by George Orwell
Tribune, 1945
January 12 / January 19 / January 26 / February 2 / February 9 / February 16
January 5:
I HAVE just been looking through a bound volume of the Quarterly Review for the year 1810, which was, I think, the second year of the Quarterly Review’s existence.
1810 was not quite the blackest period, from the British point of view, of the Napoleonic War, but it was nearly the blackest. It perhaps corresponded to 1941 in the present war. Britain was completely isolated, its commerce barred from every European port by the Berlin decrees. Italy, Spain, Prussia, Denmark, Switzerland and the Low Countries had all been subjugated. Austria was in alliance with France. Russia was also in an uneasy agreement with France, but it was known that Napoleon intended to invade Russia shortly. The United States, though not yet in the war, was openly hostile to Britain. There was no visible cause for hope, except the revolt in Spain, which had once again given Britain a foothold on the continent and opened the South American countries to British trade. It is therefore interesting to observe the tone of voice in which the Quarterly Review—a conservative paper which emphatically supported the war—speaks about France and about Napoleon at this desperate moment.
Here is the Quarterly on the alleged war-making propensities of the French people. It is reviewing a pamphlet by a Mr Walsh, an American who had just returned from France:
| We doubt the continued action of those military propensities which Mr Walsh ascribes to the French people. Without at all questioning the lively picture which he has drawn of the exultation excited amongst the squalid and famished inhabitants of Paris at the intelligence of every fresh triumph of their armies, we may venture to observe that such exultation is, everywhere, the usual concomitant of such events; that the gratification of national vanity is something, and that the festivities which victory brings with it may afford a pleasing dissipation to wretches who are perfectly free from any feelings of ambition. Our belief indeed is, that those feelings are, at present, nearly confined to the breast of the great conqueror; and that amongst his subjects, we may almost say among his officers and armies, the universal wish is for PEACE. |
Compare this with the utterances of Lord Vansittart, or, indeed, of the great part of the press. The same article contains several tributes to the military genius of Napoleon. But the thing I find most impressive is that this year’s issue of the Quarterly contains numerous reviews of recently published French books—and they are careful, serious reviews, not different in tone from the rest of its articles. There is, for instance, an article of about 9,000 words on the publication of the French scientific body known as the Société d’Arcueil. The French scientists, Gay-Lussac, Laplace and the rest of them, are treated with the utmost respect, and given their ‘Monsieur’ every time. From reading this article it would be impossible to discover that there was a war on.
Can you imagine current German books being reviewed in the British press during the present war? No, I don’t think you can. I do not, indeed, remember hearing the name of a single book published in Germany throughout the war. And if a contemporary German book did get mentioned in the press, it would almost certainly be misrepresented in some way. Looking through the reviews of French books in the Quarterly, I note that only when they are on directly political subjects does any propaganda creep in, and even then it is extremely mild by our standards. As for art, literature and science, their international character is taken for granted. And yet, I suppose, Britain was fighting for existence in the Napoleonic War just as surely as in this one, and relative to the populations involved the war was not much less bloody or exhausting.
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I HAVE been rereading with some interest The Fairchild Family, which was written in 1813 and was for fifty years or more a standard book for children. Unfortunately I only possess the first volume, but even that, in its unexpurgated state—for various pretty-pretty versions, with all the real meat cut out, have been issued in recent years—is enough of a curiosity.
The tone of the book is sufficiently indicated by the sentence: ‘Papa,’ said Lucy (Lucy was aged nine, by the way), ‘may we say some verses about mankind having bad hearts?’ And, of course, Papa is only too willing, and out come the verses, all correctly memorized. Or here is Mrs Fairchild, telling the children how when she herself was a child she disobeyed orders by picking cherries in company with the servant girl:
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Nanny was given up to her mother to be flogged; and I was shut up in the dark room, where I was to be kept several days upon bread and water. At the end of three days my aunts sent for me, and talked to me for a long time.
‘You broke the Fourth Commandment,’ said my Aunt Penelope, ‘which is, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy”: and you broke the Fifth, which is, “Honour your parents”. . . . You broke the Eighth, too, which is, “Thou shalt not steal”.’ ‘Besides,’ said my Aunt Grace, ‘the shame and disgrace of climbing trees in such low company, after all the care and pains we have taken with you, and the delicate manner in which we have reared you.’ |
The whole book is in this vein, with a long prayer at the end of every chapter, and innumerable hymns and verses from the Bible interspersed through the text. But its chief feature is the fearful visitations from Heaven which fall upon the children whenever they misbehave themselves. If they swing in the swing without leave they fall out and break several teeth: if they forget to say their prayers they fall into the trough of pig-swill; the theft of a few damsons is punished by an attack of pneumonia and narrow escape from death. On one occasion Mr Fairchild catches his children quarrelling. After the usual flogging, he takes them for a long walk to see the rotting body of a murderer hanging on a gibbet—the result, as he points out, of a quarrel between two brothers.
