George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 10 March 1944 Reading as nearly as
possible simultaneously Mr Derrick Leons Life of Tolstoy, Miss Gladys
Storeys book on Dickens,
Harry Levins book on James
Joyce, and the autobiography (not yet published in this country) of Salvador Dali, the surrealist
painter, I was struck even more forcibly than usual by the advantage that an artist
derives from being born into a relatively healthy society.
When I first read War and Peace I must have been twenty,
an age at which one is not intimidated by long novels, and my sole quarrel with this book
(three stout volumes the length of perhaps four modern novels) was that it did not
go on long enough. It seemed to me that Nicholas and Natasha Rostov, Pierre Bezukhov,
Denisov and all the rest of them, were people about whom one would gladly go on reading
for ever. The fact is that the minor Russian aristocracy of that date, with their boldness
and simplicity, their countrified pleasures, their stormy love affairs and enormous
families, were very charming people. Such a society could not possibly be called just or
progressive. It was founded on serfdom, a fact that made Tolstoy uneasy even in his
boyhood, and even the enlightened aristocrat would have found it difficult to
think of the peasant as the same species of animal as himself. Tolstoy himself did not
give up beating his servants till he was well on into adult life.
The landowner exercised a sort of droit de seigneur over the
peasants on his estate. Tolstoy had at least one bastard, and his morganatic half-brother
was the family coachman. And yet one cannot feel for these simple-minded, prolific
Russians the same contempt as one feels for the sophisticated cosmopolitan scum who gave
Dali his livelihood. Their saving grace is that they are rustics, they have never heard of
benzedrine or gilded toenails, and though Tolstoy was later to repent of the sins of his
youth more vociferously than most people, he must have known that he drew his strength
his creative power as well as the strength of his vast muscles from that
rude, healthy background where one shot woodcocks on the marshes and girls thought
themselves lucky if they went to three dances in a year.
One of the big gaps in Dickens is that he writes nothing, even in
a burlesque spirit, about country life. Of agriculture he does not even pretend to know
anything. There are some farcical descriptions of shooting in the Pickwick Papers,
but Dickens, as a middle-class radical, would be incapable of describing such amusements
sympathetically. He sees field-sports as primarily an exercise in snobbishness, which they
already were in the England of that date. The enclosures, industrialism, the vast
differentiation of wealth, and the cult of the pheasant and the red deer had all combined
to drive the mass of the English people off the land and make the hunting instinct, which
is probably almost universal in human beings, seem merely a fetish of the aristocracy.
Perhaps the best thing in War and Peace is the description of the wolf hunt. In the
end it is the peasants dog that outstrips those of the nobles and gets the wolf; and
afterwards Natasha finds it quite natural to dance in the peasants hut.
To see such scenes in England you would have had to go back a
hundred or two hundred years, to a time when difference in status did not mean any very
great difference in habits. Dickenss England was already dominated by the
Trespassers will be Prosecuted board. When one thinks of the accepted
left-wing attitude towards hunting, shooting and the like, it is queer to reflect that Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were all of them keen
sportsmen in their day. But then they belonged to a large empty country where there was no
necessary connexion between sport and snobbishness, and the divorce between country and
town was never complete. This society which almost any modern novelist has as his material
is very much meaner, less comely and less carefree than Tolstoys, and to grasp this
has been one of the signs of talent. Joyce would have been falsifying the facts, if he had
made the people in Dubliners less disgusting than they are. But the natural
advantage lay with Tolstoy: for, other things being equal, who would not rather write
about Pierre and Natasha than about furtive seductions in boarding-houses or drunken
Catholic businessmen celebrating a retreat?
In his book on Joyce Mr Harry Levin gives a few biographical details,
but is unable to tell us much about Joyces last year of life. All we know is that
when the Nazis entered France he escaped over the border into Switzerland, to die about a
year later in his old home in Zurich. Even the whereabouts of Joyces children is
not, it seems, known for certain.
The academic critics could not resist the opportunity to kick
Joyces corpse. The Times gave him a mean, cagey little obituary, and then
though The Times has never lacked space for letters about batting averages
or the first cuckoo refused to print the letter of protest that T. S. Eliot wrote. This was in
accordance with the grand old English tradition that the dead must always be flattered
unless they happen to be artists. Let a politician die, and his worst enemies will stand
up on the floor of the House and utter pious lies in his honour, but a writer or artist
must be sniffed at, at least if he is any good. The entire British press united to insult D. H. Lawrence
(pornographer was the usual description) as soon as he was dead. But the
snooty obituaries were merely what Joyce would have expected. The collapse of France, and
the need to flee from the Gestapo
like a common political suspect, were a different matter, and when the war is over it will
be very interesting to find out what Joyce thought about it. Joyce was a conscious exile
from Anglo-Irish philistinism. Ireland would have none of him, England and America barely
tolerated him. His books were refused publication, destroyed when in type by timid
publishers, banned when they came out, pirated with the tacit connivance of the
authorities, and, in any case, largely ignored until the publication of Ulysses. He
had a genuine grievance, and was extremely conscious of it. But it was also his aim to be
a pure artist, above the battle and indifferent to politics. He
had written Ulysses in Switzerland, with an Austrian passport and a British
pension, during the 1914-18 war, to which he paid as nearly as possible no attention. But
the present war, as Joyce found out, is not of a kind to be ignored, and I think it must
have left him reflecting that a political choice is necessary and that even
stupidity is better than totalitarianism.
One thing that Hitler and his friends have
demonstrated is what a relatively good time the intellectual has had during the past
hundred years. After all, how does the persecution of Joyce, Lawrence, Whitman, Baudelaire, even Oscar Wilde, compare with the kind
of thing that has been happening to liberal intellectuals all over Europe since Hitler
came to power? Joyce left Ireland in disgust: he did not have to run for his life, as he
did when the panzers rolled into Paris. The British Government duly banned Ulysses
when it appeared, but it took the ban off fifteen years later, and what is probably more
important, it helped Joyce to stay alive while the book was written. And thereafter,
thanks to the generosity of an anonymous admirer, Joyce was able to live a civilized life
in Paris for nearly twenty years, working away at Finnegans Wake and surrounded by
a circle of disciples, while industrious teams of experts translated Ulysses not
only into various European languages but even into Japanese. Between 1900 and 1920 he had
known hunger and neglect: but take it for all in all, his life would appear a pretty good
one if one were viewing it from inside a German concentration camp.
What would the Nazis have done with Joyce if they could have laid
hands on him? We dont know. They might even have made efforts to win him over and
add him to their bag of converted literary men. But he must have seen that
they had not only broken up the society that he was used to, but were the deadly enemies
of everything that he valued. The battle which he had wanted to be above did,
after all, concern him fairly directly, and I like to think that before the end he brought
himself to utter some non-neutral comment on Hitler and coming from Joyce it might
be quite a stinger which is lying in Zurich and will be accessible after the war. |