What vitiates nearly all that is written about
antisemitism
is the
assumption in the writer’s mind that HE HIMSELF is immune to it.
assumption in the writer’s mind that HE HIMSELF is immune to it.
Orwell
What
is comparatively new is to find the accepted pattern, according to which (a) right is right
and wrong is wrong, whoever wins, and (b) weakness must be respected, disappearing
from popular literature as well. When I first read D. H. Lawrence’s novels, at the age of
about twenty, I was puzzled by the fact that there did not seem to be any classification of
the characters into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Lawrence seemed to sympathize with all of them
about equally, and this was so unusual as to give me the feeling of having lost my
bearings. Today no one would think of looking for heroes and villains in a serious novel,
but in lowbrow fiction one still expects to find a sharp distinction between right and
wrong and between legality and illegality. The common people, on the whole, are still
living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since
escaped. But the popularity of NO ORCHIDS and the American books and magazines to
which it is akin shows how rapidly the doctrine of ‘realism’ is gaining ground.
Several people, after reading NO ORCHIDS, have remarked to me, ‘It’s pure Fascism’.
This is a correct description, although the book has not the smallest connexion with
politics and very little with social or economic problems. It has merely the same relation
to Fascism as, say Trollope’s novels have to nineteenth-century capitalism. It is a
daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age. In his imagined world of gangsters Chase is
presenting, as it were, a distilled version of the modem political scene, in which such
things as mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages, torture to obtain confessions,
secret prisons, execution without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in
cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics, treachery, bribery, and
quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they are done in a large
and bold way. The average man is not directly interested in politics, and when he reads,
he wants the current struggles of the world to be translated into a simple story about
individuals. He can take an interest in Slim and Fenner as he could not in the G. P. U. and
the Gestapo. People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A
twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships
A1 Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A NEW
STATESMAN reader worships Stalin. There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but
none in moral outlook. Thirty years ago the heroes of popular fiction had nothing in
common with Mr. Chase’s gangsters and detectives, and the idols of the English liberal
intelligentsia were also comparatively sympathetic figures. Between Holmes and Fenner
on the one hand, and between Abraham Lincoln and Stalin on the other, there is a similar
gulf.
One ought not to infer too much from the success of Mr. Chase’s books. It is possible that
it is an isolated phenomenon, brought about by the mingled boredom and brutality of war.
But if such books should definitely acclimatize themselves in England, instead of being
merely a half-understood import from America, there would be good grounds for dismay.
In choosing RAFFLES as a background for NO ORCHIDS I deliberately chose a book
which by the standards of its time was morally equivocal. Raffles, as I have pointed out,
has no real moral code, no religion, certainly no social consciousness. All he has is a set
of reflexes the nervous system, as it were, of a gentleman. Give him a sharp tap on this
reflex or that (they are called ‘sport’, ‘pal’, ‘woman’, ‘king and country’ and so forth),
and you get a predictable reaction. In Mr. Chase’s books there are no gentlemen and no
taboos. Emancipation is complete. Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs.
Comparing the schoolboy atmosphere of the one book with the cruelty and corruption of
the other, one is driven to feel that snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon
behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.
ANTISEMITISM IN BRITAIN (1945)
There are about 400,000 known Jews in Britain, and in addition some thousands or, at
most, scores of thousands of Jewish refugees who have entered the country from 1934
onwards. The Jewish population is almost entirely concentrated in half a dozen big towns
and is mostly employed in the food, clothing and furniture trades. A few of the big
monopolies, such as the ICI, one or two leading newspapers and at least one big chain of
department stores are Jewish-owned or partly Jewish-owned, but it would be very far
from the truth to say that British business life is dominated by Jews. The Jews seem, on
the contrary, to have failed to keep up with the modern tendency towards big
amalgamations and to have remained fixed in those trades which are necessarily carried
out on a small scale and by old-fashioned methods.
I start off with these background facts, which are already known to any well-informed
person, in order to emphasise that there is no real Jewish “problem” in England. The Jews
are not numerous or powerful enough, and it is only in what are loosely called
“intellectual circles” that they have any noticeable influence. Yet it is generally admitted
that antisemitism is on the increase, that it has been greatly exacerbated by the war, and
that humane and enlightened people are not immune to it. It does not take violent forms
(English people are almost invariably gentle and law-abiding), but it is ill-natured
enough, and in favourable circumstances it could have political results. Here are some
samples of antisemitic remarks that have been made to me during the past year or two:
Middle-aged office employee: “I generally come to work by bus. It takes longer, but I
don’t care about using the Underground from Golders Green nowadays. There’s too
many of the Chosen Race travelling on that line. ”
Tobacconist (woman): “No, I’ve got no matches for you. I should try the lady down the
street. SHE’S always got matches. One of the Chosen Race, you see. ”
Young intellectual, Communist or near-Communist: “No, I do NOT like Jews. I’ve never
made any secret of that. I can’t stick them. Mind you, I’m not antisemitic, of course. ”
Middle-class woman: “Well, no one could call me antisemitic, but I do think the way
these Jews behave is too absolutely stinking. The way they push their way to the head of
queues, and so on. They’re so abominably selfish. I think they’re responsible for a lot of
what happens to them. ”
Milk roundsman: “A Jew don’t do no work, not the same as what an Englishman does.
‘E’s too clever. We work with this ‘ere” (flexes his biceps). “They work with that there”
(taps his forehead).
Chartered accountant, intelligent, left-wing in an undirected way: “These bloody Yids are
all pro-German. They’d change sides tomorrow if the Nazis got here. I see a lot of them
in my business. They admire Hitler at the bottom of their hearts. They’ll always suck up
to anyone who kicks them. ”
Intelligent woman, on being offered a book dealing with antisemitism and Gennan
atrocities: “Don’t show it me, PLEASE don’t show it to me. It’ll only make me hate the
Jews more than ever. ”
I could fill pages with similar remarks, but these will do to go on with. Two facts emerge
from them. One — which is very important and which I must return to in a moment — is
that above a certain intellectual level people are ashamed of being antisemitic and are
careful to draw a distinction between “antisemitism” and “disliking Jews”. The other is
that antisemitism is an irrational thing. The Jews are accused of specific offences (for
instance, bad behaviour in food queues) which the person speaking feels strongly about,
but it is obvious that these accusations merely rationalise some deep-rooted prejudice. To
attempt to counter them with facts and statistics is useless, and may sometimes be worse
than useless. As the last of the above-quoted remarks shows, people can remain
antisemitic, or at least anti-Jewish, while being fully aware that their outlook is
indefensible. If you dislike somebody, you dislike him and there is an end of it: your
feelings are not made any better by a recital of his virtues.
It so happens that the war has encouraged the growth of antisemitism and even, in the
eyes of many ordinary people, given some justification for it. To begin with, the Jews are
one people of whom it can be said with complete certainty that they will benefit by an
Allied victory. Consequently the theory that “this is a Jewish war” has a certain
plausibility, all the more so because the Jewish war effort seldom gets its fair share of
recognition. The British Empire is a huge heterogeneous organisation held together
largely by mutual consent, and it is often necessary to flatter the less reliable elements at
the expense of the more loyal ones. To publicise the exploits of Jewish soldiers, or even
to admit the existence of a considerable Jewish army in the Middle East, rouses hostility
in South Africa, the Arab coun tries and elsewhere: it is easier to ignore the whole subject
and allow the man in the street to go on thinking that Jews are exceptionally clever at
dodging military service. Then again, Jews are to be found in exactly those trades which
are bound to incur unpopularity with the civilian public in war-time. Jews are mostly
concerned with selling food, clothes, furniture and tobacco — exactly the commodities of
which there is a chronic shortage, with consequent overcharging, black-marketing and
favouritism. And again, the common charge that Jews behave in an exceptionally
cowardly way during air raids was given a certain amount of colour by the big raids of
1940. As it happened, the Jewish quarter of Whitechapel was one of the first areas to be
heavily blitzed, with the natural result that swarms of Jewish refugees distributed
themselves all over London. If one judged merely from these war-time phenomena, it
would be easy to imagine that antisemitism is a quasi-rational thing, founded on mistaken
premises. And naturally the antisemite thinks of himself as a reasonable being. Whenever
I have touched on this subject in a newspaper article, I have always had a considerable
“come-back”, and invariably some of the letters are from well-balanced, middling
people — doctors, for example — with no apparent economic grievance. These people
always say (as Hitler says in MEIN KAMPF) that they started out with no anti-Jewish
prejudice but were driven into their present position by mere observation of the facts. Yet
one of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be
true. One could see a good example of this in the strange accident that occurred in
London in 1942, when a crowd, frightened by a bomb-burst nearby, fled into the mouth
of an Underground station, with the result that something over a hundred people were
crushed to death. The very same day it was repeated all over London that “the Jews were
responsible”. Clearly, if people will believe this kind of thing, one will not get much
further by arguing with them. The only useful approach is to discover WHY they can
swallow absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others.
But now let me come back to that point I mentioned earlier — that there is widespread
awareness of the prevalence of antisemitic feeling, and unwillingness to admit sharing it.