A curious and interesting feature of the book is that the Fairchild children, reared upon these stern principles, seem to be rather exceptionally untrustworthy. As soon as their parents’ backs are turned they invariably misbehave themselves, which suggests that flogging and bread and water are not a very satisfactory treatment after all. It is worth recording, by the way, that the author, Mrs Sherwood, brought up several children, and at any rate they did not actually die under her ministrations.
January 12:
SOME time back a correspondent wrote to ask whether I had seen the exhibition of waxworks, showing German atrocities, which has been on show in London for a year or more. It is advertised outside with such captions as: HORRORS OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP. COME INSIDE AND SEE REAL NAZI TORTURES. FLOGGING, CRUCIFIXION, GASCHAMBERS, ETC. CHILDREN’S AMUSEMENT SECTION NO EXTRA CHARGE.
I did go and see this exhibition a long time ago, and I would like to warn prospective visitors that it is most disappointing. To begin with many of the figures are not life-size, and I suspect that some of them are not even real waxworks, but merely dressmakers’ dummies with new heads attached. And secondly, the tortures are not nearly so fearful as you are led to expect by the posters outside. The whole exhibition is grubby, unlifelike and depressing. But the exhibitors are, I suppose, doing their best, and the captions are interesting in the complete frankness of their appeal to sadism and masochism. Before the war, if you were a devotee of all-in wrestling, or wrote letters to your M.P. to protest against the abolition of flogging, or haunted second-hand bookshops in search of such books as The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber, you laid yourself open to very unpleasant suspicions. Moreover, you were probably aware of your own motives and somewhat ashamed of them. Now, however, you can wallow in the most disgusting descriptions of torture and massacre, not only without any sensation of guilt, but with the feeling that you are performing a praiseworthy political action.
I am not suggesting that the stories about Nazi atrocities are untrue. To a great extent I think they are true. These horrors certainly happened in German concentration camps before the war, and there is no reason why they should have stopped since. But they are played up largely because they give the newspapers a pretext for pornography. This morning’s papers are splashing the official British Army Report on Nazi atrocities. They are careful to inform you that naked women were flogged, sometimes spotlighting this detail by means of a headline. The journalists responsible know very well what they are doing. They know that innumerable people get a sadistic kick out of thinking about torture, especially the torture of women, and they are cashing in on this widespread neurosis. No qualms need be felt, because these deeds are committed by the enemy, and the enjoyment that one gets out of them can be disguised as disapproval. And one can get a very similar kick out of barbarous actions committed by one’s own side so long as they are thought of as the just punishment of evil-doers.
We have not actually got to the point of Roman gladiatorial shows yet, but we could do so if the necessary pretext were supplied. If, for instance, it were announced that the leading war criminals were to be eaten by lions or trampled to death by elephants in the Wembley Stadium, I fancy that the spectacle would be quite well attended.
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I INVITE attention to an article entitled ‘The Truth about Mihailovich?’ (the author of it also writes for Tribune, by the way) in the current World Review. It deals with the campaign in the British press and the B.B.C. to brand Mihailovich as a German agent.
Jugoslav politics are very complicated and I make no pretence of being an expert on them. For all I know it was entirely right on the part of Britain as well as the U.S.S.R. to drop Mihailovich and support Tito. But what interests me is the readiness, once this decision had been taken, of reputable British newspapers to connive at what amounted to forgery in order to discredit the man whom they had been backing a few months earlier. There is no doubt that this happened. The author of the article gives details of one out of a number of instances in which material facts were suppressed in the most impudent way. Presented with very strong evidence to show that Mihailovich was not a German agent, the majority of our newspapers simply refused to print it, while repeating the charges of treachery just as before.
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IN the same number of World Review I note that Mr Edward Hulton remarks rather disapprovingly that ‘the small city of Athens possesses far more daily newspapers than London.’ All I can say is, good luck to Athens! It is only when there are large numbers of newspapers, expressing all tendencies, that there is some chance of getting at the truth. Counting evenings, London has only twelve daily papers, and they cover the whole of the south of England and penetrate as far north as Glasgow. When they all decide to tell the same lie, there is no minority press to act as a check. In pre-war France the press was largely venal and scurrilous, but you could dig more news out of it than out of the British press, because every political faction had its paper and every viewpoint got a hearing. I shall be surprised if Athens keeps its multiplicity of newspapers under the kind of government that we apparently intend to impose.
