The robbers and the robbed

Spotted in The Christian World in 1937 -- on a page devoted to “What Writers and Thinkers are Saying": a quote from George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier:

“Probably we could do with a little less talk about ‘capitalists’ and ‘proletarian,’ and a little more about the robbers and the robbed. But at any rate we must drop that misleading habit of pretending that the only proletarians are manual labourers. It has got to be brought home to the clerk, the engineer, the commercial traveller, the middle-class man who has ‘come down in the world,’ the village grocer, the lower-grade civil servant and all other doubtful cases that they are the proletariat, and that Socialism means a fair deal for them as well as for the navvy and the factory hand. They must not be allowed to think that the battle is between those who pronounce their aitches and those who don’t; for if they think that, they will join in on the side of the aitches.” (Quoted in The Christian World, 1 April 1937, 13)

A curious spot to find Orwell, though it seems as relevant now as then (even if it should be taken to heart as much by those on the side of the missing aitches as on the other one). 

First we take Clarence Bridge, then it's on to Whitehall

George Orwell, commenting on the generally frustrating organisation of things during wartime, with specific reference to the Home Guard, 21 June 1942: 

Details of organisation, battle positions etc. have been changed so frequently that hardly anyone knows at any given moment what the current arrangements are supposed to be. To give just one example, for well over a year our company has been trying to dig a system of trenches in Regents Park, in case airborne troops land there. Though dug over and over again these trenches have never once been in a completed state, because when they are half done there is always a change of plan and fresh orders. Ditto with everything. Whatever one undertakes, one starts with the knowledge that presently there will come a sudden change of orders, and then another change, and so on indefinitely. Nothing ever happens except continuous dithering, resulting in progressive disillusionment all round. The best one can hope is that it is much the same on the other side.

That reference to Regent's Park caught my eye. When we stay in London, we tend to go jogging there regularly.

I'll not be able to run through the place any more without wondering where it was that Orwell and his Dad's Army chums were digging their 'system of trenches'.

Which got me wondering: if you were going to launch an airborne attack on London, surely St. James's or Hyde Park would be better tactical options? I mean, if your aim was to take out the government?

Not encouraging this, mind, just idly speculating.

While we're at it: anyone know whether there were any genuine Nazi plans to air drop troops into London's parks?

Julia, She-Wolf of the Anti-Sex League

While browsing through Boing Boing I was struck by this image, a cover from some Signet edition of 1984, which makes Orwell's classic novel of political totalitarianism look more like a 1970s sexploitation film...

Double-plus extraordinary.

On being selective

George Orwell, about 70 years ago, describing the actions of himself and his wife after their building was (in the end only slightly)damaged by a bomb:

We slipped on some clothes, grabbed up a few things and went out, at this time imagining that the house might be seriously on fire and it might be impossible to get back. At such times one takes what one feels to be important, and I noticed afterwards that what I had taken was not my typewriter or any documents but my firearms and a haversack containing food, etc., which was always kept ready.

Priorities, priorities....

Yesterday's News

A striking passage from Orwell's diary, 19 October 1940:

The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.

Gave me a bit of a shiver, and not just because it's turned right nippy here in the last week.

Avoiding all thoughts of the coming night

Quite a nice image from Orwell, 21 September 1940:

Withal, huge areas of London almost normal, and everyone quite happy in the daytime, never seeming to think about the coming night, like animals which are unable to foresee the future so long as they have a bit of food and a place in the sun. 

Along with noting the imagery, it occurs to me that 'withal' is used far too seldom these days.

Vox populi

I'd sort of lost touch with the Orwell diaries blog (which tracks George Orwell's diary from seventy years ago, day by day), since, well, the guy did have a thing for the minutiae of his garden.

Exhibit A, the last entry before the most recent one:

I think a little rain in the night. All day overcast, with sometimes fine mist almost amounting to rain, but not exactly cold. Mended the fence, which cannot be done completely as there are not enough stakes. Planted out 1 doz. largish lettuces got from T. (2^d dozen). Uncovered the little ones. Let the tadpoles go, as not certain how many days I shall be away. Gave the grass a quick cut. Leeks are just showing. Some apple blossom showing in some gardens. Find it is held locally that there is always a frost at the full moon (ie. in May) & people sow their runners with reference to this.