Among educated people, antisemitism is held to be an unforgivable sin and in a quite
different category from other kinds of racial prejudice. People will go to remarkable
lengths to demonstrate that they are NOT antisemitic. Thus, in 1943 an intercession
service on behalf of the Polish Jews was held in a synagogue in St John’s Wood. The
local authorities declared themselves anxious to participate in it, and the service was
attended by the mayor of the borough in his robes and chain, by representatives of all the
churches, and by detachments of RAF, Home Guards, nurses, Boy Scouts and what not.
On the surface it was a touching demonstration of solidarity with the suffering Jews. But
it was essentially a CONSCIOUS effort to behave decently by people whose subjective
feelings must in many cases have been very different. That quarter of London is partly
Jewish, antisemitism is rife there, and, as I well knew, some of the men sitting round me
in the synagogue were tinged by it. Indeed, the commander of my own platoon of Home
Guards, who had been especially keen beforehand that we should “make a good show” at
the intercession service, was an ex-member of Mosley’s Blackshirts. While this division
of feeling exists, tolerance of mass violence against Jews, or, what is more important,
antisemitic legislation, are not possible in England. It is not at present possible, indeed,
that antisemitism should BECOME RESPECTABLE. But this is less of an advantage
than it might appear.
One effect of the persecutions in Gennany has been to prevent antisemitism from being
seriously studied. In England a brief inadequate survey was made by Mass Observation a
year or two ago, but if there has been any other investigation of the subject, then its
findings have been kept strictly secret. At the same time there has been conscious
suppression, by all thoughtful people, of anything likely to wound Jewish susceptibilities.
After 1934 the Jew joke disappeared as though by magic from postcards, periodicals and
the music-hall stage, and to put an unsympathetic Jewish character into a novel or short
story came to be regarded as antisemitism. On the Palestine issue, too, it was DE
RIGUEUR among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid
examining the claims of the Arabs — a decision which might be correct on its own merits,
but which was adopted primarily because the Jews were in trouble and it was felt that one
must not criticise them. Thanks to Hitler, therefore, you had a situation in which the press
was in effect censored in favour of the Jews while in private antisemitism was on the up-
grade, even, to some extent, among sensitive and intelligent people. This was particularly
noticeable in 1940 at the time of the internment of the refugees. Naturally, every thinking
person felt that it was his duty to protest against the wholesale locking-up of unfortunate
foreigners who for the most part were only in England because they were opponents of
Hitler. Privately, however, one heard very different sentiments expressed. A minority of
the refugees behaved in an exceedingly tactless way, and the feeling against them
necessarily had an antisemitic undercurrent, since they were largely Jews. A very eminent
figure in the Labour Party — I won’t name him, but he is one of the most respected people
in England — said to me quite violently: “We never asked these people to come to this
country. If they choose to come here, let them take the consequences. ” Yet this man
would as a matter of course have associated himself with any kind of petition or
manifesto against the internment of aliens. This feeling that antisemitism is something
sinful and disgraceful, something that a civilised person does not suffer from, is
unfavourable to a scientific approach, and indeed many people will admit that they are
frightened of probing too deeply into the subject. They are frightened, that is to say, of
discovering not only that antisemitism is spreading, but that they themselves are infected
by it.
To see this in perspective one must look back a few decades, to the days when Hitler was
an out-of-work house-painter whom nobody had heard of. One would then find that
though antisemitism is sufficiently in evidence now, it is probably LESS prevalent in
England than it was thirty years ago. It is true that antisemitism as a fully thought-out
racial or religious doctrine has never flourished in England. There has never been much
feeling against inter-marriage, or against Jews taking a prominent part in public life.
Nevertheless, thirty years ago it was accepted more or less as a law of nature that a Jew
was a figure of fun and — though superior in intelligence — slightly deficient in
“character”. In theory a Jew suffered from no legal disabilities, but in effect he was
debarred from certain professions. He would probably not have been accepted as an
officer in the navy, for instance, nor in what is called a “smart” regiment in the army. A
Jewish boy at a public school almost invariably had a bad time. He could, of course, live
down his Jewishness if he was exceptionally charming or athletic, but it was an initial
disability comparable to a stammer or a birthmark. Wealthy Jews tended to disguise
themselves under aristocratic English or Scottish names, and to the average person it
seemed quite natural that they should do this, just as it seems natural for a criminal to
change his identity if possible. About twenty years ago, in Rangoon, I was getting into a
taxi with a friend when a small ragged boy of fair complexion rushed up to us and began
a complicated story about having arrived from Colombo on a ship and wanting money to
get back. His manner and appearance were difficult to “place”, and I said to him:
“You speak very good English. What nationality are you? ”
He answered eagerly in his chi-chi accent: “I am a JOO, sir! ”
And I remember turning to my companion and saying, only partly in joke, “He admits it
openly. ” Ah the Jews I had known till then were people who were ashamed of being
Jews, or at any rate preferred not to talk about their ancestry, and if forced to do so tended
to use the word “Hebrew”.
The working-class attitude was no better. The Jew who grew up in Whitechapel took it
for granted that he would be assaulted, or at least hooted at, if he ventured into one of the
Christian slums nearby, and the “Jew joke” of the music halls and the comic papers was
almost consistently ill-natured. * There was also literary Jew-baiting, which in the hands
of Belloc, Chesterton and their followers reached an almost continental level of scurrility.
Non-Catholic writers were sometimes guilty of the same thing in a milder form. There
has been a perceptible antisemitic strain in English literature from Chaucer onwards, and
without even getting up from this table to consult a book I can think of passages which IF
WRITTEN NOW would be stigmatised as antisemitism, in the works of Shakespeare,
Smollett, Thackeray, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and various
others. Offhand, the only English writers I can think of who, before the days of Hitler,
made a definite effort to stick up for Jews are Dickens and Charles Reade. And however
little the average intellectual may have agreed with the opinions of Belloc and
Chesterton, he did not acutely disapprove of them. Chesterton’s endless tirades against
Jews, which he thrust into stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts, never got him
into trouble — indeed Chesterton was one of the most generally respected figures in
English literary life. Anyone who wrote in that strain NOW would bring down a storm of
abuse upon himself, or more probably would find it impossible to get his writings
published.
* It is interesting to compare the “Jew joke” with that other stand-by of the music halls, the
“Scotch joke”, which superficially it resembles. Occasionally a story is told (e. g. the Jew
and the Scotsman who went into a pub together and both died of thirst) which puts both
races on an equality, but in general the Jew is credited MERELY with cunning and avarice
while the Scotsman is credited with physical hardihood as well. This is seen, for example, in
the story of the Jew and the Scotsman who go together to a meeting which has been
advertised as free. Unexpectedly there is a collection, and to avoid this the Jew faints and
the Scotsman carries him out. Here the Scotsman performs the athletic feat of carrying the
other. It would seem vaguely wrong if it were the other way about. ( Author’s footnote. )
If, as I suggest, prejudice against Jews has always been pretty widespread in England,
there is no reason to think that Hitler has genuinely diminished it. He has merely caused a
sharp division between the politically conscious person who realises that this is not a time
to throw stones at the Jews, and the unconscious person whose native antisemitism is
increased by the nervous strain of the war. One can assume, therefore, that many people
who would perish rather than admit to antisemitic feelings are secretly prone to them. I
have already indicated that I believe antisemitism to be essentially a neurosis, but of
course it has its rationalisations, which are sincerely believed in and are partly true. The
rationalisation put forward by the common man is that the Jew is an exploiter. The partial
justification for this is that the Jew, in England, is generally a small businessman — that is
to say a person whose depredations are more obvious and intelligible than those of, say, a
ha nk or an insurance company. Higher up the intellectual scale, antisemitism is
rationalised by saying that the Jew is a person who spreads disaffection and weakens
national morale. Again there is some superficial justification for this. During the past
twenty-five years the activities of what are called “intellectuals” have been largely
mischievous. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that if the “intellectuals” had done
their work a little more thoroughly, Britain would have surrendered in 1940. But the
disaffected intelligentsia inevitably included a large number of Jews. With some
plausibility it can be said that the Jews are the enemies of our native culture and our
national morale. Carefully examined, the claim is seen to be nonsense, but there are
always a few prominent individuals who can be cited in support of it. During the past few
years there has been what amounts to a counter-attack against the rather shallow Leftism
which was fashionable in the previous decade and which was exemplified by such
organisations as the Left Book Club. This counter-attack (see for instance such books as
Arnold Lutin’s THE GOOD GORILLA or Evelyn Waugh’s PUT OUT MORE FLAGS)
has an antisemitic strain, and it would probably be more marked if the subject were not so
obviously dangerous. It so happens that for some decades past Britain has had no
nationalist intelligentsia worth bothering about. But British nationalism, i. e. nationalism
of an intellectual kind, may revive, and probably will revive if Britain comes out of the
present war greatly weakened. The young intellectuals of 1950 may be as naively
patriotic as those of 1914. In that case the kind of antisemitism which flourished among
the anti-Dreyfusards in France, and which Chesterton and Belloc tried to import into this
country, might get a foothold.