January 19:
LAST week Henri Béraud, the French journalist, was sentenced to death—later commuted to life imprisonment—for collaboration with the Germans. Béraud used to contribute to the Fascist weekly paper Gringoire, which in its later years had become the most disgusting rag it is possible to imagine. I have seldom been so angered by anything in the press as by its cartoon when the wretched Spanish refugees streamed into France with Italian aeroplanes machine-gunning them all the way. The Spaniards were pictured as a procession of villainous-looking men, each pushing a hand-cart piled with jewellery and bags of gold. Gringoire kept up an almost continuous outcry for the suppression of the French Communist Party, but it was equally fierce against even the mildest politicians of the Left. One can get an idea of the moral level at which it conducted political controversy from the fact that it once published a cartoon showing Léon Blum in bed with his own sister. Its advertisement columns were full of ads for clairvoyants and books of pornography. This piece of rubbish was said to have a circulation of 500,000.
At the time of the Abyssinian war Béraud wrote a violent pro-Italian article in which he proclaimed ‘I hate England’, and gave his reasons for doing so. It is significant that it was mostly people of this type, who had made no secret of their Fascist sympathies for years beforehand, that the Germans had to make use of for press propaganda in France. A year or two ago Mr Raymond Mortimer published an article on the activity of French writers during the war, and there have been several similar articles in American magazines. When one pieces these together, it becomes clear that the French literary intelligentsia has behaved extremely well under the German occupation. I wish I could feel certain that the English literary intelligentsia as a whole would have behaved equally well if we had had the Nazis here. But it is true that if Britain had also been overrun, the situation would have been hopeless and the temptation to accept the New Order very much stronger.
. . . . .
I THINK I owe a small apology to the twentieth century. Apropos of my remarks about the Quarterly Review for 1810—in which I pointed out that French books could get favourable reviews in England at the height of the war with France—two correspondents have written to tell me that during the present war German scientific publications have had fair treatment in the scientific press in this country. So perhaps we aren’t such barbarians after all.
But I still feel that our ancestors were better at remaining sane in war-time than we are. If you ever have to walk from Fleet Street to the Embankment, it is worth going into the office of the Observer and having a look at something that is preserved in the waiting-room. It is a framed page from the Observer (which is one of our oldest newspapers) for a certain day in June, 1815. In appearance it is very like a modern newspaper, though slightly worse printed, and with only five columns on the page. The largest letters used are not much more than a quarter of an inch high. The first column is given up to ‘Court and Society’, then follows several columns of advertisements, mostly of rooms to let. Half-way down the last column is a headline SANGUINARY BATTLE IN FLANDERS. COMPLETE DEFEAT OF THE CORSICAN UPRISING. This is the first news of Waterloo!
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There are also about eighty ways in the English and American languages of expressing incredulity—for example, garn, come off it, you bet, sez you, oh yeah, not half, I don’t think, less of it or and the pudding! But I think and then you wake up is the exactly suitable answer to a remark like the one quoted above.
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RECENTLY I read the biography of Edgar Wallace which was written by Margaret Lane some years ago. It is a real ‘log cabin to White House’ story, and by implication a frightful commentary on our age. Starting off with every possible disadvantage—an illegitimate child, brought up by very poor foster-parents in a slum street—Wallace worked his way up by sheer ability, enterprise and hard work. His output was enormous. In his later years he was turning out eight books a year, besides plays, radio scripts and much journalism. He thought nothing of composing a full-length book in less than a week. He took no exercise, worked behind a glass screen in a super-heated room, smoked incessantly and drank vast quantities of sweetened tea. He died of diabetes at the age of fifty-seven.
It is clear from some of his more ambitious books that Wallace did in some sense take his work seriously, but his main aim was to make money, and he made it. Towards the end of his life he was earning round about £50,000 a year. But it was all fairy gold. Besides losing money by financing theatres and keeping strings of race-horses which seldom won, Wallace spent fantastic sums on his various houses, where he kept a staff of twenty servants. When he died very suddenly in Hollywood, it was found that his debts amounted to £140,000, while his liquid assets were practically nil. However, the sales of his books were so vast that his royalties amounted to £26,000 in the two years following his death.
