnham considers, in a society which retains democratic habits – that is, where opposition is permitted and certain bodies such as the press and the trade unions can keep their autonomy. Here Burnham undoubtedly contradicts his earlier opinion. In The Managerial Revolution, which was written in 1940, it is taken as a matter of course that ‘managerial’ Germany is in all ways more efficient than a capitalist democracy such as France or Britain. In the second book, written in 1942, Burnham admits that the Germans might have avoided some of their more serious strategic errors if they had permitted freedom of speech. However, the main thesis is not abandoned. Capitalism is doomed, and Socialism is a dream. If we grasp what is at issue we may guide the course of the managerial revolution to some extent, but that revolution is happening, whether we like it or not. In both books, but especially the earlier one, there is a note of unmistakable relish over the cruelty and wickedness of the processes that are being discussed. Although he reiterates that he is merely setting forth the facts and not stating his own preferences, it is clear that Burnham is fascinated by the spectacle of power, and that his sympathies were with Germany so long as Germany appeared to be winning the war. A more recent essay, ‘Lenin’s Heir’, published in the Partisan Review about the beginning of 1945, suggests that this sympathy has since been transferred to the U.S.S.R. ‘Lenin’s Heir’, which provoked violent controversy in the American left-wing press, has not yet been reprinted in England, and I must return to it later.

It will be seen that Burnham’s theory is not, strictly speaking, a new one. Many earlier writers have foreseen the emergence of a new kind of society, neither capitalist nor Socialist, and probably based upon slavery: though most of them have differed from Burnham in not assuming this development to be inevitable. A good example is Hilaire Belloc’s book, The Servile State, published in 1911. The Servile State is written in a tiresome style, and the remedy it suggests (a return to small-scale peasant ownership) is for many reasons impossible: still, it does foretell with remarkable insight the kind of things that have been happening from about 1930 onwards. Chesterton, in a less methodical way, predicted the disappearance of democracy and private property, and the rise of a slave society which might be called either capitalist or Communist. Jack London, in The Iron Heel (1909), foretold some of the essential features of Fascism, and such books as Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes (1900), Zamyatin’s We (1923), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1930), all described imaginary worlds in which the special problems of capitalism had been solved without bringing liberty, equality, or true happiness any nearer. More recently, writers like Peter Drucker and F. A. Voigt have argued that Fascism and Communism are substantially the same thing. And indeed, it has always been obvious that a planned and centralized society is liable to develop into an oligarchy or a dictatorship. Orthodox Conservatives were unable to see this, because it comforted them to assume that Socialism ‘wouldn’t work’, and that the disappearance of capitalism would mean chaos and anarchy. Orthodox Socialists could not see it, because they wished to think that they themselves would soon be in power, and therefore assumed that when capitalism disappears, Socialism takes its place. As a result they were unable to foresee the rise of Fascism, or to make correct predictions about it after it had appeared. Later, the need to justify the Russian dictatorship and to explain away the obvious resemblances between Communism and Nazism clouded the issue still more. But the notion that industrialism must end in monopoly, and that monopoly must imply tyranny, is not a startling one.

Where Burnham differs from most other thinkers is in trying to plot the course of the ‘managerial revolution’ accurately on a world scale, and in assuming that the drift towards totalitarianism is irresistible and must not be fought against, though it may be guided. According to Burnham, writing in 1940, ‘managerialism’ has reached its fullest development in the U.S.S.R., but is almost equally well developed in Germany, and has made its appearance in the United States. He describes the New Deal as ‘primitive managerialism’. But the trend is the same everywhere, or almost everywhere. Always laissez-faire capitalism gives way to planning and state interference, the mere owner loses power as against the technician and the bureaucrat, but Socialism – that is to say, what used to be called Socialism – shows no sign of emerging:

Some apologists try to excuse Marxism by saying that it has ‘never had a chance’. This is far from the truth. Marxism and the Marxist parties have had dozens of chances. In Russia, a Marxist party took power. Within a short time it abandoned Socialism; if not in words, at any rate in the effect of its actions. In most European nations there were during the last months of the first world war and the years immediately thereafter, social crises which left a wide-open door for the Marxist parties: without exception they proved unable to take and hold power. In a large number of countries – Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, England, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, France – the reformist Marxist parties have administered the governments, and have uniformly failed to introduce Socialism or make any genuine step towards Socialism. . . . These parties have, in practice, at every historical test – and there have been many – either failed Socialism or abandoned it. This is the fact which neither the bitterest foe nor the most ardent friend of Socialism can erase. This fact does not, as some think, prove anything about the moral quality of the Socialist ideal. But it does constitute unblinkable evidence that, whatever its moral quality, Socialism is not going to come.

Burnham does not, of course, deny that the new ‘managerial’ régimes, like the régimes of Russia and Nazi Germany, may be called Socialist. He means merely that they will not be Socialist in any sense of the word which would have been accepted by Marx, or Lenin, or Keir Hardie, or William Morris, or indeed, by any representative Socialist prior to about 1930. Socialism, until recently, was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality and internationalism. There is not the smallest sign that any of these things is in a way to being established anywhere, and the one great country in which something described as a proletarian revolution once happened, i.e. the U.S.S.R., has moved steadily away from the old concept of a free and equal society aiming at universal human brotherhood. In an almost unbroken progress since the early days of the Revolution, liberty has been chipped away and representative institutions smothered, while inequalities have increased and nationalism and militarism have grown stronger. But at the same time, Burnham insists, there has been no tendency to return to capitalism. What is happening is simply the growth of ‘managerialism’, which, according to Burnham, is in progress everywhere, though the manner in which it comes about may vary from country to country.

Now, as an interpretation of what is happening, Burnham’s theory is extremely plausible, to put it at the lowest. The events of, at any rate, the last fifteen years in the U.S.S.R. can be far more easily explained by this theory than by any other. Evidently the U.S.S.R. is not Socialist, and can only be called Socialist if one gives the word a meaning different from what it would have in any other context. On the other hand, prophecies that the Russian régime would revert to capitalism have always been falsified, and now seem further than ever from being fulfilled. In claiming that the process had gone almost equally far in Nazi Germany, Burnham probably exaggerates, but it seems certain that the drift was away from old-style capitalism and towards a planned economy with an adoptive oligarchy in control. In Russia the capitalists were destroyed first and the workers were crushed later. In Germany the workers were crushed first, but the elimination of the capitalists had at any rate begun, and calculations based on the assumption that Nazism was ‘simply capitalism’ were always contradicted by events. Where Burnham seems to go most astray is in believing ‘managerialism’ to be on the up-grade in the United States, the one great country where free capitalism is still vigorous. But if one considers the world movement as a whole, his conclusions are difficult to resist; and even in the United States the all-prevailing faith in laissez-faire may not survive the next great economic crisis. It has been urged against Burnham that he assigns far too much importance to the ‘managers’, in the narrow sense of the word – that is, factory bosses, planners and technicians – and seems to assume that even in Soviet Russia it is these people, and not the Communist Party chiefs, who are the real holders of power. However, this is a secondary error, and it is particularly corrected in The Machiavellians. The real question is not whether the people who wipe their boots on you during the next fifty years are to be called managers, bureaucrats, or politicians; the question is whether capitalism, now obviously doomed, is to give way to oligarchy or to true democracy.

But curiously enough, when one examines the predictions which Burnham has based on his general theory, one finds that in so far as they are verifiable, they have been falsified. Numbers of people have pointed this out already. However, it is worth following up Burnham’s predictions in detail because they form a sort of pattern which is related to contemporary events, and which reveals, I believe, a very important weakness in present-day political thought.

To begin with, writing in 1940, Burnham takes a German victory more or less for granted. Britain is described as ‘dissolving’, and as displaying ‘all the characteristics which have distinguished decadent cultures in past historical transitions’, while the conquest and integration of Europe which Germany achieved in 1940 is described as ‘irreversible’. ‘England,’ writes Burnham, ‘no matter with what non-European allies, cannot conceivably hope to conquer the European continent.’ Even if Germany should somehow manage to lose the war, she could not be dismembered or reduced to the status of the Weimar Republic, but is bound to remain as the nucleus of a unified Europe. The future map of the world, with its three great super-states is, in any case, already settled in its main outlines: and ‘the nuclei of these three super-states are, whatever may be their future names, the previously existing nations, Japan, Germany, and the United States’.

Burnham also commits himself to the opinion that Germany will not attack the U.S.S.R until after Britain has been defeated. In a condensation of his book published in the Partisan Review of May-June 1941, and presumably written later than the book itself, he says:

As in the case of Russia, so with Germany, the third part of the managerial problem – the contest for dominance with other sections of managerial society – remains for the future. First had to come the death-blow that assured the toppling of the capitalist world order, which meant above all the destruction of the foundations of the British Empire (the keystone of the capitalist world order) both directly and through the smashing of the European political structure, which was a necessary prop of the Empire. This is the basic explanation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which is not intelligible on other grounds. The future conflict between Germany and Russia will be a managerial conflict proper; prior to the great world-managerial battles, the end of the capitalist order must be assured. The belief that Nazism is ‘decadent capitalism’ . . . makes it impossible to explain reasonably the Nazi-Soviet Pact. From this belief followed the always expected war between Germany and Russia, not the actual war to the death between Germany and the British Empire. The war between Germany and Russia is one of the managerial wars of the future, not of the anti-capitalist wars of yesterday and today.

However, the attack on Russia will come later, and Russia is certain, or almost certain, to be defeated. ‘There is every reason to believe . . . that Russia will split apart, with the western half gravitating towards the European base and the eastern towards the Asiatic.’ This quotation comes from The Managerial Revolution. In the above-quoted article, written probably about six months later, it is put more forcibly: ‘the Russian weaknesses indicate that Russia will not be able to endure, that it will crack apart, and fall towards east and west.’ And in a supplementary note which was added to the English (Pelican) edition, and which appears to have been written at the end of 1941, Burnham speaks as though the ‘cracking apart’ process were already happening. The war, he says, ‘is part of the means whereby the western half of Russia is being integrated into the European super-state’.

Sorting these various statements out, we have the following prophecies:

• Germany is bound to win the war.
• Germany and Japan are bound to survive as great states, and to remain the nuclei of power in their respective area.
• Germany will not attack the U.S.S.R. until after the defeat of Britain.
• The U.S.S.R. is bound to be defeated.

However, Burnham has made other predictions besides these. In a short article in the Partisan Review, in the summer of 1944, he gives his opinion that the U.S.S.R. will gang up with Japan in order to prevent the total defeat of the latter, while the American Communists will be set to work to sabotage the eastern end of the war. And finally, in an article in the same magazine in the winter of 1944–45, he claims that Russia, destined so short a while ago to ‘crack apart’, is within sight of conquering the whole of Eurasia. This article, which was the cause of violent controversies among the American intelligentsia, has not been reprinted in England. I must give some account of it here, because its manner of approach and its emotional tone are of a peculiar kind, and by studying them one can get nearer to the real roots of Burnham’s theory.

The article is entitled ‘Lenin’s Heir’, and it sets out to show that Stalin is the true and legitimate guardian of the Russian Revolution, which he has not in any sense ‘betrayed’ but has merely carried forward on lines that were implicit in it from the start. In itself, this is an easier opinion to swallow than the usual Trotskyist claim that Stalin is a mere crook who has perverted the Revolution to his own ends, and that things would somehow have been different if Lenin had lived or Trotsky had remained in power. Actually there is no strong reason for thinking that the main lines of development would have been very different. Well before 1923 the seeds of a totalitarian society were quite plainly there. Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely.[1] Had he lived, it is probable that he would either have been thrown out, like Trotsky, or would have kept himself in power by methods as barbarous, or nearly as barbarous, as those of Stalin. The title of Burnham’s essay, therefore, sets forth a reasonable thesis, and one would expect him to support it by an appeal to the facts.

However, the essay barely touches upon its ostensible subject-matter. It is obvious that anyone genuinely concerned to show that there has been continuity of policy as between Lenin and Stalin would start by outlining Lenin’s policy and then explain in what way Stalin’s has resembled it. Burnham does not do this. Except for one or two cursory sentences he says nothing about Lenin’s policy, and Lenin’s name only occurs five times in an essay of twelve pages: in the first seven pages, apart from the title, it does not occur at all. The real aim of the essay is to present Stalin as a towering, superhuman figure, indeed a species of demigod, and Bolshevism as an irresistible force which is flowing over the earth and cannot be halted until it reaches the outermost borders of Eurasia. In so far as he makes any attempt to prove his case, Burnham does so by repeating over and over again that Stalin is ‘a great man’ – which is probably true, but is almost completely irrelevant. Moreover, though he does advance some solid arguments for believing in Stalin’s genius, it is clear that in his mind the idea of ‘greatness’ is inextricably mixed up with the idea of cruelty and dishonesty. There are curious passages in which it seems to be suggested that Stalin is to be admired because of the limitless suffering that he has caused:

Stalin proves himself a ‘great man’, in the grand style. The accounts of the banquets, staged in Moscow for the visiting dignitaries, set the symbolic tone. With their enormous menus of sturgeon, and roasts, and fowl, and sweets; their streams of liquor, the scores of toasts with which they end; the silent, unmoving secret police behind each guest; all against the winter background of the starving multitudes of besieged Leningrad; the dying millions at the front: the jammed concentration camps; the city crowds kept by their minute rations just at the edge of life; there is little trace of dull mediocrity or the hand of Babbitt. We recognize, rather, the tradition of the most spectacular of the Tsars, of the Great Kings of the Medes and Persians, of the Khanate of the Golden Horde, of the banquet we assign to the gods of the Heroic Ages in tribute to the insight that insolence, and indifference, and brutality on such a scale remove beings from the human level. . . . Stalin’s political techniques shows a freedom from conventional restrictions that is incompatible with mediocrity: the mediocre man is custom-bound. Often it is the scale of their operations that sets them apart. It is usual, for example, for men active in practical life to engineer an occasional frame-up. But to carry out a frame-up against tens of thousands of persons, important percentages of whole strata of society, including most of one’s own comrades, is so far out of the ordinary that the long-run mass conclusion is either that the frame-up must be true – at least ‘have some truth in it’ – or that power so immense must be submitted to – is a ‘historical necessity’, as intellectuals put it. . . . There is nothing unexpected in letting a few individuals starve for reasons of state; but to starve, by deliberate decision, several millions, is a type of action attributed ordinarily only to gods.

In these and other similar passages there may be a tinge of irony, but it is difficult not to feel that there is also a sort of fascinated admiration. Towards the end of the essay Burnham compares Stalin with those semi-mythical heroes, like Moses or Asoka, who embody in themselves a whole epoch, and can justly be credited with feats that they did not actually perform. In writing of Soviet foreign policy and its supposed objectives, he touches an even more mystical note:

Starting from the magnetic core of the Eurasian heartland, the Soviet power, like the reality of the One of Neo-Platonism overflowing in the descending series of the emanative progression, flows outward, west into Europe, south into the Near East, east into China, already lapping the shores of the Atlantic, the Yellow and China Seas, the Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf. As the undifferentiated One, in its progression, descends through the stages of Mind, Soul, and Matter, and then through its fatal Return back to itself; so does the Soviet power, emanating from the integrally totalitarian centre, proceed outwards by Absorption (the Baltics, Bessarabia, Bukovina, East Poland), Domination (Finland, the Balkans, Mongolia, North China and, tomorrow, Germany), Orienting Influence (Italy, France, Turkey, Iran, Central and south China . . .), until it is dissipated in MH ON, the outer material sphere, beyond the Eurasian boundaries, of momentary Appeasement and Infiltration (England, the United States).

I do not think it is fanciful to suggest that the unnecessary capital letters with which this passage is loaded are intended to have a hypnotic effect on the reader. Burnham is trying to build up a picture of terrifying, irresistible power, and to turn a normal political manoeuvre like infiltration into Infiltration adds to the general portentousness. The essay should be read in full. Although it is not the kind of tribute that the average russophile would consider acceptable, and although Burnham himself would probably claim that he is being strictly objective, he is in effect performing an act of homage, and even of self-abasement. Meanwhile, this essay gives us another prophecy to add to the list; i.e. that the U.S.S.R. will conquer the whole of Eurasia, and probably a great deal more. And one must remember that Burnham’s basic theory contains, in itself, a prediction which still has to be tested – that is, that whatever else happens, the ‘managerial’ form of society is bound to prevail.

Burnham’s earlier prophecy, of a German victory in the war and the integration of Europe round the German nucleus, was falsified, not only in its main outlines, but in some important details. Burnham insists all the way through that ‘managerialism’ is not only more efficient than capitalist democracy or Marxian Socialism, but also more acceptable to the masses. The slogans of democracy and national self-determination, he says, no longer have any mass appeal: ‘managerialism’, on the other hand, can rouse enthusiasm, produce intelligible war aims, establish fifth columns everywhere, and inspire its soldiers with a fanatical morale. The ‘fanaticism’ of the Germans, as against the ‘apathy’ or ‘indifference’ of the British, French, etc., is much emphasized, and Nazism is represented as a revolutionary force sweeping across Europe and spreading its philosophy ‘by contagion’. The Nazi fifth columns ‘cannot be wiped out’, and the democratic nations are quite incapable of projecting any settlement which the German or other European masses would prefer to the New Order. In any case, the democracies can only defeat Germany if they go ‘still further along the managerial road than Germany has yet gone’.

