The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Orwell didn’t go that far. Like Auden, he feared a fascist victory in Spain and so felt obliged to fight. So did many others. In fact, the range of writers and other intellectuals who travelled to Spain to take part in the civil war was remarkable: from France, André Malraux, François Mauriac, Jacques Maritain, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard; from Britain, besides Orwell and Auden, there was Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Herbert Read; from the United States, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Theodore Dreiser; from Russia, Ilya Ehrenburg and Michael Kol’tsov; from Chile, Pablo Neruda.52 There was not yet the grand disillusion with the Soviet system that would come later, and many intellectuals were worried about the further extension of fascism beyond Germany and Italy (fascist parties existed in Finland, Portugal, and Britain, as well as elsewhere). They thought it was a ‘just war.’ A small number of writers supported Franco – George Santayana and Ezra Pound among them – because they thought he might impose a nationalistic and aristocratic social order, which would rescue culture from its inevitable decline; and there were a number of Roman Catholic writers who wanted a return to a Christian society. Some authors, after the senseless slaughter in the nationalist zone of Spain’s own best poet, Federico García Lorca, also joined the fight. From among these writers the war generated several first-person accounts.53 Most of the issues raised were overtaken by World War II and the Cold War that soon followed. But the Spanish Civil War generated at least two great novels that have lasting value, and one painting. These are André Malraux’s L’Espoir (translated as Days of Hope), Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.

  André Malraux was involved in the war far more than most other intellectuals, and far more than as a writer. He was an accomplished pilot, and spent time obtaining tanks and airplanes for the Republicans and even travelled to the United States to raise funds (successfully). His novel L’Espoir followed the fortunes of the International Brigade, in particular the air squadron, from the beginning of the war, in Madrid, to Barcelona and Toledo, ending at the battle of Guadalajara in March 1937.54 It is in part a combat diary and at other times an exploration of different philosophies as reflected in the experiences and attitudes of the various members of the brigade.55 The underlying theme is that courage alone is not enough in war: victory will go to the side that best organises that courage. This was designed to be a two-edged message. L’Espoir was published while the war was still going on, so Malraux was speaking to his fellow combatants as well as to the world at large. While courage is clearly needed for a revolution, the author says, organisation raises entirely different issues, of discipline, rank, sacrifice. With one eye firmly on Lenin and Stalin, organisers par excellence, Malraux drew attention to the dangers inherent in revolution, reminding readers that organisation can be a weapon, and as with any weapon, in the wrong hands it is a calamity.

  Ernest Hemingway’s book is set later in the war, in the early summer of 1937, an important date because at that time a Republican defeat was beginning to seem likely. The plot centres on a group of Republican partisans, drawn from all over Spain, subsisting in a cave high among the pines of the Sierra del Guadaramas, one hundred kilometres southwest of Madrid, and behind fascist lines. Much more than in L’Espoir, Hemingway’s book is a study of doom and betrayal, of a dawning awareness among some of the characters that the cause for which they are fighting cannot win and the beginning of an analysis of who and why that situation has come about. Hemingway’s view was that the Spanish people had been betrayed, by the international powers who had not delivered on their promises, but also by Spain herself, by self-interest, factionalism, undisciplined individualism. Some of the power and poignancy of the novel arises from the fact that the American Robert Jordan realises that there is a stage in every war when the possibility of defeat appears, and yet that possibility cannot be admitted, and one has to go on killing. Where does that leave the liberal conscience?56

