All Art Is Propaganda (2 page)

A generation of students has gone to school on the banal truth that all literature is "constructed," and learned to scoff at the notion that words on the page might express something essentially authentic about the writer. The usefulness of this insight runs up against its limits when you pick up Orwell's essays. Open these books anywhere and you encounter the same voice. Orwell always sounds like Orwell: readier to fight than most writers, toughened but also deepened by hard, largely self-inflicted experience, able to zero in on what's essential about a poem or a politician or a memory, unsurprised without being cynical, principled without being priggish, direct and yet slightly reserved. It is not a clever or inventive voice, and occasionally it can sound a bit pedestrian. It doesn't seduce and exhaust you with literary dazzle; it persuades you with the strength of its prose and the soundness of its judgment. Exactly what relation this voice has to the private individual born with the name Eric Arthur Blair is unknowable. Within the confines of these pages, its integrity is consistent and enduring.

A career like Orwell's would be difficult to undertake today. There is too much specialization in writing, too little genuine independence, and not much room in the major newspapers and magazines for strongly individual essays. It was hard enough to make a living as an essay writer when Orwell was alive—in 1944, one of his most prolific years as an essayist, he earned less than six hundred pounds for his one hundred thousand words—and much harder now. Yet for any young writer willing to try, these essays don't merely survive as historical artifacts and literary masterpieces. In his openness to the world and his insistence on being true to himself, Orwell's essays show readers and writers of any era what it means to live by the vocation.

—G
EORGE
P
ACKER

O
RWELL
published the essays collected here in the 1940s—and though he was just thirty-seven in 1940, this would be the last decade of his life. He had behind him four conventional "social" novels and, more significantly, three books of documentary reportage, each one better than the last, culminating in his classic account of the Spanish civil war,
Homage to Catalonia.
Gradually in the others but culminating in
Homage,
Orwell perfected his signature "plain" style, which so resembles someone speaking honestly and without pretense directly to you, and he had more or less settled on his political opinions: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly,
against
totalitarianism and
for
democratic Socialism, as I understand it." So he said in 1946.

But while this may have been settled, there were other matters Orwell was still working out in his mind. The subjects of these critical essays are almost all, in one way or another, things Orwell
doesn't like.
The essays are incessantly self-contradicting. First, Orwell declares that no great novel could now be written from a Catholic (or Communist) perspective; later he allows that a novel
could
be written from such a perspective, in a pinch; and then in his essay on Graham Greene he comes very near to suggesting that
only
Catholics can now write novels. At one point ("The Art of Donald McGill") he praises dirty postcards; at another he suggests that a different sort of dirty postcard ("that used to be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns") ought to be censored. In the essay on T. S. Eliot he writes that it is "fashionable to say that in verse only the words count and the 'meaning' is irrelevant, but in fact every poem contains a prose-meaning, and when the poem is any good it is a meaning which the poet urgently wishes to express. All art is to some extent propaganda." Several years later, in "The Prevention of Literature," in arguing for the idea that poetry might survive totalitarianism while prose would not, he writes that "what the poet is saying—that is, what his poem 'means' if translated into prose—is relatively unimportant even to himself." Early in the volume, which also means early in the war, he repeatedly points out that the insight of the great totalitarian ideologies (at another point, however, "smelly little orthodoxies") is that mankind needs more than simply a bit of pleasure to make life worth living. The scientific rationalist H. G. Wells, who insisted on belittling Hitler, "was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them." Later in the volume, after the war, Orwell will repeatedly plead for a much more humdrum view of human life. What's particularly frustrating about these contradictions is that at each successive moment Orwell presents them in his great style, his wonderful sharp-edged plainspoken style, which makes you feel that there is no way on earth you could possibly disagree with him, unless you're part of the pansy left, or a sandal wearer and fruit-juice drinker, or maybe just a crank.

In a way I'm exaggerating, because the rightness of Orwell on a number of topics has been an albatross around his neck for sixty years. In truth, Orwell was wrong about all sorts of things. He is wrong in these essays about Eliot's "Four Quartets," a poem of more profound despair than he admits. He is howlingly wrong when he says that
Uncle Tom's Cabin
will outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf. These are minor things. A major thing he was wrong about was the inner logic of totalitarianism: He thought a mature totalitarian system would so deform its citizenry that they would not be able to overthrow it. This was the nightmare vision of
1984.
In fact, as it turned out in Russia, even the ruling elite was not willing to maintain mature totalitarianism after Stalin's death. Other totalitarian regimes have repeated the pattern. Orwell was wrong and Orwell contradicted himself. He was more insightful about the distant dangers of Communist thought-control, in the Soviet Union, than the more pressing and durable thought-control of Western consumerism. Nor did he see the sexual revolution coming, not by a long shot; one wonders what the too-frequent taunter of the "pansy left" would have made of the fact that the gay movement was one of the most successful, because most militant, of the post-1960s liberation struggles.