The germ of truth in all this is that the smaller European states, demoralized by the chaos and stagnation of the pre-war years, collapsed rather more quickly than they need have done, and might conceivably have accepted the New Order if the Germans had kept same of their promises. But the actual experience of German rule aroused almost at once such a fury of hatred and vindictiveness as the world has seldom seen. After about the beginning of 1941 there was hardly any need of a positive war aim, since getting rid of the Germans was a sufficient objective. The question of morale, and its relation to national solidarity, is a nebulous one, and the evidence can be so manipulated as to prove almost anything. But if one goes by the proportion of prisoners to other casualties, and the amount of quislingism, the totalitarian states come out of the comparison worse than the democracies. Hundreds of thousands of Russians appear to have gone over to the Germans during the course of the war, while comparable numbers of Germans and Italians had gone over to the Allies before the war started: the corresponding number of American or British renegades would have amounted to a few scores. As an example of the inability of ‘capitalist ideologies’ to enlist support, Burnham cites ‘the complete failure of voluntary military recruiting in England (as well as the entire British Empire) and in the United States’. One would gather from this that the armies of the totalitarian states were manned by volunteers. Actually, no totalitarian state has ever so much as considered voluntary recruitment for any purpose, nor, throughout history, has a large army ever been raised by voluntary means.[2] It is not worth listing the many similar arguments that Burnham puts forward. The point is that he assumes that the Germans must win the propaganda war as well as the military one, and that, at any rate in Europe, this estimate was not borne out by events.

It will be seen that Burnham’s predictions have not merely, when they were verifiable, turned out to be wrong, but that they have sometimes contradicted one another in a sensational way. It is this last fact that is significant. Political predictions are usually wrong, because they are usually based on wish-thinking, but they can have symptomatic value, especially when they change abruptly. Often the revealing factor is the date at which they are made. Dating Burnham’s various writings as accurately as can be done from internal evidence, and then noting what events they coincided with, we find the following relationships:-

In the supplementary note added to the English edition of the book, Burnham appears to assume that the U.S.S.R. is already beaten and the splitting-up process is about to begin. This was published in the spring of 1942 and presumably written at the end of 1941; i.e. when the Germans were in the suburbs of Moscow.

The prediction that Russia would gang up with Japan against the U.S.A. was written early in 1944, soon after the conclusion of a new Russo-Japanese treaty.

The prophecy of Russian world conquest was written in the winter of 1944, when the Russians were advancing rapidly in eastern Europe while the Western Allies were still held up in Italy and northern France.

It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship or power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.

Suppose in 1940 you had taken a Gallup poll, in England, on the question ‘Will Germany win the war?’ You would have found, curiously enough, that the group answering ‘Yes’ contained a far higher percentage of intelligent people – people with IQ of over 120, shall we say – than the group answering ‘No’. The same would have held good in the middle of 1942. In this case the figures would not have been so striking, but if you had made the question ‘Will the Germans capture Alexandria?’ or ‘Will the Japanese be able to hold on to the territories they have captured?’, then once again there would have been a very marked tendency for intelligence to concentrate in the ‘Yes’ group. In every case the less-gifted person would have been likelier to give a right answer.

If one went simply by these instances, one might assume that high intelligence and bad military judgement always go together. However, it is not so simple as that. The English intelligentsia, on the whole, were more defeatist than the mass of the people – and some of them went on being defeatist at a time when the war was quite plainly won – partly because they were better able to visualize the dreary years of warfare that lay ahead. Their morale was worse because their imaginations were stronger. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory. But there was more to it than that. There was also the disaffection of large numbers of intellectuals, which made it difficult for them not to side with any country hostile to Britain. And deepest of all, there was admiration – though only in a very few cases conscious admiration – for the power, energy and cruelty of the Nazi régime. It would be a useful though tedious labour to go through the left-wing press and enumerate all the hostile references to Nazism during the years 1935–45. One would find, I have little doubt, that they reached their high-water mark in 1937–38 and 1944–45, and dropped off noticeably in the years 1939–42 – that is, during the period when Germany seemed to be winning. One would find, also, the same people advocating a compromise peace in 1940 and approving the dismemberment of Germany in 1945. And if one studied the reactions of the English intelligentsia towards the U.S.S.R., there, too, one would find genuinely progressive impulses mixed up with admiration for power and cruelty. It would be grossly unfair to suggest that power worship is the only motive for russophile feeling, but it is one motive, and among intellectuals it is probably the strongest one.

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end. Burnham’s writings are full of apocalyptic visions. Nations, governments, classes and social systems are constantly described as expanding, contracting, decaying, dissolving, toppling, crashing, crumbling, crystallizing, and, in general, behaving in an unstable and melodramatic way. The slowness of historical change, the fact that any epoch always contains a great deal of the last epoch, is never sufficiently allowed for. Such a manner of thinking is bound to lead to mistaken prophecies, because, even when it gauges the direction of events rightly, it will miscalculate their tempo. Within the space of five years Burnham foretold the domination of Russia by Germany and of Germany by Russia. In each case he was obeying the same instinct: the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible. With this in mind one can criticize his theory in a broader way.

The mistakes I have pointed out do not disprove Burnham’s theory, but they do cast light on his probable reasons for holding it. In this connexion one cannot leave out of account the fact that Burnham is an American. Every political theory has a certain regional tinge about it, and every nation, every culture, has its own characteristic prejudices and patches of ignorance. There are certain problems that must almost inevitably be seen in a different perspective according to the geographical situation from which one is looking at them. Now, the attitude that Burnham adopts, of classifying Communism and Fascism as much the same thing, and at the same time accepting both of them – or, at any rate, not assuming that either must be violently struggled against – is essentially an American attitude, and would be almost impossible for an Englishman or any other western European. English writers who consider Communism and Fascism to be the same thing invariably hold that both are monstrous evils which must be fought to the death: on the other hand, any Englishman who believes Communism and Fascism to be opposites will feel that he ought to side with one or the other.[3] The reason for this difference of outlook is simple enough and, as usual, is bound up with wish-thinking. If totalitarianism triumphs and the dreams of the geopoliticians come true, Britain will disappear as a world power and the whole of western Europe will be swallowed by some single great state. This is not a prospect that it is easy for an Englishman to contemplate with detachment. Either he does not want Britain to disappear – in which case he will tend to construct theories proving the thing that he wants – or, like a minority of intellectuals, he will decide that his country is finished and transfer his allegiance to some foreign power. An American does not have to make the same choice. Whatever happens, the United States will survive as a great power, and from the American point of view it does not make much difference whether Europe is dominated by Russia or by Germany. Most Americans who think of the matter at all would prefer to see the world divided between two or three monster states which had reached their natural boundaries and could bargain with one another on economic issues without being troubled by ideological differences. Such a world-picture fits in with the American tendency to admire size for its own sake and to feel that success constitutes justification, and it fits in with the all-prevailing anti-British sentiment. In practice. Britain and the United States have twice been forced into alliance against Germany, and will probably, before long, be forced into alliance against Russia: but, subjectively, a majority of Americans would prefer either Russia or Germany to Britain, and, as between Russia and Germany, would prefer whichever seemed stronger at the moment.[4] It is, therefore, not surprising that Burnham’s world-view should often be noticeably close to that of the American imperialists on the one side, or to that of the isolationists on the other. It is a ‘tough’ or ‘realistic’ world-view which fits in with the American form of wish-thinking. The almost open admiration for Nazi methods which Burnham shows in the earlier of his two books, and which would seem shocking to almost any English reader, depends ultimately on the fact that the Atlantic is wider than the Channel.

As I have said earlier, Burnham has probably been more right than wrong about the present and the immediate past. For quite fifty years past the general drift has almost certainly been towards oligarchy. The ever-increasing concentration of industrial and financial power; the diminishing importance of the individual capitalist or shareholder, and the growth of the new ‘managerial’ class of scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats; the weakness of the proletariat against the centralized state; the increasing helplessness of small countries against big ones; the decay of representative institutions and the appearance of one-party régimes based on police terrorism, faked plebiscites, etc.: all these things seem to point in the same direction. Burnham sees the trend and assumes that it is irresistible, rather as a rabbit fascinated by a boa constrictor might assume that a boa constrictor is the strongest thing in the world. When one looks a little deeper, one sees that all his ideas rest upon two axioms which are taken for granted in the earlier book and made partly explicit in the second one. They are:

• Politics is essentially the same in all ages.
• Political behaviour is different from other kinds of behaviour.

To take the second point first. In The Machiavellians, Burnham insists that politics is simply the struggle for power. Every great social movement, every war, every revolution, every political programme, however edifying and Utopian, really has behind it the ambitions of some sectional group which is out to grab power for itself. Power can never be restrained by any ethical or religious code, but only by other power. The nearest possible approach to altruistic behaviour is the perception by a ruling group that it will probably stay in power longer if it behaves decently. But curiously enough, these generalizations only apply to political behaviour, not to any other kind of behaviour. In everyday life, as Burnham sees and admits, one cannot explain every human action by applying the principle of cui bono? Obviously, human beings have impulses which are not selfish. Man, therefore, is an animal that can act morally when be acts as an individual, but becomes unmoral when he acts collectively. But even this generalization only holds good for the higher groups. The masses, it seems, have vague aspirations towards liberty and human brotherhood, which are easily played upon by power-hungry individuals or minorities. So that history consists of a series of swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job, enslaved over again by new masters.

Political activity, therefore, is a special kind of behaviour, characterized by its complete unscrupulousness, and occurring only among small groups of the population, especially among dissatisfied groups whose talents do not get free play under the existing form of society. The great mass of the people – and this is where (2) ties up with (1) – will always be unpolitical. In effect, therefore, humanity is divided into two classes: the self-seeking, hypocritical minority, and the brainless mob whose destiny is always to be led or driven, as one gets a pig back to the sty by kicking it on the bottom or rattling a stick inside a swill-bucket, according to the needs of the moment, And this beautiful pattern is to continue for ever. Individuals may pass from one category to another, whole classes may destroy other classes and rise to the dominant position, but the division of humanity into rulers and ruled is unalterable. In their capabilities, as in their desires and needs, men are not equal. There is an ‘iron law of oligarchy’, which would operate even if democracy were not impossible for mechanical reasons.

It is curious that in all his talk about the struggle for power, Burnham never stops to ask why people want power. He seems to assume that power hunger, although only dominant in comparatively few people, is a natural instinct that does not have to be explained, like the desire for food. He also assumes that the division of society into classes serves the same purpose in all ages. This is practically to ignore the history of hundreds of years. When Burnham’s master, Machiavelli, was writing, class divisions were not only unavoidable, but desirable. So long as methods of production were primitive, the great mass of the people were necessarily tied down to dreary, exhausting manual labour: and a few people had to be set free from such labour, otherwise civilization could not maintain itself, let alone make any progress. But since the arrival of the machine the whole pattern has altered. The justification for class distinctions, if there is a justification, is no longer the same, because there is no mechanical reason why the average human being should continue to be a drudge. True, drudgery persists; class distinctions are probably re-establishing themselves in a new form, and individual liberty is on the down-grade: but as these developments are now technically avoidable, they must have some psychological cause which Burnham makes no attempt to discover. The question that he ought to ask, and never does ask, is: Why does the lust for naked power become a major human motive exactly now, when the dominion of man over man is ceasing to be necessary? As for the claim that ‘human nature’, or ‘inexorable laws’ of this and that, make Socialism impossible, is simply a projection of the past into the future. In effect, Burnham argues that because a society of free and equal human beings has never existed, it never can exist. By the same argument one could have demonstrated the impossibility of aeroplanes in 1900, or of motor cars in 1850.

The notion that the machine has altered human relationships, and that in consequence Machiavelli is out of date, is a very obvious one. If Burnham fails to deal with it, it can, I think, only be because his own power instinct leads him to brush aside any suggestion that the Machiavellian world of force, fraud, and tyranny may somehow come to an end. It is important to bear in mind what I said above: that Burnham’s theory is only a variant – an American variant, and interesting because of its comprehensiveness – of the power worship now so prevalent among intellectuals. A more normal variant, at any rate in England, is Communism. If one examines the people who, having some idea of what the Russian régime is like, are strongly russophile, one finds that, on the whole, they belong to the ‘managerial’ class of which Burnham writes. That is, they are not managers in the narrow sense, but scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people who feel themselves cramped by a system that is still partly aristocratic, and are hungry for more power and more prestige. These people look towards the U.S.S.R. and see in it, or think they see, a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves. It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip. Burnham at least has the honesty to say that Socialism isn’t coming; the others merely say that Socialism is coming, and then give the word ‘Socialism’ a new meaning which makes nonsense of the old one. But his theory, for all its appearance of objectivity, is the rationalization of a wish. There is no strong reason for thinking that it tells us anything about the future, except perhaps the immediate future. It merely tells us what kind of world the ‘managerial’ class themselves, or at least the more conscious and ambitious members of the class, would like to live in.

Fortunately the ‘managers’ are not so invincible as Burnham believes. It is curious how persistently, in The Managerial Revolution, he ignores the advantages, military as well as social, enjoyed by a democratic country. At every point the evidence is squeezed in order to show the strength, vitality, and durability of Hitler’s crazy régime. Germany is expanding rapidly, and ‘rapid territorial expansion has always been a sign, not of decadence . . . but of renewal’. Germany makes war successfully, and ‘the ability to make war well is never a sign of decadence but of its opposite’. Germany also ‘inspires in millions of persons a fanatical loyalty. This, too, never accompanies decadence’. Even the cruelty and dishonesty of the Nazi régime are cited in its favour, since ‘the young, new, rising social order is, as against the old, more likely to resort on a large scale to lies, terror, persecution’. Yet, within only five years this young, new, rising social order had smashed itself to pieces and become, in Burnham’s usage of the word, decadent. And this had happened quite largely because of the ‘managerial’ (i.e. undemocratic) structure which Burnham admires. The immediate cause of the German defeat was the unheard-of folly of attacking the U.S.S.R. while Britain was still undefeated and America was manifestly getting ready to fight. Mistakes of this magnitude can only be made, or at any rate they are most likely to be made, in countries where public opinion has no power. So long as the common man can get a hearing, such elementary rules as not fighting all your enemies simultaneously are less likely to be violated.

But, in any case, one should have been able to see from the start that such a movement as Nazism could not produce any good or stable result. Actually, so long as they were winning, Burnham seems to have seen nothing wrong with the methods of the Nazis. Such methods, he says, only appear wicked because they are new:

There is no historical law that polite manners and ‘justice’ shall conquer. In history there is always the question of whose manners and whose justice. A rising social class and a new order of society have got to break through the old moral codes just as they must break through the old economic and political institutions. Naturally, from the point of view of the old, they are monsters. If they win, they take care in due time of manners and morals.

This implies that literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it. It ignores the fact that certain rules of conduct have to be observed if human society is to hold together at all. Burnham, therefore, was unable to see that the crimes and follies of the Nazi régime must lead by one route or other to disaster. So also with his new-found admiration for Stalin. It is too early to say in just what way the Russian régime will destroy itself. If I had to make a prophecy, I should say that a continuation of the Russian policies of the last fifteen years – and internal and external policy, of course, are merely two facets of the same thing – can only lead to a war conducted with atomic bombs, which will make Hitler’s invasion look like a tea-party. But at any rate, the Russian régime will either democratize itself, or it will perish. The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or, if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.

One cannot always make positive prophecies, but there are times when one ought to be able to make negative ones. No one could have been expected to foresee the exact results of the Treaty of Versailles, but millions of thinking people could and did foresee that those results would be bad. Plenty of people, though not so many in this case, can foresee that the results of the settlement now being forced on Europe will also be bad. And to refrain from admiring Hitler or Stalin – that, too, should not require an enormous intellectual effort. But it is partly a moral effort. That a man of Burnham’s gifts should have been able for a while to think of Nazism as something rather admirable, something that could and probably would build up a workable and durable social order shows, what damage is done to the sense of reality by the cultivation of what is now called ‘realism’.

