George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 6 October 1944By permission of a
correspondent, I quote passages from a letter of instruction which she recently received
from a well-known school of journalism. I should explain that when she undertook her
course the instructor asked her to supply the necessary minimum of information
about her background and experience, and then told her to write a couple of specimen
essays on some subject interesting to her. Being a miners wife, she chose to write
about coal-mining. Here is the reply she got from someone calling himself the
Assistant Director of Studies. I shall have to quote from it at some length:
I have read your two exercises with care and interest. You should
have a good deal to write about: but do be careful of getting a bee in your bonnet. Miners
are not the only men who have a hard time. How about young naval officers, earning less
than a skilled miner who must spend three or four years from home and family, in
ice or the tropics? How about the many retired folks on a tiny pension or allowance, whose
previous £2 or £3 have been reduced
by half by the income tax. We all make sacrifices in this war and the
so-called upper classes are being hard hit indeed.
Instead of writing propaganda for
Socialist newspapers you will do better to describe for the housewives what
life is like in a mining village. Do not go out of your way to be hostile to owners and
managers who are ordinary fellow creatures but, if you must air a grievance,
do so tolerantly, and fit it in with your plot or theme.
Many of your readers will be people who are not in the least
inclined to regard employers as slave drivers and capitalist villains of society . . . .
Write simply and naturally, without any attempt at long words or sentences. Remember that
your task is to entertain. No reader will bother after a hard days work to
read a list of somebody elses woes. Keep a strict eye on your inclination to write
about the wrongs of mining. There are millions of people who will not
forget that miners did strike while our sons and husbands were fighting the
Germans. Where would the miners be if the troops had refused to fight? I mention this to
help you keep a sense of perspective. I advise you against writing very controversial
things. They are hard to sell. A plain account of mining life will stand a far better
chance . . . . The average reader is willing to read facts about other ways of life
but unless he is a fool or knave, he will not listen to one-sided propaganda. So
forget your grievances, and tell us something of how you manage in a typical
mining village. One of the womens magazines will, Im sure, consider a
housewifes article on that subject.
My correspondent, who, it seems, had agreed in advance to pay £11 for
this course, sent the letter on to me with the query: Did I think that her instructor was
trying to influence her to give her writings an acceptable political slant? Was an attempt
being made to talk her out of writing like a Socialist?
I do think so, of course, but the implications of this letter are
worse than that. This is not a subtle capitalist plot to dope the
workers. The writer of that slovenly letter is not a sinister plotter, but simply an ass
(a female ass, I should say by the style) upon whom years of bombing and privation have
made no impression. What it demonstrates is the unconquerable, weed-like vitality of
pre-war habits of mind. The writer assumes, it will be seen, that the only purpose of
journalism is to tickle money out of the pockets of tired businessmen, and that the best
way of doing this is to avoid telling unpleasant truths about present-day society. The
reading public, so he (or she) reasons, dont like being made to think: therefore
dont make them think. You are after the big dough, and no other consideration
enters.
Anyone who has had anything to do with courses in
free-lance journalism, or has ever come as near to them as studying the now-defunct
Writer and the Writers and Artists Yearbook, will recognize the
tone of that letter. Remember that your task is to entertain, No
reader will bother after a hard days work to read a list of somebody elses
woes, and I advise you against writing very controversial things. They are
hard to sell. I pass over the fact that even from a commercial point of view such
advice is misleading. What is significant is the assumption that nothing ever changes,
that the public always will be and always must be the same mob of nit-wits wanting only to
be doped, and that no sane person would sit down behind a typewriter with any other object
than to produce saleable drivel.
When I started writing, about fifteen years ago, various people
who, however, didnt succeed in getting £11 out of me in return gave
me advice almost identical with what I have quoted above. Then too, it seemed, the public
did not want to hear about unpleasant things like
unemployment, and articles on controversial subjects were
hard to sell. The dreary sub-world of the free-lance journalist, the world of
furnished bed-sitting rooms, hired typewriters and self-addressed envelopes, was entirely
dominated by the theory that your task is to entertain. But at that time there
was some excuse. To begin with there was widespread unemployment, and every newspaper and
magazine was besieged by hordes of amateurs struggling
frantically to earn odd guineas; and in addition the press was incomparably sillier than
it is now and there was some truth in the claim that editors would not print
gloomy contributions. If you looked on writing as simply and solely a way of
making money, then cheer-up stuff was probably the best line. What is depressing is to see
that for the school of journalism the world has stood still. The bombs have
achieved nothing. And, indeed, when I read that letter I had the same feeling that the
pre-war world is back upon us as I had a little while ago when, through the window of some
chambers in the Temple, I watched somebody with great care and evident pleasure in
the process polishing a top-hat.
It is superfluous to say that long railway journeys are not pleasant in these days, and
for a good deal of the discomfort that people have to suffer, the railway companies are
not to blame. It is not their fault that there is an enormous to-and-fro of civilian
traffic at a time when the armed forces are monopolizing most of the rolling stock, nor
that an English railway carriage is built with the seeming object of wasting as much space
as possible. But journeys which often entail standing for six or eight hours in a crowded
corridor could be made less intolerable by a few reforms.
To begin with, the First Class nonsense should be scrapped once
and for all. Secondly, any woman carrying a baby should have a priority right to a seat.
Thirdly, waiting rooms should be left open at night. Fourthly, if time-tables cannot be
adhered to, porters and other officials should be in possession of correct information,
and not, as at present, tell you that you will have to change when you wont, and
vice versa. Also a thing that is bad enough in peace time but is even worse at this
moment why is it that there is no cheap way of moving luggage across a big town?
What do you do if you have to move a heavy trunk from Paddington to Camden Town? You take
a taxi. And suppose you cant afford a taxi, what do you do then? Presumably you
borrow a hand-cart, or balance the trunk on a perambulator. Why are there not cheap
luggage-vans, just as there are buses for human passengers? Or why not make it possible to
carry luggage on the Underground?
This evening, as Kings Cross discharged another horde of
returned evacuees, I saw a man and woman, obviously worn out by a long journey,
trying to board a bus. The woman carried a squalling baby and clutched a child of about
six by the other hand; the man was carrying a broken suitcase tied with rope and the elder
childs cot. They were refused by one bus after another. Of course, no bus could take
a cot on board. How could it be expected to? But, on the other hand, how were those people
to get home? It ended by the woman boarding a bus with the two children, while the man
trailed off carrying the cot. For all I know he had a five-mile walk ahead of him.
In war-time one must expect this kind of thing. But the point is
that if those people had made the same journey, similarly loaded, in peace time, their
predicament would have been just the same. For:
The rain it raineth every day
Upon the just and unjust feller,
But more upon the just because
The unjust has the justs umbrella.
Our society is not only so arranged that if you have money you can buy luxuries with
it. After all, that is what money is for. It is also so arranged that if you dont
have money you pay for it at every hour of the day with petty humiliations and totally
unnecessary discomforts such as, for instance, walking home with a suitcase cutting
your fingers off when a mere half-crown would get you there in five minutes. |