  A month after the battle of Guadalajara, which formed a set piece in Malraux’s novel, on 26 April 1937, forty-three Heinkels from the German Luftwaffe attacked the tiny Spanish town of Guernica in the Basque region. One aircraft after another descended on the town in the afternoon light and strafed and bombed the defenceless roofs and churches and squares of an ancient and sacred place. By the time the attack was over, 1,600 of Guernica’s 7,000 inhabitants had been killed, and 70 percent of the town destroyed. It was an amazing act of wanton cruelty. Prior to this, Pablo Picasso had been commissioned by the Spanish government to produce a canvas for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair later in 1939. He had procrastinated despite the fact that he hated Franco and, at the beginning of the year, had composed ‘Dream and Lie of Franco,’ a poem full of violent imagery, designed to ridicule the general, whom he presented as a loathsome, barely human hairy slug. Having dithered for months over the government commission, the attack on Guernica finally stimulated him into action. He started within weeks of the attack and completed the huge canvas, twenty-five feet by eleven feet, in a frenzy in only a month or so.57 For the first time Picasso allowed himself an audience while he worked. Dora Maar, his companion, was always present, photographing the development of the composition; Paul Eluard was another member of this select group, together with Christian Zervos, André Malraux, Maurice Raynal, and Jean Cassou, watching him, sleeves rolled up, often talking about Goya, whose paintings had recorded the horrors of the Napoleonic wars.58 The painting was a distillation of forty years of Picasso’s art, deeply introspective and personal as well as having wider significance.59 It shows a woman, bull, and horse as terrified companions in a black-and-white nightmare. The novelist Claude Roy, then a law student, saw Guernica at the Paris World’s Fair and thought it was ‘a message from another planet. Its violence dumbfounded me, it petrified me with an anxiety I have never experienced before.’60 Herbert Read said, ‘Art long ago ceased to be monumental, the age must have a sense of glory. The artist must have some faith in his fellow men, and some confidence in the civilisation to which he belongs. Such an attitude is not possible in the modern world…. The only logical monument would be some sort of negative monument. A monument to disillusion, to despair, to destruction. It was inevitable that the greatest artist of our time should be driven to this conclusion. Picasso’s great fresco is a monument to destruction, a cry of outrage and horror amplified by the spirit of genius.’61

  The painting is above all Picasso. The frantic, screaming woman, the horse, shrieking in pain, its eyeballs distended in agony, the sinister bull, all broken, disfigured by war and bereavement, are entirely in black and white, with traces of newsprint on the horse’s torso. In his despair, Picasso is hinting that even his monument may prove no more permanent than a newspaper. As Robert Hughes has written, Guernica was the last great history painting.62 It was also the last major painting that took its subject from politics ‘with the intention of changing the way large numbers of people thought and felt about power.’ By the end of World War II the role of ‘war artist’ would be rendered obsolete by war photography.63 Early in the war, in the autumn of 1940, when Picasso was living in occupied Paris, the Nazis checked up on his assets. They visited the strongrooms in his bank and inventoried his paintings there. Then they visited his apartment. One of the officers noticed a photograph of Guernica lying on a table. The officer examined the photo and said, ‘Did you do this?’

  ‘No,’ Picasso replied. ‘You did.’64

  Picasso was wrong about one thing, though. The images in Guernica have lasted, and still have resonance today. So does the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell, who fought with the Republican partisans in and around Barcelona and produced a splendid account, Homage to Catalonia, explained how the war seemed a catalyst to him: ‘The Spanish Civil War and other events in 1936–7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democrati
c socialism, as I understand it.’65 In other words, Orwell knew what totalitarianism was like in 1936. It would take others decades to admit as much.

  Homage to Catalonia not only conveys the horror of war, the cold, the lice, the pain (Orwell was shot in the neck), but also the boredom.66 It was impossible to fight off the cold or the lice, but in a brief aside Orwell says that he staved off the boredom because he had brought with him, in his knapsack, ‘a few Penguins.’ This is one of the first references in print to a new literary phenomenon of the thirties: the paperback book.