I have no hard-and-fast theory about the origins of antisemitism. The two current
explanations, that it is due to economic causes, or on the other hand, that it is a legacy
from the Middle Ages, seem to me unsatisfactory, though I admit that if one combines
them they can be made to cover the facts. All I would say with confidence is that
antisemitism is part of the larger problem of nationalism, which has not yet been
seriously examined, and that the Jew is evidently a scapegoat, though for what he is a
scapegoat we do not yet know. In this essay I have relied almost entirely on my own
limited experience, and perhaps every one of my conclusions would be negatived by
other observers. The fact is that there are almost no data on this subject. But for what they
are worth I will summarise my opinions. Boiled down, they amount to this:
There is more antisemitism in England than we care to admit, and the war has
accentuated it, but it is not certain that it is on the increase if one thinks in terms of
decades rather than years.
It does not at present lead to open persecution, but it has the effect of making people
callous to the sufferings of Jews in other countries.
It is at bottom quite irrational and will not yield to argument.
The persecutions in Germany have caused much concealment of antisemitic feeling and
thus obscured the whole picture.
The subject needs serious investigation.
Only the last point is worth expanding. To study any subject scientifically one needs a
detached attitude, which is obviously harder when one’s own interests or emotions are
involved. Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins,
say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources
of their own income.
What vitiates nearly all that is written about antisemitism is the
assumption in the writer’s mind that HE HIMSELF is immune to it. “Since I know that
antisemitism is irrational,” he argues, “it follows that I do not share it. ” He thus fails to
start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable
evidence — that is, in his own mind.
It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now
almost universal. Antisemitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not
everyone will have the disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be
antisemitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned
upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in
an inverted form. The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in
modem civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of
believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil. I defy
any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming
upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another. It is the fact that he can
feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are,
that gives him his status as an intellectual. It will be seen, therefore, that the starting point
for any investigation of antisemitism should not be “Why does this obviously irrational
belief appeal to other people? ” but “Why does antisemitism appeal TO ME? What is
there about it that I feel to be true? ” If one asks this question one at least discovers one’s
own rationalisations, and it may be possible to find out what lies beneath them.
Antisemitism should be investigated — and I will not say by antisemites, but at any rate by
people who know that they are not immune to that kind of emotion. When Hitler has
disappeared a real enquiry into this subject will be possible, and it would probably be best
to start not by debunking antisemitism, but by marshalling all the justifications for it that
can be found, in one’s own mind or anybody else’s. In that way one might get some clues
that would lead to its psychological roots. But that antisemitism will be definitively
CURED, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe.
FREEDOM OF THE PARK (1945)
A few weeks ago, five people who were selling papers outside Hyde Park were arrested
by the police for obstruction. When taken before the magistartes, they were all found
guilty, four of them being bound over for six months and the other sentenced to forty
shillings fine or a month’s imprisonments. He preferred to serve his tenn.
The papers these people were selling were PEACE NEWS, FORWARD and FREEDOM,
besides other kindred literature. PEACE NEWS is the organ of the Peace Pledge Union,
FREEDOM (till recently called WAR COMMENTARY) is that of the Anarchists; as for
FORWARD, its politics defy definition, but at any rate it is violently Left. The
magistrate, in passing sentence, stated that he was not influenced by the nature of the
literature that was being sold; he was concerned merely with the fact of obstruction, and
that this offence had technically been committed.
This raises several important points. To begin with, how does the law stand on the
subject? As far as I can discover, selling newspapers in the street is technically an
obstruction, at any rate if you fail to move when the police tell you to. So it would be
legally possible for any policeman who felt like it to arrest any newsboy for selling the
EVENING NEWS. Obviously this doesn’t happen, so that the enforcement of the law
depends on the discretion of the police.
And what makes the police decide to arrest one man rather than another? However it may
be with the magistrate, I find it hard to believe that in this case the police were not
influenced by political considerations. It is a bit too much of a coincidence that they
should have picked on people selling just those papers.
If they had also arrested someone selling TRUTH, or the TABLET, or the SPECTATOR,
or even the CHURCH TIMES, their impartiality would be easier to believe in.
The British police are not like the continental GENDARMERIE or Gestapo, but I do not
think [sic] one maligns them in saying that, in the past, they have been unfriendly to Left-
wing activities. They have generally shown a tendency to side with those whom they
regarded as the defenders of private property. Till quite recently “red” and “illegal” were
almost synonymous, and it was always the seller of, say the DAILY WORKER, never the
seller of say, the DAILY TELEGRAPH, who was moved on and generally harassed.
Apparently it can be the same, at any rate at moments, under a Labour Government.
A thing I would like to know — it is a thing we hear very little about — is what changes
are made in the administrative personnel when there has been a change of government. .
Does a police officer who has a vague notion that “Socialism” means something against
the law carry on just the same when the government itself is Socialist?
When a Labour government takes over, I wonder what happens to Scotland Yard Special
Branch? To Military Intelligence? We are not told, but such symptoms as there are do not
suggest that any very extensive shuffling is going on.
However, the main point of this episode is that the sellers of newspapers and pamphlets
should be interfered with at all. Which particular minority is singled out — whether
Pacifists, Communists, Anarchists, Jehovah’s Witness of the Legion of Christian
Reformers who recently declared Hitler to be Jesus Christ — is a secondary matter. It is of
symptomatic importance that these people should have been arrested at that particular
spot. You are not allowed to sell literature inside Hyde Park, but for many years past it
has been usual for the paper-sellers to station themselves outside the gates and distribute
literature connected with the open air meetings a hundred yards away. Every kind of
publication has been sold there without interference.
The degree of freedom of the press existing in this country is often over-rated.
Technically there is great freedom, but the fact that most of the press is owned by a few
people operates in much the same way as State censorship. On the other hand, freedom of
speech is real. On a platform, or in certain recognised open air spaces like Hyde Park,
you can say almost anything, and, what is perhaps more significant, no one is frightened
to utter his true opinions in pubs, on the tops of busses, and so forth.
The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law
is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the
police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people
are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law
forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even
if laws exist to protect them. The decline in the desire for individual liberty has not been
so sharp as I would have predicted six years ago, when the war was starting, but still
there has been a decline. The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed a
hearing is growing. It is given currency by intellectuals who confuse the issue by not
distinguishing between democratic opposition and open rebellion, and it is reflected in
our growing indifference to tyranny and injustice abroad. And even those who declare
themselves to be in favour of freedom of opinion generally drop their claim when it is
their own adversaries who are being prosecutued.
I am not suggesting that the arrest of five people for selling hannless newspapers is a
major calamity. When you see what is happening in the world today, it hardly seems
worth squeeling about such a tiny incident. All the same, it is not a good syptom that such
things should happen when the war is well over, and I should feel happier if this and the
long series of similar episodes that have preceded it, were capable of raising a genuine
popular clamour, and not merely a mild flutter in sections of the minority press.
FUTURE OF A RUINED GERMANY (1945)
As the advance into Germany continues and more and more of the devastation wrought
by the Allied bombing planes is laid bare, there are three comments that almost every
observer finds himself making. The first is: ‘The people at home have no conception of
this. ’ The second is, ‘It’s a miracle that they’ve gone on fighting. ’ And the third is, ‘Just
think of the work of building this all up again! ’
It is quite true that the scale of the Allied blitzing of Germany is even now not realised in
this country, and its share in the breaking-down of German resistance is probably much
underrated. It is difficult to give actuality to reports of air warfare and the man in the
street can be forgiven if he imagines that what we have done to Gennany over the past
four years is merely the same kind of thing they did to us in 1940.
But this error, which must be even commoner in the United States, has in it a potential
danger, and the many protests against indiscriminate bombing which have been uttered
by pacifists and humanitarians have merely confused the issue.
Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane,
which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon.
‘Normal’ or ‘legitimate’ warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and
enormously so of human lives.
Moreover, a bomb kills a casual cross-section of the population, whereas the men killed
in battle are exactly the ones that the community can least afford to lose. The people of
Britain have never felt easy about the bombing of civilians and no doubt they will be
ready enough to pity the Germans as soon as they have definitely defeated them; but what
they still have not grasped — thanks to their own comparative immunity — is the frightful
destructiveness of modern war and the long period of impoverishment that now lies
ahead of the world as a whole.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the
continuity of civilisation. For one has to remember that it is not only Germany that has
been blitzed. The same desolation extends, at any rate in considerable patches, all the
way from Brussels to Stalingrad. And where there has been ground fighting, the
destruction is even more thorough. In the 300 miles or so between the Mame and the
Rhine there is not such a thing as a bridge or a viaduct that has not been blown up.
Even in England we are aware that we need three million houses, and that the chances of
getting them within measurable time seem rather slender. But how many houses will
Gennany need, or Poland or the USSR, or Italy? When one thinks of the stupendous task
of rebuilding hundreds of European cities, one realises that a long period must elapse
before even the standards of living of 1939 can be re-established.
We do not yet know the full extent of the damage that has been done to Germany but
judging from the areas that have been overrun hitherto, it is difficult to believe in the
power of the Germans to pay any kind of reparations, either in goods or in labour. Simply
to re -house the German people, to set the shattered factories working, and to keep
German agriculture from collapsing after the foreign workers have been liberated, will
use up all the labour that the Germans are likely to dispose of.
If, as is planned, millions of them are to be deported for reconstruction work, the
recovery of Germany itself will be all the slower. After the last war, the impossibility of
obtaining substantial money reparations was finally grasped, but it was less generally
realised that the impoverishment of any one country reacts unfavourably on the world as
a whole. It would be no advantage to turn Germany into a kind of rural slum.
