George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 25 February 1944 A short story in
the Home Companion and Family Journal, entitled Hullo, Sweetheart,
recounts the adventures of a young girl named Lucy Fallows who worked on the switchboard
of a long-distance telephone exchange. She had sacrificed her yearning to be in
uniform in order to take this job, but found it dull and uneventful. So many
silly people seemed to use long-distance just to blether to each other . . . . She felt
fed up; she felt that she was a servant to selfish people, and there was a
cloud in her hazel eyes. However, as you will readily guess, Lucys job soon
livened up, and before long she found herself in the middle of thrilling adventures which
included the sinking of a U-boat, the capture of a German sabotage crew, and a long
motor-ride with a handsome naval officer who had a crisp voice. Such is life
in the Telephone Exchange.
At the end of the story there is a little note: Any of our
young readers themselves interested in the work of the Long Distance Telephone Exchange
(such work as Lucy Fallows was doing) should apply to the Staff Controller, L.T.R.,
London, who will inform them as to the opportunities open.
I do not know whether this is an advertisement likely to have
much success. I should doubt whether even girls of the age aimed at would believe that
capturing U-boats enters very largely into the lives of telephone operators. But I note
with interest the direct correlation between a government recruiting advertisement and a
piece of commercial fiction. Before the war the Admiralty, for instance, used to put its
advertisements in the boys adventure papers, which was a natural place to put them,
but stories were not, so far as I know, written to order. Probably they are not definitely
commissioned even now. It is more likely that the departments concerned keep their eye on
the weekly papers (incidentally I like to think of some stripe-trousered personage in the
G.P.O. reading Hullo, Sweetheart as part of his official duties) and push in
an ad when any story seems likely to form an attractive bait. But from that to the actual
commissioning of stories to be written round the A.T.S., Womens Land Army, or any
other body in need of recruits, is only a short step. One can almost hear the tired,
cultured voices from the M.O.I. saying:
Hullo! Hullo! Is that you, Tony? Oh, hullo. Look here,
Ive got another script for you, Tony, "A Ticket to Paradise". Its
bus conductress this time. Theyre not coming in. I believe the trousers dont
fit, or something. Well, anyway, Peter says make it sexy, but kind of clean you
know. Nothing extra-marital. We want the stuff in by Tuesday. Fifteen thousand words. You
can choose the hero. I rather favour the kind of outdoor man that dogs and kiddies all
love you know. Or very tall with a sensitive mouth, I dont mind,
really. But pile on the sex, Peter says.
Something resembling this already happens with radio features and
documentary films, but hitherto there has not been any very direct connexion between
fiction and propaganda. That half-inch ad in the Home Companion seems to mark
another small stage in the process of co-ordination that is gradually
happening to all the arts.
Looking through Chestertons
Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition (incidentally, Chestertons
Introductions to Dickens are
about the best thing he ever wrote), I note the typically sweeping statement: There
are no new ideas. Chesterton is here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones
but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then been abandoned.
But the claim that there is nothing new under the sun is one of the stock
arguments of intelligent reactionaries. Catholic apologists, in particular, use it almost
automatically. Everything that you can say or think has been said or thought before. Every
political theory from Liberalism
to Trotskyism can be shown to be
a development of some heresy in the early Church. Every system of philosophy springs
ultimately from the Greeks. Every scientific theory (if we are to believe the popular
Catholic press) was anticipated by Roger
Bacon and others in the thirteenth century. Some Hindu thinkers go even further and
claim that not merely the scientific theories, but the products of applied science as
well, aeroplanes, radio and the whole bag of tricks, were known to the ancient Hindus, who
afterwards dropped them as being unworthy of their attention.
It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the
fear of progress. If there is nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or
another always returns, then the future when it comes will be something familiar. At any
rate what will never come since it has never come before is that hated,
dreaded thing, a world of free and equal human beings. Particularly comforting to
reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical universe, in which the same chain of events
happens over and over again. In such a universe every seeming advance towards democracy
simply means that the coming age of tyranny and privilege is a bit nearer. This belief,
obviously superstitious though it is, is widely held nowadays, and is common among Fascists and near-Fascists.
In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced
civilization need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance: it is a good
deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chestertons dictum were true,
it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone.
Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. It could be claimed, for example,
that the most important part of Marxs
theory is contained in the saying: Where your treasure is, there will your heart be
also. But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any
attention to it? Who had inferred from it what it certainly implies that
laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property
relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx
who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests,
judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion which, of
course, is why they hate him so much. |