  Homage to Catalonia itself became a very popular Penguin, but the books available to Orwell in Spain were unlikely to have been particularly highbrow. Penguin Books had a difficult and rather undistinguished birth. The idea for the company arose from a weekend visit which Allen Lane made to Devon in the spring of 1934 to stay with Agatha Christie and her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist. Lane was then managing director of the Bodley Head, a London publisher. He very much enjoyed the weekend, finding his hosts in excellent spirits. (Christie used to say, ‘An archaeologist is the best person to be married to – the older you get the more interested he is.’) On the journey home, however, Lane found himself with nothing to read.67 Changing trains at Exeter, he had an hour to wait, time to inspect the station’s bookstalls. All he could find were magazines, cheap thrillers, and romances in dreary hard covers. The very next day, at the morning meeting with his two brothers, Dick and John, who were also directors of the Bodley Head, he said that he had had an idea for a new kind of book: reprints of quality fiction and nonfiction, but bound in cheerful paper covers which would mean they could be priced at sixpence, well below the price of normal hardcovers and the same as a packet of ten cigarettes. The idea did not go down well with the brothers. If the books were to sell for sixpence, they said, how could they hope to make a profit? Allen’s answer was one word: Woolworth – though it might easily have been Ford, or Fordism. Because these paperbacks would be unimaginably cheap, he insisted, they would sell in unimaginably large quantities. Unit costs would be minimal and income maximised. Allen’s enthusiasm gradually won over his brothers. There had been cheap books before, but none of them spawned the change in reading habits that Allen Lane brought about.68 His first choice of name for the new series was Dolphin, part of the coat of arms of Bristol, Lane’s hometown. It was already being used, and so was Porpoise. Penguin, however, was free. It proved far harder to sell the idea to the rest of the book trade than Lane had envisaged, and Penguin only became remotely commercial, says J. E. Morpurgo, Lane’s biographer, after the wife of Woolworth’s senior buyer happened to be present at one of the meetings and said she liked the range of titles for the first ten books, and the jacket design.69 Her husband then placed a bulk order.

  The first Penguins were a mixed bunch. Number one was André Maurois’s Ariel, followed by Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Then came Eric Linklater’s Poet’s Pub, Susan Ertz’s Madame Claire, Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles. These were followed by Beverley Nichols’s Twenty-five, E. H. Young’s William, and Mary Webbs’s Gone to Earth. At number ten was Compton Mackenzie’s Carnival. It was a solid list, but it cannot be said to have broken new ground intellectually – sensible but safe, in the words of one friend.70 It was, however, an immediate commercial success. Some of the sociological reasons given at the time for the impact made by Penguin were more plausible than others. For example, it was argued that during the depression books were a cheap form of escape; alternatively, that large private libraries were no longer possible, in the smaller houses that J. B. Priestley had written about in English Journey, an examination of the social changes in Britain in the 1930s.71 But a better understanding of Penguin’s success emerged from a study Lane was familiar with, since it had been published only two years before, in 1932, which had examined people’s reading habits. This was Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public. Queenie Leavis was the wife of F. R. Leavis, a controversial don and literary critic in the English department at Cambridge. ‘English’ was then a relatively new subject at that university. The department, formed shortly after World War I, was run by the professor there, Hector Munro Chadwick, and his colleagues I. A. Richards, William Empson, and the Leavises. They had two main interests: the belief that literature was man’s noblest adventure, the attempt above all others to forge an ethical, moral, and therefore ultimately an enjoyable and satisfying life; and the corrupting influence on literature, and therefore on the mind, of commercial culture. In 1930 F. R. Leavis had produced Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, in which he argued that the ‘discerning appreciation’ of art and literature always depends on a small minority and that ‘fine living’ stems crucially from the ‘unprompted first-hand judgement’ of this minority.72 High culture was led by poetry.

  In Cambridge, Richards and the Leavises were surrounded by scientists. Empson originally went to Cambridge to read mathematics, Kathleen Raine was there and read biology, and the leading student literary magazine was edited by a man better known as a scientist, Jacob Bronowski. There is no question but that they were affected by this. As Leavis’s biographer tells us, poetry, for him, ‘belonged to the “vast corpus of problems” that are addressed by subjective opinion, rather than scientific method or conventional rule of thumb: “The whole world, in brief, of abstract opinion and disputation about matters of feeling.” Poetry invited subjectivity, so it was an eminently suitable bait for anyone who wishes to trap current opinions and responses” ’73 (italics in original). Leavis and Richards were interested in what ‘ordinary’ people (as opposed to critics) thought about poetry, about specific poems, and carried out surveys (science of sorts) to gauge reactions. Discussion of these ‘protocols’ introduced a new interaction in the lecture room, which was also revolutionary for the time. It was an attempt to be more objective, more scientific, as was Fiction and the Reading Public, in which Q. D. Leavis described herself as a sort of anthropologist looking at literature.