The curious thing is that this utterly wasted life—a life of sitting almost continuously in a stuffy room and covering acres of paper with slightly pernicious nonsense—is what is called, or would have been called a few years ago, ‘an inspiring story’. Wallace did what all the ‘get on or get out’ books, from Smiles’s Self Help onwards, have told you to do. And the world gave him the kind of rewards he would have asked for, after his death as well as in life. When his body was brought home,
| He was carried on board the Berengaria . . . . They laid a Union Jack over him, and covered him with flowers. He lay alone in the empty saloon under his burden of wreaths, and no journey that he had ever taken had been made in such quiet dignity and state. When the ship crept into Southampton Water her flag was flying at half-mast, and the flags of Southampton slipped gently down to salute him. The bells of Fleet Street tolled, and Wyndham’s was dark. |
All that and £50,000 a year as well! They also gave Wallace a plaque on the wall at Ludgate Circus. It is queer to think that London could commemorate Wallace in Fleet Street and Barrie in Kensington Gardens, but has never yet got round to giving Blake a monument in Lambeth.
January 26:
THE OTHER night I attended a mass meeting of an organization called the League for European Freedom. Although officially an all-party organization—there was one Labour M.P. on the platform—it is, I think it is safe to say, dominated by the anti-Russian wing of the Tory Party.
I am all in favour of European freedom, but I feel happier when it is coupled with freedom elsewhere—in India, for example. The people on the platform were concerned with the Russian actions in Poland, the Baltic countries, etc., and the scrapping of the principles of the Atlantic Charter that those actions imply. More than half of what they said was justified, but curiously enough they were almost as anxious to defend our own coercion of Greece as to condemn the Russian coercion of Poland. Victor Raikes, the Tory M.P., who is an able and outspoken reactionary, made a speech which I should have considered a good one if it had referred only to Poland and Jugoslavia. But after dealing with those two countries he went on to speak about Greece, and then suddenly black became white, and white black. There was no booing, no interjections from the quite large audience—and none there, apparently, who could see that the forcing of quisling governments upon unwilling peoples is equally undesirable whoever does it.
It is very hard to believe that people like this are really interested in political liberty as such. They are merely concerned because Britain did not get a big enough cut in the sordid bargain that appears to have been driven at Teheran. After the meeting I talked with a journalist whose contacts among influential people are much more extensive than mine. He said he thought it probable that British policy will shortly take a violent anti-Russian swing, and that it would be quite easy to manipulate public opinion in that direction if necessary. For a number of reasons I don’t believe he was right, but if he did turn out to be right, then ultimately it is our fault and not that of our adversaries.
No one expects the Tory Party and its press to spread enlightenment. The trouble is that for years past it has been just as impossible to extract a grown-up picture of foreign politics from the left-wing press either. When it comes to such issues as Poland, the Baltic countries, Jugoslavia or Greece, what difference is there between the russophile press and the extreme Tory press? The one is simply the other standing on its head. The News Chronicle gives the big headlines to the fighting in Greece but tucks away the news that ‘force has had to be used’ against the Polish Home Army in small print at the bottom of a column. The Daily Worker disapproves of dictatorship in Athens, the Catholic Herald disapproves of dictatorship in Belgrade. There is no one who is able to say—at least, no one who has the chance to say in a newspaper of big circulation—that this whole dirty game of spheres of influence, quislings, purges, deportation, one-party elections and hundred per cent plebiscites is morally the same whether it is done by ourselves, the Russians or the Nazis. Even in the case of such frank returns to barbarism as the use of hostages, disapproval is only felt when it happens to be the enemy and not ourselves who is doing it.
And with what result? Well, one result is that it becomes much easier to mislead public opinion. The Tories are able to precipitate scandals when they want to partly because on certain subjects the Left refuses to talk in a grown-up manner. An example was the Russo-Finnish war of 1940. I do not defend the Russian action in Finland, but it was not especially wicked. It was merely the same kind of thing as we ourselves did when we seized Madagascar. The public could be shocked by it, and indeed could be worked up into a dangerous fury about it, because for years they had been falsely taught that Russian foreign policy was morally different from that of other countries. And it struck me as I listened to Mr Raikes the other night that if the Tories do choose to start spilling the beans about the Lublin Committee, Marshal Tito and kindred subjects, there will be—thanks to prolonged self-censorship on the Left—plenty of beans for them to spill.