Orwell’s notes

Published by Polemic, May 1946, and as James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution when published as a pamphlet, 1946

• Orwell Lecture 2010: Ferdinand Mount – Orwell and the Oligarchs

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Several years after hearing of its existence, I have at last got my hands on a copy of Zamyatin’s We, which is one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age. Looking it up in Gleb Struve’s 25 Years of Soviet Russian Literature, I find its history to have been this:

Zamyatin, who died in Paris in 1937, was a Russian novelist and critic who published a number of books both before and after the Revolution. We was written about 1923, and though it is not about Russia and has no direct connection with contemporary politics—it is a fantasy dealing with the twenty-sixth century A.D.—it was refused publication on the ground that it was ideologically undesirable. A copy of the manuscript found its way out of the country, and the book has appeared in English, French and Czech translations, but never in Russian. The English translation was published in the United States, and I have never been able to procure a copy: but copies of the French translation (the title is Nous Autres) do exist, and I have at last succeeded in borrowing one. So far as I can judge it is not a book of the first order, but it is certainly an unusual one, and it is astonishing that no English publisher has been enterprising enough to re-issue it.

The first thing anyone would notice about We is the fact—never pointed out, I believe—that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it. Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanised, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence. The atmosphere of the two books is similar, and it is roughly speaking the same kind of society that is being described, though Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories.

In the twenty-sixth century, in Zamyatin’s vision of it, the inhabitants of Utopia have so completely lost their individuality as to be known only by numbers. They live in glass houses (this was written before television was invented), which enables the political police, known as the ‘Guardians,’ to supervise them more easily. They all wear identical uniforms, and a human being is commonly referred to either as ‘a number’ or ‘a unif’ (uniform). They live on synthetic food, and their usual recreation is to march in fours while the anthem of the Single State is played through loudspeakers. At stated intervals they are allowed for one hour (known as ‘the sex hour’) to lower the curtains round their glass apartments. There is, of course, no marriage, though sex life does not appear to be completely promiscuous. For purposes of love-making everyone has a sort of ration book of pink tickets, and the partner with whom he spends one of his allotted sex hours signs the counterfoil. The Single State is ruled over by a personage known as The Benefactor, who is annually re-elected by the entire population, the vote being always unanimous. The guiding principle of the State is that happiness and freedom are incompatible. In the Garden of Eden man was happy, but in his folly he demanded freedom and was driven out into the wilderness. Now the Single State has restored his happiness by removing his freedom.

So far the resemblance with Brave New World is striking. But though Zamyatin’s book is less well put together—it has a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarise—it has a political point which the other lacks. In Huxley’s book the problem of ‘human nature’ is in a sense solved, because it assumes that by pre-natal treatment, drugs and hypnotic suggestion the human organism can be specialised in any way that is desired. A first-rate scientific worker is as easily produced as an Epsilon semi-moron, and in either case the vestiges of primitive instincts, such as maternal feeling or the desire for liberty, are easily dealt with. At the same time no clear reason is given why society should be stratified in the elaborate way that is described. The aim is not economic exploitation, but the desire to bully and dominate does not seem to be a motive either. There is no power-hunger, no sadism, no hardness of any kind. Those at the top have no strong motive for staying at the top, and though everyone is happy in a vacuous way, life has become so pointless that it is difficult to believe that such a society could endure.

Zamyatin’s book is on the whole more relevant to our own situation. In spite of education and the vigilance of the Guardians, many of the ancient human instincts are still there. The teller of the story, D-503, who, though a gifted engineer, is a poor conventional creature, a sort of Utopian Billy Brown of London Town, is constantly horrified by the atavistic impulses which seize upon him. He falls in love (this is a crime, of course) with a certain I-330 who is a member of an underground resistance movement and succeeds for a while in leading him into rebellion. When the rebellion breaks out it appears that the enemies of The Benefactor are in fact fairly numerous, and these people, apart from plotting the overthrow of the State, even indulge, at the moment when their curtains are down, in such vices as smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. D-503 is ultimately saved from the consequences of his own folly. The authorities announce that they have discovered the cause of the recent disorders: it is that some human beings suffer from a disease called imagination. The nerve-centre responsible for imagination has now been located, and the disease can be cured by X-ray treatment. D-503 undergoes the operation, after which it is easy for him to do what he has known all along that he ought to do—that is, betray his confederates to the police. With complete equanimity he watches I-330 tortured by means of compressed air under a glass bell:

She looked at me, her hands clasping the arms of the chair, until her eyes were completely shut. They took her out, brought her to herself by means of an electric shock, and put her under the bell again. This operation was repeated three times, and not a word issued from her lips.

The others who had been brought along with her showed themselves more honest. Many of them confessed after one application. Tomorrow they will all be sent to the Machine of the Benefactor.

The Machine of the Benefactor is the guillotine. There are many executions in Zamyatin’s Utopia. They take place publicly, in the presence of the Benefactor, and are accompanied by triumphal odes recited by the official poets. The guillotine, of course, is not the old crude instrument but a much improved model which literally liquidates its victim, reducing him in an instant to a puff of smoke and a pool of clear water. The execution is, in fact, a human sacrifice, and the scene describing it is given deliberately the colour of the sinister slave civilisations of the ancient world. It is this intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes—that makes Zamyatin’s book superior to Huxley’s.

It is easy to see why the book was refused publication. The following conversation (I abridge it slightly) between D-503 and I-330 would have been quite enough to set the blue pencils working:

“Do you realise that what you are suggesting is revolution?” “Of course, it’s revolution. Why not?”

“Because there can’t be a revolution. Our revolution was the last and there can never be another. Everybody knows that.”

“My dear, you’re a mathematician: tell me, which is the last number?”

“What do you mean, the last number?”

“Well, then, the biggest number!”

“But that’s absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can’t be a last one.”

“Then why do you talk about the last revolution?”

There are other similar passages. It may well be, however, that Zamyatin did not intend the Soviet regime to be the special target of his satire. Writing at about the time of Lenin’s death, he cannot have had the Stalin dictatorship in mind, and conditions in Russia in 1923 were not such that anyone would revolt against them on the ground that life was becoming too safe and comfortable. What Zamyatin seems to be aiming at is not any particular country but the implied aims of industrial civilisation. I have not read any of his other books, but I learn from Gleb Struve that he had spent several years in England and had written some blistering satires on English life. It is evident from We that he had a strong leaning towards primitivism. Imprisoned by the Czarist Government in 1906, and then imprisoned by the Bolsheviks in 1922 in the same corridor of the same prison, he had cause to dislike the political regime he had lived under, but his book is not simply the expression of a grievance. It is in effect a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again. This is a book to look out for when an English version appears.

Published in Tribune, 4th January 1946.

Gleb Struve on We and Zamyatin

In Tribune, 25 January 1946, Gleb Struve amplified Orwell’s remarks on We and Zamyatin.

May I add a few observations and facts to George Orwell’s article about Zamyatin’s We (Tribune, January 4) which, though, I agree, not a great book, is certainly both an important and an interesting work deserving to be known in this country?

There is no doubt that Zamyatin had in mind, in his Utopian satire, the Soviet Union which, even in 1922, was a single-party dictatorship, and it was because it was understood to be aimed at the Soviet State that the book was refused publication. Although never published in the original (and I do not know whether the Russian manuscript of it has been preserved) the book was at one time freely commented upon by Soviet critics. It is, of course, possible that some features of Zamyatin’s State of the future were suggested by Mussolini’s incipient Fascist order. Conditions of life in Zamyatin’s ‘Single State’ may differ in important particulars from those actually prevailing in the U.S.S.R. at the time the book was written, but the aspects on which Zamyatin dwelt were those which seemed to him to be the inevitable logical outcome of modern totalitarianism. Had the book been written after Hitler’s advent to power it might have been allowed to see the light of day and even hailed as a powerful invective of the Nazi State. It is important just because it is even more prophetic than topical.

On the other hand Orwell is right in saying that the book was also meant as a protest against the dominant spirit of our machine age. Zamyatin saw modern civilisation heading for an impasse and at times even looked forward to the emergence of a new Attila as the only salvation for humanity. It is curious that Zamyatin himself was by profession a shipbuilding engineer, and it was as an expert in the construction of ice-breakers that he came to this country towards the end of the 1914-18 war on a mission from the Russian Government. His mathematical training is strongly reflected in all his work. The satire on England which Orwell refers to is a longish short story called The Islanders, a bitingly satirical picture of English smugness and philistinism. So far as I know it was translated into English but was turned down by publishers because of its ‘anti-English’ bias.

Zamyatin’s other works include a satirical play, The Fires of St. Dominic, generally believed to have been aimed at the Soviet Cheka. The action, however, is set in Spain in the times of the Inquisition, and, unlike We, the play was allowed to appear in print. As a result of writing We, and of his general unorthodox attitude, Zamyatin fell under a cloud, was proclaimed an ‘inside émigré’ and eventually forced (or allowed) to emigrate (in 1930, I think). His last book, written in Paris, had Attila for its subject. At one time Zamyatin, as a master of his craft, had a great influence on younger Soviet writers and held the post of Chairman of the Association of Soviet Writers.

Further reading:

• George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Paul Owen: 1984 thoughtcrime? Does it matter that George Orwell pinched the plot?

Among the biographers who have applied themselves to relating and explaining the life and times of George Orwell, who was once Eric Blair, there will be few who, having delved and dug into this short but momentous life, are capable of letting it rest there. With the richness and depth of the literature he left us, it is easy to forget that even though he lived for forty-seven years, only half that time were serious writing years. He was a straightforward man, Eric Blair, given to good manners and plain speaking. Having purged some of his own demons (Down and Out in Paris and London and Burmese Days) and then morphed into George Orwell, he went in search of other people’s devils and did his best to present them as he found them (The Road to Wigan Pier and Animal Farm). In the process maybe he came to understand himself better, as is liable to happen when any problem is deliberately examined under the public and defining microscope of the written word.

No one appears to have enjoyed this sharing of his conceptions and misconceptions more than he himself did. His novels explored aspects of contemporary 20th century life which are relevant socio-political documents today. Despite the high profile of his last two novels, his articles, reviews and essays in various journals such as Horizon and Tribune are where one might be forgiven for feeling closest to George Orwell, to his likes and dislikes, and to those subjects closest to his heart. It is the magic of constant discovery within these works that the irresistibility of the plain man’s words will quietly entwine themselves round you and ensure that you never again quite escape the fascination of interpreting and then re-interpreting George Orwell.

Were you to settle down with some of the essays (Penguin published a miscellany of over 40 of them in 2000, with an introduction by Sir Bernard Crick) the often cheerful, matter-of-fact subjects tumble onto the page, a kaleidoscope of passion and pessimism, humour and humility impossible to resist. The everyday making of a good cup of tea becomes a strangely intimate exercise and sides are taken when it is discovered that, unlike some, Orwell belongs to the brigade which puts the tea in the cup first and adds the milk afterwards. After only mentioning one quite trivial subject, there are already questions to be asked and opinions to be exchanged. That is where he grabs you because every line he writes is liable to be encrypted and contains a wealth of possibilities; the more you read and read again, the more enlightenment you find.

The same changing angles and unexpected layers of perception apply to the Orwell poems. The other day a friend and I were discussing his poem ‘Romance’ and my friend thought it showed all the bitterness and cynicism of a young man simply making use of the facilities in the Burma of 1922-27 when the British Raj did as it pleased. My interpretation was completely the reverse, for in it I saw the pleasure in the girl’s youth and beauty, his relief, after abortive efforts in England, at finally parting with his virginity, and the quirky little last line in which he laughs with wry indulgence at the girl’s awareness of her own value, knowing that they know that she will be the winner and, what’s more, that he’ll visit her again.

Romance

When I was young and had no sense,
In far off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day.

Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,
Her teeth were ivory;
I said “For twenty silver pieces,
Maiden, sleep with me.”

She looked at me, so pure, so sad,
The loveliest thing alive,
And in her lisping, virgin voice,
Stood out for twenty-five.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

One wonders whether Orwell considered that his life was really dull and colourless because his novels seem to reflect a tired kind of depression and seediness that is not present in the essays. To be constantly short of money will make life extremely grey and ‘featureless’ because it takes a certain amount of liquidity to inject the colour of incident into each day and without it, the eking-out of meagre funds tends to make life very ‘dull’ indeed. But George had his own ways of gingering things up. To be sent off to the other side of the World for five years, having left behind The Girl Most Desired ‘with all hope denied’ (Page 154, Eric & Us) was clearly enough to start off his Burmese idyll on the wrong foot and, judging by the gloom – even the rage – with which he described those years, it appears to have introduced a sullen mood of inward despair. This youthful angst grew even darker on returning to England with his unsuccessful attempt to re-establish his boyhood romance. The disappointment of what he saw as rejection evolved into a determination to sink himself down to the bilges of life in order to allow himself the recognition that others were suffering a great deal more all around him (Down and Out in Paris & London, 1935; Burmese Days, 1936; The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937). It certainly affected, and at times depressed, the way he wrote his novels which is why the essays are such bran tubs of lucky dips and all so much more satisfying in many ways.

The interesting thing about applying oneself to debating the content of George Orwell’s work is that he quite generously expects you to disagree with him now and then. The ‘puckish’ side of his nature positively entices his reader to cross swords with such remarks as:

‘Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.’
‘Politics and The English Language’, Horizon, April 1946

In occasional bullish mood he will fling out remarks to make your blood pressure rise, such as an essay called ‘The Prevention of Literature’ where Orwell deliberately provokes with:

‘Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of antisocial selfishness.’

Such provocation is entirely deliberate from one who likes nothing better than dropping a stone into the pond of discussion and watching the ripples as they spread across the whole surface. And yet… and yet, in another mood entirely, this plain-speaking man is riveted by small wonders. In his essay ‘Some Thoughts on The Common Toad’ (Tribune, April 1946) his perfection of the art of plain speaking cannot be bettered than in a single sentence:

‘… after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict
Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent.’

In a line and a half you have the whole picture, complete with sly sparkle of humour and a total economy of words. Ah, that may be what he wrote but is that what he meant? The plain-speaking man has, with his lifelong habit of ‘double-speak’, planted doubt in the mind of his reader. Is anything the way it seems to be?

* * * * * * * * * *

It is extraordinary that George Orwell appears to be more often appreciated by men than women. Could this be because of that previously mentioned tendency to dusty greyness which permeates his novels and which may well appeal less to women? It would be a good subject for debate because there are to be found such riches of colour and style, intellect and humour in the essays, written in that practical, un-flowery way of his which express his genius without drama or decoration. There are also so many subtle references back to that childhood which he chose to present as having been far from happy (‘Such, Such Were The Joys’). Much has been made of this essay and its assertions over the years, but was firmly refuted by Jacintha Buddicom (Eric & Us, 1974/2006) who should know, after all, since Eric Blair spent most of them with her and her family until he went to Burma in 1922. That Orwell also, in his heart, would have agreed with her comes over quite strongly all over his work if you look for it.

There is a long, three paragraph reflection on the happiness of childhood past in an essay called ‘Riding Down To Bangor’ which he wrote for Tribune in November 1946. By then several heart-wrenching things had happened to him in that he and his wife Eileen had adopted a baby boy in wartime 1944 and, within months, Eileen had died while Orwell, by then an official War correspondent, was away in recently liberated Paris. He returned to assume fatherhood and to take care of Richard with the help of family and then a nanny. By the time he wrote ‘Riding Down to Bangor’ Richard was nearly two and Orwell was deeply involved with all things domestic, a state which he clearly thoroughly enjoyed. His own childhood may well have been in his mind when he wrote:

It is hard not to feel that it was a better kind of society than that which arose from the sudden industrialization of the later part of the century. The people… may be mildly ridiculous but they were uncorrupted. They have something that is best described as integrity, or good morale, founded partly on an unthinking piety.

George Orwell was a loving and devoted father, bringing Richard back to London to live with him as soon as he possibly could. He took his turn with the practical aspects of parenthood as well as quickly recognising how fast a child’s mind will absorb learning of every kind. Animal Farm with all its intriguing sub-texts, had been published and become a resounding success by this period, money was coming in and it was at last possible to consider the future. Despite his declining health and increasing demands by various journals which kept a regular income coming in, it was decided to lease a property in Scotland on the island of Jura so that Richard could progress in health and freedom and George could write his last, and deeply complicated novel, Nineteen Eighty Four. The fact that both ideals were achieved despite his health gradually descending into terminal illness says so much for his strength and determination. The plain-spoken man with the no-nonsense approach to his genius left behind him such a wealth of literature that it takes time and endless re-reading to recognize within the phrases the truth of who he was, and the source of where his often battered happiness lay. One of his most pared-down but revealing sentences may be considered especially illuminating. Sandwiched between a contemplation of the quality of love between children and adults, and his supposed crush on an older girl called Elsie (Mallinson?) in ‘Such, Such Were The Joys’ one discovers:

Love, the spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love, was something I could only feel for people who were young.

Given that he was recalling his early youth, and that at the time of writing this essay he was forty four, with many affairs in his life, a brief but ‘open’ marriage, and an occasional eye for the girls when opportunity knocked, one wonders whether there were, in Orwell’s short life, just two completely ‘unqualified’ and selfless loves. Consider Eric Blair’s absolute eight-year commitment to Jacintha Buddicom, and the even briefer period of complete devotion to his son Richard. Orwell’s deceptively uncluttered essays tend to raise these sort of questions to those who read them; causing repeated reads while the true message is searched for. This was, after all, the way that he and his Muse wrote to each other from their earliest youth and one wonders whether it became so ingrained in them that this was the way they continued to write for the rest of their lives.

