A Little History of Literature (25 page)

Authors in Germany historically enjoyed a relatively liberal regime, particularly so in the Weimar Republic of 1919–33. This was when writers like the dramatist Bertolt Brecht, with works such as
The Threepenny Opera
(from which comes the still popular song ‘Mack the Knife’) could create a uniquely political and revolutionary form of theatre which has left a lasting mark, worldwide. With the Nazi takeover in 1933, repression was tyrannic. The burning of books was as much part of the theatre of Nazism as the Nuremberg Rallies. The aim was to control the ‘mind’ of the population by denying it any sustenance not approved by the Party. It worked too well. No literature of the slightest historical value was produced for a dozen years. Worse still, Hitler's regime left a poisoned bequest when it ended in 1945. After the war, writers such as the novelist Günter Grass had the literary equivalent (as Grass put it) of literary bomb-blast rubble to work with.

In Britain, until the eighteenth century the control was political, and an arm of the state. A writer who offended could find himself in the Tower of London, without due process of any law, or (like Defoe) consigned by the magistrate to the stocks. Writers were wise to be wary. Shakespeare, for example, sets none of his plays in England of the present day. Why? Because he was not merely a genius, but a careful genius.

Censorship of the stage, particularly, is a long-running feature in Britain. Why? Because audiences are ‘gatherings’ and can easily become ‘mobs’. Censorship of the theatre remained in place until the 1960s. George Bernard Shaw was in constant battle with the Lord Chamberlain (whose office licensed all drama). Witty ‘Shavian’ plays such as
Mrs Warren's Profession
(1895), which mischievously portrays a house of ill repute as a legitimate commercial enterprise, had a hard time making it to the public stage. Shaw was a self-proclaimed supporter of the Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. Attempts to stage plays such as Ibsen's
Ghosts
(which touched on the supremely dangerous topic of venereal disease) provoked scandal and inevitable bannings. Even in the 1950s, first performances of plays such as Samuel's Beckett's
Waiting for Godot
(Chapter 33) required the Lord Chamberlain's say-so. Small changes were required and duly supplied.

Britain did not formalise censorship in law until 1857 (the same year that
Madame Bovary
went on trial in Paris). The first of a series of Obscene Publications Acts that Parliament passed that year was purest British fudge. A work of literature was deemed ‘obscene’ if it tended to ‘deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences’. Dickens satirically paraphrased the offence as anything which would ‘call a blush into the cheek of a young person’. Henry James called it ‘the tyranny of the young reader’. Morality – whether prosecuted in court or simply ‘the spirit of the age’ – ruled. Thomas Hardy gave up fiction altogether when in 1895 the Bishop of Wakefield burned his novel,
Jude the Obscure
(as usual, for condoning adultery), and published only inoffensive poetry for the last thirty years of his life. The ‘corrupt and deprave’ rule made the kind of novel he wanted to write impossible.

Hardy's disciple, D.H. Lawrence, had the whole first edition of his novel
The Rainbow
judicially burned in 1915. It contained highly poeticised but wholly inoffensive (to our eyes) descriptions of sex, without a single four-letter word. After the war Lawrence left England, never to return. Those who stayed behind watched their step. E.M. Forster wrote and published many great novels (see Chapter 26). One novel he wrote around 1913, and circulated
privately but didn't publish, was
Maurice
– a work that dealt, frankly, with his own gay sexuality. It would not see the light of print until 1971, after his death, when it had only historical interest.

Canny British writers and publishers ‘self-censored’, as did Forster. When George Orwell tried to get
Animal Farm
into print in 1944 he could not find a publisher willing to take on a fable that attacked Britain's wartime ally, the Soviet Union. The whole literary establishment was, Orwell concluded, ‘gutless’. ‘Prudent’ is the word they would have used.

The climate changed radically with the
Lady Chatterley's Lover
trial, in 1960. In 1959 a new Obscene Publications Act had come in, by which an intrinsically offensive work of literature could be published if it was for the public good: ‘in the interests of science, literature, art or learning’. D.H. Lawrence had died in 1930, but Penguin publishers decided to test the new Act by publishing his novel. It had been written, as Lawrence put it, to ‘hygienise’ literature. Why, the novel asks, cannot we use good old Anglo-Saxon words, rather than Latin euphemisms, for the most important acts of our personal lives? On their side, the prosecution adopted the same line as those French authorities that had hauled Flaubert into court: Lawrence's story of an aristocrat's wife who falls in love with a gamekeeper endorsed adultery. Various ‘expert witnesses’, including respected authors, testified in defence of the publication, and the defence won.

The fight against the censorshp of literature in the world continues, as every issue of the London-based journal,
Index on Censorship
, testifies. It is a constant battle. Literature, literary history demonstrates, can do great things under oppression, in chains, or in exile. It can even, like the phoenix, rise from the flames of its own destruction. It is a glorious vindication of the human spirit that it can do so.

CHAPTER
26

Empire

K
IPLING
, C
ONRAD AND
F
ORSTER

The point was made in earlier chapters that great literatures tend to be the product of great nations. Those, that is, which have enlarged their territory by conquest, invasion or, in some cases, downright theft. No subject in literature raises thornier issues than ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ – most particularly the right by which one country claims to own, dominate, plunder, and in some instances destroy another country. Or, as the imperial power may argue, ‘to bring civilisation’.