15 eggs.

Don't get me wrong: this is all interesting in many ways, and I can see why one might want to keep such information for posterity. And, indeed, it provides a fascinating insight into the more everyday interests of someone we tend to associate with mere Big Ideas.

And I feel a special sympathy for this kind of thing at a time when the world outside the pages of the diary in question are falling apart.

I have a very fond memory (and a video somewhere) of my mother reading through her own wartime diary for 6 June 1944 (at which time she was 17 years old and living in Newton Abbot, near Britain's south coast, an area that had until that day been swarming with American soldiers--among them the man who would later become her husband).

Her entry for that fateful day went, as I recall, something like this:

Washed hair. Bought a new dress. The invasion has begun.

In that order. I mean: priorities are, I suppose, priorities.

So I can see where Orwell was coming from with his tadpole, lettuce, leek and bean fixation.

But, you know, day after day, it becomes a bit...wearing.

So, it was a pleasure to find the most recent entry beginning to have a bit of action and an insight into history in the wider sense as it was lived (the spring of 1940 being one with, you know, rather a lot going on beyond the garden wall).

Such as:

This is the first day on which newspaper posters are definitely discontinued… Half of the front page of the early Star[1] devoted to news of the Belgian surrender, the other half to news to the effect that the Belgians are holding out and the King is with them. This is presumably due to paper shortage. Nevertheless of the early Star’s eight pages, six are devoted to racing.

And:

People talk a little more of the war, but very little. As always hitherto, it is impossible to overhear any comments on it in the pubs, etc. Last night, E.[3] and I went to the pub to hear the 9 o’c news. The barmaid was not going to have it on if we had not asked her, and to all appearances nobody listened.

Indeed. I tend to think that if D-Day happened tomorrow, the following day's edition of the Sun would still feature a topless page 3 girl being quoted as saying how exciting she finds a day at the beaches.

It's that kind of country world.

In the bleak midwinter

There is something strikingly poetic, spare and lovely--but also gloomy and foreboding--in George Orwell's diary entry from 2 January 1940:

No thaw. Fallen ash-boughs all stripped & gnawed by rabbits. Pan of water left out all day is thickly frozen by evening.

6 eggs.

Winter. Can it end already?

Just as a kestrel sees more vividly than a mole

I recently ordered the first volume of George Orwell's collected essays, journalism and letters (we have volumes two and three, and very well thumbed they are...).

It's striking that, before you've even read a few dozen pages, you find such amazing examples of both cutting insult and sublime praise.

The insult comes from a review of J. B. Priestley's novel Angel Pavement:

When a novel lacks the indefinable, unmistakable thing we call beauty, one looks in it for sound delineation of character, or humour of situation, or verbal wit. But one looks in vain in Angel Pavement--Mr. Priestley can be clever, but he cannot be in any way memorable. (26)

Oh, that's painful, in a particularly painful way. But then comes the coup de grâce: Orwell notes that Priestley has been much over-praised by other reviewers, and he continues,

Once this absurd praise is discounted, we can salute Mr. Priestley for the qualities which he really possesses, and take Angel Pavement for what it is: an excellent holiday novel , genuinely gay and pleasant, which supplies a good bulk of reading matter for ten and sixpence.(Emphasis added, 27)

Oh man...that must have burned.

On the other hand, Orwell knew how to make a well-placed compliment.

In the context of a review of a biography of Herman Melville, he enthuses:

More important than his strength, he had--what is implied in real strength--passionate sensitiveness; to him seas were deeper and skies were vaster than to other men, and similarly beauty was more actual and pain and humiliation more agonising. Who but Melville would have seen the beauty and terror of a ridiculous beast like a whale? And who else could have written scenes like the bullying of Harry in Redburn, or that shocking and ludicrous account of an amputation in White Jacket? Such things were done by a man who felt more vividly than common men, just as a kestrel sees more vividly than a mole. (Emphasis added, 20-21.)

Partly because of this review, and partly because I noted recently that Melville also made the top of the 'best reads' list by J. G. Ballard some years ago (I found this in the additional material added to my copy of Millennium People), I have thought I should probably give Moby Dick another chance.