Dione Venables runs Finlay Publisher, who publish a new essay by a leading Orwell scholar every two months. Dione contributed a revealing postscript to the 2006 edition of Jacintha Buddicom’s Eric & Us, a memoir of her childhood with her close friend, Eric Blair (later George Orwell). The three Buddicoms in Eric & Us were the children of Dione’s aunt Laura Finlay. Dione is the author of seven historical novels, and a sometime BBC broadcaster and miniaturist.

George Orwell, The Independent, 2002

It is said that the Roman Emperor Maximus Severus once decided to play a series of cruel and malicious tricks on his slaves. Some of them were lured into a river to be drowned or eaten by crocodiles. Others, on pain of death, were set deliberately impossible tasks such as counting the feathers in the Imperial mattress. Finally the Emperor ordered that a hole should be cut into the wall of the slaves’ sleeping quarters so that they could be seen by passers-by. At this point, so the story goes, Severus’ retinue laid down their weapons and refused to serve him any longer.

As a child I was always impressed by this legend, for it seemed to me to demonstrate an elemental truth about any kind of remotely civilised life. This is that the average human being values his privacy above practically any other condition or state of mind. In a queer way even the prospect of being thrown to the crocodiles is preferable to someone watching you defecate or having an argument with your wife. On the face of it the idea of putting a dozen young people in a specially constructed house – quite a decent house, I should say, from the look of it – and continuously observing their behaviour ought to be an instructive business. Scientists, after all, regularly base their deductions on examining cagefuls of animals, and when it comes down to it a human being is really only a superior rat, albeit lacking some of the rat’s innate resourcefulness.

To anyone who knows their Swift, Big Brother’s message will be deeply reassuring. Men are not quite beasts, of course, but they are near enough to being beasts to need reminding of the fact every so often. Neither should the programme’s apparent popularity – several million people are said to watch it each night – come as any great surprise. Scratch the average bourgeois hard enough and you can be pretty sure of finding a voyeur underneath. One scarcely needs to be told, for example, that the old ladies who write scandalized letters to the Daily Mail about Jade and PJ’s behaviour in the lavatory (I am told that one programme contained a fairly frank depiction of oral sex) are among the show’s most faithful viewers.

Equally, no one should be much shocked by the some of the alleged depravities that have been seized on by the popular press. Put a dozen young people together in an environment devoid of any kind of mental stimulus – by far the most sinister aspect of the Big Brother house, to my mind, was that there were no books – and it would be rather surprising for them not to get drunk and behave with maximum boorishness. To prattle about ‘exhibitionism’, as one or two critics have done, is to miss a substantial point about the age we inhabit. We are all exhibitionists – you and I and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr Tony Blair – and to ignore this fact is to ignore one of the more salient forces now contending for our souls.

At the same time, anyone who watches Big Brother will be conscious of a nagging feeling of unease, like ghostly knocking heard a long way off. Admittedly the cultural value of television is absurdly low, and I am not for a moment suggesting that Alex, Jade, PJ and Kate are in any way representative, and yet the spectacle of them venturing the sort of remarks that would be frowned on in the average sergeants’ mess, and the range of emotions this provoked, seem worth analysing at some length:

• Boredom Say what you like, human beings taken en masse are generally desperately uninteresting (Swift was right about this). This was particularly noticeable in the dialogue (some of it, to be fair, very funny) – a kind of dreadful, self-righteous blah-blahing about nothing, rather as if a flock of sheep had by some miracle been taught a few elementary phrases from a language primer and been encouraged to bleat them at intervals.
• Embarrassment I am not a particularly sensitive man, but the sight of Alex trying to explain to Jade why he disliked her, in terms that he could not articulate and she could not understand, depressed me horribly: like a pair of stalactites dripping away side by side in a cave – “So what would you do if we met in the street? Drip drip drip.” “I’d probably say hello. Drip drip drip.”
• Jade No point in pretending, of course, that much of this isn’t simply a header into the cesspool. Here is this wretched child, dragged out of some Bermondsey slum by the lure of celebrity, hoodwinked by the media barons into making remarks that would shame a parrot. Perhaps, in the last resort, it does not matter if such people are swindled or not, but there was a frightful moment in last Wednesday’s programme during the time she was helping Johnny to be sick when she turned to face the camera.

It was the ordinary slum girl’s look, the look of a girl who is twenty but looks thirty owing to a lifetime of bad food and the lack of healthy exercise, but something in her face caught my eye, and I realized that the people who say “It’s not the same for them as it would be for us” are wrong. She knew, as well as I did, what a dreadful destiny it was to be sitting in a designer armchair under the merciless artificial light with a bottle of cheap champagne, ready to betray her inanity with every sentence that she uttered. And all this for a mere £70,000! Somehow it seems a poor sort of exchange.

For all this, though, there was some good fun to be had. In particular, the people responsible for the programme’s production are to be congratulated for grasping one of the elementary maxims of low comedy from Max Miller down. This is that if you are going to get people to humiliate themselves in public, then you should make sure that you do the job thoroughly. In this respect the whole proceedings reminded me of one of those dreadful dance contests that used to take place in big American cities at the height of the Depression, where the cash prize was awarded to the last couple that remained standing.

Several other points are probably worth recording. The first is the utter collapse of educational standards revealed by exercises of this kind. In fact the producers have done us all a service by exposing the depths of ignorance now apparent in the mass society. If I were Ms Estelle Morris, on the strength of this performance by a collection of young people who have recently passed through the country’s educational system, I think I should go out and hang myself forthwith.

The second is the peculiar position that ‘class’ now occupies in early twenty-first century culture. Early on in the series a rather feeble effort was made to divide up the household along class lines into ‘rich’ and ‘poor’. This was quite properly resented by the inmates, largely, you feel, because of its obvious arbitrariness. Unquestionably, class distinctions still exist in the world of Big Brother, but they are much less fathomable, less to do with the old notions of dress and accent than with poise, manner, a queer kind of expertise that several of the participants altogether failed to possess. Jade, in particular, seemed vaguely conscious of this. You could see her looking at the others with an odd kind of hopelessness, the thought that there were certain kinds of conditioning that would always be beyond her, like a carthorse suddenly introduced to a stable of expensive thoroughbreds.

It would be all too easy to write Big Brother off as simply another example of Western decadence, that uniquely tiresome navel-gazing of people with too much to eat and too little to do that goes on regardless while half the world starves and American bombs defenceless children with lumps of thermite. In a curious way, though, what has taken place here on our television screens over the last two months has its positive side. Pace Huxley, man does not flourish in a hedonistic environment. One of the last group activities of the final week involved the four remaining inmates – Jade, Alex, Johnny and Kate – laying out their weekly income. Predictably enough they spent it on drink for a party, were promptly sick and lay around the floor singing songs of inconceivable silliness and futility.

This seemed to me to illustrate another important truth – one that practically every social planner, futurist guru and whatnot forgets – which is that, by and large, the average human being does not want most of the appurtenances of a secular heaven that are regularly dangled in their faces by the admen. To judge from the average TV show the summit of most human ambition is own a DVD and take five holidays a year. At the same time there is another part of the human soul that wants blood, sweat, toil and lofted banners: the distance between Johnny vomiting up his supper (not without its amusing side, if you like that kind of thing) and the dull thump of car bombs and bullets tap-tapping from the machine-gun nests is smaller than you think. It is a point that Mr Blair and President Bush, as they make their dispositions for the future shape of our lives, might care to ponder.

As told to D.J. TAYLOR

D. J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is the author of five novels, including English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour prize, Trespass and The Comedy Man. He is also well-known as a critic and reviewer, and is the author of A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s, After the War: The Novel and England since 1945 and an acclaimed biography, Thackeray. His critically acclaimed Orwell biography, Orwell: The Life (2003) won the Whitbread Biography Award, and he gave the 2005 Orwell Lecture entitled ‘Projections of the Inner “I”: George Orwell’s Fiction’. He is married with three children and lives in Norwich. Reproduced from Orwell: The Life (2003), by kind permission of the author.

In a shortish working career of a little over two decades, Orwell produced nearly two million words. The twenty volumes that Peter Davison’s monumental Complete Works needed to accommodate them take up nearly four feet of shelf space. If he lived to be seventy, Orwell once proposed, comparing his professional output with that of the average coal-miner, the chances were that he would leave a shelf-full of books. He died young, the novels and essays that would have occupied his fifties and sixties were never written, and yet posthumously at any rate, with the help of devoted editors and compilers, he achieved his ambition. Again – and these comparisons say something about the way in which his mind worked – Orwell once calculated that the lifetime output for a prolific writer of boys’ school stories would, were the pages to be lined end to end, have carpeted the best part of an acre. His own oeuvre spread out sheet by sheet would occupy an area roughly the size of Norwich city centre. The fifty years since his death have brought perhaps two million words more: biographies, critical studies, memoirs by literary colleagues and childhood friends, even a novel (David Caute’s Dr Orwell and Mr Blair) in which he plays a starring role. Why add to them?

Thackeray once declared that when he read a book all that remained in his head was a picture of the author. This defies all known precepts of modern literary theory, but the point remains. Orwell has obsessed me for the best part of a quarter of a century. The first ‘adult’ novel I ever picked off the bookshelf in my parents’ house was a Penguin paperback of A Clergyman’s Daughter that some ineluctable instinct had led my mother to buy in the early 1960s. The GCSE O-level English paper essay that I prophetically set out on a year or so later was: ‘Whose biography would you most like to write?’ Always in my adolescence, Orwell was there, the ghostly figure on the back of the book jacket urging me on. The sense of sheer personality that rises from his work – that urgent need to communicate vital things – is immensely strong, all the more so if you are a teenager who barely knows that books exist.

‘He knows all about me,’ you feel, ‘he wrote this for me’ – which, curiously enough, is what Orwell himself wrote about Henry Miller. Were I ever to meet his shade in the celestial equivalent of the Groucho Club – not, you suspect, somewhere Orwell would ever allow himself to be found – I should say what Philip Larkin maintained that he said to Cyril Connolly when the two of them were introduced at Auden’s memorial service: ‘Sir, you formed me.’ Cheap Penguins in those days, procurable at fifty pence a throw from the University of East Anglia bookshop, the four volumes of Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus’ Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters were my private cornucopia in the sixth-form years, a vast, sprawling bran tub into which repeated scoops yielded up anything but bran. Dickens, Thackeray, Gissing, Smollett, hosts of minor writers washed up on the early-twentieth-century shore: hardly any of the people who came to occupy my mental lumber room would have taken up residence there had it not been for Orwell.

There was more to it than this, of course. Marking down Orwell’s collected works as a hugely idiosyncratic version of the Good Book Guide is perhaps the equivalent of regarding Sir Winston Churchill as a moderately effective leader of the Conservative Party. For Orwell is, above all, a moral force, a light glinting in the darkness, a way through the murk. His status as a kind of ethical litmus paper stems not so much from repeated injunctions to ‘behave decently’, and some of the implications of behaving decently for the average western lifestyle, as from the armature that supported them. Broadly speaking he realised – and he did so a great deal earlier than most commentators of either Right or Left – that the single most important crisis of the twentieth century was the decline in mass religious belief and, its corollary, in personal immortality. God was dead and yet the secular substitutes put in His place, whether totalitarianism or western consumer capitalism, merely travestied human ideals and aspirations. The task facing modern man, as Orwell saw it, was to take control of that immense reservoir of spiritual feeling – all that moral sensibility looking for a home – and use it to irrigate millions of ordinary and finite lives. The atrocities of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – and this point is repeated endlessly in his later writings – could only have been designed by the godless because they presuppose a world in which there is no moral reckoning, and where the only power that matters is the ability to control not only your fellow men but the history of which they are a part and the knowledge on which that history rests. The idea that there was a life after death was unsustainable, but the moral baggage that accompanied that belief was indispensable. As it happens, and for reasons it is superfluous to explore here, I don’t believe that God is altogether dead, but I do believe in the materials which Orwell used to construct his opposition to – that eternally memorable phrase from an essay published in 1940 – ‘the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’. It is worth pointing out that these orthodoxies still exist sixty years later, if in rather different forms and wearing yet more elaborate disguises, and that it is our duty to resist them with exactly the same vigour with which Orwell resisted Hitler and Stalin.

And so in a cautious way I always knew that I would end up writing about Orwell, that the contents of the Oxford history syllabus were as nothing compared to – say – the essay ‘Oysters and Brown Stout’, which first alerted me to the fact that there was a writer called Thackeray, or the essay on Dickens, which leaves you with the feeling that Dickens and for that matter Orwell himself are sitting in the room talking to you as you read. The intensity of this fixation was such that it took me most of my twenties to establish the areas in which Orwell, mysteriously, was fallible, principally those breathtaking generalisations which close, adult inspection reveals to be a little less watertight than they seem. Take the famous statement that ‘Good prose is like a window-pane’. One doesn’t have to be a literary theorist to know that this is nonsense. Ronald Firbank, Marcel Proust and James Joyce (the last of whom at least Orwell profoundly admired) wrote varieties of ‘good prose’ and none of their sentences is remotely like a window-pane. Transparency, surely, is not the only virtue? It is the same with some of Orwell’s no-nonsense prescriptions for linguistic frankness, his hatred, for example, of those double-negative formulations of the ‘His was a not an insignificant talent’ type. Arguably the complexities hinted at when one writer remarks of another that his talent was not insignificant are worth going into, something that redounds to language’s credit rather than its capacity for obfuscation. I believe, for example, that Orwell’s own attitude to the Jews was not unprejudiced. Equally, one suspects that Orwell, in one of his less hard-line moments, would have seen this.

Meanwhile the process of finding out about Orwell, of accumulating, both openly and surreptitiously, that stock of Orwell lore went on. Any sixtysomething littérateur with some kind of track record met in early days around literary London was immediately pinioned with the question ‘Did you know George Orwell?’ The first book I ever reviewed – sniffily: how dare anyone crash in on my private party? – was Bernard Crick’s George Orwell: A Biography. All this – the harassing of literary notables, the snootiness over Professor Crick – was undertaken not in a spirit of fluttering antiquarianism but in the absolute conviction that Orwell, to borrow the original title of Christopher Hitchens’ recent polemic, matters in a way that ninety-nine out of a hundred writers do not. As a reader I have always been wary of ‘relevance’ in literature: so often it means the cast-off manuscripts of Group Theatre, Soviet social realism and novels with titles like Brixton Superfly. All art, Orwell famously suggested, is propaganda; equally, not all propaganda is art. At the same time it is accurate to say that in the fifty years since his death Orwell has managed to colonise vast areas of political thinking and ordinary language in a way that would have seemed remarkable to the friends who gathered round his deathbed. As with Dickens – perhaps the writer whose absorption into the national subconscious Orwell’s case most closely resembles – several of his most resonant utterances are used on an almost daily basis by people who have never read a line of his books. Again, as with Dickens, people mysteriously know about Orwell at second hand: that all animals are equal but some are more equal than others; that Big Brother is watching you; that Room 101 is where you go to be confronted by your worst horrors.

This centrality to a whole area of our national life was confirmed, on one very narrow level, by the tumult of approbation that greeted Peter Davison’s edition of the Complete Works on its appearance in 1998, and on another, much more expansive plateau, in media reaction to the events of 11 September 2001. Without warning Orwell was everywhere: mentor, guide, motivating spirit, conscience. As readily as one commentator inveighed against the ‘pansy left’ and proposed that every British soldier sent to Afghanistan should have an edition of Orwell’s essays packed into his rucksack, so another would dole out some of his less comforting observations about war’s inescapable moral consequences. All this may seem a considerable distance from the emaciated figure dying in a hospital bed half a century and more ago, and not the least fascinating speculation about Orwell is what he might have made of it all. Distinguishing the reality from the myth was difficult enough in the week after his death, Malcolm Muggeridge thought. Fifty-three years later it is harder still. And yet it is this contemporary fixation with Orwell, with that grey and curiously sorrowful face staring remorselessly back across time, that justifies the attempt to get inside his head: to establish not only what can be said about him and the world he inhabited, but what he can tell us about ourselves.

