Fifty Orwell Essays
Page 47
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt
about the continuity of civilisation. For one has to remember that it is
not only Germany that has been blitzed. The same desolation extends, at
any rate in considerable patches, all the way from Brussels to
Stalingrad. And where there has been ground fighting, the destruction is
even more thorough. In the 300 miles or so between the Marne and the
Rhine there is not such a thing as a bridge or a viaduct that has not
been blown up.
Even in England we are aware that we need three million houses, and that
the chances of getting them within measurable time seem rather slender.
But how many houses will Germany need, or Poland or the USSR, or Italy?
When one thinks of the stupendous task of rebuilding hundreds of European
cities, one realises that a long period must elapse before even the
standards of living of 1939 can be re-established.
We do not yet know the full extent of the damage that has been done to
Germany but judging from the areas that have been overrun hitherto, it is
difficult to believe in the power of the Germans to pay any kind of
reparations, either in goods or in labour. Simply to re-house the German
people, to set the shattered factories working, and to keep German
agriculture from collapsing after the foreign workers have been
liberated, will use up all the labour that the Germans are likely to
dispose of.
If, as is planned, millions of them are to be deported for reconstruction
work, the recovery of Germany itself will be all the slower. After the
last war, the impossibility of obtaining substantial money reparations
was finally grasped, but it was less generally realised that the
impoverishment of any one country reacts unfavourably on the world as a
whole. It would be no advantage to turn Germany into a kind of rural
slum.
GOOD BAD BOOKS
Not long ago a publisher commissioned me to write an introduction for a
reprint of a novel by Leonard Merrick. This publishing house, it appears,
is going to reissue a long series of minor and partly-forgotten novels of
the twentieth century. It is a valuable service in these bookless days,
and I rather envy the person whose job it will be to scout round the
threepenny boxes, hunting down copies of his boyhood favourites.
A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which
flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, is what Chesterton called the "good bad book": that is, the
kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable
when more serious productions have perished. Obviously outstanding books
in this line are RAFFLES and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which have kept
their place when innumerable "problem novels", "human documents" and
"terrible indictments" of this or that have fallen into deserved
oblivion. (Who has worn better, Conan Doyle or Meredith?) Almost in the
same class as these I, put R. Austin Freeman's earlier stories--"The
Singing Bone" "The Eye of Osiris" and others--Ernest Bramah's MAX
CARRADOS, and, dropping the standard a bit, Guy Boothby's Tibetan
thriller, DR NIKOLA, a sort of schoolboy version of Hue's TRAVELS IN
TARTARY, which would probably make a real visit to Central Asia seem a
dismal anticlimax.
But apart from thrillers, there were the minor humorous writers of the
period. For example, Pett Ridge-but I admit his full-length books no
longer seem readable--E. Nesbit (THE TREASURE SEEKERS), George
Birmingham, who was good so long as he kept off politics, the
pornographic Binstead ("Pitcher" of the PINK 'UN), and, if American books
can be included, Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories. A cut above most of
these was Barry Pain. Some of Pain's humorous writings are, I suppose,
still in print, but to anyone who comes across it I recommend what must
now be a very rare book--THE OCTAVE OF CLAUDIUS, a brilliant exercise in
the macabre. Somewhat later in time there was Peter Blundell, who wrote
in the W.W. Jacobs vein about Far Eastern seaport towns, and who seems to
be rather unaccountably forgotten, in spite of having been praised in
print by H.G. Wells.
However, all the books I have been speaking of are frankly "escape"
literature. They form pleasant patches in one's memory, quiet corners
where the mind can browse at odd moments, but they hardly pretend to have
anything to do with real life. There is another kind of good bad book
which is more seriously intended, and which tells us, I think, something
about the nature of the novel and the reasons for its present decadence.
During the last fifty years there has been a whole series of writers--some
of them are still writing--whom it is quite impossible to call "good" by
any strictly literary standard, but who are natural novelists and who
seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good
taste. In this class I put Leonard Merrick himself, W.L. George, J.D.
Beresford, Ernest Raymond, May Sinclair, and--at a lower level than the
others but still essentially similar--A.S.M. Hutchinson.
Most of these have been prolific writers, and their output has naturally
varied in quality. I am thinking in each case of one or two outstanding
books: for example, Merrick's CYNTHIA, J.D. Beresford's A CANDIDATE FOR
TRUTH, W.L. George's CALIBAN, May Sinclair's THE COMBINED MAZE and Ernest
Raymond's WE, THE ACCUSED. In each of these books the author has been
able to identify himself with his imagined characters, to feel with them
and invite sympathy on their behalf, with a kind of abandonment that
cleverer people would find it difficult to achieve. They bring out the
fact that intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a
story-teller, as it would be to a music-hall comedian.
