George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 2 June 1944 An extract
from the Italian radio, about the middle of 1942, describing life in London:
Five shillings were given for one egg yesterday, and one pound sterling
for a kilogram of potatoes. Rice has disappeared, even from the Black Market, and peas
have become the prerogative of millionaires. There is no sugar on the market, although
small quantities are still to be found at prohibitive prices.
One day there will be a big, careful, scientific inquiry into the extent
to which propaganda is believed. For instance, what is the effect of an item like the one
above, which is fairly typical of the Fascist
radio? Any Italian who took it seriously would have to assume that Britain was due to
collapse within a few weeks. When the collapse failed to happen, one would expect him to
lose confidence in the authorities who had deceived him. But it is not certain that that
is the reaction. For quite long periods, at any rate, people can remain undisturbed by
obvious lies, either because they simply forget what is said from day to day or because
they are under such a constant propaganda bombardment that they become anaesthetized to
the whole business.
It seems clear that it pays to tell the truth when things are
going badly, but it is by no means certain that it pays to be consistent in your
propaganda. British propaganda is a good deal hampered by its efforts not to be
self-contradictory. It is almost impossible, for instance, to discuss the colour question
in a way that will please both the Boers and the Indians. The Germans are not troubled by
a little thing like that. They just tell everyone what they think he will want to hear,
assuming, probably rightly, that no one is interested in anyone elses problems. On
occasion their various radio stations have even attacked one another.
One which aimed at middle-class Fascists used sometimes to warn
its listeners against the pseudo-Left Workers Challenge, on the ground that the
latter was financed by Moscow.
Another thing that that inquiry, if it ever takes place, will
have to deal with is the magical properties of names. Nearly all human beings feel that a
thing becomes different if you call it by a different name. Thus when the Spanish Civil War broke out the
B.B.C. produced the name Insurgents for Francos followers. This
covered the fact that they were rebels while making rebellion sound respectable. During
the Abyssinian war Haile Selassie was called the
Emperor by his friends and the Negus by his enemies. Catholics strongly resent being
called Roman Catholics. The Trotskyists
call themselves Bolshevik-Leninists but are refused this name by their opponents.
Countries which have liberated themselves from a foreign conqueror or gone through a
nationalist revolution almost invariably change their names, and some countries have a
whole series of names, each with a different implication. Thus the U.S.S.R. is called
Russia or U.S.S.R. (neutral or for short), Soviet Russia (friendly) and Soviet Union (very
friendly). And it is a curious fact that of the six names by which our own country is
called, the only one that does not tread on somebody or others toes is the archaic
and slightly ridiculous name Albion.
Wading through the entries for the Short Story Competition, I was struck
once again by the disability that English short stories suffer in being all cut to a
uniform length. The great short stories of the past are of all lengths from perhaps 1,500
words to 20,000. Most of Maupassants
stories, for instance, are very short, but his two masterpieces, Boule de Suif
and La Maison de Madame Tellier, are decidedly long. Poes stories vary similarly. D. H. Lawrences
England, My England, Joyces
The Dead, Conrads
Youth, and many stories by Henry James, would probably be considered too long
for any modern English periodical. So, certainly, would a story like Mérimées Carmen.
This belongs to the class of long short stories which have almost died out in
this country, because there is no place for them. They are too long for the magazines and
too short to be published as books. You can, of course, publish a book containing several
short stories, but this is not often done because at normal times these books never sell.
It would almost certainly help to rehabilitate the short story if
we could get back to the bulky nineteenth-century magazine, which had room in it for
stories of almost any length. But the trouble is that in modern England monthly and
quarterly magazines of any intellectual pretensions dont pay. Even the Criterion,
perhaps the best literary paper we have ever had, lost money for sixteen years before
expiring. Why? Because people were not willing to fork out the seven and sixpence that it
cost. People wont pay that much for a mere magazine. But why then will they pay the
same sum for a novel, which is no bulkier than the Criterion, and much less worth
keeping? Because they dont pay for the novel directly. The average person never buys
a new book, except perhaps a Penguin. But he does, without knowing it, buy quite a lot of
books by paying twopence into lending libraries. If you could take a literary magazine out
of the library just as you take a book, these magazines would become commercial
propositions and would be able to enlarge their bulk as well as paying their contributors
better. It is book-borrowing and not book-buying that keeps authors and publishers alive,
and there seems no good reason why the lending library system should not be extended to
magazines. Restore the monthly magazine or make the weekly paper about a quarter of
an inch fatter and you might be able to restore the short story. And incidentally
the book review, which for lack of elbow room has dwindled to a perfunctory summary, might
become a work of art again, as it was in the days of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly.
After reading the Matrimonial Post last week I looked in the
Penguin Herodotus for a passage
I vaguely remembered about the marriage customs of the Babylonians. Here it is:
Once a year in each village the maidens of an age to marry were
collected altogether into one place, while the men stood round them in a circle. Then a
herald called up the damsels one by one and offered them for sale. He began with the most
beautiful. When she was sold for no small sum of money, he offered for sale the one who
came next to her in beauty . . . . The custom was that when the herald had gone through
the whole number of the beautiful damsels, he should then call up the ugliest and offer
her to the men, asking who would agree to take her with the smallest marriage portion. And
the man who offered to take the smallest sum had her assigned to him. The marriage
portions were furnished by the money paid for the beautiful damsels, and thus the fairer
maidens portioned out the uglier.
This custom seems to have worked very well and Herodotus is full of
enthusiasm for it. He adds, however, that, like other good customs, it was already going
out round about 450 BC. |