47. Literature and the Left

“When a man of true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by this infallible Sign, that all the Dunces are in Conspiracy against him.” So wrote Jonathan Swift, two hundred years before the publication of Ulysses.

If you consult any sporting manual or yearbook you will find many pages devoted to the hunting of the fox and the hare, but not a word about the hunting of the highbrow.

Yet this, more than any other, is the characteristic British sport, in season all the year round and enjoyed by rich and poor alike, with no complications from either class-feeling or political alignment.

For it should be noted that in its attitude towards “highbrows” — that is, towards any writer or artist who makes experiments in technique — the Left is no friendlier than the Right. Not only is “highbrow” almost as much a word of abuse in the Daily Worker as in Punch, but it is exactly those writers whose work shows both originality and the power to endure that Marxist doctrinaires single out for attack. I could name a long list of examples, but I am thinking especially of Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence and Eliot. Eliot, in particular, is damned in the leftwing press almost as automatically and perfunctorily as Kipling — and that by critics who only a few years back were going into raptures over the already forgotten masterpieces of the Left Book Club.

Is you ask a “good party man” (and this goes for almost any party of the Left) what he objects to in Eliot, you get an answer that ultimately reduces to this. Eliot is a reactionary (he has declared himself a royalist, an Anglo-Catholic, etc.), and he is also a “bourgeois intellectual”, out of touch with the common man: therefore he is a bad writer.

Contained in this statement is a half-conscious confusion of ideas which vitiates nearly all politico-literary criticism.

To dislike a writer’s politics is one thing. To dislike him because he forces you to think is another, not necessarily incompatible with the first. But as soon as you start talking about “good” and “bad” writers you are tacitly appealing to literary tradition and thus dragging in a totally different set of values. For what is a “good” writer? Was Shakespeare “good”? Most people would agree that he was. Yet Shakespeare is, and

perhaps was even by the standards of his own time, reactionary in tendency; and he is also a difficult writer, only doubtfully accessible to the common man. What, then, becomes of the notion that Eliot is disqualified, as it were, by being an Anglo-Catholic royalist who is given to quoting Latin?

Leftwing literary criticism has not been wrong in insisting on the importance of subject-matter. It may not even have been wrong, considering the age we live in, in demanding that literature shall be first and foremost propaganda. Where it has been wrong is in making what are ostensibly literary judgements for political ends. To take a crude example, what Communist would dare to admit in public that Trotsky is a better writer than Stalin — as he is, of course? To say “X is a gifted writer, but he is a political enemy and I shall do my best to silence him” is harmless enough. Even if you end by silencing him with a tommy-gun you are not really sinning against the intellect. The deadly sin is to say “X is a political enemy: therefore he is a bad writer.” And if anyone says that this kind of thing doesn’t happen, I answer merely: look up the literary pages of the leftwing press, from the News Chronicle to the Labour Monthly, and see what you find.

There is no knowing just how much the Socialist movement has lost by alienating the literary intelligentsia. But it has alienated them, partly by confusing tracts with literature, and partly by having no room in it for a humanistic culture. A writer can vote Labour as easily as anyone else, but it is very difficult for him to take part in the Socialist movement as a writer. Both the book-trained doctrinaire and the practical politician will despise him as a “bourgeois intellectual”, and will lose no opportunity of telling him so.

They will have much the same attitude towards his work as a golfing stockbroker would have. The illiteracy of politicians is a special feature of our age — as G. M. Trevelyan put it, “In the seventeenth century Members of Parliament quoted the Bible, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the classics, and in the twentieth century nothing” — and its corollary is the [political] impotence of writers. In the years following the last war the best English writers were reactionary in tendency, though most of them took no direct part in politics. After them, about 1930, there came a generation of writers who tried very hard to be actively useful in the leftwing movement. Numbers of them joined the Communist Party, and got there exactly the same reception as they would have got in the Conservative Party. That is, they were first regarded with patronage and suspicion, and then, when it was found that they would not or could not turn themselves into gramophone records, they were thrown out on their ears. Most of them retreated into individualism. No doubt they still vote Labour, but their talents are lost to the movement; and — a more sinister development — after them there comes a new generation of writers who, without being strictly non-political, are outside the Socialist movement from the start. Of the very young writers who are now beginning their careers, the most gifted are pacifists; a few may even have a leaning towards Fascism. There is hardly one to whom the mystique of the Socialist movement appears to mean anything. The ten-year-long struggle against Fascism seems to them meaningless and uninteresting, and they say so frankly. One could explain this in a number of ways, but the contemptuous attitude of the Left towards “bourgeois intellectuals” is likely to be part of the reason.