It was--like many things...and nearly Shakespeare!...ruined for me in high school (a common story, perhaps).

Though my renewed Melvillian interests may also be partly because I've been enjoying my belated discovery of Mastodon's 2004 heavy metal concept album, Leviathan, which is based on that novel about the white whale.

(I very much like the song--though not so much the video--for 'Blood and Thunder'...which for some reason involves clowns. Far scarier than whales, if you ask me.)



Any post-secondary-school Melville fans out there with their own observations?

And, yes, I know: from a strictly naturalistic perspective, one could have turned Orwell's metaphor on it's head, saying just as a mole feels more vividly than a kestrel.

But somehow I don't think it'd have worked as well.

Funny, that....

He must have been there in winter...

I've just finished reading Jack London's novel The Iron Heel. Written in 1908, the book is a dark dystopian vision of the creation of a brutal capitalist dictatorship - 'the Oligarchy' - and of the early, futile resistance to it by a dedicated band of revolutionaries. It is narrated from the point of view of an autobiography 'found' in some distant socialist utopia several centuries hence.

I'm sad to say (sad, since I do like some of London's other work) that it doesn't read very well and parts of it even reminded me of a left-wing version of Ayn Rand's fiction - which is a harsh judgement, I know - even if it is mercifully much shorter.

But it does have some redeeming qualities. The mixture of dystopia and utopia (which is hinted at in the 'footnotes' added to the main narrative) is intriguing and there are a few very harrowing and exciting passages (such as that recounting the doomed 'Chicago Commune').

I can't, in the end, improve on what Orwell said about it in 1940, in his essay 'Prophecies of Fascism', in which he compared it to H.G. Wells's The Sleeper Wakes (reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 2, pp. 45-49):

As a book, The Iron Heel is hugely inferior. It is clumsily written, it shows no grasp of scientific possibilites, and the hero is the kind of human gramophone who is now disappering even from Socialist tracts. But because of his own streak of savagery London could grasp something that Wells apparently could not, and that is that hedonistic societies do not endure.

In this essay (which is what originally inspired me to read the book), Orwell denies what seems to have been a common opinion of his time, that The Iron Heel was an accurate forecast of fascism. He does, however, credit London with having insight into the difficulties of promoting a transition to socialism (something that Orwell - like London - advocated) and also into the psychology of fascism.

In an intellectual way London accepted the conclusions of Marxism, and he imagined that the 'contradictions' of capitalism, the unconsumable surplus and so forth, would persist even after the capitalist class had organized themselves into a single corporate body.

(Incidentally: that London 'accepted the conclusions of Marxism' is something I definitely do not recall learning when we read 'Call of the Wild' back in high school...)

But temperamentally he was very different from the majority of Marxists. With his love of violence and physical strength, his belief in 'natural aristocracy', his animal-worship and exaltation of the primitive, he had in him what one might fairly call a Fascist strain. This probably helped him to understand just how the possessing class would behave once they were seriously menaced.

In any case, the book's 'footnotes' (added by an 'editor' writing from a post-Oligarchy socialist future) are full of references to real people, events and texts from London's time. My favourite has to be the following one, about a city which is very close to my heart:

Chicago was the industrial inferno of the nineteenth century A.D. A curious anecdote has come down to us of John Burns, a great English labor leader and one time member of the British Cabinet. In Chicago, while on a visit to the United States, he was asked by a newspaper reporter for his opinion of that city. 'Chicago,' he answered, 'is a pocket edition of hell.' Some time later, as he was going aboard his steamer to sail to England, he was approached by another reporter, who wanted to know if he had changed his opinion of Chicago. 'Yes I have,' was his reply 'My present opinion is that hell is a pocket edition of Chicago.' (The Iron Heel, Penguin, 2006 [1908], 221)

(If anyone can confirm the original source for this quote, I'd be grateful: the only thing I can find online is a reference to Ashley Montagu referring to it sometime later.)

Orwellian sweet tooth

Don't look now (or, actually, please do), but someone's gorging himself on sugary sweet George Orwell essays.