But political dishonesty has its comic side. Presiding over that meeting of the League for European Freedom was no less a person than the Duchess of Atholl. It is only about seven years since the Duchess—‘the Red Duchess’ as she was affectionately nicknamed—was the pet of the Daily Worker and lent the considerable weight of her authority to every lie that the Communists happened to be uttering at the moment. Now she is fighting against the monster that she helped to create. I am sure that neither she nor her Communist ex-friends see any moral in this.
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I WANT to correct an error that I made in this column last week. It seems that there is a plaque to William Blake, and that it is somewhere near St George’s Church in Lambeth. I had looked for one in that area and had failed to find it. My apologies to the L.C.C.
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IF one cares about the preservation of the English language, a point one often has to decide is whether it is worth putting up a struggle when a word changes its meaning.
Some words are beyond redemption. One could not, I imagine, restore ‘impertinent’ to its original meaning, or ‘journal’, or ‘decimate’. But how about the use of ‘infer’ for ‘imply’ (‘He didn’t actually say I was a liar, but he inferred it’), which has been gaining ground for some years? Ought one to protest against it? And ought one to acquiesce when certain words have their meanings arbitrarily narrowed? Examples are ‘immoral’ (nearly always taken as meaning sexually immoral), and ‘criticize’ (always taken as meaning criticize unfavourably). It is astonishing what numbers of words have come to have a purely sexual significance, partly owing to the need of the newspapers for euphemisms. Constant use of such phrases as ‘intimacy took place twice’ has practically nulled the original meaning of ‘intimacy’, and quite a dozen other words have been perverted in the same way.
Obviously this kind of thing ought to be prevented if possible, but it is uncertain whether one can achieve anything by struggling against the current usage. The coming and going of words is a mysterious process whose rules we do not understand. In 1940 the word ‘wallop’, meaning mild beer, suddenly became current all over London. I had never heard it until that date, but it seems that it was not a new word, but had been peculiar to one quarter of London. Then it suddenly spread all over the place, and now it appears to have died out again. Words can also revive, for no very clear reason, after lying dormant for hundreds of years: for example the word ‘car’, which had never had any currency in England except in highflown classical poetry, but was resurrected about 1900 to describe the newly invented automobile.
Possibly, therefore, the degradation which is certainly happening to our language is a process which one cannot arrest by conscious action. But I would like to see the attempt made. And as a start I would like to see a few dozen journalists declare war on some obviously bad usage—for example, the disgusting verb ‘to contact’, or the American habit of tying an unnecessary preposition on to every verb—and see whether they could kill it by their concerted efforts.
February 2:
I HAVE just been rereading, with great interest, an old favourite of my boyhood, The Green Curve by ‘Ole Luk-Oie’. ‘Ole Luk-Oie’ was the pseudonym of Major Swinton (afterwards General Swinton), who was, I believe, one of the rather numerous people credited with the invention of the tank. The stories in this book, written about 1908, are the forecasts of an intelligent professional soldier who had learned the lessons of the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War, and it is interesting to compare them with what actually happened a few years later.
One story, written as early as 1907 (at which date no aeroplane had actually risen off the ground for more than a few seconds), describes an air raid. The aeroplanes carry eight-pounder bombs! Another story, written in the same year, deals with a German invasion of England, and I was particularly interested to notice that in this story the Germans are already nicknamed ‘Huns’. I had been inclined to attribute the use of the word ‘Hun’, for Germans, to Kipling, who certainly used it in the poem that he published during the first week of the last war.
In spite of the efforts of several newspapers, ‘Hun’ has never caught on in this war, but we have plenty of other offensive nicknames. Someone could write a valuable monograph on the use of question-begging names and epithets, and their effect in obscuring political controversies. It would bring out the curious fact that if you simply accept and apply to yourself a name intended as an insult, it may end by losing its insulting character. This appears to be happening to ‘Trotskyist’, which is already dangerously close to being a compliment. So also with ‘Conchy’ during the last war. Another example is ‘Britisher’. This word was used for years as a term of opprobrium in the anglophobe American press. Later on, Northcliffe and others, looking round for some substitute for ‘Englishman’ which should have an imperialistic and jingoistic flavour, found ‘Britisher’ ready to hand, and took it over. Since then the word has had an aura of gutter patriotism, and the kind of person who tells you that ‘what these natives need is a firm hand’ also tells you that he is ‘proud to be a Britisher’—which is about equivalent to a Chinese Nationalist describing himself as a ‘Chink’.