Take, for example, Ernest Raymond's WE, THE ACCUSED--a peculiarly sordid
and convincing murder story, probably based on the Crippen case. I think
it gains a great deal from the fact that the author only partly grasps
the pathetic vulgarity of the people he is writing about, and therefore
does not despise them. Perhaps it even--like Theodore Dreiser's An
AMERICAN TRAGEDY--gains something from the clumsy long-winded manner in
which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at
selection, and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is
slowly built up. So also with A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH. Here there is not
the same clumsiness, but there is the same ability to take seriously the
problems of commonplace people. So also with CYNTHIA and at any rate the
earlier part of Caliban. The greater part of what W.L. George wrote was
shoddy rubbish, but in this particular book, based on the career of
Northcliffe, he achieved some memorable and truthful pictures of
lower-middle-class London life. Parts of this book are probably
autobiographical, and one of the advantages of good bad writers is their
lack of shame in writing autobiography. Exhibitionism and self-pity are
the bane of the novelist, and yet if he is
too frightened of them his
creative gift may suffer.
The existence of good bad literature--the fact that one can be amused or
excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to
take seriously--is a reminder that art is not the same thing as
cerebration. I imagine that by any test that could be devised, Carlyle
would be found to be a more intelligent man than Trollope. Yet Trollope
has remained readable and Carlyle has not: with all his cleverness he had
not even the wit to write in plain straightforward English. In novelists,
almost as much as in poets, the connection between intelligence and
creative power is hard to establish. A good novelist may be a prodigy of
self-discipline like Flaubert, or he may be an intellectual sprawl like
Dickens. Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been
poured into Wyndham Lewis's so-called novels, such as TARR or SNOOTY
BARONET. Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books
right through. Some indefinable quality, a sort of literary vitamin,
which exists even in a book like IF WINTER COMES, is absent from them.
Perhaps the supreme example of the "good bad" book is UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.
It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous
melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially
true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other. But
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, after all, is trying to be serious and to deal
with the real world. How about the frankly escapist writers, the
purveyors of thrills and "light" humour? How about SHERLOCK HOLMES, VICE
VERSA, DRACULA, HELEN'S BABIES or KING SOLOMON'S MINES? All of these are
definitely absurd books, books which one is more inclined to laugh AT
than WITH, and which were hardly taken seriously even by their authors;
yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do so. All one can
say is that, while civilisation remains such that one needs distraction
from time to time, "light" literature has its appointed place; also that
there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have
more survival value than erudition or intellectual power. There are
music-hall songs which are better poems than three-quarters of the stuff
that gets into the anthologies:
Come where the booze is cheaper,
Come where the pots hold more,
Come where the boss is a bit of a sport,
Come to the pub next door!
Or again:
Two lovely black eyes
Oh, what a surprise!
Only for calling another man wrong,
Two lovely black eyes!
I would far rather have written either of those than, say, "The Blessed
Damozel" or "Love in the Valley". And by the same token I would back
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or
George Moore, though I know of no strictly literary test which would show
where the superiority lies.
IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE (1945)
When the Germans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the early
summer of 1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse,
who had been living throughout the early part of the war in his villa at
Le Touquet, and seems not to have realised until the last moment that he
was in any danger. As he was led away into captivity, he is said to have
remarked, "Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book." He was
placed for the time being under house arrest, and from his subsequent
statements it appears that he was treated in a fairly friendly way,
German officers in the neighbourhood frequently "dropping in for a bath
or a party".
Over a year later, on 25th June 1941, the news came that Wodehouse had
been released from internment and was living at the Adlon Hotel in
Berlin. On the following day the public was astonished to learn that he
had agreed to do some broadcasts of a "non-political" nature over the
German radio. The full texts of these broadcasts are not easy to obtain
at this date, but Wodehouse seems to have done five of them between 26th
June and 2nd July, when the Germans took him off the air again. The first
broadcast, on 26th June, was not made on the Nazi radio but took the form
of an interview with Harry Flannery, the representative of the Columbia
Broadcasting System, which still had its correspondents in Berlin.
Wodehouse also published in the SATURDAY EVENING POST an article which he
had written while still in the internment camp.
The article and the broadcasts dealt mainly with Wodehouse's experiences
in internment, but they did include a very few comments on the war. The
following are fair samples:
"I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work up any kind
of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel belligerent about some
country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any
fighting thoughts or feelings."
"A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the right idea;
at least they sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And I have been there
forty-two weeks. There is a good deal to be said for internment. It keeps
you out of the saloon and helps you to keep up with your reading. The
chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a long time.