GOOD BAD BOOKS (1945)
Not long ago a publisher commissioned me to write an introduction for a reprint of a
novel by Leonard Merrick. This publishing house, it appears, is going to reissue a long
series of minor and partly-forgotten novels of the twentieth century. It is a valuable
service in these bookless days, and I rather envy the person whose job it will be to scout
round the threepenny boxes, hunting down copies of his boyhood favourites.
A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with
great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton
called the “good bad book”: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but
which remains readable when more serious productions have perished. Obviously
outstanding books in this line are RAFFLES and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which
have kept their place when innumerable “problem novels”, “human documents” and
“terrible indictments” of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion. (Who has worn
better, Conan Doyle or Meredith? ) Almost in the same class as these I put R. Austin
Freeman’s earlier stories — “The Singing Bone” “The Eye of Osiris” and others — Ernest
Bramah’s MAX CARRADOS, and, dropping the standard a bit, Guy Boothby’s Tibetan
thriller, DR NIKOLA, a sort of schoolboy version of Hue’s TRAVELS IN TART ARY,
which would probably make a real visit to Central Asia seem a dismal anticlimax.
But apart from thrillers, there were the minor humorous writers of the period. For
example, Pett Ridge-but I admit his full-length books no longer seem readable — E.
Nesbit (THE TREASURE SEEKERS), George Birmingham, who was good so long as he
kept off politics, the pornographic Binstead (“Pitcher” of the PINK ‘UN), and, if
American books can be included, Booth Tarkington’s Penrod stories. A cut above most
of these was Barry Pain. Some of Pain’s humorous writings are, I suppose, still in print,
but to anyone who comes across it I recommend what must now be a very rare book —
THE OCTAVE OF CLAUDIUS, a brilliant exercise in the macabre. Somewhat later in
time there was Peter Blundell, who wrote in the W. W. Jacobs vein about Far Eastern
seaport towns, and who seems to be rather unaccountably forgotten, in spite of having
been praised in print by H. G. Wells.
However, all the books I have been speaking of are frankly “escape” literature. They
form pleasant patches in one’s memory, quiet corners where the mind can browse at odd
moments, but they hardly pretend to have anything to do with real life. There is another
kind of good bad book which is more seriously intended, and which tells us, I think,
something about the nature of the novel and the reasons for its present decadence. During
the last fifty years there has been a whole series of writers — some of them are still
writing — whom it is quite impossible to call “good” by any strictly literary standard, but
who are natural novelists and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not
inhibited by good taste. In this class I put Leonard Merrick himself, W. L. George, J. D.
Beresford, Ernest Raymond, May Sinclair, and — at a lower level than the others but still
essentially similar — A. S. M. Hutchinson.
Most of these have been prolific writers, and their output has naturally varied in quality. I
am thinking in each case of one or two outstanding books: for example, Merrick’s
CYNTHIA, J. D. Beresford’s A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH, W. L. George’s CALIBAN,
May Sinclair’s THE COMBINED MAZE and Ernest Raymond’s WE, THE ACCUSED.
In each of these books the author has been able to identify himself with his imagined
characters, to feel with them and invite sympathy on their behalf, with a kind of
abandonment that cleverer people would find it difficult to achieve. They bring out the
fact that intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as it would be to a
music-hall comedian.
Take, for example, Ernest Raymond’s WE, THE ACCUSED — a peculiarly sordid and
convincing murder story, probably based on the Crippen case. I think it gains a great deal
from the fact that the author only partly grasps the pathetic vulgarity of the people he is
writing about, and therefore does not despise them. Perhaps it even — like Theodore
Dreiser’s An AMERICAN TRAGEDY — gains something from the clumsy long-winded
manner in which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at selection,
and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is slowly built up. So also with A
CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH. Here there is not the same clumsiness, but there is the same
ability to take seriously the problems of commonplace people. So also with CYNTHIA
and at any rate the earlier part of Caliban. The greater part of what W. L. George wrote
was shoddy rubbish, but in this particular book, based on the career of Northcliffe, he
achieved some memorable and truthful pictures of lower-middle-class London life. Parts
of this book are probably autobiographical, and one of the advantages of good bad writers
is their lack of shame in writing autobiography. Exhibitionism and self-pity are the bane
of the novelist, and yet if he is too frightened of them his creative gift may suffer.
The existence of good bad literature — the fact that one can be amused or excited or even
moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously — is a reminder that
art is not the same thing as cerebration. I imagine that by any test that could be devised,
Carlyle would be found to be a more intelligent man than Trollope. Yet Trollope has
remained readable and Carlyle has not: with all his cleverness he had not even the wit to
write in plain straightforward English. In novelists, almost as much as in poets, the
connection between intelligence and creative power is hard to establish. A good novelist
may be a prodigy of self-discipline like Flaubert, or he may be an intellectual sprawl like
Dickens. Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into
Wyndham Lewis’s so-called novels, such as TARR or SNOOTY BARONET. Yet it
would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books right through. Some indefinable
quality, a sort of literary vitamin, which exists even in a book like IF WINTER COMES,
is absent from them.
Perhaps the supreme example of the “good bad” book is UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. It is an
unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also
deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other.
But UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, after all, is trying to be serious and to deal with the real
world. How about the frankly escapist writers, the purveyors of thrills and “light”
humour? How about SHERLOCK HOLMES, VICE VERSA, DRACULA, HELEN’S
BABIES or KING SOLOMON’S MINES? All of these are definitely absurd books,
books which one is more inclined to laugh AT than WITH, and which were hardly taken
seriously even by their authors; yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do
so. All one can say is that, while civilisation remains such that one needs distraction from
time to time, “light” literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as
sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or
intellectual power. There are music-hall songs which are better poems than three-quarters
of the stuff that gets into the anthologies:
Come where the booze is cheaper,
Come where the pots hold more,
Come where the boss is a bit of a sport,
Come to the pub next door!
Or again:
Two lovely black eyes
Oh, what a surprise!
Only for calling another man wrong,
Two lovely black eyes!
I would far rather have written either of those than, say, “The Blessed Damozel” or
“Love in the Valley”. And by the same token I would back UNCLE TOM’S CABIN to
outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore, though I know of no
strictly literary test which would show where the superiority lies.
IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE (1945)
When the Gennans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the early summer of
1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, who had been living
throughout the early part of the war in his villa at Le Touquet, and seems not to have
realised until the last moment that he was in any danger. As he was led away into
captivity, he is said to have remarked, “Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book. ” He
was placed for the time being under house arrest, and from his subsequent statements it
appears that he was treated in a fairly friendly way, German officers in the
neighbourhood frequently “dropping in for a bath or a party”.
Over a year later, on 25th June 1941, the news came that Wodehouse had been released
from internment and was living at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. On the following day the
public was astonished to learn that he had agreed to do some broadcasts of a “non-
political” nature over the German radio. The full texts of these broadcasts are not easy to
obtain at this date, but Wodehouse seems to have done five of them between 26th June
and 2nd July, when the Germans took him off the air again. The first broadcast, on 26th
June, was not made on the Nazi radio but took the form of an interview with Harry
Flannery, the representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System, which still had its
correspondents in Berlin. Wodehouse also published in the SATURDAY EVENING
POST an article which he had written while still in the internment camp.
The article and the broadcasts dealt mainly with Wodehouse’ s experiences in internment,
but they did include a very few comments on the war. The following are fair samples:
“I never was interested in politics. I’m quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent
feeling. Just as I’m about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of
chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings. ”
“A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the right idea; at least they
sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And I have been there forty-two weeks. There is a
good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep
up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a
long time. When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to be on the
safe side. ”
“In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an Englishman,
but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen I
am not so sure. . . The only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of
bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves
the rest to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of my
books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This offer
holds good till Wednesday week. ”
The first extract quoted above caused great offence. Wodehouse was also censured for
using (in the interview with Flannery) the phrase “whether Britain wins the war or not,”
and he did not make things better by describing in another broadcast the filthy habits of
some Belgian prisoners among whom he was interned. The Germans recorded this
broadcast and repeated it a number of times. They seem to have supervised his talks very
lightly, and they allowed him not only to be funny about the discomforts of internment
but to remark that “the internees at Trost camp all fervently believe that Britain will
eventually win. ” The general upshot of the talks, however, was that he had not been ill
treated and bore no malice.
These broadcasts caused an immediate uproar in England. There were questions in
Parliament, angry editorial comments in the press, and a stream of letters from fellow-
authors, nearly all of them disapproving, though one or two suggested that it would be
better to suspend judgment, and several pleaded that Wodehouse probably did not realise
what he was doing. On 15th July, the Home Service of the B. B. C. carried an extremely
violent Postscript by “Cassandra” of the DAILY MIRROR, accusing Wodehouse of
“selling his country. ” This postscript made free use of such expressions as “Quisling” and
“worshipping the Fihrer”. The main charge was that Wodehouse had agreed to do
Gennan propaganda as a way of buying himself out of the internment camp.