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A LEAFLET recently received from the Friends’ Peace Committee states that if the current scheme to remove all Poles from the areas to be taken over by the U.S.S.R., and, in compensation, all Germans from the portions of Germany to be taken over by Poland, is put into operation, ‘this will involve the transfer of not less than seven million people’.
Some estimates, I believe, put it higher than this, but let us assume it to be seven millions. This is equivalent to uprooting and transplanting the entire population of Australia, or the combined populations of Scotland and Ireland. I am no expert on transport or housing, and I would like to hear from somebody better qualified a rough estimate (a) of how many wagons and locomotives, running for how long, would be involved in transporting those seven million people, plus their livestock, farm machinery and household goods; or, alternatively, (b) of how many of them are going to die of starvation and exposure if they are simply shipped off without their livestock, etc.
I fancy the answer to (a) would show that this enormous crime cannot actually be carried through, though it might be started, with confusion, suffering and the sowing of irreconcilable hatreds as the result. Meanwhile, the British people should be made to understand, with as much concrete detail as possible, what kind of policies their statesmen are committing them to.
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A NOT-TOO-DISTANT explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the 1964 class wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I find myself thinking, ‘Is it possible that human beings can continue with this lunacy very much longer?’ You know the answer, of course. Indeed, the difficulty nowadays is to find anyone who thinks that there will not be another war in the fairly near future.
Germany, I suppose, will be defeated this year, and when Germany is out of the way Japan will not be able to stand up to the combined power of Britain and the U.S.A. Then there will be a peace of exhaustion, with only minor and unofficial wars raging all over the place, and perhaps this so-called peace may last for decades. But after that, by the way the world is actually shaping, it may well be that war will become permanent. Already, quite visibly and more or less with the acquiescence of all of us, the world is splitting up into the two or three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution. One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see more or less what areas they will comprise. And if the world does settle down into this pattern, it is likely that these vast states will be permanently at war with one another, though it will not necessarily be a very intensive or bloody kind of war. Their problems, both economic and psychological, will be a lot simpler if the doodlebugs are more or less constantly whizzing to and fro.
If these two or three super-states do establish themselves, not only will each of them be too big to be conquered, but they will be under no necessity to trade with one another, and in a position to prevent all contact between their nationals. Already, for a dozen years or so, large areas of the earth have been cut off from one another, although technically at peace.
Some months ago, in this column, I pointed out that modern scientific inventions have tended to prevent rather than increase international communication. This brought me several angry letters from readers, but none of them were able to show that what I had said was false. They merely retorted that if we had Socialism, the aeroplane, the radio, etc. would not be perverted to wrong uses. Very true, but then we haven’t Socialism. As it is, the aeroplane is primarily a thing for dropping bombs and the radio primarily a thing for whipping up nationalism. Even before the war there was enormously less contact between the peoples of the earth than there had been thirty years earlier, and education was perverted, history rewritten and freedom of thought suppressed to an extent undreamed of in earlier ages. And there is no sign whatever of these tendencies being reversed.
Maybe I am pessimistic. But, at any rate, those are the thoughts that cross my mind (and a lot of other people’s too, I believe) every time the explosion of a V bomb booms through the mist.
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Someone receives an invitation to go out lion-hunting. ‘But,’ he exclaims, ‘I haven’t lost any lions!’
February 9:
EVERY time I wash up a batch of crockery I marvel at the unimaginativeness of human beings who can travel under the sea and fly through the clouds, and yet have not known how to eliminate this sordid time-wasting drudgery from their daily lives. If you go into the Bronze Age room in the British Museum (when it is open again) you will notice that some of our domestic appliances have barely altered in three thousand years. A saucepan, say, or a comb, is very much the same thing as it was when the Greeks were besieging Troy. In the same period we have advanced from the leaky galley to the 50,000 ton liner, and from the ox-cart to the aeroplane.
It is true that in the modern labour-saving house in which a tiny percentage of human beings live, a job like washing-up takes rather less time than it used to. With soap flakes, abundant hot water, plate racks, a well-lighted kitchen, and—what very few houses in England have—an easy method of rubbish disposal, you can make it more tolerable than it used to be when copper dishes had to be scoured with sand in porous stone sinks by the light of a candle. But certain jobs (for instance, cleaning out a frying-pan which has had fish in it) are inherently disgusting, and this whole business of messing about with dishmops and basins of hot water is incredibly primitive. At this moment the block of flats I live in is partly uninhabitable: not because of enemy action, but because accumulations of snow have caused water to pour through the roof and bring down the plaster from the ceilings. It is taken for granted that this calamity will happen every time there is an exceptionally heavy fall of snow. For three days there was no water in the taps because the pipes were frozen: that, too, is a normal, almost yearly experience. And the newspapers have just announced that the number of burst pipes is so enormous that the job of repairing them will not be completed till the end of 1945—when, I suppose, there will be another big frost and they will all burst again. If our methods of making war had kept pace with our methods of keeping house, we should be just about on the verge of discovering gunpowder.