The tortuous history of Orwell biography is largely down to its subject. Orwell requested in his will that no biography of him should be written. Orwell’s widow Sonia spent many years trying to enforce this edict against increasingly sophisticated opposition. The first critical studies of Orwell’s work by Laurence Brander (who had known him at the BBC) and John Atkins appeared within a few years of his death. By the late 1950s there was already a market for Orwell reminiscences. Paul Potts’ memoir ‘Don Quixote on a Bicycle’ appeared in the London Magazine in 1957. Richard Rees’ full-length study, Fugitive from the Camp of Victory, which contains many biographical fragments, followed four years later, along with his sister Avril’s radio broadcast, ‘My Brother, George Orwell’. Sonia’s response to this rising tide of interest was twofold. On the one hand she set to work with Ian Angus, then Deputy Librarian at University College, London, on what eventually became the four-volume Collected Journalism, Essays and Letters, published by Secker & Warburg in 1968. On the other she appointed Malcolm Muggeridge, a close friend of Orwell’s in the 1940s, as official biographer. The Muggeridge benediction, it now seems clear, was a deliberate spoiler. A full-time editor, television presenter and controversialist, Muggeridge – as Sonia, one imagines, had foreseen – found the demands of a full-scale biography beyond him. His preliminary research survives, but there is no evidence that he made any serious effort to complete the book. In any case Sonia intended the four-volume, 1,500-page selection of Orwell’s work to be his memorial. As for the real biographical monument, there were other interested parties at work. Peter Stansky and William Abrahams’ The Unknown Orwell, uncountenanced by Sonia but displaying the fruits of a great deal of painstaking research, was well received on its publication in 1972. Cyril Connolly was moved to declare that the years he and Orwell had had in common were ‘described with so much tenderness and insight that I am often deluded that the writers were there’. It was this that apparently decided Sonia to appoint a new ‘official’ biographer and ensure that he actually produced a biography. Having read and been impressed by something he had written, she selected the then Birkbeck politics don Bernard Crick. George Orwell: A Biography duly appeared in late 1980. Sonia, who survived long enough to read the proofs, supposedly went to her grave believing that she had betrayed her late husband’s memory.

Quite why Sonia took this view of punctilious and in many ways ground-breaking account of Orwell’s life is uncertain. You suspect that by this stage in the proceedings any biography would have fallen short of the exacting yardsticks she had in mind. Sonia, as this book will perhaps show, was an odd woman and an odder literary widow: loyal, protective, keen to do the right thing, but simultaneously erratic in her judgement and capricious in her personal likes and dislikes. In her absence the floodgates of Orwell studies were opened. The year 1984, inevitably, brought a deluge of material: Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick’s assemblage of first-hand testimony, Orwell Remembered; a similar collection, Remembering Orwell, edited by Stephen Wadhams; W. J. West’s Orwell: The War Broadcasts, based on scripts discovered in the BBC archives at Caversham. (A companion volume, Orwell: The War Commentaries, appeared the following year.) Subsequently the tide became a torrent: a second biography by the American scholar Michael Shelden in 1991; a third by Jeffrey Meyers in 2000. In between these high-water marks there have been studies of Orwell’s fiction, of the intellectual climate in which his books were published and received, further reminiscences and dissections of the ‘Orwell myth’. This is a well-trodden path, and the scenery can be distressingly familiar. Writing once to a woman to whom Orwell had diffidently proposed marriage in 1946, I got back a letter which amongst other information listed the seven previous researchers who had come to interview her. What more was there to be said? this lady wondered.

It was, and is, a good question. Practically anyone of any consequence who came across him during the decade and a half of his life on the public stage has left a record of the encounter. The Orwell who turns up in the recollections of ordinary people is a rather different figure: less touched by fifty years of posthumous sanctification, more human. Three years ago, for example, I went to a village near Didcot in Oxfordshire to interview an old gentleman named George Summers, then in his early nineties. As it happened, I had met Mr Summers nearly two decades before when I was at college with his daughter Annie and had heard rumours of his connection with Orwell even then. Mr Summers, re-encountered in his front room, was affable but cagey. The story itself, pieced together through numberless digressions, involved Orwell’s attempt, back in Suffolk in the early 1930s, to worm his way into the affections of Mr Summers’s then fiancée, a woman named Dorothy Rogers. It ended with a chase – Orwell on foot, Mr Summers pursuing on a motorcycle – across Southwold common, remembered by the pursuer sixty-five years later as follows (this is a direct transcription from the tape): ‘I tried… I missed him… I went I suppose fifty yards, and there he was, and there was she… I was the guardian angel… I ran up the bank… I sort of pushed him off… I didn’t kill him,’ Mr Summers innocuously concluded.

However laboriously reassembled in a ninety-year-old’s memory, this is an extraordinary image: the vengeful figure crouched over the handlebars; the lanky interloper fleeing before him over the springy turf. (It is worth asking, too, what Dorothy was doing. Following behind? Watching the chase from the vantage point of the bank? Carrying on home, leaving the boys to fight it out?) However incongruous, nothing in twenty years of reading and writing about Orwell has quite so narrowly conveyed to me what, in a certain sense, Orwell was like. It took perhaps three-quarters of an hour for Mr Summers to finish, and embellish, his tale. Later Annie and I drove to Sutton Courtenay, a few miles away over the back roads, to examine Orwell’s grave in the village churchyard plot secured for him by his friend David Astor. Not the least of the many ironies that have attached themselves to Orwell is that this professional man of the people should have been buried amidst the Oxfordshire verdure, through the agency of an Anglo-American aristocrat.

Just over fifty years earlier another couple could have been found lingering in the graveyard at Sutton Courtenay: a striking blonde woman in her early thirties, pale with strain and anxiety, supported by a slightly older man. The two of them – avid Astor, editor of The Observer, and Sonia, Orwell’s widow – were not alone. They came accompanied by a solicitor, an undertaker’s van and a very long coffin. Orwell’s funeral and interment took place on 26 January 1950. Among several interested spectators who left records of the event, Malcolm Muggeridge was perhaps the most intrigued. It is Muggeridge, more than anyone else, who conveys something of the sheer difficulty in getting the deceased underground. Somewhat to general surprise, Orwell had requested in his will that his funeral service should follow the rites of the Church of England and that he should be buried in a cemetery. For one who had never professed Christian beliefs, still less been affiliated to any place of worship – at any rate in his later years – this demand would be difficult to realise. In the end the idea of a London burial place was abandoned and Astor influence was brought to bear on the vicar of Sutton Courtenay. Meanwhile, Muggeridge and Orwell’s close friend Anthony Powell (‘churchy’ people, according to Astor, and aware of the protocols involved) engaged the vicar of Christ Church, Albany Street, where the Powells worshipped, to conduct the service in London. Muggeridge, who had an eye for this kind of detail, was interested to find that the undertaker knew the Reverend Rose, in facty was lunching with him the same day to talk over future business. Sonia, deeply distressed by the events of the past few days, was consulted but took no active part in the arrangements. She was ‘quite helpless in the matter’, Muggeridge noted.

Thursday 26 January was bitterly cold. London lay in the grip of winter. Travelling to the church in a taxi with Orwell’s sister Avril, and seeking to break the ice with a woman who had little small-talk, David Astor asked her who she thought that Orwell had most admired. Avril misunderstood the question – Astor meant an individual rather than a type – and shot back ‘the working-class mother of eight children’. Sonia had not felt up to greeting the mourners as they entered the church. Instead the vestibule was manned by Orwell’s publisher, Fred Warburg, and his business partner Roger Senhouse, both of them behaving ‘as if it were a publisher’s party’, according to Lady Violet Powell. Stationed inside, Muggeridge allowed his wintry eye to rove over the congregation. Largely Jewish, he decided, and almost entirely unbelievers. The Reverend Rose was ‘excessively parsonical’ and his church unheated. As for the mourners themselves, Fred Warburg and his wife Pamela occupied the front row, followed by a file of relations of Eileen O’Shaugnessy, Orwell’s first wife, whose obvious grief seemed to Muggeridge ‘practically the only real element in the whole affair’. However artificial Muggeruidge may have thought the proceedings, he was impressed by the lesson (chosen by Powell) from the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes: ‘man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets… Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it’. This was, everyone agreed, a desperately sad affair: not some ancient literary eminence called to his eternal rest in a blaze of pomp and glory but a man of forty-six who had not survived long enough to taste the fruits of his success. Sonia seemed ‘dazed’. Muggeridge felt a pang as the coffin was removed, particularly because of its length: ‘Somehow this circumstance, reflecting George’s tallness, was poignant.’ A quarter of a century later Anthony Powell remembered the service as one of the most harrowing he had ever attended.

Afterwards the majority of the congregation repaired to the Powells’ house in Chester Gate. Astor, Sonia and the hearse departed for Oxfordshire. Following the burial service, read by the Reverend Gordon Dunstan from the Book of Common Prayer, the ‘small company’ (the vicar’s words) proceeded outside. By chance the graveyard at Sutton Courtenay abutted a government building used for testing water samples from the Thames. Apart from Sonia, himself and their professional attendants, Astor recalled, Orwell’s interment had only a single spectator: a scientist in a lab coat smoking a cigarette and looking, Astor thought, horribly like an extra from Nineteen Eighty-Four. Back in London, reading through the obituaries by Arthur Koestler, V. S. Pritchett, Julian Symons and others, Muggeridge felt that he saw in them ‘how the legend of a human being is created’.

D. J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is the author of five novels, including English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour prize, Trespass and The Comedy Man. He is also well-known as a critic and reviewer, and is the author of A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s, After the War: The Novel and England since 1945 and an acclaimed biography, Thackeray. His critically acclaimed Orwell biography, Orwell: The Life (2003) won the Whitbread Biography Award, and he gave the 2005 Orwell Lecture entitled ‘Projections of the Inner “I”: George Orwell’s Fiction’. He is married with three children and lives in Norwich. Reproduced from Orwell: The Life (2003), by kind permission of the author.

Orwell is a writer who continually experimented with narrative voice and presence. Failure to understand Orwell’s play with narrative perspective is perhaps an underlying cause of critical dissatisfaction with Orwell’s fiction. For what has been largely missed is the fact that the narrative voices, which are subject to continual shifts in psychological perspective and narratorial positioning, have been carefully placed in accordance with a high degree of narrative understanding. It has to be said that this is not how Orwell’s work is considered by many: ‘[Orwell’s] four pre-war efforts constitute a sort of amateur throat clearing’[1]. And: ‘[Orwell’s] whole work is a kind of didactic monologue’[2].

In Down and Out in Paris and London, as with his other documentary works, a relatively straightforward authorial point of view operates, one that is manifestly different from the variable, third-person voice of Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and also the first-person voice in Coming Up for Air. In Down and Out, as one would expect, the speaking voice works appropriately as a conduit for the author’s thoughts and perspective. Orwell’s thirties’ novels are widely perceived to be failed attempts at leaving the journalistic tone behind. At best Orwell is seen only to half succeed in establishing another voice, and when he does it is claimed that one cannot distinguish, for the greater part, between Orwell’s voice and that of his characters’. In fact, Orwell does make distinctions in his novels; what is more, he layers his narrative with different voices, thereby distancing the omniscient narrator and bringing in a fallible human voice that has the effect of softening the didacticism by way of truer-to-life accents.

Orwell’s alternating narrative style can be immediately discerned by contrasting Down and Out in Paris and London (given first) with Keep the Aspidistra Flying:

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty – it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping (D&O, p. 76).

Women, women! … Why should one, merely because one has no money, be deprived of that? … What else could you expect? He had no hold over her. No money, therefore no hold. In the last resort, what holds a woman to a man, except money? (KTAF, pp. 113-4)

In the first passage on poverty there is no uncertainty about who is speaking – it is Orwell; it is a ‘straightforward’ authorial point of view. In the second passage, on the fickleness of women, is it as clear from whom the fictive utterance comes? Should this insight into the female disposition in relation to love and money be taken as representing the author’s thoughts? And if not, is this voice valid in itself, i.e. is this an example of a Dostoevskyan author-thinker whose argument should be treated with the respect one affords an author? David Seed puts it neatly when he writes, referring to Burmese Days, that Orwell’s protagonist ‘Flory enacts the novelist’s dissatisfaction with the Anglo-Indians by renouncing the club’[3]. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell employs various narrative devices to signal that Gordon Comstock in no way enacts the author’s dissatisfaction with the moneyed world by his renunciation of it. This is mostly achieved through free indirect thought (or free indirect speech) presentation where a character’s thoughts replace the voice of the omniscient narrator. Many critics mistake a character’s, often flawed, vision of the world for authorial commentary. With free indirect thought a character’s thoughts are not formally indicated with the he/she thought tag, nor are there any quotation marks, but instead the narration unobtrusively shifts into their perspective, although adopting key linguistic markers to alert the reader to the altered internal focalisation, through the use of exclamation marks, colloquial language, viewing position and so on.

Orwell as a proletarian novelist was keen to reflect the thought processes of ordinary people and this meant showing their often limited and prejudiced view of the world. For example, when Flory, in Burmese Days, makes one of his typical anti-imperial remarks, such as, ‘The official holds the Burman down while the business man goes through his pockets’ (p. 38), all might be well in terms of valid comment. However, Flory adds, ‘The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to … gangs of Jews and Scotchmen’. This political observation, then, whilst being partly true is shown as too complex for Flory’s intellectual grasp; but, after all, he is just your ‘average sensual man’ and therefore limited[4]. The leitmotif of limitation works on all narrative levels. There is a crucial point in the book where Flory is tormented because he believes the woman he loves, Elizabeth Lackersteen, may be having an affair with the handsome and wealthy young Lieutenant, the Honourable Verrall:

But meanwhile, was it true, what he suspected? Had Verrall really become Elizabeth’s lover? There is no knowing, but on the whole the chances were against it, for, had it been so, there would have been no concealing it in such a place as Kyauktada (p. 236).

This kind of narration demonstrates that there is restricted vision, and this serves to limit the powers of the narrator. Again, it is the deliberate use of a ‘limited intermediary’ and this brings the reader into play. A sense, almost of deficiency, often strong in Flory’s political commentary, is woven into the narrative, which undermines the asides, reflections, casual comments and universal truths expressed, so that nothing can be taken at face-value because the ‘integrity’ of the speaker is not, in a sense, known. Toward the end of the story, Verrall leaves without saying goodbye to Elizabeth. The narrative runs, ‘Whether Verrall had started the train early to escape Elizabeth, or to escape the grass-wallahs, was an interesting question that was never cleared up’ (p. 279). Of course, this also operates as a joke, but it is very much in keeping with an overall narrative caprice or seeming caprice that vacillates between omniscience and limitation—a feature of Orwell’s political aesthetic throughout his writing career.

Orwell’s desire to reduce the presence of the author in his narration can also be traced through the excessive use of the second-person ‘you’ in A Clergyman’s Daughter and the novels that follow. Unlike Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter opens with the informal ‘you’. It serves to create a subjective, intimate mood from the outset, and the voice that follows, while not Dorothy’s, is aligned with her way of seeing and thinking, and gives the illusion that the narrator is an active participant in the story: ‘The alarm clock continued its nagging, feminine clamour, which would go on for five minutes or thereabouts if you did not stop it’ (p. 1). It would be natural enough to write this as a passive sentence and thus avoid the subject ‘you’: ‘which would go on for five minutes or thereabouts if it were not stopped’ [my italics], but to do that would create a more objective commentary. The passive sentence is practically non-existent in Orwell’s thirties’ novels. Moreover, it is the narrator behind the ‘you’ that is significant. Who is speaking here? Who would be inclined to describe the alarm of a clock as a ‘nagging, feminine clamour’?

Daphne Patai believes that the description of the ‘nagging’ clock unwittingly betrays a masculine bias, one that will subsequently fall short in portraying a female character with any real sympathy: ‘If the book’s title prepares us for a narrative about a woman, the novel’s second line reveals that this woman and her story will be judged from a conventionally biased masculine perspective’[5]. Patai does not consider that Orwell has intentionally opted for this patriarchal inferiorization of female association in the description. This is more likely to be Dorothy’s feeling toward the clock that might wake her father, which, if it did, would certainly be viewed by him as ‘nagging, feminine clamour’[6]. Dorothy is even afraid to let the bath water run freely lest it awaken her father: ‘Dorothy filled the bath as slowly as possible—the splashing always woke her father if she turned on the tap too fast’ (p. 2). So the narrative, whilst appearing to have a sexist bias, is actually always aligned with Dorothy’s point of view.

I have just given a taste here of the degree to which Orwell delivered highly controlled narratives; and even this brief demonstration of Orwell’s narrative method should make it astonishing that many of his novels are dismissed as half-baked, with critics cavalierly asserting, with exiguous recourse to textual example, that ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter is pretty well unreadable today’[7]. Orwell’s novels are demonstrably more than this, and it has to be understood that Orwell was a ruthless and blinkered critic when it came to his own work. Moreover, he was never constructive when criticizing himself; he was merely emotional, and a good demonstration of this is the fact that he ‘destroyed an entire manuscript after a single publisher’s letter’[8].

Notes

[It] display[s] two obvious weaknesses. Like his other novels, this too deals with a solitary character, but Orwell has compounded this fact with the greater failing—as he himself was soon to pronounce it—of making it a first-person narrative (David Wykes, A Preface to George Orwell (London: Longman, 1987) p. 106).

Typically, no examples of this obvious weakness are provided; in their place is Orwell’s self-denigration.