But there is a deeper logic to these essays, beneath the contradictions and inevitable oversights. The crisis that Orwell was writing himself through in the 1940s was the crisis of the war and, even more confusingly, the postwar. It involved a kind of projection into the future of certain tendencies latent in the present. Throughout these essays Orwell worries about the potential Sovietization of Europe, but also the infection by totalitarian thinking of life outside the Soviet sphere—not just specific threats to specific freedoms, but to deeper structures of feeling. As the philologist Syme says to Winston Smith in
1984
: "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?...Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller." If Orwell was wrong in some sense about the long-term development of totalitarianism, he was right about its deepest intellectual intentions, about the rot it wished to create at the center of thinking itself. And he was right that this rot could spread.

One solution would be to cordon off literature from life and politics entirely: This was, in some sense, the solution adopted by the writers of the previous generation—Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound—whom Orwell calls the writers of the 1920s and we now call the high modernists. And yet Orwell did not want to make a special plea for literature; in fact, of all the writers of his time, Orwell was constitutionally the least capable of making this separation. His own writing and politics were the fruit of his specific experience—of imperialism in Burma, of the conditions in the English coal mines, of the war in Spain. He begins these essays with the insistence that "all art is propaganda" (he repeats this several times)—the expression of a particular world-view. In Dickens's case this is the worldview of a classic nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal, a worldview Orwell admires even as he sees its limitations. ("Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.") In the case of boys' weeklies, it is a worldview that is in a sense incidental (precisely because they are
not
art): "These papers exist because of a specialised demand, because boys at certain ages find it necessary to read about Martians, death-rays, grizzly bears and gangsters. They get what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them." Orwell was producing these essays contemporaneously with the great Western Marxist debates over "committed" literature, but Orwell is, to put it mildly, considerably more down to earth. In the case of the boys' weeklies he suggests some reforms: not that they become the
Daily
Worker,
but, since it's all the same to the boys so long as the death rays are present, that a more leftist perspective couldn't hurt.

For the Orwell of the early essays, the case of Henry Miller is the tough one. Because while Dickens's politics are in the end congenial enough, Miller's quietism is less so. "I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain," writes Orwell. "What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot." Orwell nonetheless went to Spain, and fought there. He was a writer who felt it was vital to let politics animate his work; Miller was the opposite. As Orwell puts it in perfect Orwell deadpan: "When
Tropic of Cancer
was published the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and Hitler's concentration-camps were already bulging. The intellectual foci of the world were Rome, Moscow and Berlin. It did not seem to be a moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be written about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter." And yet, as Orwell suggests, someone this unfashionable had to be working under the spell of a profound conviction. He contrasts Miller favorably to W. H. Auden, who at this time in the famous poem "Spain" was miming the thoughts of the good party man about the "necessary murder." Miller is so far removed from this sort of sentiment, so profound is his individualism and his conviction, that Orwell comes close to endorsing it—"Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism—robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale—or rather, admit that you are inside the whale (for you
are,
of course)." Except Orwell doesn't really mean this. He may be inside the whale but he does not intend to stop disturbing its digestion, he does not intend to be any more quietistic—in fact, just a few months later, in one of his eccentric moods, Orwell was drawing up a scheme for the guerrilla defense of the island, in case the Germans landed, and trying to get it to the government. What he admired above all in Miller was his willingness to go against the grain of the time. While all art is propaganda, it needn't necessarily propagandize something correct. The important thing is that the writer himself believe it.

But there are certain things—here is where Orwell begins to extend and then to contradict his thinking—that you simply can't believe. "No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition," he asserts. Is that true? At almost the exact same moment, Jean-Paul Sartre (a writer Orwell thought, incorrectly, was "full of air"), in
What Is Literature?
was writing, "Nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism." Is
that
true? It seems to have been a problem that leftist writers of the 1940s were going to face by sheer bluff assertion. For Orwell the number of beliefs hostile to literary production seemed to expand and expand. Eliot's "Four Quartets" is labeled "Petainist"—a fairly strong term to hurl at a long experimental poem that doesn't even rhyme. And Salvador Dalí, in "Benefit of Clergy," is a "rat." Orwell wants to chart a middle course between the philistines who would dismiss Dalí out of hand for his outrages and the aesthetes unable even to acknowledge the problem, but Orwell's own trouble is that he loathes Dalí, above all for abandoning France in its moment of danger. After asserting that the painter is more talented than most of the people who would denounce his morals, Orwell proceeds to denounce those morals, and the morals of those who enjoy Dalí's paintings.

As the war goes on, then ends, Orwell's sense of peril grows sharper, and he looks at literature in a different way. He comes to think that no matter who wins, the world will find itself split again into armed camps, each of them threatening the others, none of them truly free—and literature will simply not survive. This is the landscape of
1984
and it is also the landscape of the later essays in this volume—"The Prevention of Literature," "Politics and the English Language," "Writers and Leviathan." There is even, momentarily, a kind of hallucination, in the curious short piece "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," where some of Orwell's old interest in the starving writer crops up, now mixed with the wintry gloominess of his later years: "In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it ... He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if only his pair were not chronically lost." Who is this but Winston Smith, the failed hero of
1984,
figured as a book reviewer? Or who, conversely, is Winston Smith, but a book reviewer figured as the prisoner of a futuristic totalitarian regime?