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TO come back to washing-up. Like sweeping, scrubbing and dusting, it is of its nature an uncreative and life-wasting job. You cannot make an art out of it as you can out of cooking or gardening. What, then, is to be done about it? Well, this whole problem of housework has three possible solutions. One is to simplify our way of living very greatly; another is to assume, as our ancestors did, that life on earth is inherently miserable, and that it is entirely natural for the average women to be a broken-down drudge at the age of thirty; and the other is to devote as much intelligence to rationalizing the interiors of our houses as we have devoted to transport and communications.
I fancy we shall choose the third alternative. If one thinks simply in terms of saving trouble and plans one’s home as ruthlessly as one would plan a machine, it is possible to imagine houses and flats which would be comfortable and would entail very little work. Central heating, rubbish chutes, proper consumption of smoke, cornerless rooms, electrically warmed beds and elimination of carpets would make a lot of difference. But as for washing-up, I see no solution except to do it communally, like a laundry. Every morning the municipal van will stop at your door and carry off a box of dirty crocks, handing you a box of clean ones (marked with your initial of course) in return. This would be hardly more difficult to organize than the daily diaper service which was operating before the war. And though it would mean that some people would have to be full-time washers-up, as some people are now full-time laundry-workers, the all-over saving in labour and fuel would be enormous. The alternatives are to continue fumbling about with greasy dishmops, or to eat out of paper containers.
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A SIDELIGHT on the habits of book reviewers.
Some time ago I was commissioned to write an essay for an annual scrapbook which shall be nameless. At the very last minute (and when I had had the money, I am glad to say) the publishers decided that my essay must be suppressed. By this time the book was actually in process of being bound. The essay was cut out of every copy, but for technical reasons it was impossible to remove my name from the list of contributors on the title page.
Since then I have received a number of press cuttings referring to this book. In each case I am mentioned as being ’among the contributors’, and not one reviewer has yet spotted that the contribution attributed to me is not actually there.
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NOW that ‘explore every avenue’ and ‘leave no stone unturned’ have been more or less laughed out of existence, I think it is time to start a campaign against some more of the worn-out and useless metaphors with which our language is littered.
Three that we could well do without out are ‘cross swords with’, ‘ring the changes on’, and ‘take up the cudgels for’. How lifeless these and similar expressions have become you can see from the fact that in many cases people do not even remember their original meaning. What is meant by ‘ringing the changes’, for instance? Probably it once had something to do with church bells, but one could not be sure without consulting a dictionary, ‘Take up the cudgels for’ possibly derives from the almost obsolete game of singlestick. When an expression has moved as far from its original meaning as this, its value as a metaphor—that is, its power of providing a concrete illustration—has vanished. There is no sense whatever in writing ‘X took up the cudgels for Y’. One should either say ‘X defended Y’ or think of a new metaphor which genuinely makes one’s meaning more vivid.
In some cases these overworked expressions have actually been severed from their original meaning by means of a misspelling. An example is ‘plain sailing’ (plane sailing). And the expression ‘toe the line’ is now coming to be spelled quite frequently ‘tow the line’. People who are capable of this kind of thing evidently don’t attach any definite meaning to the words they use.
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I WONDER whether people read Bret Harte nowadays. I do not know why, but for an hour past some stanzas from ‘The Society upon the Stanislaus’ have been running in my head. It describes a meeting of an archaeological society which ended in disorder:
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Then Abner Dean of Angel’s raised a point of order, when A chunk of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen; And he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled upon the floor, And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more. |
It has perhaps been unfortunate for Bret Harte’s modern reputation that of his two funniest poems, one turns on colour prejudice and the other on class snobbery. But there are a number that are worth rereading, including one or two serious ones: especially ‘Dickens in Camp’, the new almost forgotten poem which Bret Harte wrote after Dickens’s death and which was about the finest tribute Dickens ever had.