Gilbert Murray relates somewhere or other that he once lectured on Shakespeare to a Socialist debating society. At the end he called for questions in the usual way, to receive as the sole question asked: “Was Shakespeare a capitalist?” The depressing thing

about this story is that it might well be true. Follow up its implications, and you perhaps get a glimpse of the reason why Céline wrote Mea Culpa and Auden is watching his navel in America.

Tribune, 4 June 1943

48. Letter to an American Visitor, by Obadiah Hornbooke4

4. Pseudonym of Alex Comfort.

Columbian poet, whom we’ve all respected

From a safe distance for a year or two,

Since first your magnum opus was collected -It seems a pity no one welcomed you

Except the slippery professional few,

Whose news you’ve read, whose posters you’ve inspected;

Who gave America Halifax, and who

Pay out to scribes and painters they’ve selected

Doles which exceed a fraction of the debts

Of all our pimps in hardware coronets.

You’ve seen the ruins, heard the speeches, swallowed

The bombed-out hospitals and cripples’ schools -You’ve heard (on records) how the workers hollowed

And read in poker-work GIVE US THE TOOLS:

You know how, with the steadfastness of mules,

The Stern Determination of the People

Goes sailing through a paradise of fools

Like masons shinning up an endless steeple -A climb concluding after many days

In a brass weathercock that points all ways.

The land sprouts orators. No doubt you’ve heard

How every buffer, fool and patrioteer

Applies the Power of the Spoken Word

And shoves his loud posterior in your ear;

So Monkey Hill competes with Berkeley Square -The B.B.C. as bookie, pimp and vet

Presenting Air Vice-Marshals set to cheer

Our raided towns with vengeance (though I’ve yet

To hear from any man who lost his wife

Berlin or Lübeck brought her back to life).

 

You’ve heard of fighting on the hills and beaches

And down the rabbit holes with pikes and bows

You’ve heard the Baron’s bloody-minded speeches

(Each worth a fresh Division to our foes)

That smell so strong of murder that the crows

Perch on the Foreign Office roof and caw

For German corpses laid in endless rows,

“A Vengeance such as Europe never saw” -The maniac Baron’s future contribution

To peace perpetual through retribution…

You’ve heard His Nibs decanting year by year

The dim productions of his bulldog brain,

While homes and factories sit still to hear

The same old drivel dished up once again -You heard the Churches’ cartwheels to explain

That bombs are Christian when the English drop them -The Union bosses scrapping over gain

While no one’s the temerity to stop them

Or have the racketeers who try to bleed ‘em

Flogged, like the Indians for demanding freedom.

They found you poets — quite a decent gallery

Of painters who don’t let their chances slip;

And writers who prefer a regular salary

To steer their writings by the Party Whip -Hassall’s been tipped to have Laureateship:

Morton is following Goebbels, not St Paul.

There’s Elton’s squeaky pump still gives a drip,

And Priestley twists his proletarian awl

Cobbling at shoes that Mill and Rousseau wore

And still the wretched tool contrives to bore.

They found you critics — an astounding crowd:

(Though since their work’s living, I won’t say

Who howled at Eliot, hooted Treece, were loud

In kicking Auden when he slipped away

Out of the looney-bin to find, they say,

A quiet place where men with minds could write:

But since Pearl Harbour, in a single day

The same old circus chase him, black is white,

And once again by day and night he feels

The packs of tripehounds yelling at his heels).

I say, they found you artists, well selected,

Whom we export to sell the British case:

 

We keep our allied neighbours well protected

From those who give the thing a different face -One man’s in jail, one in a “medical place”;

Another working at a farm with pigs on:

We take their leisure, close their books, say grace,

And like that bus-conducting lad Geoff Grigson

We beat up every buzzard, kite and vulture,

And dish them out to you as English Culture.

Once in a while, to every Man and Nation,

There comes, as Lowell said, a sort of crisis

Between the Ministry of Information

And what your poor artistic soul advises:

They catch the poets, straight from Cam or Isis:

“Join the brigade, or be for ever dumb -Either cash in your artistic lysis

Or go on land work if you won’t succumb:

Rot in the Army, sickened and unwilling”:

So you can wonder that they draw their shilling?

You met them all. You don’t require a list

Of understrapping ghosts who once were writers -Who celebrate the size of Britain’s fist,

Write notes for sermons, dish out pep to mitres,

Fake letters from the Men who Fly our Fighters.