When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to
be on the safe side."
"In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an
Englishman, but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or
repository of Englishmen I am not so sure... The only concession I want
from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of bread, tells the gentlemen
with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves the rest
to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of
my books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on
a radiator. This offer holds good till Wednesday week."
The first extract quoted above caused great offence. Wodehouse was also
censured for using (in the interview with Flannery) the phrase "whether
Britain wins the war or not," and he did not make things better by
describing in another broadcast the filthy habits of some Belgian
prisoners among whom he was interned. The Germans recorded this broadcast
and repeated it a number of times. They seem to have supervised his talks
very lightly, and they allowed him not only to be funny about the
discomforts of internment but to remark that "the internees at Trost camp
all fervently believe that Britain will eventually win." The general
upshot of the talks, however, was that he had not been ill treated and
bore no malice.
These broadcasts caused an immediate uproar in England. There were
questions in Parliament, angry editorial comments in the press, and a
stream of letters from fellow-authors, nearly all of them disapproving,
though one or two suggested that it would be better to suspend judgment,
and several pleaded that Wodehouse probably did not realise what he was
doing. On 15th July, the Home Service of the B.B.C. carried an extremely
violent Postscript by "Cassandra" of the DAILY MIRROR, accusing Wodehouse
of "selling his country." This postscript made free use of such
expressions as "Quisling" and "worshipping the F�hrer". The main charge
was that Wodehouse had agreed to do German propaganda as a way of buying
himself out of the internment camp.
"Cassandra's" Postscript caused a certain amount of protest, but on the
whole it seems to have intensified popular feeling against Wodehouse. One
result of it was that numerous lending libraries withdrew Wodehouse's
books from circulation. Here is a typical news item:
"Within twenty-four hours of listening to the broadcast of Cassandra, the
DAILY MIRROR columnist, Portadown (North Ireland) Urban District Council
banned P. G. Wodehouse's books from their public library. Mr. Edward
McCann said that Cassandra's broadcast had clinched the matter. Wodehouse
was funny no longer." (DAILY MIRROR.)
In addition the B.B.C. banned Wodehouse's lyrics from the air and was
still doing so a couple of years later. As late as December 1944 there
were demands in Parliament that Wodehouse should be put on trial as a
traitor.
There is an old saying that if you throw enough mud some of it will
stick, and the mud has stuck to Wodehouse in a rather peculiar way. An
impression has been left behind that Wodehouse's talks (not that anyone
remembers what he said in them) showed him up not merely as a traitor but
as an ideological sympathiser with Fascism. Even at the time several
letters to the press claimed that "Fascist tendencies" could be detected
in his books, and the charge has been repeated since. I shall try to
analyse the mental atmosphere of those books in a moment, but it is
important to realise that the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of
anything worse than stupidity. The really interesting question is how and
why he could be so stupid. When Flannery met Wodehouse (released, but
still under guard) at the Adlon Hotel in June 1941, he saw at once that
he was dealing with a political innocent, and when preparing him for
their broadcast interview he had to warn him against making some
exceedingly unfortunate remarks, one of which was by implication slightly
anti-Russian. As it was, the phrase "whether England wins or not" did get
through. Soon after the interview Wodehouse told him that he was also
going to broadcast on the Nazi radio, apparently not realising that this
action had any special significance. Flannery comments [ASSIGNMENT TO
BERLIN by Harry W. Flannery.]:
"By this time the Wodehouse plot was evident. It was one of the best Nazi
publicity stunts of the war, the first with a human angle...Plack
(Goebbels's assistant) had gone to the camp near Gleiwitz to see
Wodehouse, found that the author was completely without political sense,
and had an idea. He suggested to Wodehouse that in return for being
released from the prison camp he write a series of broadcasts about his
experiences; there would be no censorship and he would put them on the
air himself. In making that proposal Plack showed that he knew his man.
He knew that Wodehouse made fun of the English in all his stories and
that he seldom wrote in any other way, that he was still living in the
period about which he wrote and had no conception of Nazism and all it
meant. Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster."
The striking of an actual bargain between Wodehouse and Plack seems to be
merely Flannery's own interpretation. The arrangement may have been of a
much less definite kind, and to judge from the broadcasts themselves,
Wodehouse's main idea in making them was to keep in touch with his public
and--the comedian's ruling passion--to get a laugh. Obviously they are
not the utterances of a Quisling of the type of Ezra Pound or John Amery,
nor, probably, of a person capable of understanding the nature of
Quislingism. Flannery seems to have warned Wodehouse that it would be