Loraine taught English as a foreign language in Brazil, Germany and Poland after graduating from university. She went on to complete her PhD in English literature at Liverpool University and then taught at the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and currently Hope Liverpool. Having just had her first book published, The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell she is currently pursuing further subjects. This essay is an extract from her book, The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell: The Novels from Burmese Days to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I have always felt as if I lived in Orwell’s England. Like every English child born at the end of the Second World War, I grew up in it. My first memories are American – colourful, plentiful and warm. My first English memories are of London in 1948. By contrast, they are grey and sepia, like a backdrop to Nineteen Eighty-Four. I recall a city of bombsites and soot-covered, pock-marked buildings, of gas firs turned low to save fuel and curtains lined with blackout material to keep in the warmth, of sweets on ration, cod-liver oil capsules and undrinkable National Health orange juice. Germany had been beaten, the Soviet Union was the next enemy, capitalism was on the slide and everybody looked to the state as the provider.

As it happens, I also grew up in Orwell’s England in a more personal way. From a very early age, I was aware of a connection with the writer which was no less evocative for being remote. One of my childhood treasures was a christening mug given by my godmother, Gwen O’Shaughnessy, sister-in-law of Orwell’s first wife Eileen. George Orwell died of tuberculosis in January 1950, at the age of forty-six. In the mid-1950s, my elder sister and I used to stay with Gwen and her half-sister Doreen Kopp in Norfolk, where Gwen continued to practise as a doctor, and where the two of them brought up a pooled brood of five children. Gwen and Doreen were both widows. It was a happy household, but one that was full of the echoes of dead men.

I remember George as a ghostly presence: a difficult, often exasperating, yet beloved spectre, whose name conjured up muddy boots and dirty finger-nails, adventures in foreign parts, and a stubbornly masculine failure to be practical. For me, Orwell’s stern whimsicality has ever since been bound up with a pre-affluent world that no longer exists – of long-faced, heavy-smoking, New Statesman & Nation-reading men (and a few women), who treated the well-to-do with tolerant condescension, and regarded a commitment to history, literature and the public service as taken-for-granted attributes of any civilized human being.

Today – in my mind, at least, but also I think more widely – Orwell’s England still conveys a sense of time and place: in particular, the atmosphere of a capital city traumatized by two world wars, London during the threadbare 1930s and the austere 1940s. Sometimes the metropolis is in the foreground. For example, few things Orwell wrote are more grainily evocative of austerity London than The English People, a text written during the Second World War as semi-propaganda, though not published until 1947. At other times, what the author writes about seems to have nothing to do with London. But London is there, nonetheless: The Road to Wigan Pier is as much about the mentality of the capital, as it is about the North. Thus, the rootedness of Orwell, the precision of his social comment, make it tempting to see his work as a kind of old-fashioned art movie. England, after all, no longer has coal-mines: and there are probably more wine bars than tripe shops in Wigan.

Yet there is a paradox. On the one hand, Orwell is quintessentially an English writer, carrying into his work many English qualities (suspicion of theory, for example), and his work will always be cited for its representative Englishness. On the other hand – like Boswell’s Samuel Johnson, another firmly based Englishman, whom in some ways he resembles – Orwell is the reverse of parochial. Indeed, by one reading, Orwell’s England is not a place at all. It is a state of mind. That is why the writings in this volume will continue to be appreciated by people who have only the haziest knowledge of, and only the most limited interest in, the national context in which they were written.

As well as a paradox, there is an irony. Somebody who pitted his satirical talent against the mid-twentieth-century obsession with utopias, appears today – more than fifty years after his death – as one of the most persuasively utopian writers who ever put pen to paper. If Orwell continues to nibble and gnaw at the reader’s moral conscience, it is because of the conviction infusing all his work that a satisfactory way of living with neighbours is attainable. Orwell was a socialist – the point needs underlining, for there have been many who have preferred to ignore this fundamental aspect of his life and work. His attacks on other socialists derived, not from a rejection of their goal, but from his own assessment of the vanities and humbug of many of those who self-consciously adopted the label.

Abolishing cant was his aim. What gives him his unique moral appeal is a passion for honesty which acknowledges that nobody is ever completely honest. If he had a universal message, it was this: a better life can be achieved, not by the repetition of stock phrases, but by examining the actual world we inhabit.

George Orwell was a socialist. Was he also a hero, even a martyr? It is important to get things into perspective. One obstacle to a proper understanding of his work is the posthumous cult that grew up in the years after his death, and especially (another irony) after the publication of Bernard Crick’s masterly and not at all reverential biography. The cult focused on the life, presenting the writer as a Christ or John the Baptist, and conveniently dividing the narrative into New Testament segments: youthful promise, followed by retreat into the wilderness and period of obscurity; self-examination in the company of outcasts and the needy; brief, brilliant and controversial ministry; even briefer period of celebrity; early death. The cult apparently solved the problem of Orwell’s refusal to be categorized: morally perfect and above reproach, the writer became the property of everybody. As a result, his work is nowadays quoted as scripture, often by people to whom he would not have given the time of day (and, no doubt, vice versa).

Orwell would laugh at this, and so should we. The passage of time ought to enable us to see him today as altogether fallible, struggling for most of his adult life to find a voice and earn his crust. To regard him in this light does not diminish his work but, on the contrary, makes it more remarkable: it helps us to appreciate that author, social inquirer and human being are of a piece. In place of the god or prophet, we discover a ‘degenerate modern semi-intellectual’ (his self-description) trembling on the edge of failure. We see writing that stems not from a master plan, but from a series of false starts. Indeed, so far from being structured, Orwell’s actual life was chaotic. The Orwell we encounter at the beginning of this book is Eric Blair, the Old Etonian drop-out and insecure drifter, more or less on his beam ends. If England is his topic, this is faute de mieux – it has less to do with a fascinated interest in his native country, than because it is the material most readily at hand.

By the mid-1930s, the scene has changed. With three published books under his belt and another on the way, he has acquired a literary persona (as well as a name). Yet he remains an eccentric, if by now well-directed, outsider – eking out a meagre existence on the margins of London journalistic and political life. We see an ambitious author who rather pettishly resents the success of his better-organized contemporaries. We see a rebel whose rebellion is more against the caste of left-wing fellow-writers, than against the shabby-genteel stratum which he identifies as his own. We see a vocal critic of social snobbery, whose access to publishing houses and literary journals owes more to doors opened through old-boy connections with people like Cyril Connolly, than he is ever prepared to admit. In such a context, Orwell’s famously savage indictment of brutality and conditioning at his prep school (‘Such, Such Were the Joys’) appears almost ungrateful.

Yet if Orwell in this pre-war period is an aspirant writer like any other, seizing at every opportunity to climb the greasy pole, he stands out from the rest – because of his relationship to his subject. He observes, and he chews at his observations, like a dog with a bone. Orwell is a classic documentary writer, not because experts say he is – stylistically he breaks practically every rule – but because of his story-teller’s instinct for conveying the emotions of a social traveller. Orwell’s skill is in convincing his audience that his own non-conventional feelings are actually the same as theirs would be, if they had shared his experience. He is not just a voyeur, peering at the dirty linen and messy lives of people the world prefers not to know about. He is a collusive, seductive voyeur. His achievement is to abolish (or appear to abolish) self-censorship, and to provide in his account an almost embarrassing intimacy: the reader is told to peer into the writer’s psyche and see the unpleasant things, as well as the good ones.

In this he differs from many of the philosophers and agitators among his contemporaries who saw themselves as messengers for a higher cause, interpreting or relaying points of view derived from Continental theories. For such people, documentary was political ammunition in a war with set battle-lines. By contrast, Orwell sniffs orthodoxy at a hundred yards: and, having sniffed, seeks to upset its adherents. Nobody was ever more politically incorrect than Orwell – or, on occasion, more illiberal: so far from being a model for twenty-first century progressives, he reveals attitudes (towards ‘Nancy poets’ of the literary establishment, for example, and ‘birth controllers’) which, if expressed for the first time today, would get him thrown out of the faculty of an American university. However, he does not claim superior virtue. He admits that many of his own attributes are undesirable. He self-flagellates as much as he flagellates.

The core of this volume is provided by Orwell’s most important non-fiction work. The Road to Wigan Pier is a sequel to Down and Out in Paris and London, the author’s first book, which established his distinctive style, and also himself as a social investigator of a particular, Jack London, type. At the same time, it is transitional, marking the writer’s move from amateur to professional status. Wigan Pier was commissioned by his publisher, Victor Gollancz, in January 1936, just after Orwell had finished the manuscript of his third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Hitherto, he had lived hand to mouth. The commission marked a step forward in his standing as a writer, and signalled a new confidence.

Orwell’s brief was to write about the condition of the unemployed in the North of England, much as he had previously written about tramps and social outcasts. Though non-fiction, it contains a literary convention that is fictional. The portrayal of the author as an impecunious scribbler not far removed from those he is observing (‘Economically, I belong to the working class’), is unduly modest. Every other aspect of the book, however, is essentially truthful – as the meticulous ‘Road to Wigan Pier Diary’, included in this volume, shows. Orwell treated the project with the utmost seriousness. For Down and Out he himself became a tramp, to find out what it felt like. For Wigan Pier he travelled North as a burgeoning writer, armed with letters of introduction from journalists and political activists, making no pretence of joining the ranks of those he sought to observe. At the same time, he was concerned to write as sensitive a description as he could, in the time available.

The book was based on two months (February and March, 1936) with working people and their families in Manchester, Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield, together with a spell with his sister and her husband in Leeds, and a visit to Liverpool docks. The author did not seek to be like the people he visited. However, he tried to be more than a typical journalist: he avoided staying in ordinary hotels, adopting instead the style of an anthropologist. After taking a train to Coventry, he made his way to Manchester by bus and on foot through some of the grimmest industrial areas, sleeping in lodging houses and on one occasion in a doss-house. In Manchester, he stayed for four days with a trade union official and his wife, and was directed on to Wigan, a town particularly hard hit by cotton-mill and coal-mine closures. There he lived at a variety of addresses (as his Diary entries record), including lodgings over a tripe shop. He visited homes, attended political meetings, and went down a pit. The fruit of his efforts is a work that combines detailed observation, a matter-of-fact tone, human feeling and political passion. At the same time, the author uses his account of proletarian life as a peg on which to hang what really interested him: not just the lives of working-class people as such, but his own inner dialogue about how middle-class people like himself did and should relate to them.

The Road to Wigan Pier is about class, and its effects. It is not about industry, or the economy. ‘I know nothing whatever about the technical side of mining,’ the author is at pains to point out. ‘I am merely describing what I have seen… I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one.’ The book is about the English as they really were, and possibly still are. It is about contrasts, hypocrisy, and convenient amnesia. Thus, the author drives home the unwelcome truth that, whoever you happen to be, the luxury to do what you do depends on hard, physical work done by others. ‘In order that Hitler may march the goose-step’, he writes, ‘that the Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lord’s, that the Nancy poets may scratch one another’s backs, coal has got to be forthcoming.’ Middle-class Southerners are a particular target. There may be, he suggests, ‘at least a tinge of truth in that picture of Southern England as one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards’, who know little about the manual labour they require to be performed.

The first part of Wigan Pier (buttressed by photos and simple bits of arithmetic which, alas, the passage of time has rendered quaint, rather than shocking) is a Baedeker’s guide to the slums, damp, dirt, disease, accident rates and high mortality that are the consequences of poor wages and bad working conditions. Repeatedly, the author stresses how difficult it is for a middle-class observer to take in what is going on. The conditions of the English proletariat, he indicates, are a foreign country. ‘Even when I am on the verge of starvation’, he points out, ‘I have certain rights attaching to my bourgeois status.’ The working class are not so lucky. Juxtaposed are the tragedies of squalid lives (‘on the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table, I decided to leave’); and the confessional, as the author seeks to explain why, to middle-class eyes and nostrils, working-class conditions are repugnant as well as tragic. It is a shattering book, yet surprisingly not a despairing one. It ends on a positive note: the reader is left with a sense that the task of breaking down social barriers is almost impossible – but not quite. The solution, Orwell argues, is for middle-class wage-earners in Southern England to accept that their future lies in alliance with, not in fearful opposition to, the Northern proletariat. The message is uncompromisingly political. If Socialism becomes something ‘large numbers of Englishmen genuinely care about’, he declares, then ‘the class-difficulty may solve itself more rapidly than now seems thinkable.’

Such an upbeat conclusion may have owed something to the author’s concern – in view of his heavy criticisms of socialists early in the book – to make clear which side he is on. The Left-Right struggle was intensifying, and it was not a time for ambiguity. It may also have something to do with an event in the author’s private life. In June 1936, Orwell married Eileen O’Shaugnessy. Orwell’s friend Geoffrey Gorer once remarked that the only time he ever saw Orwell really happy was in the first year of his marriage. It also happened to be the period when the author was writing up his Wigan Pier notes. Whether or not this was a factor, the reader comes away from The Road to Wigan Pier horrified by what it describes, but also with a sense of the dignity of those described in it, and of a challenge.

The challenge went beyond England. Orwell wrote Wigan Pier just as the attention of radicals at home was moving away from domestic problems to European ones. In March 1936, German troops entered the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, in violation of the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno. In July, Franco’s rebellion against the Republican Government in Spain precipitated a civil war. By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was published, its topic had become unfashionable: everybody on the Left was talking about Spain, and Orwell himself had taken time off from writing to arrange to join the Independent Labour Party’s expeditionary unit. If the book can be seen as a follow-up to Down and Out, it is also a prequel to Homage to Catalonia – the final section, on the need to resist creeping fascism, was written against the background of the growing Spanish conflict.

Spain impinged in another way as well. A week after Franco’s return to the mainland, Gollancz launched his pioneering Left Book Club, whose monthly ‘choices’ – selected by a triumvirate of Gollancz himself, John Strachey and Harold Laski – were guaranteed not only a wide but an enthusiastic and committed readership. The Club was a movement as well as a publishing venture. Its primary aim was to whip up support for the Spanish Republican cause and for a pro-Communist, anti-fascist popular front. Most of the ‘choices’ were by Communists or fellow-travellers. The Road to Wigan Pier, with its open scorn for middle-class Marxists, scarcely fitted the Club’s mould. Gollancz’s publishing instincts, however, were even stronger than his political ones, and as soon as he had read the manuscript he offered the author a place on the LBC list. The book was duly published by the Club in March 1937 – albeit with a preface by the publisher, distancing himself from Orwell’s anti-Communist opinions. By then, Orwell was in Spain, and received his copy in the trenches before Huesca. The first edition sold over 47,000 copies.

It is easy to see why Wigan Pier made Gollancz both excited and nervous. On the one hand, the descriptions of poverty were grist to the Marxist and ‘popular front’ mill. On the other, Orwell’s attack in the second half of the book on actually existing socialists (which Gollancz urged him to drop), was disconcertingly persuasive. Modern readers may also have difficulty with parts of the book, but for different reasons. Some may be more amused than outraged by the famous passage in which the author provocatively lumps together the many varieties of people he regards as cranks (‘One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist and feminist in England’). Harder to take, however, is Orwell’s blush-making description of working-class life at its best:

Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat – it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.

Such passages have been used to lampoon Orwell as a naïve and patronizing sentimentalist. Fortunately there are few of them: and they do little to detract from the author’s powerful account of a country morally crippled by class, by a bourgeois urge to keep up appearances, and by ignorance of the working and housing conditions of those whose downtrodden lives support the comforts of the better off.

There is a need for people to know. ‘It is a kind of duty’, he insists, ‘to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist.’ Smell plays a critical part. Orwell reminds the reader, self-analytically, that people like him – precariously ‘lower-upper-middle-class’ – were brought up to believe that ‘the lower classes smell’. Things may have changed since his own childhood before and during the Great War, he acknowledges. But he doubts if they have changed much.

Wigan Pier presents one picture of Orwell’s England. It is refined, but seldom contradicted, elsewhere in the author’s writings. A pattern emerges: England (not Ireland or Scotland or Wales – none of which greatly interests him) is a country where social divisions cause the poor unnecessary suffering; and also where the middle and upper classes are maimed by their upbringing and education. It is an England where, because of class, those on the margins of a particular layer attach themselves desperately, and pathetically, to the values of the one above them. There is a lace-curtain, ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion’ aspect. There is also militarism. ‘Most of the English middle class are trained for war from the cradle onwards’, the author observes, and asks, ‘how is it that England, with one of the smallest armies in the world, has so many retired colonels?’

People of moderate disposition who imagine that Orwell’s England may offer them consolation will have to look elsewhere: the author is uncompromising. In Wigan Pier, he writes of a need for an ‘effective Socialist party… with genuinely revolutionary intentions’, in order to resist an English form of fascism. The Second World War radicalizes him still further. Who can be relied on? Not the English police, ‘the very people who would go over to Hitler once they were certain he had won’. In his wartime essay, ‘My Country Right or Left’, Orwell does not mince his words. ‘Only revolution can save England’, he concludes, ‘that has been obvious for ten years. I dare say London gutters will have to run with blood.’ But if Orwell’s England is a country on the brink, its weaknesses can also be saving graces. Thus, the English ‘training for war’ and public-school system may even have advantages: turning out stiff-upper-lip idealists of the John Cornford type, splendidly equipped for leadership roles as revolutionaries. Meanwhile if England gets into serious trouble, the loyalty of anybody who has experienced ‘the long drilling in patriotism which the middle classes go through’ can be relied upon to rally round, regardless of political opinions.