Cheer when we blast some enemy bungalows -Think up atrocities, the artful blighters,

To keep the grindstone at the public’s nose -Combining moral uplift and pornography,

Produced with arty paper and typography.

They find their leisure to fulfil their promise,

Their work is praised, funguntur vice cotis,

And Buddy Judas cracks up Doubting Thomas.

Their ways are paved with favourable notice

(Look how unanimous the Tory vote is).

They write in papers and review each other,

You’d never guess how bloody full the boat is;

I shan’t forgive MacNeice his crippled brother

Whom just a year ago on New Year’s Day

The Germans murdered in a radio play.

O for another Dunciad — a POPE

To purge this dump with his gigantic boot -Drive fools to water, aspirin or rope -Make idle lamp-posts bear their fitting fruit:

 

Private invective’s far too long been mute -O for another vast satiric comet

To blast this wretched tinder, branch and root.

The servile stuff that makes a true man vomit -Suck from the works to which they cling like leeches,

Those resurrection-puddings, Churchill’s speeches.

God knows — for there is libel — I can’t name

How many clammy paws of these you’ve shaken,

Been told our English spirit is the same

From Lord Vansittart back to pseudo-Bacon -Walked among licensed writers, and were taken

To Grub Street, Malet Street, and Portland Place,

Where every question that you ask will waken

The same old salesman’s grin on every face

Among the squads of columbines and flunkeys,

Set on becoming Laureate of Monkeys.

We do not ask, my friend, that you’ll forget

The squirts and toadies when you were presented,

The strength-through-joy brigades you will have met

Whose mouths are baggy and whose hair is scented -Only recall we were not represented.

We wrote our own refusals, and we meant them.

Our work is plastered and ourselves resented -Our heads are bloody, but we have not bent them.

We hold no licences, like ladies’ spaniels;

We live like lions in this den of Daniels.

O friend and writer, deafened by the howls

That dying systems utter, mad with fear

In darkness, with a sinking of the bowels,

Where all the devils of old conscience leer -Forget the gang that met you on the pier,

Grinning and stuffed with all the old excuses

For starving Europe, and the crocodile tear

Turned on for visitors who have their uses.

We know the capers of the simian crew.

We send our best apologies to you.

Tribune, 4 June 1943

As One Non-Combatant to Another (A Letter to “Obadiah Hornbooke”) O poet strutting from the sandbagged portal

 

Of that small world where barkers ply their art,

And each new “school” believes itself immortal,

Just like the horse that draws the knacker’s cart:

O captain of a clique of self-advancers,

Trained in the tactics of the pamphleteer,

Where slogans serve for thoughts and sneers for answers -You’ve chosen well your moment to appear

And hold your nose amid a world of horror

Like Dr Bowdler walking through Gomorrah.

In the Left Book Club days you wisely lay low,

But when “Stop Hitler!” lost its old attraction

You bounded forward in a Woolworth’s halo

To cash in on antiwar reaction;

You waited till the Nazis ceased from frightening,

Then, picking a safe audience, shouted “Shame!”

Like a Prometheus you defied the lightning,

But didn’t have the nerve to sign your name.5

You’re a true poet, but as saint and martyr

You’re a mere fraud, like the Atlantic Charter.

5. In a footnote to Orwell’s reply the Editor of Tribune stated: “In fairness to ‘Mr Hornbooke’ it should be stated that he was willing to sign his name if we insisted, but preferred a pseudonym.”

Your hands are clean, and so were Pontius Pilate’s,

But as for “bloody heads”, that’s just a metaphor;

The bloody heads are on Pacific islets

Or Russian steppes or Libyan sands — it’s better for

The health to be a C.O. than a fighter,

To chalk a pavement doesn’t need much guts,

It pays to stay at home and be a writer

While other talents wilt in Nissen huts;

“We live like lions” — yes, just like a lion,

Pensioned on scraps in a safe cage of iron.

For while you write the warships ring you round

And flights of bombers drown the nightingales,

And every bomb that drops is worth a pound

To you or someone like you, for your sales

Are swollen with those of rivals dead or silent,

Whether in Tunis or the B.B.C.,

And in the drowsy freedom of this island

You’re free to shout that England isn’t free;

They even chuck you cash, as bears get buns,

For crying “Peace!” behind a screen of guns.

In ‘seventeen to snub the nosing bitch

 

Who slipped you a white feather needed cheek,

But now, when every writer finds his niche

Within some mutual-admiration clique,

Who cares what epithets by Blimps are hurled?

Who’d give a damn if handed a white feather?