“Cassandra’s” Postscript caused a certain amount of protest, but on the whole it seems to
have intensified popular feeling against Wodehouse. One result of it was that numerous
lending libraries withdrew Wodehouse ’s books from circulation.
is comparatively new is to find the accepted pattern, according to which (a) right is right
and wrong is wrong, whoever wins, and (b) weakness must be respected, disappearing
from popular literature as well. When I first read D. H. Lawrence’s novels, at the age of
about twenty, I was puzzled by the fact that there did not seem to be any classification of
the characters into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Lawrence seemed to sympathize with all of them
about equally, and this was so unusual as to give me the feeling of having lost my
bearings. Today no one would think of looking for heroes and villains in a serious novel,
but in lowbrow fiction one still expects to find a sharp distinction between right and
wrong and between legality and illegality. The common people, on the whole, are still
living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since
escaped. But the popularity of NO ORCHIDS and the American books and magazines to
which it is akin shows how rapidly the doctrine of ‘realism’ is gaining ground.
Several people, after reading NO ORCHIDS, have remarked to me, ‘It’s pure Fascism’.
This is a correct description, although the book has not the smallest connexion with
politics and very little with social or economic problems. It has merely the same relation
to Fascism as, say Trollope’s novels have to nineteenth-century capitalism. It is a
daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age. In his imagined world of gangsters Chase is
presenting, as it were, a distilled version of the modem political scene, in which such
things as mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages, torture to obtain confessions,
secret prisons, execution without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in
cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics, treachery, bribery, and
quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they are done in a large
and bold way. The average man is not directly interested in politics, and when he reads,
he wants the current struggles of the world to be translated into a simple story about
individuals. He can take an interest in Slim and Fenner as he could not in the G. P. U. and
the Gestapo. People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A
twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships
A1 Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A NEW
STATESMAN reader worships Stalin. There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but
none in moral outlook. Thirty years ago the heroes of popular fiction had nothing in
common with Mr. Chase’s gangsters and detectives, and the idols of the English liberal
intelligentsia were also comparatively sympathetic figures. Between Holmes and Fenner
on the one hand, and between Abraham Lincoln and Stalin on the other, there is a similar
gulf.
One ought not to infer too much from the success of Mr. Chase’s books. It is possible that
it is an isolated phenomenon, brought about by the mingled boredom and brutality of war.
But if such books should definitely acclimatize themselves in England, instead of being
merely a half-understood import from America, there would be good grounds for dismay.
In choosing RAFFLES as a background for NO ORCHIDS I deliberately chose a book
which by the standards of its time was morally equivocal. Raffles, as I have pointed out,
has no real moral code, no religion, certainly no social consciousness. All he has is a set
of reflexes the nervous system, as it were, of a gentleman. Give him a sharp tap on this
reflex or that (they are called ‘sport’, ‘pal’, ‘woman’, ‘king and country’ and so forth),
and you get a predictable reaction. In Mr. Chase’s books there are no gentlemen and no
taboos. Emancipation is complete. Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs.
Comparing the schoolboy atmosphere of the one book with the cruelty and corruption of
the other, one is driven to feel that snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon
behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.
ANTISEMITISM IN BRITAIN (1945)
There are about 400,000 known Jews in Britain, and in addition some thousands or, at
most, scores of thousands of Jewish refugees who have entered the country from 1934
onwards. The Jewish population is almost entirely concentrated in half a dozen big towns
and is mostly employed in the food, clothing and furniture trades. A few of the big
monopolies, such as the ICI, one or two leading newspapers and at least one big chain of
department stores are Jewish-owned or partly Jewish-owned, but it would be very far
from the truth to say that British business life is dominated by Jews. The Jews seem, on
the contrary, to have failed to keep up with the modern tendency towards big
amalgamations and to have remained fixed in those trades which are necessarily carried
out on a small scale and by old-fashioned methods.
I start off with these background facts, which are already known to any well-informed
person, in order to emphasise that there is no real Jewish “problem” in England. The Jews
are not numerous or powerful enough, and it is only in what are loosely called
“intellectual circles” that they have any noticeable influence. Yet it is generally admitted
that antisemitism is on the increase, that it has been greatly exacerbated by the war, and
that humane and enlightened people are not immune to it. It does not take violent forms
(English people are almost invariably gentle and law-abiding), but it is ill-natured
enough, and in favourable circumstances it could have political results. Here are some
samples of antisemitic remarks that have been made to me during the past year or two:
Middle-aged office employee: “I generally come to work by bus. It takes longer, but I
don’t care about using the Underground from Golders Green nowadays. There’s too
many of the Chosen Race travelling on that line. ”
Tobacconist (woman): “No, I’ve got no matches for you. I should try the lady down the
street. SHE’S always got matches. One of the Chosen Race, you see. ”
Young intellectual, Communist or near-Communist: “No, I do NOT like Jews. I’ve never
made any secret of that. I can’t stick them. Mind you, I’m not antisemitic, of course. ”
Middle-class woman: “Well, no one could call me antisemitic, but I do think the way
these Jews behave is too absolutely stinking. The way they push their way to the head of
queues, and so on. They’re so abominably selfish. I think they’re responsible for a lot of
what happens to them. ”
Milk roundsman: “A Jew don’t do no work, not the same as what an Englishman does.
‘E’s too clever. We work with this ‘ere” (flexes his biceps). “They work with that there”
(taps his forehead).
Chartered accountant, intelligent, left-wing in an undirected way: “These bloody Yids are
all pro-German. They’d change sides tomorrow if the Nazis got here. I see a lot of them
in my business. They admire Hitler at the bottom of their hearts. They’ll always suck up
to anyone who kicks them. ”
Intelligent woman, on being offered a book dealing with antisemitism and Gennan
atrocities: “Don’t show it me, PLEASE don’t show it to me. It’ll only make me hate the
Jews more than ever. ”
I could fill pages with similar remarks, but these will do to go on with. Two facts emerge
from them. One — which is very important and which I must return to in a moment — is
that above a certain intellectual level people are ashamed of being antisemitic and are
careful to draw a distinction between “antisemitism” and “disliking Jews”. The other is
that antisemitism is an irrational thing. The Jews are accused of specific offences (for
instance, bad behaviour in food queues) which the person speaking feels strongly about,
but it is obvious that these accusations merely rationalise some deep-rooted prejudice. To
attempt to counter them with facts and statistics is useless, and may sometimes be worse
than useless. As the last of the above-quoted remarks shows, people can remain
antisemitic, or at least anti-Jewish, while being fully aware that their outlook is
indefensible. If you dislike somebody, you dislike him and there is an end of it: your
feelings are not made any better by a recital of his virtues.
It so happens that the war has encouraged the growth of antisemitism and even, in the
eyes of many ordinary people, given some justification for it. To begin with, the Jews are
one people of whom it can be said with complete certainty that they will benefit by an
Allied victory. Consequently the theory that “this is a Jewish war” has a certain
plausibility, all the more so because the Jewish war effort seldom gets its fair share of
recognition. The British Empire is a huge heterogeneous organisation held together
largely by mutual consent, and it is often necessary to flatter the less reliable elements at
the expense of the more loyal ones. To publicise the exploits of Jewish soldiers, or even
to admit the existence of a considerable Jewish army in the Middle East, rouses hostility
in South Africa, the Arab coun tries and elsewhere: it is easier to ignore the whole subject
and allow the man in the street to go on thinking that Jews are exceptionally clever at
dodging military service. Then again, Jews are to be found in exactly those trades which
are bound to incur unpopularity with the civilian public in war-time. Jews are mostly
concerned with selling food, clothes, furniture and tobacco — exactly the commodities of
which there is a chronic shortage, with consequent overcharging, black-marketing and
favouritism. And again, the common charge that Jews behave in an exceptionally
cowardly way during air raids was given a certain amount of colour by the big raids of
1940. As it happened, the Jewish quarter of Whitechapel was one of the first areas to be
heavily blitzed, with the natural result that swarms of Jewish refugees distributed
themselves all over London. If one judged merely from these war-time phenomena, it
would be easy to imagine that antisemitism is a quasi-rational thing, founded on mistaken
premises. And naturally the antisemite thinks of himself as a reasonable being. Whenever
I have touched on this subject in a newspaper article, I have always had a considerable
“come-back”, and invariably some of the letters are from well-balanced, middling
people — doctors, for example — with no apparent economic grievance. These people
always say (as Hitler says in MEIN KAMPF) that they started out with no anti-Jewish
prejudice but were driven into their present position by mere observation of the facts. Yet
one of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be
true. One could see a good example of this in the strange accident that occurred in
London in 1942, when a crowd, frightened by a bomb-burst nearby, fled into the mouth
of an Underground station, with the result that something over a hundred people were
crushed to death. The very same day it was repeated all over London that “the Jews were
responsible”. Clearly, if people will believe this kind of thing, one will not get much
further by arguing with them. The only useful approach is to discover WHY they can
swallow absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others.
But now let me come back to that point I mentioned earlier — that there is widespread
awareness of the prevalence of antisemitic feeling, and unwillingness to admit sharing it.
Among educated people, antisemitism is held to be an unforgivable sin and in a quite
different category from other kinds of racial prejudice. People will go to remarkable
lengths to demonstrate that they are NOT antisemitic. Thus, in 1943 an intercession
service on behalf of the Polish Jews was held in a synagogue in St John’s Wood. The
local authorities declared themselves anxious to participate in it, and the service was
attended by the mayor of the borough in his robes and chain, by representatives of all the
churches, and by detachments of RAF, Home Guards, nurses, Boy Scouts and what not.