In sum, the England that emerges from this book is a country (and an idea) which Orwell regards with a kind of weary affection and matured respect, even against his own better judgement: an England whose manifold injustices should not obscure its blessings. It is an England of tramps on the way down (‘homosexuality is a vice which is not unknown to these eternal wanderers’), trade union officials on the way up (‘as soon as a working-man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he wish or no’), of schools like Roedean (‘I could feel waves of snobbishness pouring out’), and a socialist bourgeoisie ‘most of whom give me the creeps’; an England where red pillar-boxes and suet puddings enter your soul, an England of privacy, an England which is also ‘the most class-ridden country under the sun’; an irreligious yet vaguely theistic England that maintains an unusual tradition of people ‘not killing one another’; a philistine, xenophobic England of compromises, bad teeth, lack of artistic talent or ability at languages. The English are ‘not intellectual’, the author tells us, approvingly – a dig at the ‘Nancy poets’ and other members of the intelligentsia who ‘take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow’.

Like the writer himself (and, implicitly, the readers he takes into his confidence) Orwell’s England is a territory of contradictions – in need of new management, but neither negligible, nor to be disregarded. Orwell indicts the double-standards, lack of warmth and pomposity of the English. No author dissects his fellow countrymen so pitilessly. But he also refuses to scorn English qualities of common sense, empiricism and toleration.

The books, essays, reviews, articles and jottings contained within this volume do not provide a comprehensive picture of the nation in Orwell’s head. What they do capture, however, is a sense of the author’s changing world view, with England as his point of reference. Orwell’s England displays a writer and his subject-matter in varying moods – of depression, fear, doggedness, bereavement, make-do-and-mend. It also provides, for the first time, a gathering impression of an outlook that is questioning, affectionate, critical and hopeful: a non-topographical, abstract Albion.

Will a modern young person – a black or brown Briton, born in Wilson’s England or Thatcher’s – feel any affinity towards it? Would Eric Blair recognize Tony Blair’s England? In some respects he would find it unimaginably different, in others only superficially so. Some characteristic features of Orwell’s sepia England have undoubtedly faded. The great work-forces of miners, dockers, metal-workers, ship-builders that dominated mid-century proletarian England no longer exist, and blue-collar workers are now supposedly in a minority. In place of slum-dwelling and the Means Test, problems to do with schooling, crime and family breakup dominate the contemporary social agenda. Among the middle class, stiff upper lips are less in evidence and social distinctions, though still harshly divisive, have blurred at the edges. Yet there are elements of bourgeois culture that remain stubbornly recognizable, down the generations:

‘How much a year has your father got?’

I told him what I thought it was, adding a few hundred pounds to make it sound better…

‘My father has over two hundred times as much money as yours’, he announced with a sort of amused contempt.

That was in 1915… I wonder, do conversations of that kind happen at preparatory schools now?

Do they still? It is conceivable. It is equally conceivable that there are people inhabiting what nowadays we call Middle England (not to mention up-market London boroughs where millionaires and beggars live cheek by jowl), who have a small understanding of those below the poverty line – and as small a wish to know – at the start of the twenty-first century as their counterparts had, at the beginning of the twentieth.

Orwell’s account of England endures partly because the modern bourgeoisie, complacent and blinkered as ever, still define the essence of Englishness the world sees; and partly because the poor (now called the socially excluded), who constitute the invisible England, are ever with us. It endures as an idea because, in our better moments, many of the most bourgeois of us continue to support Orwell’s dream – of an England and a world without barriers of any description; and because everything Orwell ever wrote is part of an extended polemic in favour of seeing truth, however ugly, in ourselves.

Professor Ben Pimlott was a leading historian and political biographer of post-war Britain. His works include lives of Hugh Dalton (1985, winner of the Whitbread Prize for biography), Harold Wilson (1992), and a study of Queen Elizabeth II (1996). His other books include Labour And The Left In The 1930s (1977), The Trade Unions In British Politics (with Chris Cook, 1982), Fabian Essays In Socialist Thought (1984), The Alternative (with Tony Wright and Tony Flower, 1990), Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks (1994) and Governing London (with Nirmala Rao, 2002).

He wrote about Portugal’s ‘Carnation Revolution’ in the 1970s (work which drew comparisons with Orwell in Catalonia), and during the 1980s he was a prolific essayist and book reviewer for the New Statesman, The Guardian and The Independent. He was also a political commentator at times for The Sunday Times, The Times and the New Statesman, where he was political editor in 1987-88. Chairman of the Fabian Society in 1993, he joined the politics and sociology department at Birkbeck College in 1981, and was Warden of Goldsmiths College until shortly before his death in 2004.

This essay – an introduction to a collection of Orwell’s works on England and the English, including The Road to Wigan Pier – is reproduced by kind permission of Jean Seaton, his wife.

I

Let me begin with the Hollywood film that has become a permanent icon of a certain kind of educated culture, at least among older generations: Casablanca. The cast will still be familiar, I hope: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Marcel Dalio, Conrad Veit, Claude Rains. Its phrases have become part of our discourse: ‘Play it again, Sam’, ‘Round up the usual suspects’. It is essentially about the subject of this essay. For, if we leave aside the basic love affair, this is a film about the relations of the Spanish Civil War and the wider politics of that strange but decisive period in twentieth century history, the era of Adolf Hitler. Rick, the hero, you will remember, has fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. He emerges from it defeated and cynical in his Moroccan café, and he ends by returning to the struggle in World War II. In short, Casablanca is about the mobilization of anti-fascism in the nineteen-thirties. And those mobilized against fascism before most others, and most passionately, were the Western intellectuals.

In my history of the ‘short twentieth century’ (Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Abacus), I discussed the peculiarities and complexities of this mobilization. As we know, the Axis – Germany, Italy and Japan – were in the end defeated by a military, and tacitly by something like an ideological, alliance, both short-lived, between capitalist USA, communist USSR and the old liberal-bourgeois imperialism of Great Britain. But this alliance did not come into being effectively until 1941, almost nine years after Hitler’s accession to power. In fact, it was forced on all the allies by the relentless expansionism of the Axis powers, headed by Germany. Hitler forced a war successively on Britain and France, the USSR and the USA, all of whom wanted to avoid it.

That ‘Fascism Means War’, as the slogan of the times had it, was evident from the moment that Hitler came to power. So, at least for everyone to the left of the political centre, was the nature of the Nazi project. Hitler made no secret of it. The logical response was obvious: to unite all the forces opposed to fascism, for whatever reason. I regard this proposition as self-evident, and indeed in the end this unity was forged and defeated fascism. For reasons that I fail to understand this has been contested in France, notably by the late François Furet in his Le passé d’une illusion. What infuriated Furet was that the Communists, and especially the French Communist Party, benefited from this policy of anti-fascist union, and indeed established themselves as the chief proponents of this union. He therefore denied the reality of anti-fascism, which he regarded merely as a Communist tactical trick to capture the support of liberal and democratic ingénues. Following similar lines, Kristof Pomian, who criticized my twentieth century history in the journal Le Débat, sought to present the politics of the 1930s as triangular rather than binary. Democracy, he argued, confronted both fascism and communism with equal hostility, or at least it should have done.

But that was not the case. The choice was between two sides. It was recognized as being between two sides. Those in London, Paris and Washington who feared a new world war did not for a moment believe that it would be against anyone except the aggressor powers, i.e. Germany, whether or not allied to Italy and Japan. No doubt Poland, Romania and the small Baltic States feared Russia, and with good reason, but speaking globally, Russia was seen as a counterweight to the main danger, which was Germany. Liberals did not even have the option of neutrality. The most immediate lesson of the Spanish Civil War was that ‘non-intervention’ helped one side. This was evident to the British government, which certainly wanted the Nationalists to win, though it also wanted at that time to avoid formally taking sides with Hitler and Mussolini against bolshevism. As Maurice Hankey, Cabinet Secretary, put it to the British Cabinet on July 20, 1936:

In the present stage of Europe, with France and Spain menaced by Bolshevism, it is not inconceivable that we may soon find it advisable to unite with Germany and Italy. The more we keep out of European complications the better.

(Cited in Enrique Moradiellos, La perfidia de Albión: el gobierno británico y la Guerra civil española, Siglo XX, Madrid 1996, p.51)

It was equally clear to Léon Blum that in accepting non-intervention reluctantly, for reasons of both domestic and international policy, he was betraying the Spanish Republic. He justified this in public by claiming that this was the only way to avoid a war, Europe being – he said – on the brink of war in August 1936 (Speech in the Chamber of Deputies of 6 December 1936) – but this was plainly not so. In short, genuine neutrality between the two sides in the Civil War, or equal hostility to both, was impossible. That, after all, is what Stalin himself was to discover in 1939-41.

In fact, of course, liberal and democratic opinion was not neutral between the two sides. In Age of Extremes, I quote the public opinion poll of early 1939 that asked the people of the USA who they wanted to win if war were to break out between Russia and Germany. Eighty-three per cent wanted a Russian victory, seventeen per cent a German one. A similar enquiry exists for the Spanish Civil War: eighty-seven per cent of Americans favoured the Republic, thirteen per cent the Nationalists.

II

The Spanish Civil War was both at the centre and on the margin of the era of anti-fascism. It was central, since it was immediately seen as a European war between fascism and anti-fascism, almost as the first battle in the coming world war, some of the characteristic aspects of which – air raids against civilian populations – it anticipated. But Spain took no part in World War II. Franco’s victory was to have no bearing on the collapse of France in 1940. The experience of the Republican armed forces was not relevant to the subsequent wartime resistance movements, even though in France these resistance movements were largely composed of refugee Spanish Republicans, and former International Brigaders played a major role in those of other countries. For it is a curious fact that guerrilla or partisan warfare was not much used by the Republicans during the Civil War, and, where it did occur, it was not very successful; all the more curious since this strategy was pursued with local success by Spanish Communists between 1945 and 1949.

The British and American armed forces were to make scarcely any use of the experience of the ‘premature anti-fascist’ volunteers who had fought in the International Brigade, whereas the German, Italian and Russian forces were to make prominent use of the professionals they had sent to Spain between 1936 and 1939.

Strangely enough the Civil War made its greatest impact on subsequent history through its political rather than its military activities. As I tried to show in my Age of Extremes (chapter 5, section IV) it provided the model both for the political strategy of the European resistance movements and hence for the form taken after liberation by liberated governments, particularly in the Soviet zone of influence. However, this phase of European politics was short-lived. The Cold War put an end to it after 1947.

In short, after its brief moment at the centre of world history, Spain returned to its traditional position on its margin. Outside Spain the Civil War lived on, as it still does among the rapidly diminishing number of its non-Spanish contemporaries. It became and has remained something remembered by those who were young at the time like the heart-rending and indestructible memory of a first great and lost love. This is not the case in Spain itself, where all experienced the tragic, murderous and complex impact of civil war,obscured as it was by the mythology and manipulation of the regime of the victors, which has been excellently studied in Paloma Aguilar Fernández’s Memoria y olvido de la Guerra civil española (Madrid 1996) [Remembering and forgetting the Spanish Civil War].

If we want to situate the Spanish Civil War within this general framework of the anti-fascist era, we have to bear in mind two things: the failure actually to resist fascism and the disproportionate success of anti-fascist mobilization among Europe’s intellectuals.

I am speaking not only of the success of fascist expansionism and the failure of the forces favouring peace to halt the apparently inevitable approach of another world war. I am also remembering the failure of its opponents to change public opinion. The only regions that saw a genuine political shift to the left after the Great Depression were Scandinavia and Northern America. Much of central and southern Europe was already under authoritarian governments or was to fall into their hands, but insofar as we can judge from the scattered electoral data, the drift in Hungary and Russia, not to mention among the German diaspora, was sharply to the right. On the other hand the victory of the Popular Front in France was a shift within the French Left, not a shift of opinion to the left. The 1936 electoral victory gave the combined Radicals, Socialists and Communists barely one per cent more votes than in 1932. And yet, if I can reconstruct the feelings of that generation from personal memory, my generation of the left, whether we were intellectuals or not, did not see ourselves as a retreating minority. We did not think that fascism would inevitably continue to advance. We were sure that a new world would come. Given the logic of antifascist unity, only the failure of governments and progressive parties to unite against fascism accounted for our series of defeats.

This helps to explain the disproportionate shift towards the Communists among those already on the left. But it also helps to explain our confidence as young intellectuals, for this social group was most easily, and disproportionately, mobilized against fascism. The reason is obvious. Fascism – even Italian fascism – was opposed in principle to the causes which defined and mobilized intellectuals as such, namely the values of the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions. Except in Germany, with its powerful schools of theory critical of liberalism ,there was no significant body of secular intellectuals who did not belong to this tradition. The Roman Catholic Church had very few eminent intellectuals known and respected as such outside its own ranks. I am not denying that in some fields, notably literature, some of the most distinguished figures were clearly on the right: Eliot, Hamsun, Pound, Yeats, Paul Claudel, Céline, Evelyn Waugh – but even in the armies of literature the politically conscious Right formed a modest regiment in the 1930s, except perhaps in France. Once again this became evident in 1936. US writers, whether or not they accepted US neutrality, were overwhelmingly opposed to Franco, and Hollywood even more so (Frederick R. Benson, Writers in Arms: The Impact of the Spanish Civil War, 1968, p.26). Of the British writers asked, five favoured the Nationalist, 16 were neutral and 106 were for the Republic, often passionately (Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, paperback edition, p. 347). As for Spain itself, there is no doubt where the poets of the Spanish language stood, who are now remembered: García Lorca, the brothers Machado, Alberti, Miguel Hernández, Neruda, Vallejo, Guillén.

This bias already operated against Italian fascism, even though it lacked at least two characteristics that were likely to make it unpopular among intellectuals: racism (until 1938) and hatred of modernism in the arts. Italian fascism did not lose the support of intellectuals, other than those already committed to the Left in 1922, until the Spanish Civil War. It seems that, with rare exceptions, Italian writers – very unlike German writers – did not emigrate during fascism. Therefore, 1936 forms a turning point in Italian cultural as well as political history. This may be a reason why the Civil War has left few traces in Italian belles lettres, except in retrospect (Vittorini). Those who wrote about it at the time were the émigré activists: the Rossellis, Pacciardi, Nenni, Longo, Togliatti (Aldo Garosci, Gli intelletuali e la Guerra di Spagna, Torino 1959, 433ff). On the other hand, against Germany intellectual anti-fascism operated from the moment Hitler took power, ritually burned the books of which Nazi ideology disapproved, and let loose a flood of ideological and racial emigrants. Willi Muenzenberg recognized its international potential immediately and exploited it brilliantly with the Brown Book and the campaign in defence of Dimitrov in the Reichstag Fire Trial.

The reactions of both intellectuals and the mobilized Left to the Spanish Civil War were, not surprisingly, spontaneous and massive. Here, at last, the advance of fascism was being resisted by arms. The appeal of armed resistance, being able to fight and not merely to talk, was almost certainly decisive. The poet Auden, asked to go to Spain for the propaganda value of his name, wrote to a friend: ‘I shall probably be a bloody bad soldier. But how can I speak to/for them without becoming one?’ (Carpenter, Life of W. H. Auden, p. 207) I think it is safe to say that most politically conscious British students of my age group felt they ought to fight in Spain and had a bad conscience if they did not. The extraordinary wave of volunteers who went to fight for the Republic is, I think, unique in the twentieth century. The most reliable figure for the strength of the body of foreign volunteers fighting for the Republic is around 35,000, not much less than Hugh Thomas’ original estimate of 40,000 (Skoutelsky, 1998, pp. 327-331).

They were a very mixed bunch, socially, culturally and by personal background. And yet, as one of them, the English poet Laurie Lee, has put it:

I believe we shared something else, unique to us at that time – the chance to make one grand and uncomplicated gesture of personal sacrifice and faith, which might never occur again . . . few of us yet knew that we had come to a war of antique muskets and jamming machine-guns, to be led by brave but bewildered amateurs. But for the moment there were no half-truths and hesitations, we had found a new freedom, almost a new morality, and discovered a new Satan – Fascism.’