  The focus of her attention was ‘the best-seller’ and why best-sellers are never regarded as great literature. Her early chapters were based on a questionnaire sent to best-selling authors, but were overshadowed by the rest of the book, which was historical, describing the rise of the fiction-reading public in Britain. Leavis noted how in Elizabethan times the most popular form of culture was music; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Puritan conscience maintained a canon of literature that was designed to be uplifting, a reflection of the fact that, at the least, the established church put ‘a scholar and a gentleman in every parish’ who helped to lead taste. The changes that followed all stemmed from one thing: the growth in and changes to journalism. In the late eighteenth century, with the growth in popularity of periodicals like the Tatler and the Spectator, the reading of fiction quadrupled. This change, Leavis says, was so rapid that standards fell; novelists wrote more quickly to meet the expanding demand, producing inferior works. Then, in the early nineteenth century, the demand for novels written in serial form meant that novelists were forced to write more quickly still, in instalments, where each instalment had to end in as sensational a way as possible. Standards still fell further. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, with the arrival of the rotary press and the modern newspaper – and Lord Northcliffe and his Daily Mail in particular – standards fell yet again under the rubric ‘Give the public what it wants.’ By stages, Leavis said, the novel acquired a standing and then lost it; where once it had been a highbrow exploration of man’s essential ethical nature, it had since fallen a long way, step by step, to become mere storytelling. By the end of her book, Leavis had quite abandoned her anthropological stance and her scientific impartiality. Fiction and the Reading Public ends up as an angry work, angry with Lord Northcliffe in particular.74

  The book did, however, offer some clues as to the success of Allen Lane and Penguin Books. Several of the authors Le
avis mentions – Hemingway, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc – were included in the early lists. Hemingway, she said, glorified the ‘regular man,’ the figure set up by journalists in opposition to the highbrow; Chesterton and Belloc used a prose that, though more polished than journalism, was recognisably of that genre, carefully crafted to make no intellectual demands on the reader.75 This was not entirely fair on Lane. His lists were a mix, and with some of his other titles he did try to raise people’s horizons. For example, the second ten Penguins were better than the first ten: Norman Douglas’s South Wind, W. H. Hudson’s Purple Land, Dashiell Hammett’s Thin Man, Vita Sackville-West’s Edwardians, and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. In May 1937 Lane launched the Pelican imprint, and it was this range of nonfiction books that may have brought him his greatest triumph.76 It was the 1930s, and something was clearly wrong with Western capitalism, or the Western system.77 Pelican actually started after Allen had been sent one of George Bernard Shaw’s notorious postcards, in the summer of 1936. Shaw’s message was that he liked the first Penguins, and he recommended Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s Worst Journey in the World as a ‘distinguished addition.’ Lane had already dismissed that very tide on the grounds that, at sixpence a book, it was far too long to make a profit. And so, when he replied to Shaw, he was careful to make no promises, but he did say that what he really wanted was Shaw’s own Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism and Sovietism. Shaw simply replied: ‘How much?’78 With Shaw on board, H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, G. D. H. Cole, and Leonard Woolley soon followed. As this list shows, Penguin moved into science immediately and took a predominantly left-of-centre view of the world. But by now, 1937, the world was turning darker, and to adjust, Lane introduced a third innovation: the Penguin Special.79 The first was Germany Puts the Clock Back, which came out in November 1937, written by the opinionated American journalist Edgar Mowrer. The tone of the text was polemical, but also relevant to its success was the fact that the book had been quickly produced to address a specific predicament. This note of urgency was new, making Penguin Specials feel different from the traditional, leisured manner of the book trade. Before the outbreak of war, Penguin produced thirty-six specials, among them Blackmail or War?, China Struggles for Unity, The Air Defence of Britain, Europe and the Czechs, Between Two Wars?, Our Food Problem, and Poland (the latter released only two months before Hitler’s invasion).80