Each little mob of pansies is a world,

Cosy and warm in any kind of weather;

In such a world it’s easy to “object”,

Since that’s what both your friends and foes expect.

At times it’s almost a more dangerous deed

Not to object; I know, for I’ve been bitten.

I wrote in nineteen-forty that at need

I’d fight to keep the Nazis out of Britain;

And Christ! how shocked the pinks were! Two years later

I hadn’t lived it down; one had the effrontery

To write three pages calling me a “traitor”,

So black a crime it is to love one’s country.

Yet where’s the pink that would have thought it odd of me

To write a shelf of books in praise of sodomy?

Your game is easy, and its rules are plain:

Pretend the war began in ‘thirty-nine,

Don’t mention China, Ethiopia, Spain,

Don’t mention Poles except to say they’re swine;

Cry havoc when we bomb a German city,

When Czechs get killed don’t worry in the least,

Give India a perfunctory squirt of pity

But don’t inquire what happens further East;

Don’t mention Jews — in short, pretend the war is

Simply a racket “got up” by the Tories.

Throw in a word of “anti-Fascist” patter

From time to time, by way of reinsurance,

And then go on to prove it makes no matter

If Blimps or Nazis hold the world in durance;

And that we others who “support” the war

Are either crooks or sadists or flag-wavers

In love with drums and bugles, but still more

Concerned with cadging Brendan Bracken’s favours;

Or fools who think that bombs bring back the dead,

A thing not even Harris ever said.

If you’d your way we’d leave the Russians to it

And sell our steel to Hitler as before;

Meanwhile you save your soul, and while you do it,

 

Take out a long-term mortgage on the war.

For after war there comes an ebb of passion,

The dead are sniggered at — and there you’ll shine,

You’ll be the very bull’s-eye of the fashion,

You almost might get back to ‘thirty-nine,

Back to the dear old game of scratch-my-neighbour

In sleek reviews financed by coolie labour.

But you don’t hoot at Stalin — that’s “not done” -Only at Churchill; I’ve no wish to praise him,

I’d gladly shoot him when the war is won,

Or now, if there was someone to replace him.

But unlike some, I’ll pay him what I owe him;

There was a time when empires crashed like houses,

And many a pink who’d titter at your poem

Was glad enough to cling to Churchill’s trousers.

Christ! how they huddled up to one another

Like day-old chicks about their foster-mother!

I’m not a fan for “fighting on the beaches”,

And still less for the “breezy uplands” stuff,

I seldom listenin to Churchill’s speeches,

But I’d far sooner hear that kind of guff

Than your remark, a year or so ago,

That if the Nazis came you’d knuckle under

And peaceably “accept the status quo“.

Maybe you would! But I’ve a right to wonder

Which will sound better in the days to come,

“Blood, toil and sweat” or “Kiss the Nazi’s bum”.

But your chief target is the radio hack,

The hired pep-talker — he’s a safe objective,

Since he’s unpopular and can’t hit back.

It doesn’t need the eye of a detective

To look down Portland Place and spot the whores,

But there are men (I grant, not the most heeded)

With twice your gifts and courage three times yours

Who do that dirty work because it’s needed;

Not blindly, but for reasons they can balance,

They wear their seats out and lay waste their talents.

All propaganda’s lying, yours or mine;

It’s lying even when its facts are true;

That goes for Goebbels or the “party line”,

Or for the Primrose League or P.P.U.

But there are truths that smaller lies can serve,

 

And dirtier lies that scruples can gild over;

To waste your brains on war may need more nerve

Than to dodge facts and live in mental clover;

It’s mean enough when other men are dying,

But when you lie, it’s much to know you’re lying.

That’s thirteen stanzas, and perhaps you’re puzzled

To know why I’ve attacked you — well, here’s why:

Because your enemies all are dead or muzzled,

You’ve never picked on one who might reply.

You’ve hogged the limelight and you’ve aired your virtue,

While chucking sops to every dangerous faction,

The Left will cheer you and the Right won’t hurt you;

What did you risk? Not even a libel action.

If you would show what saintly stuff you’re made of,

Why not attack the cliques you are afraid of?

Denounce Joe Stalin, jeer at the Red Army,

Insult the Pope — you’ll get some come-back there;

It’s honourable, even if it’s barmy,

To stamp on corns all round and never care.

But for the halfway saint and cautious hero,

Whose head’s unbloody even if “unbowed”,

My admiration’s somewhere near to zero;

So my last words would be: Come off that cloud,

Unship those wings that hardly dared to flitter,

And spout your halo for a pint of bitter.

George Orwell

Tribune, 18 June 1943