On the surface it was a touching demonstration of solidarity with the suffering Jews. But
it was essentially a CONSCIOUS effort to behave decently by people whose subjective
feelings must in many cases have been very different. That quarter of London is partly
Jewish, antisemitism is rife there, and, as I well knew, some of the men sitting round me
in the synagogue were tinged by it. Indeed, the commander of my own platoon of Home
Guards, who had been especially keen beforehand that we should “make a good show” at
the intercession service, was an ex-member of Mosley’s Blackshirts. While this division
of feeling exists, tolerance of mass violence against Jews, or, what is more important,
antisemitic legislation, are not possible in England. It is not at present possible, indeed,
that antisemitism should BECOME RESPECTABLE. But this is less of an advantage
than it might appear.
One effect of the persecutions in Gennany has been to prevent antisemitism from being
seriously studied. In England a brief inadequate survey was made by Mass Observation a
year or two ago, but if there has been any other investigation of the subject, then its
findings have been kept strictly secret. At the same time there has been conscious
suppression, by all thoughtful people, of anything likely to wound Jewish susceptibilities.
After 1934 the Jew joke disappeared as though by magic from postcards, periodicals and
the music-hall stage, and to put an unsympathetic Jewish character into a novel or short
story came to be regarded as antisemitism. On the Palestine issue, too, it was DE
RIGUEUR among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid
examining the claims of the Arabs — a decision which might be correct on its own merits,
but which was adopted primarily because the Jews were in trouble and it was felt that one
must not criticise them. Thanks to Hitler, therefore, you had a situation in which the press
was in effect censored in favour of the Jews while in private antisemitism was on the up-
grade, even, to some extent, among sensitive and intelligent people. This was particularly
noticeable in 1940 at the time of the internment of the refugees. Naturally, every thinking
person felt that it was his duty to protest against the wholesale locking-up of unfortunate
foreigners who for the most part were only in England because they were opponents of
Hitler. Privately, however, one heard very different sentiments expressed. A minority of
the refugees behaved in an exceedingly tactless way, and the feeling against them
necessarily had an antisemitic undercurrent, since they were largely Jews. A very eminent
figure in the Labour Party — I won’t name him, but he is one of the most respected people
in England — said to me quite violently: “We never asked these people to come to this
country. If they choose to come here, let them take the consequences. ” Yet this man
would as a matter of course have associated himself with any kind of petition or
manifesto against the internment of aliens. This feeling that antisemitism is something
sinful and disgraceful, something that a civilised person does not suffer from, is
unfavourable to a scientific approach, and indeed many people will admit that they are
frightened of probing too deeply into the subject. They are frightened, that is to say, of
discovering not only that antisemitism is spreading, but that they themselves are infected
by it.
To see this in perspective one must look back a few decades, to the days when Hitler was
an out-of-work house-painter whom nobody had heard of. One would then find that
though antisemitism is sufficiently in evidence now, it is probably LESS prevalent in
England than it was thirty years ago. It is true that antisemitism as a fully thought-out
racial or religious doctrine has never flourished in England. There has never been much
feeling against inter-marriage, or against Jews taking a prominent part in public life.
Nevertheless, thirty years ago it was accepted more or less as a law of nature that a Jew
was a figure of fun and — though superior in intelligence — slightly deficient in
“character”. In theory a Jew suffered from no legal disabilities, but in effect he was
debarred from certain professions. He would probably not have been accepted as an
officer in the navy, for instance, nor in what is called a “smart” regiment in the army. A
Jewish boy at a public school almost invariably had a bad time. He could, of course, live
down his Jewishness if he was exceptionally charming or athletic, but it was an initial
disability comparable to a stammer or a birthmark. Wealthy Jews tended to disguise
themselves under aristocratic English or Scottish names, and to the average person it
seemed quite natural that they should do this, just as it seems natural for a criminal to
change his identity if possible. About twenty years ago, in Rangoon, I was getting into a
taxi with a friend when a small ragged boy of fair complexion rushed up to us and began
a complicated story about having arrived from Colombo on a ship and wanting money to
get back. His manner and appearance were difficult to “place”, and I said to him:
“You speak very good English. What nationality are you? ”
He answered eagerly in his chi-chi accent: “I am a JOO, sir! ”
And I remember turning to my companion and saying, only partly in joke, “He admits it
openly. ” Ah the Jews I had known till then were people who were ashamed of being
Jews, or at any rate preferred not to talk about their ancestry, and if forced to do so tended
to use the word “Hebrew”.
The working-class attitude was no better. The Jew who grew up in Whitechapel took it
for granted that he would be assaulted, or at least hooted at, if he ventured into one of the
Christian slums nearby, and the “Jew joke” of the music halls and the comic papers was
almost consistently ill-natured. * There was also literary Jew-baiting, which in the hands
of Belloc, Chesterton and their followers reached an almost continental level of scurrility.
Non-Catholic writers were sometimes guilty of the same thing in a milder form. There
has been a perceptible antisemitic strain in English literature from Chaucer onwards, and
without even getting up from this table to consult a book I can think of passages which IF
WRITTEN NOW would be stigmatised as antisemitism, in the works of Shakespeare,
Smollett, Thackeray, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and various
others. Offhand, the only English writers I can think of who, before the days of Hitler,
made a definite effort to stick up for Jews are Dickens and Charles Reade. And however
little the average intellectual may have agreed with the opinions of Belloc and
Chesterton, he did not acutely disapprove of them. Chesterton’s endless tirades against
Jews, which he thrust into stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts, never got him
into trouble — indeed Chesterton was one of the most generally respected figures in
English literary life. Anyone who wrote in that strain NOW would bring down a storm of
abuse upon himself, or more probably would find it impossible to get his writings
published.
* It is interesting to compare the “Jew joke” with that other stand-by of the music halls, the
“Scotch joke”, which superficially it resembles. Occasionally a story is told (e. g. the Jew
and the Scotsman who went into a pub together and both died of thirst) which puts both
races on an equality, but in general the Jew is credited MERELY with cunning and avarice
while the Scotsman is credited with physical hardihood as well. This is seen, for example, in
the story of the Jew and the Scotsman who go together to a meeting which has been
advertised as free. Unexpectedly there is a collection, and to avoid this the Jew faints and
the Scotsman carries him out. Here the Scotsman performs the athletic feat of carrying the
other. It would seem vaguely wrong if it were the other way about. ( Author’s footnote. )
If, as I suggest, prejudice against Jews has always been pretty widespread in England,
there is no reason to think that Hitler has genuinely diminished it. He has merely caused a
sharp division between the politically conscious person who realises that this is not a time
to throw stones at the Jews, and the unconscious person whose native antisemitism is
increased by the nervous strain of the war. One can assume, therefore, that many people
who would perish rather than admit to antisemitic feelings are secretly prone to them. I
have already indicated that I believe antisemitism to be essentially a neurosis, but of
course it has its rationalisations, which are sincerely believed in and are partly true. The
rationalisation put forward by the common man is that the Jew is an exploiter. The partial
justification for this is that the Jew, in England, is generally a small businessman — that is
to say a person whose depredations are more obvious and intelligible than those of, say, a
ha nk or an insurance company. Higher up the intellectual scale, antisemitism is
rationalised by saying that the Jew is a person who spreads disaffection and weakens
national morale. Again there is some superficial justification for this. During the past
twenty-five years the activities of what are called “intellectuals” have been largely
mischievous. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that if the “intellectuals” had done
their work a little more thoroughly, Britain would have surrendered in 1940. But the
disaffected intelligentsia inevitably included a large number of Jews. With some
plausibility it can be said that the Jews are the enemies of our native culture and our
national morale. Carefully examined, the claim is seen to be nonsense, but there are
always a few prominent individuals who can be cited in support of it. During the past few
years there has been what amounts to a counter-attack against the rather shallow Leftism
which was fashionable in the previous decade and which was exemplified by such
organisations as the Left Book Club. This counter-attack (see for instance such books as
Arnold Lutin’s THE GOOD GORILLA or Evelyn Waugh’s PUT OUT MORE FLAGS)
has an antisemitic strain, and it would probably be more marked if the subject were not so
obviously dangerous. It so happens that for some decades past Britain has had no
nationalist intelligentsia worth bothering about. But British nationalism, i. e. nationalism
of an intellectual kind, may revive, and probably will revive if Britain comes out of the
present war greatly weakened. The young intellectuals of 1950 may be as naively
patriotic as those of 1914. In that case the kind of antisemitism which flourished among
the anti-Dreyfusards in France, and which Chesterton and Belloc tried to import into this
country, might get a foothold.
I have no hard-and-fast theory about the origins of antisemitism. The two current
explanations, that it is due to economic causes, or on the other hand, that it is a legacy
from the Middle Ages, seem to me unsatisfactory, though I admit that if one combines
them they can be made to cover the facts. All I would say with confidence is that
antisemitism is part of the larger problem of nationalism, which has not yet been
seriously examined, and that the Jew is evidently a scapegoat, though for what he is a
scapegoat we do not yet know. In this essay I have relied almost entirely on my own
limited experience, and perhaps every one of my conclusions would be negatived by
other observers. The fact is that there are almost no data on this subject. But for what they
are worth I will summarise my opinions. Boiled down, they amount to this:
There is more antisemitism in England than we care to admit, and the war has
accentuated it, but it is not certain that it is on the increase if one thinks in terms of
decades rather than years.