Literature's engagement with the subject of the rights and wrongs of empire, is complex, fraught and at times quarrelsome. The nature of that engagement has changed over the last two centuries as the global picture has changed. Literature which is relevant in one period is hopelessly dated in another. No other variety of literature requires knowledge of when it was written, and who for, than this kind of literature.

It helps to sketch out the big historical picture. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Britain, a small cluster of islands off the coast of northern Europe, acquired and ruled over an empire
which, at its height in the Victorian era, stretched from the meridian line at Greenwich over vast tracts of Africa, to Palestine, the Indian sub-continent, Australasia and Canada. In the eighteenth century the thirteen colonies that would become the United States of America was included in that list. Not even ancient Rome could boast about ‘owning’ a larger expanse of Planet Earth than Great Britain.

By the second half of the twentieth century that empire was virtually gone, with traumatic suddenness. One after another, countries claimed and won independence. The last time Britain fought to defend its overseas territories was in 1982, for a tiny set of islands in the South Atlantic, the Falklands, with its population barely larger than an English village. No epics were forthcoming.

Literature is a sensitive recorder of socio-historical change, registering both the facts of the international world and the nation's complex and fluid responses to those facts as they happen. The British frame of mind, in the high imperial and immediately postimperial phase of the country's history, was touched – as literature reflects – by a fluctuating mixture of pride and shame.

Let's consider the famous, and in its time much admired, poem by Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man's Burden’ (1899). It opens:

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was British but ‘The White Man's Burden’ was addressed specifically to the people of the USA. (Kipling, significantly, had an American wife.) It was inspired by the US suppression of an independence uprising in the Philippines, and its acquisition, in the same period, of Puerto Rico, Guam and Cuba. The Philippines campaign was particularly bloody. Up to a
quarter of a million Filipinos were estimated to have perished. The white man's burden has always been streaked with red.

The poem was an immediate hit in the USA, and its title became a proverbial phrase. One still hears it from time to time – usually ironically. As the nineteenth century (‘Britain's Century’) came to an end, Kipling believed the role of supreme world power would pass, as historically it did, to the USA. The twentieth century was destined to be America's. Britain, Kipling fondly anticipated, would be a partner, if a junior partner, with its great ally. The two nations, between them, would run the world as benign masters.

Kipling had been born in colonial India and his novel
Kim
(1901), reflecting his childhood in Bombay (now Mumbai), contains a much more sympathetic depiction of the relation of what he called ‘East and West’. The basic idea of Kipling's poem is clear enough. Empire is the imposition of a white civilisation on peoples who are, and will always be, ‘half devil and half child’. The act of empire is essentially benign. It is a ‘burden’ undertaken with no thought of national gain and, most poignantly, no expectation of any thanks from those inferior races lucky enough to be colonised by the white man. Today Kipling's poem is a literary embarrassment. It met with overwhelming approval in 1899. Times change.

In that same year, 1899, another work about empire and the white man's imperialism was published –
Heart of Darkness
, by Joseph Conrad (1857–1924). It is a much more thoughtful effort and, most would agree, a much greater work of literature. Conrad had been born in Ukraine, of Polish parents, as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. His father was a patriot, a poet and a rebel against the Russian occupation of his homeland. He dedicated his life to the cause of independence. It meant the young Józef could never base himself in Poland. Exile was his destiny. He embarked on a career as a sailor, and in 1886 became a British subject and an officer in the British merchant navy, and changed his name to Joseph Conrad. Then, in his mid thirties, he left the sea for literature.

The autobiographical seed for
Heart of Darkness
was Conrad's being commissioned in 1890 to skipper a decrepit steamer up the Congo River to an inland station, run by a dying manager, called
Klein (renamed ‘Kurtz’ in the novel:
klein
means ‘small’, and
kurz
means ‘short’ in German). For a few months Conrad – a man of decency, if not entirely immune from the racial prejudices of his age and class – was in the service of a colonial agency that Europe should, forever, be ashamed of: the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo.

The so-called Congo Free State had been founded in 1885 by Belgium, one of the smaller European imperial nations. ‘Free’ meant free to plunder. King Leopold II farmed out the million square miles his country ‘owned’ to whatever firm would pay most. What the purchaser did thereafter with their colonial leasehold was entirely up to them. The result was what has been called the first genocide of the modern era. Conrad called it ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience’.

The river voyage had a profound influence on Conrad: ‘Before the Congo I was a mere animal’, he later said. It took eight years for the ‘horror’ (a key word in the novel) to settle sufficiently in his mind for him to write
Heart of Darkness
. The story is simple. Marlow (Conrad's hero-narrator in a number of his novels) entertains some friends, as the sun sinks over the yardarm, on his boat, the
Nellie
, bobbing sedately in the mouth of the Thames. Looking down towards London, in a momentary lull in conversation, he muses: ‘This also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ He is thinking of the Romans and ancient Britain. Behind every empire, we apprehend, lies crime.

Marlow goes on to recall a command he had in his early thirties. He was recruited in Brussels (a ‘whitened sepulchre’ of a city) to go on a mission in Africa (the heart-shaped ‘dark’ continent) up the Congo to the heart of the Belgian colony, where a station manager, Kurtz, had gone crazy in the process of harvesting elephant ivory. (Ivory was in huge demand in Europe and America to make things like billiard balls and piano keys.) The voyage is one that takes Marlow into the dark truth of things – capitalism, human nature, himself and, most importantly, the nature of empire.