February 16:
LAST week I received a copy of a statement on the future of Burma, issued by the Burma Association, an organization which includes most of the Burmese resident in this country. How representative this organization is I am not certain, but probably it voices the wishes of a majority of politically-conscious Burmese. For reasons I shall try to make clear presently, the statement just issued is an important document. Summarized as shortly as possible, it makes the following demands:
(a) An amnesty for Burmese who have collaborated with the Japs during the occupation. (b) A statement by the British Government of a definite date at which Burma shall attain Dominion status. The period, if possible, to be less than six years. The Burmese people to summon a Constituent Assembly in the meantime. (c) No interim of ‘direct rule’. (d) The Burmese people to have a greater share in the economic development of their own country. (e) The British Government to make an immediate unequivocal statement of its intentions towards Burma.
The striking thing about these demands is how moderate they are. No political party with any tinge of nationalism, or any hope of getting a mass following, could possibly ask for less. But why do these people pitch their claims so low? Well, I think one can guess at two reasons. To begin with, the experience of Japanese occupation has probably made Dominion status seem a more tempting goal than it seemed three years ago. But—much more important—if they demand so little it is probably because they expect to be offered even less. And I should guess that they expect right. Indeed, of the very modest suggestions listed above, only the first is likely to be carried out.
The Government has never made any clear statement about the future of Burma, but there have been persistent rumours that when the Japs are driven out there is to be a return to ‘direct rule’, which is a polite name for military dictatorship. And what is happening, politically, in Burma at this moment? We simply don’t know: nowhere have I seen in any newspaper one word about the way in which the reconquered territories are being administered. To grasp the significance of this one has to look at the map of Burma. A year ago Burma proper was in Japanese hands and the Allies were fighting in wild territories thinly populated by rather primitive tribes who have never been much interfered with and are traditionally pro-British. Now they are penetrating into the heart of Burma, and some fairly important towns, centres of administration, have fallen into their hands. Several million Burmese must be once again under the British flag. Yet we are told nothing whatever about the form of administration that is being set up. Is it surprising if every thinking Burmese fears the worst?
It is vitally important to interest the British public in this matter, if possible. Our eyes fixed on Europe, we forget that at the other end of the world there is a whole string of countries awaiting liberation and in nearly every case hoping for something better than a mere change of conquerors. Burma will probably be the first British territory to be reconquered, and it will be a test case: a more important test than Greece or Belgium, not only because more people are involved, but because it will be almost wholly a British responsibility. It will be a fearful disaster if through apathy and ignorance we let Churchill, Amery and Co. put across some reactionary settlement which will lose us the friendship of the Burmese people for good.
For a year or two after the Japanese have gone, Burma will be in a receptive mood and more pro-British than it has been for a dozen years past. Then is the moment to make a generous gesture. I don’t know whether Dominion status is the best possible solution. But if the politically conscious section of the Burmese ask for Dominion status, it would be monstrous to let the Tories refuse it in a hopeless effort to bring back the past. And there must be a date attached to it, a not too distant date. Whether these people remain inside the British Commonwealth or outside it, what matters in the long run is that we should have their friendship—and we can have it if we do not play them false at the moment of crisis. When the moment comes for Burma’s future to be settled, thinking Burmese will not turn their eyes towards Churchill. They will be looking at us, the Labour movement, to see whether our talk about democracy, self-determination, racial equality and what-not has any truth in it. I do not know whether it will be in our power to force a decent settlement upon the Government; but I do know that we shall harm ourselves irreparably if we do not make at least as much row about it as we did in the case of Greece.
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WHEN asked, ‘Which is the wisest of the animals?’ a Japanese sage replied, ‘The one that man has not yet discovered.’
I have just seen in a book the statement that the grey seals, the kind that are found round the coasts of Britain, number only ten thousand. Presumably there are so few of them because they have been killed off, like many another over-trustful animal. Seals are quite tame, and appear to be very inquisitive. They will follow a boat for miles, and sometimes they will even follow you when you are walking round the shore. There is no good reason for killing them. Their coats are no use for fur, and except for eating a certain amount of fish they do no harm.
They breed mostly on uninhabited islands. Let us hope that some of the islands remain uninhabited, so that these unfortunate brutes may escape being exterminated entirely. However, we are not quite such persistent slaughterers of rare animals as we used to be. Two species of birds, the bittern and the spoonbill, extinct for many years, have recently succeeded in re-establishing themselves in Britain. They have even been encouraged to breed in some places. Thirty years ago, any bittern that dared to show its beak in this country would have been shot and stuffed immediately.
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THE Gestapo is said to have teams of literary critics whose job is to determine, by means of stylistic comparison, the authorship of anonymous pamphlets. I have always thought that, if only it were in a better cause, this is exactly the job I would like to have . . .