It does not at present lead to open persecution, but it has the effect of making people
callous to the sufferings of Jews in other countries.
It is at bottom quite irrational and will not yield to argument.
The persecutions in Germany have caused much concealment of antisemitic feeling and
thus obscured the whole picture.
The subject needs serious investigation.
Only the last point is worth expanding. To study any subject scientifically one needs a
detached attitude, which is obviously harder when one’s own interests or emotions are
involved. Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins,
say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources
of their own income.
What vitiates nearly all that is written about antisemitism is the
assumption in the writer’s mind that HE HIMSELF is immune to it. “Since I know that
antisemitism is irrational,” he argues, “it follows that I do not share it. ” He thus fails to
start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable
evidence — that is, in his own mind.
It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now
almost universal. Antisemitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not
everyone will have the disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be
antisemitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned
upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in
an inverted form. The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in
modem civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of
believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil. I defy
any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming
upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another. It is the fact that he can
feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are,
that gives him his status as an intellectual. It will be seen, therefore, that the starting point
for any investigation of antisemitism should not be “Why does this obviously irrational
belief appeal to other people? ” but “Why does antisemitism appeal TO ME? What is
there about it that I feel to be true? ” If one asks this question one at least discovers one’s
own rationalisations, and it may be possible to find out what lies beneath them.
Antisemitism should be investigated — and I will not say by antisemites, but at any rate by
people who know that they are not immune to that kind of emotion. When Hitler has
disappeared a real enquiry into this subject will be possible, and it would probably be best
to start not by debunking antisemitism, but by marshalling all the justifications for it that
can be found, in one’s own mind or anybody else’s. In that way one might get some clues
that would lead to its psychological roots. But that antisemitism will be definitively
CURED, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe.
FREEDOM OF THE PARK (1945)
A few weeks ago, five people who were selling papers outside Hyde Park were arrested
by the police for obstruction. When taken before the magistartes, they were all found
guilty, four of them being bound over for six months and the other sentenced to forty
shillings fine or a month’s imprisonments. He preferred to serve his tenn.
The papers these people were selling were PEACE NEWS, FORWARD and FREEDOM,
besides other kindred literature. PEACE NEWS is the organ of the Peace Pledge Union,
FREEDOM (till recently called WAR COMMENTARY) is that of the Anarchists; as for
FORWARD, its politics defy definition, but at any rate it is violently Left. The
magistrate, in passing sentence, stated that he was not influenced by the nature of the
literature that was being sold; he was concerned merely with the fact of obstruction, and
that this offence had technically been committed.
This raises several important points. To begin with, how does the law stand on the
subject? As far as I can discover, selling newspapers in the street is technically an
obstruction, at any rate if you fail to move when the police tell you to. So it would be
legally possible for any policeman who felt like it to arrest any newsboy for selling the
EVENING NEWS. Obviously this doesn’t happen, so that the enforcement of the law
depends on the discretion of the police.
And what makes the police decide to arrest one man rather than another? However it may
be with the magistrate, I find it hard to believe that in this case the police were not
influenced by political considerations. It is a bit too much of a coincidence that they
should have picked on people selling just those papers.
If they had also arrested someone selling TRUTH, or the TABLET, or the SPECTATOR,
or even the CHURCH TIMES, their impartiality would be easier to believe in.
The British police are not like the continental GENDARMERIE or Gestapo, but I do not
think [sic] one maligns them in saying that, in the past, they have been unfriendly to Left-
wing activities. They have generally shown a tendency to side with those whom they
regarded as the defenders of private property. Till quite recently “red” and “illegal” were
almost synonymous, and it was always the seller of, say the DAILY WORKER, never the
seller of say, the DAILY TELEGRAPH, who was moved on and generally harassed.
Apparently it can be the same, at any rate at moments, under a Labour Government.
A thing I would like to know — it is a thing we hear very little about — is what changes
are made in the administrative personnel when there has been a change of government. .
Does a police officer who has a vague notion that “Socialism” means something against
the law carry on just the same when the government itself is Socialist?
When a Labour government takes over, I wonder what happens to Scotland Yard Special
Branch? To Military Intelligence? We are not told, but such symptoms as there are do not
suggest that any very extensive shuffling is going on.
However, the main point of this episode is that the sellers of newspapers and pamphlets
should be interfered with at all. Which particular minority is singled out — whether
Pacifists, Communists, Anarchists, Jehovah’s Witness of the Legion of Christian
Reformers who recently declared Hitler to be Jesus Christ — is a secondary matter. It is of
symptomatic importance that these people should have been arrested at that particular
spot. You are not allowed to sell literature inside Hyde Park, but for many years past it
has been usual for the paper-sellers to station themselves outside the gates and distribute
literature connected with the open air meetings a hundred yards away. Every kind of
publication has been sold there without interference.
The degree of freedom of the press existing in this country is often over-rated.
Technically there is great freedom, but the fact that most of the press is owned by a few
people operates in much the same way as State censorship. On the other hand, freedom of
speech is real. On a platform, or in certain recognised open air spaces like Hyde Park,
you can say almost anything, and, what is perhaps more significant, no one is frightened
to utter his true opinions in pubs, on the tops of busses, and so forth.
The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law
is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the
police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people
are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law
forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even
if laws exist to protect them. The decline in the desire for individual liberty has not been
so sharp as I would have predicted six years ago, when the war was starting, but still
there has been a decline. The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed a
hearing is growing. It is given currency by intellectuals who confuse the issue by not
distinguishing between democratic opposition and open rebellion, and it is reflected in
our growing indifference to tyranny and injustice abroad. And even those who declare
themselves to be in favour of freedom of opinion generally drop their claim when it is
their own adversaries who are being prosecutued.
I am not suggesting that the arrest of five people for selling hannless newspapers is a
major calamity. When you see what is happening in the world today, it hardly seems
worth squeeling about such a tiny incident. All the same, it is not a good syptom that such
things should happen when the war is well over, and I should feel happier if this and the
long series of similar episodes that have preceded it, were capable of raising a genuine
popular clamour, and not merely a mild flutter in sections of the minority press.
FUTURE OF A RUINED GERMANY (1945)
As the advance into Germany continues and more and more of the devastation wrought
by the Allied bombing planes is laid bare, there are three comments that almost every
observer finds himself making. The first is: ‘The people at home have no conception of
this. ’ The second is, ‘It’s a miracle that they’ve gone on fighting. ’ And the third is, ‘Just
think of the work of building this all up again! ’
It is quite true that the scale of the Allied blitzing of Germany is even now not realised in
this country, and its share in the breaking-down of German resistance is probably much
underrated. It is difficult to give actuality to reports of air warfare and the man in the
street can be forgiven if he imagines that what we have done to Gennany over the past
four years is merely the same kind of thing they did to us in 1940.
But this error, which must be even commoner in the United States, has in it a potential
danger, and the many protests against indiscriminate bombing which have been uttered
by pacifists and humanitarians have merely confused the issue.
Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane,
which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon.
‘Normal’ or ‘legitimate’ warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and
enormously so of human lives.
Moreover, a bomb kills a casual cross-section of the population, whereas the men killed
in battle are exactly the ones that the community can least afford to lose. The people of
Britain have never felt easy about the bombing of civilians and no doubt they will be
ready enough to pity the Germans as soon as they have definitely defeated them; but what
they still have not grasped — thanks to their own comparative immunity — is the frightful
destructiveness of modern war and the long period of impoverishment that now lies
ahead of the world as a whole.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the
continuity of civilisation. For one has to remember that it is not only Germany that has
been blitzed. The same desolation extends, at any rate in considerable patches, all the
way from Brussels to Stalingrad. And where there has been ground fighting, the
destruction is even more thorough. In the 300 miles or so between the Mame and the
Rhine there is not such a thing as a bridge or a viaduct that has not been blown up.
Even in England we are aware that we need three million houses, and that the chances of
getting them within measurable time seem rather slender. But how many houses will
Gennany need, or Poland or the USSR, or Italy? When one thinks of the stupendous task
of rebuilding hundreds of European cities, one realises that a long period must elapse
before even the standards of living of 1939 can be re-established.
We do not yet know the full extent of the damage that has been done to Germany but
judging from the areas that have been overrun hitherto, it is difficult to believe in the
power of the Germans to pay any kind of reparations, either in goods or in labour. Simply
to re -house the German people, to set the shattered factories working, and to keep
German agriculture from collapsing after the foreign workers have been liberated, will
use up all the labour that the Germans are likely to dispose of.
If, as is planned, millions of them are to be deported for reconstruction work, the
recovery of Germany itself will be all the slower. After the last war, the impossibility of
obtaining substantial money reparations was finally grasped, but it was less generally
realised that the impoverishment of any one country reacts unfavourably on the world as
a whole. It would be no advantage to turn Germany into a kind of rural slum.