Laurie Lee, A Moment of War, 1991, p.46

I am not claiming that the Brigades were composed of intellectuals, even though volunteering for Spain, unlike joining the French Foreign Legion, implied a level of political consciousness and certainly of knowledge of the world that most non-political workers did not have. For most of them, apart from those from neighbouring France, Spain was terra incognita, at best a shape in a school atlas. Thanks to an excellent monograph (Skoutelsky, 1998), we know that the largest single body of International Brigaders, the French (just under 9000), overwhelmingly came from the working class – ninety-two per cent – and included no more than one per cent students and members of the liberal professions, virtually all of them Communists (p. 143). Given their technical qualifications, most of these were in fact employed behind the front lines (Rémi Skoutelsky, L’Espoir guidait leur pas: les volontaires français dans les Brigates internationals, Bernard Grasset, 1998). There were probably more intellectuals among the political exiles who formed the cadres of the Brigades, and I hope I am not too ‘chauvinist’ in suggesting that the high proportion of Jews among the volunteers implies intellectual activities. One third of the American Lincoln Brigade were Jews, as was the majority of all American women in Spain (N. Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, Stanford 1994). According to an informed estimate about 7000 of the International Brigaders were Jews (Arnold Paucker, ‘Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Recht und Freiheit’, Schriften d. Leo Baeck Instituts 2nd edition Teetz 2004, p. 254). However, inside or outside the Brigades, the commitment, sometimes the practical commitment, of intellectuals is not in doubt. Writers supported Spain not only with money, speech and signatures, but they wrote about it, as Hemingway, Malraux, Bernanos and virtually all the notable contemporary young British poets – Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, Macneice – did. Spain was the experience that was central to their lives between 1936 and 1939, even if they kept it out of sight later.

This was clearly so in my student days at Cambridge between 1936 and 1939. Not only was it the Spanish War that converted young men and women to the Left, but we were inspired by the specific example of those who went to fight in Spain. Anyone entering the rooms of Cambridge socialist and communist students in those days was almost certain to find in them the photograph of John Cornford, intellectual, poet, leader of the student Communist Party, who had fallen in battle in Spain on his twenty-first birthday in December 1936. Like the familiar photo of Che Guevara, it was a powerful, iconic image – but it was closer to us, and, standing on our mantelpieces, it was a daily reminder of what we were fighting for. As it happens, not many Cambridge or other students actually went to fight in Spain after the Communist Party of Great Britain decided, presumably in the autumn of 1936, to discourage students from volunteering for the International Brigades unless they had special military qualifications. Many of those who fought had joined the Republican forces before the Party established this policy. Nevertheless, the British International Brigaders contained a significant number of talented intellectuals, of whom several fell. So far as I am aware, none of those who survived has expressed regret for his decision to fight.

III

Among the losers, polemics about the Civil War, often bad-tempered, have never ceased since 1939. This was not so while the war was still continuing, although such incidents as the banning of the dissident Marxist POUM party and the murder of its leader Andrés Nin caused some international protest. Plainly a number of foreign volunteers arriving in Spain, intellectuals or not, were shocked by what they saw there, by suffering and atrocity, by the ruthlessness of warfare, brutality and bureaucracy on their own side or, insofar as they were aware of them, the intrigues and political feuds within the Republic, by the behaviour of the Russians and much else. Again, the arguments between the Communists and their adversaries never ceased. And yet, during the war the doubters remained silent once they left Spain. They did not want to give aid to the enemies of the great cause. After their return, Simone Weill, though patently disappointed, said not a word. Wystan Auden wrote nothing, though he modified his great 1937 poem Spain in 1939 and refused to allow it to be reprinted in 1950. Faced with Stalin’s terror, Louis Fischer, a journalist closely associated with Moscow, denounced his past loyalties – but he took trouble to do so only when this gesture could no longer harm the Spanish Republic. The exception proves the rule: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. It was refused by Orwell’s regular publisher, Victor Gollancz, ‘believing, as did many people on the Left, that everything should be sacrificed in order to preserve a common front against the rise of Fascism,’ which was also the reason given by Kingsley Martin, editor of the influential weekly New Statesman & Nation, for accepting a critical book review. They represented the views overwhelmingly prevalent on the left. Orwell himself admitted after his return from Spain that, ‘a number of people have said to me with varying degrees of frankness that one must not tell the truth about what is happening in Spain and the part played by the Communist Party because to do so would prejudice public opinion against the Spanish government and so aid Franco,’ (Hugh Thomas, p. 817). Indeed, as Orwell himself recognized in a letter to a friendly reviewer, ‘what you say about not letting the Fascists in owing to dissensions between ourselves is very true.’ More than this: the public showed no interest in the book. It was published in 1938 in 1500 copies, which sold so poorly that the stock was not yet exhausted thirteen years later when it was first reprinted (Orwell in Spain, pp. 28, 251, 269-70). Only in the Cold War era did Orwell cease to be an awkward, marginal figure.

Of course the posthumous polemics about the Spanish War are legitimate, and indeed essential – but only if we separate out debate on real issues from the parti pris of political sectarianism, Cold War propaganda and pure ignorance of a forgotten past. The major question at issue in the Spanish Civil War was and remains how social revolution and war were related on the Republican side. The Spanish Civil War was, or began as, both. It was both a war born of the resistance of a legitimate government, with the help of a popular mobilization, against a partially successful military coup, and, in important parts of Spain, the spontaneous transformation of the mobilization into a social revolution. A serious war conducted by a government requires structure, discipline and a degree of centralization. What characterizes social revolutions like that of 1936 was local initiative, spontaneity, independence of or even resistance to higher authority, especially given the unique strength of Anarchism in that country. In short, what was and remains at issue in these debates is what divided Marx and Bakunin. The polemics about the dissident Marxist POUM are irrelevant to this issue and, given the small size and marginal role of that party in the Civil War, barely significant. They belong to the history of ideological struggles within the international communist movement or, if one prefers, of Stalin’s ruthless war against Trotskyism with which his agents (wrongly) identified it. The conflict between libertarian enthusiasm and disciplined organization, between social revolution and winning a war, remains real in the Spanish Civil War, even if we suppose that the USSR and the Communist Party wanted the war to end in revolution and that the parts of the economy socialized by the Anarchists (i.e. handed over to local workers’ control) worked well enough. Wars, however flexible the chains of command, cannot be fought, or war economies run, in a libertarian fashion. The Spanish Civil War could not have been waged,let alone won, along Orwellian lines.

However, in a more general sense, the conflict between revolution as the aspiration to freedom and winning war is not purely Spanish. It emerges fully after the victory of revolutions in wars of liberation: in Algeria, probably in Vietnam, certainly in Yugoslavia. Since the Left lost in the Spanish Civil War, in this case the debate is posthumous and increasingly remote from the realities of the time, like Ken Loach’s film, inspiring and moving as it is. Moral revulsion against Stalinism and the behaviour of its agents in Spain is justified. It is right to criticize the Communist conviction that the only revolution that counted was one that brought the Party a monopoly of power. And yet these considerations are not central to the problem of the Civil War. Marx would have had to confront Bakunin even if all on the Republican side had been angels. But it must be said that, among those who actually fought for the Republic as soldiers, most found Marx more relevant than Bakunin. Even though Fascism with among the survivors there are some who recall the spontaneous but inefficient euphoria of the Anarchist phase of liberation with tenderness as well as exasperation.

Today it is possible to see the Civil War, Spain’s contribution to the tragic history of that most brutal of centuries, the twentieth, in its historical context. It was not, as the neo-liberal François Furet argues it should have been, a war both against the ultra-right and the Comintern, a view shared, from a Trotskyist sectarian angle, by Ken Loach’s powerful film. It was a war against Franco, that is to say against the forces of Fascism with which Franco was aligned, though not a fascist himself. Unlike in World War II, in the Spanish Civil War the wrong side won. But it is largely due to the intellectuals,the artists and writers who had mobilized so overwhelmingly in favour of the Republic, that in this instance history has not been written by the victors. In creating the world’s memory of the Spanish Civil War the pen,the brush and the camera wielded on behalf of the defeated have proved mightier than the sword and the power of those who won.

Eric Hobsbawm (1917 – 2012) was an historian and writer who taught in London and various parts of the world. He was Professor Emeritus of Economic and Social History of the University of London, president of Birkbeck College, University of London and the author of a number of historical books and an autobiography. This article is taken from Revolutionaries (Abacus, 2007), and reproduced by kind permission of the author.

• Julio Etchart: Burmese Days Revisited (PDF)
• Julio Etchart: Burmese Days Revisited Photo Gallery

U Tue Mg displays an amiable smile when he offers me a seat and a cup of sweet lapaye tea. But he is naturally nervous, as I am. We can’t exchange more than half a dozen words, between my non-existent Burmese and his most basic English. But this gentle elderly man understands the purpose of my visit to this remote corner of his country, and he proves to be an excellent host, like most of his fellow compatriots.

Mr. Mg is the secretary of the District 3 Agricultural Co-op in the town of Katha, a long train ride, or up to two days upstream by boat, from the venerable city of Mandalay, immortalized by Kipling’s famous poem. The enterprise’s large warehouse, where peanut oil and other produce are processed and stored, lies across the yard from our shady verandah. Accommodation is thrown in with the job, so he is the sole inhabitant and caretaker of the building, which used to be the headquarters of the British Club, the old colonial enclave which was the centre of the local Anglo-Indian expatriate community at the time of the Raj.

Burma had become part of the British Empire during the nineteenth century as a province of British India, and George Orwell (né Eric Blair) spent five years from 1922 to 1927 as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Police force in what is now Myanmar.

It was his experience in this isolated outpost that inspired him to write his first novel, Burmese Days, first published 75 years ago. It is a story about the waning days of the Raj before World War II and one of the greatest denunciations of imperialism ever written, and a powerful critique of the colonial mindset that underpinned the system.

‘They arrive now’, Mr. Mg reported, interrupting my tour of the old building, still in excellent condition, despite its age. He had invited me to attend the afternoon remedial Math session for the local schoolchildren. The classroom was downstairs, in what it used to be the old billiards room, then out of bounds to ‘non-Europeans’.

A group of about thirty kids started to take their places and listened to the explanations of the tutors, hired by the local education authority to help them to catch up with their school curriculum.

It was a surreal scene, trying to imagine Orwell and his workmates playing snooker in the evenings and toasting the King with a glass of gin and tonic or Indian Pale Ale. It had been transformed to a couple of dozen tables full of eager youth and a teacher pointing to a big blackboard with Burmese numerals, drowned by the cacophony of young voices reciting their tables.

‘Tennis there’… my host rescues me from the smiles of the diligent kids to steer me out of the house to point me in the direction of the outbuildings and the tennis court, also featured in the novel and still in use, as a free facility, by the neighbours. I thanked him and head off, after taking a few shots of a middle age couple doing warming up exercises before their match. The court and the changing rooms are well maintained, though the surface betrays a few cracks.

I am both confused and impressed. I had come to Burma to follow the thread of a novel by one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century. My pre-conceived narrative was fairly simple: Orwell condemned in this book and all his later work the twin evils of imperialism and thought control. I was going to put his exposition in the context of the realities of modern day Myanmar. The Raj is long gone – the country achieved its independence in 1947 – but it has been subsequently substituted by one of the most vicious dictatorships on earth, in the name of Socialism.

The destruction of the rain forest, started by the British and inferred in the novel, since some of the expatriates traded in timber, carries on at an alarming rate, though nowadays the main consumer is China, whose insatiable demand for raw materials fuels the deforestation of the countryside. I witness this at the harbour of ancient Mandalay, the second city in the country and the economic hub of upper Myanmar, where I went to photograph the constant loading of huge beams of teak unto boats of all sizes. The precious cargo is heading up north, towards the Chinese border, before reaching its final destination inside Yunnan province on the Mekong River. A fat hardwood tycoon comes out of a fancy four wheel drive and challenges me: ‘Why some many pictures; you like my trees?’

‘Very nice trees’, I retorted, in total honesty. And, trying to buy time to get away without further trouble: ‘They will make beautiful houses’. ‘Oh, yes’, said the boss, evidently pleased with my compliment …’and look, more coming’. I turned to see another five lorries, weighed down with trunks, negotiating the dusty access to the terminal to wait for the next ship to dispose of their valuable haul.

China also controls the mining industry and is blighting the cities with hotels and shopping malls of the most dubious architectural taste. More importantly, the powerful neighbour is giving the ruling junta the political support they so desperately need, as they become increasingly isolated from the rest of the world.

The average Burmese continues to suffer from the greed of a neo-colonialist power; so little has changed in the last three quarters of a century.

Yet it is not easy to discover the ‘real’ Myanmar. I am travelling independently and have no official minders attached to me, though my whereabouts are obviously known to the authorities, since you are ‘logged-into’ the system from the time you buy a train ticket or book into a guest house.

But this is not necessarily the preamble to paranoia. On the contrary, wherever you go there is this warm sense of following a series of small serendipities, of being led to places and people who seem to have adjusted to the to and fro of history with peace and resignation.

Katha has a dreamlike air about it. The small town does not seem to have changed much since Orwell lived here. It has a fantastic setting high on a bank on a bend of the mighty Ayeyarwady – formerly Irrawaddy – River, Myanmar’s main artery, with views of distant mountain ranges.

A number of Buddhist temples adorn the riverfront and I am moved to visit one of them on the far side of the main promenade. It turns out to be a monastery and the head monk greets me warmly and invites me to share their only meal of the day, taken around noon -heaps of rice and vegetables prepared by local people who take it in turns to cook for the monks -. We talk in French, which he learned in Laos during a long stay in the holy city of Luang Prabang. He is happy that the novices here don’t have the same temptations than the ones he mentored back there. There is no Internet in Katha, so no chance for his young charges to get polluted with Google and Facebook, a favourite pastime for religious probationers in the rest of SE Asia, as I have witnessed on my visits to cyber-cafes in the region. The World Wide Web in Myanmar is confined to the main cities and even then, severely monitored by the authorities, with only selected websites made accessible. Since the monks have been at the forefront of the recent anti-government protests, I try to extract some comment on my host’s political views. But, alas, his remarks are oblique: “Rien ça change ici en Katha…” which could be interpreted as a universal statement on the fate of any backwater, or as a profound analysis on the future of his troubled country, where the rulers won’t allow any dissent to flourish.

Satisfied with the rice and the blessings, I take a meandering path through a grove of fir trees to the site of another religious faith – St Paul’s Anglican church, which is one of only two Christian places of worship in town; the other is a catholic chapel. Although St Paul’s has been extensively rebuilt, it stands on the location where a crucial scene in Orwell’s book takes place. After a Sunday sermon, Flory, the central British character, is humiliated in front of the woman he loves, as part of an elaborate plot by a corrupt local magistrate to discredit him. As a result, she rejects him and he eventually commits suicide.

Through John Flory, a timber merchant who appreciates Burmese culture and becomes disillusioned with the Empire, Orwell portrays the first stages of his own personal transformation from a colonial policeman to a radical thinker.

It took me 15 hours of a very bumpy train journey to reach Katha from Mandalay.
I shared my sleeper compartment with three boisterous off-duty army officers who insisted in measuring out their ample supplies of food and local whisky with me. Unable to get any sleep, I joined them in an all night game of poker, ‘Las Vegas’ style, as they called it. Which meant, I ended up losing some 5,000 kyat – about 5 US Dollars – but I guessed that paid for the roast chicken and the liquor. The only one of them who spoke any English, a captain in what he described as a ‘tactical unit’, told me about his exploits quashing the Karen insurgents, who have been fighting the central government in the east of the country, along the Thai border for more than three decades. “I shot many enemies”, he boasted, emboldened by the firewater, “…and now we have peace in the Union of Myanmar”. It was a sobering moment and a reminder of the ruthlessness of a system that has consistently crushed the cry for autonomy or independence of the many ethnic minorities within its borders.

The company I kept on the train back to Mandalay could not have been more different: I was sharing a carriage with monks on their way to the capital, Yangon, as well as with a young family. It was inspiriting to see the monks playing with the children and exchanging jokes with their parents. Members of Buddhist orders are venerated and deeply respected throughout Burma and ordinary people who come to help clean the buildings and feed their occupants visit their temples on a daily basis.

I wondered whether my fellow travelers had been involved in the protests of last year that were brutally put down by the government. Human rights in Myanmar are a long-standing concern for the international community, and there is a consensus that the military junta is one of the world’s most repressive and abusive regimes. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi continues under house arrest and there are no signs of political liberalization.

I visited many enchanting pagodas around the country. In the visitors centre of the main ones you always find photos of the ruling generals praying and paying their respects at the altars. Buddhists believe that you can partly expiate your sins by building or restoring temples. It reminds me of U PO Kyin, the corrupt magistrate in Burmese Days, who plots against Flory to himself become a member of the exclusive British Club.

He, too, believes he can get away with his wicked ways by financing new sanctuaries, but shortly after the unhappy expatriate takes his own life, Kyin dies, unredeemed, before building a single shrine.

Maybe the mysterious laws of karma, apparently understood by Orwell, will finally vindicate the inhabitants of this alluring land.

Copyright © Julio Etchart 2009

Julio Etchart is a photo-journalist who has worked around the world for international media organisations, film and TV companies, and NGOs. A co-founder of Reportage Photos, he has also been awarded a World Press Photo First Prize.