As the next volume of an older edition of Orwell's collected journalism which I ordered has just recently arrived (one which includes quite a number of the 'As I Please' essays), I'm soon going to get back to working my way through his writing. It is addictive. And will probably result in my quoting him extensively...again.

But till then, one of the excerpts cited at Some Men Are Brothers is worth reprinting:

Now, it seems to me that you do less harm by dropping bombs on people than by calling them 'Huns'. Obviously one does not want to inflict death and wounds if it can be avoided, but I cannot feel that mere killing is all-important. We shall all be dead in less than a hundred years, and most of us by the sordid horror known as 'natural death'. The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible.

I'm looking forward to getting my own Orwell addiction back on track. I promise, though not to spoil my appetite.

(What's so funny 'bout) peace, love and understanding?

One of the things I had the pleasure of doing during my recent vacation was spending rather a lot of time with a volume of George Orwell's essays and journalism. Orwell, like some other authors (e.g. Jack London and William Shakespeare), was nearly ruined for me in high school by being reduced to a caricature of what I later learned to be his true complexity.

Orwell, for instance, was presented as merely the anti-communist author of 1984 and Animal Farm. It was never even mentioned, for example, that he was a socialist or even that he had (to great injury to himself) fought against fascism; both of these facts are - putting it mildly - fairly fundamental bits of knowledge in making sense of what he wrote.

In subsequent years, I overcame this obstacle and discovered the joy of Orwell's other writing, the best of which, I think, is not so much found in his fiction (which, though, I have enjoyed, particularly Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up For Air) but in his essays. It was great to discover (or re-discover, as I'd read some of them before) some real gems among the texts collected in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, volume 2: My Country Right or Left 1940-43. Orwell has a variety of things to say in these pieces, about war, literature, fascism, socialism and the responsibility of art in a time of crisis. (His wartime diaries, contained therein, are a great insight into the complexities of an often over-simplified period.)

Among other things, there's a review of a novel by Alex Comfort (yes, that Alex Comfort) called No Such Liberty, which was, in essence, a pacifist tract critical of British participation in the Second World War.

Orwell was, to put it kindly, not fond of the book, but he used it for a thought-provoking examination of the philosophy of pacifism in a time of emerging fascist dominance. Orwell was, quite rightly, a determined critic of pacifism in its more absolutist forms. His reasoning is the subject of the following excerpts from his essay 'No, Not One' which appeared in Adelphi in October 1941 (pages 195-201 in the above mentioned volume) after the country he was living in (about which he was quite critical) had been at war for more than two years.

1. Civilisation rests ultimately on coercion. What holds society together is not the policeman but the goodwill of common men, and yet that goodwill is powerless unless the policeman is there to back it up. Any government which refused to use violence in its own defence would cease almost immediately to exist, because it could be overthrown by any body of men, or even any individual, that was less scrupulous. Objectively, whoever is not on the side of the policeman is on the side of the criminal, and vice versa. In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis, and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the U.S.S.R.

[...]

2. Since coercion can never be altogether dispensed with, the only difference is between degrees of violence. During the last twenty years there has been less violence and less militarism inside the English-speaking world than outside it, because there has been more money and more security. The hatred of war which undoubtedly characterizes the English-speaking peoples is a reflection of their favoured position. Pacifism is only a considerable force in places where people feel themselves very safe, chiefly maritime states. [...] To abjure violence, it is necessary to have no experience of it.

[...]

The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and reality. But why should they want to make this flight, in any case? Because, rightly hating violence, they do not wish to recognize that it is integral to modern society and that their own fine feelings and noble attitudes are all the fruit of injustice backed up by force. They do not want to learn where their incomes come from. Underneath this lies the hard fact, so difficult for many people to face, that individual salvation is not possible, that the choice before human beings is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world; that is evil: or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands. It seems to me that the text for our times is not 'Woe to him through whom the evil cometh' but the one from which I took the title of this article, 'There is not one that is righteous, no, not one.' We have all touched pitch, we are all perishing by the sword. We do not have the chance, in a time like this, to say 'Tomorrow we can all start being good'. That is moonshine. We only have the chance of choosing the lesser evil and of working for the establishment of a new kind of society in which common decency will again be possible.