GOOD BAD BOOKS (1945)
Not long ago a publisher commissioned me to write an introduction for a reprint of a
novel by Leonard Merrick. This publishing house, it appears, is going to reissue a long
series of minor and partly-forgotten novels of the twentieth century. It is a valuable
service in these bookless days, and I rather envy the person whose job it will be to scout
round the threepenny boxes, hunting down copies of his boyhood favourites.
A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with
great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton
called the “good bad book”: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but
which remains readable when more serious productions have perished. Obviously
outstanding books in this line are RAFFLES and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which
have kept their place when innumerable “problem novels”, “human documents” and
“terrible indictments” of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion. (Who has worn
better, Conan Doyle or Meredith? ) Almost in the same class as these I put R. Austin
Freeman’s earlier stories — “The Singing Bone” “The Eye of Osiris” and others — Ernest
Bramah’s MAX CARRADOS, and, dropping the standard a bit, Guy Boothby’s Tibetan
thriller, DR NIKOLA, a sort of schoolboy version of Hue’s TRAVELS IN TART ARY,
which would probably make a real visit to Central Asia seem a dismal anticlimax.
But apart from thrillers, there were the minor humorous writers of the period. For
example, Pett Ridge-but I admit his full-length books no longer seem readable — E.
Nesbit (THE TREASURE SEEKERS), George Birmingham, who was good so long as he
kept off politics, the pornographic Binstead (“Pitcher” of the PINK ‘UN), and, if
American books can be included, Booth Tarkington’s Penrod stories. A cut above most
of these was Barry Pain. Some of Pain’s humorous writings are, I suppose, still in print,
but to anyone who comes across it I recommend what must now be a very rare book —
THE OCTAVE OF CLAUDIUS, a brilliant exercise in the macabre. Somewhat later in
time there was Peter Blundell, who wrote in the W. W. Jacobs vein about Far Eastern
seaport towns, and who seems to be rather unaccountably forgotten, in spite of having
been praised in print by H. G. Wells.
However, all the books I have been speaking of are frankly “escape” literature. They
form pleasant patches in one’s memory, quiet corners where the mind can browse at odd
moments, but they hardly pretend to have anything to do with real life. There is another
kind of good bad book which is more seriously intended, and which tells us, I think,
something about the nature of the novel and the reasons for its present decadence. During
the last fifty years there has been a whole series of writers — some of them are still
writing — whom it is quite impossible to call “good” by any strictly literary standard, but
who are natural novelists and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not
inhibited by good taste. In this class I put Leonard Merrick himself, W. L. George, J. D.
Beresford, Ernest Raymond, May Sinclair, and — at a lower level than the others but still
essentially similar — A. S. M. Hutchinson.
Most of these have been prolific writers, and their output has naturally varied in quality. I
am thinking in each case of one or two outstanding books: for example, Merrick’s
CYNTHIA, J. D. Beresford’s A CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH, W. L. George’s CALIBAN,
May Sinclair’s THE COMBINED MAZE and Ernest Raymond’s WE, THE ACCUSED.
In each of these books the author has been able to identify himself with his imagined
characters, to feel with them and invite sympathy on their behalf, with a kind of
abandonment that cleverer people would find it difficult to achieve. They bring out the
fact that intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as it would be to a
music-hall comedian.
Take, for example, Ernest Raymond’s WE, THE ACCUSED — a peculiarly sordid and
convincing murder story, probably based on the Crippen case. I think it gains a great deal
from the fact that the author only partly grasps the pathetic vulgarity of the people he is
writing about, and therefore does not despise them. Perhaps it even — like Theodore
Dreiser’s An AMERICAN TRAGEDY — gains something from the clumsy long-winded
manner in which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at selection,
and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is slowly built up. So also with A
CANDIDATE FOR TRUTH. Here there is not the same clumsiness, but there is the same
ability to take seriously the problems of commonplace people. So also with CYNTHIA
and at any rate the earlier part of Caliban. The greater part of what W. L. George wrote
was shoddy rubbish, but in this particular book, based on the career of Northcliffe, he
achieved some memorable and truthful pictures of lower-middle-class London life. Parts
of this book are probably autobiographical, and one of the advantages of good bad writers
is their lack of shame in writing autobiography. Exhibitionism and self-pity are the bane
of the novelist, and yet if he is too frightened of them his creative gift may suffer.
The existence of good bad literature — the fact that one can be amused or excited or even
moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously — is a reminder that
art is not the same thing as cerebration. I imagine that by any test that could be devised,
Carlyle would be found to be a more intelligent man than Trollope. Yet Trollope has
remained readable and Carlyle has not: with all his cleverness he had not even the wit to
write in plain straightforward English. In novelists, almost as much as in poets, the
connection between intelligence and creative power is hard to establish. A good novelist
may be a prodigy of self-discipline like Flaubert, or he may be an intellectual sprawl like
Dickens. Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into
Wyndham Lewis’s so-called novels, such as TARR or SNOOTY BARONET. Yet it
would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books right through. Some indefinable
quality, a sort of literary vitamin, which exists even in a book like IF WINTER COMES,
is absent from them.
Perhaps the supreme example of the “good bad” book is UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. It is an
unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also
deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other.
But UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, after all, is trying to be serious and to deal with the real
world. How about the frankly escapist writers, the purveyors of thrills and “light”
humour? How about SHERLOCK HOLMES, VICE VERSA, DRACULA, HELEN’S
BABIES or KING SOLOMON’S MINES? All of these are definitely absurd books,
books which one is more inclined to laugh AT than WITH, and which were hardly taken
seriously even by their authors; yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do
so. All one can say is that, while civilisation remains such that one needs distraction from
time to time, “light” literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as
sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or
intellectual power. There are music-hall songs which are better poems than three-quarters
of the stuff that gets into the anthologies:
Come where the booze is cheaper,
Come where the pots hold more,
Come where the boss is a bit of a sport,
Come to the pub next door!
Or again:
Two lovely black eyes
Oh, what a surprise!
Only for calling another man wrong,
Two lovely black eyes!
I would far rather have written either of those than, say, “The Blessed Damozel” or
“Love in the Valley”. And by the same token I would back UNCLE TOM’S CABIN to
outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore, though I know of no
strictly literary test which would show where the superiority lies.
IN DEFENCE OF P. G. WODEHOUSE (1945)
When the Gennans made their rapid advance through Belgium in the early summer of
1940, they captured, among other things, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, who had been living
throughout the early part of the war in his villa at Le Touquet, and seems not to have
realised until the last moment that he was in any danger. As he was led away into
captivity, he is said to have remarked, “Perhaps after this I shall write a serious book. ” He
was placed for the time being under house arrest, and from his subsequent statements it
appears that he was treated in a fairly friendly way, German officers in the
neighbourhood frequently “dropping in for a bath or a party”.
Over a year later, on 25th June 1941, the news came that Wodehouse had been released
from internment and was living at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. On the following day the
public was astonished to learn that he had agreed to do some broadcasts of a “non-
political” nature over the German radio. The full texts of these broadcasts are not easy to
obtain at this date, but Wodehouse seems to have done five of them between 26th June
and 2nd July, when the Germans took him off the air again. The first broadcast, on 26th
June, was not made on the Nazi radio but took the form of an interview with Harry
Flannery, the representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System, which still had its
correspondents in Berlin. Wodehouse also published in the SATURDAY EVENING
POST an article which he had written while still in the internment camp.
The article and the broadcasts dealt mainly with Wodehouse’ s experiences in internment,
but they did include a very few comments on the war. The following are fair samples:
“I never was interested in politics. I’m quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent
feeling. Just as I’m about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of
chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings. ”
“A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the right idea; at least they
sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And I have been there forty-two weeks. There is a
good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep
up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a
long time. When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to be on the
safe side. ”
“In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an Englishman,
but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen I
am not so sure. . . The only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of
bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves
the rest to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of my
books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This offer
holds good till Wednesday week. ”
The first extract quoted above caused great offence. Wodehouse was also censured for
using (in the interview with Flannery) the phrase “whether Britain wins the war or not,”
and he did not make things better by describing in another broadcast the filthy habits of
some Belgian prisoners among whom he was interned. The Germans recorded this
broadcast and repeated it a number of times. They seem to have supervised his talks very
lightly, and they allowed him not only to be funny about the discomforts of internment
but to remark that “the internees at Trost camp all fervently believe that Britain will
eventually win. ” The general upshot of the talks, however, was that he had not been ill
treated and bore no malice.
These broadcasts caused an immediate uproar in England. There were questions in
Parliament, angry editorial comments in the press, and a stream of letters from fellow-
authors, nearly all of them disapproving, though one or two suggested that it would be
better to suspend judgment, and several pleaded that Wodehouse probably did not realise
what he was doing. On 15th July, the Home Service of the B. B. C. carried an extremely
violent Postscript by “Cassandra” of the DAILY MIRROR, accusing Wodehouse of
“selling his country. ” This postscript made free use of such expressions as “Quisling” and
“worshipping the Fihrer”. The main charge was that Wodehouse had agreed to do
Gennan propaganda as a way of buying himself out of the internment camp.
“Cassandra’s” Postscript caused a certain amount of protest, but on the whole it seems to
have intensified popular feeling against Wodehouse. One result of it was that numerous
lending libraries withdrew Wodehouse ’s books from circulation.
