At the front he unmasks a
spy at the cost of revealing his own identity, and then dies gloriously by a Boer bullet.
spy at the cost of revealing his own identity, and then dies gloriously by a Boer bullet.
Orwell
What Dali has done and what he has imagined is
debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does
not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society
in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.
Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes,
to THE TIMES leader writers who exult over the ‘eclipse of the highbrow’ — in fact, to
any ‘sensible’ art-hating English person — it is easy to imagine what kind of response you
would get. They would flatly refuse to see any merit in Dali whatever. Such people are
not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be asthetically right, but their
real demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought
is unnecessary. And they can be especially dangerous at a time like the present, when the
Ministry of Information and the British Council put power into their hands. For their
impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well.
Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America,
with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot.
But if you talk to the kind of person who CAN see Dali’s merits, the response that you
get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman,
is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like
rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is
assumed that you lack the aesthetic sense. Since ‘Mannequin rotting in a taxicab’ is a
good composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle position, but we
seldom hear much about it. On the one side KULTURBOLSCHEVISMUS: on the other
(though the phrase itself is out of fashion) ‘Art for Art’s sake. ’ Obscenity is a very
difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be
shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art
and morals.
It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of BENEFIT OF
CLERGY. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary
people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O. K. : kicking little girls
in the head is O. K. ; even a film like L’Age d’Or is O. K. * It is also O. K. that Dali should
batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So
long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.
* Dali mentions L’Age d’Or and adds that its first public showing was broken up by
hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about. According to Henry Miller’s
account of it, it showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman
defecating. (Author’s Footnote)
One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime. In an age like our
own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain
amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a
pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a
claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if
it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we
should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another KING
LEAR. And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By
encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say,
picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously
the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one
does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a
wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what
purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves
to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be
possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the
public hangman. ’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the
implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.
Not, of course, that Dali’s autobiography, or his pictures, ought to be suppressed. Short of
the dirty postcards that used to be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful
policy to suppress anything, and Dali’s fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay
of capitalist civilisation. But what he clearly needs is diagnosis. The question is not so
much WHAT he is as WHY he is like that. It ought not to be in doubt that his is a
diseased intelligence, probably not much altered by his alleged conversion, since genuine
penitents, or people who have returned to sanity, do not flaunt their past vices in that
complacent way. He is a symptom of the world’s illness. The important thing is not to
denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who
ought not to be questioned, but to find out WHY he exhibits that particular set of
aberrations.
The answer is probably discoverable in his pictures, and those I myself am not competent
to examine. But I can point to one clue which perhaps takes one part of the distance. This
is the old-fashioned, over-omate Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to revert
when he is not being Surrealist. Some of Dali’s drawings are reminiscent of Diirer, one
(p. 113) seems to show the influence of Beardsley, another (p. 269) seems to borrow
something from Blake. But the most persistent strain is the Edwardian one. When I
opened the book for the first time and looked at its innumerable marginal illustrations, I
was haunted by a resemblance which I could not immediately pin down. I fetched up at
the ornamental candlestick at the beginning of Part I (p. 7). What did this remind me of?
Finally I tracked it down. It reminded me of a large vulgar, expensively got-up edition of
Anatole France (in translation) which must have been published about 1914. That had
ornamental chapter headings and tailpieces after this style. Dali’s candlestick displays at
one end a curly fish-like creature that looks curiously familiar (it seems to be based on
the conventional dolphin), and at the other is the burning candle. This candle, which
recurs in one picture after another, is a very old friend. You will find it, with the same
picturesque gouts of wax arranged on its sides, in those phoney electric lights done up as
candlesticks which are popular in sham-Tudor country hotels. This candle, and the design
beneath it, convey at once an intense feeling of sentimentality. As though to counteract
this, Dali has spattered a quill-ful of ink all over the page, but without avail. The same
impression keeps popping up on page after page. The sign at the bottom of page 62, for
instance, would nearly go into PETER PAN. The figure on page 224, in spite of having
her cranium elongated in to an immense sausage-like shape, is the witch of the fairy-tale
books. The horse on page 234 and the unicorn on page 218 might be illustrations to
James Branch Cabell. The rather pansified drawings of youths on pages 97, 100 and
elsewhere convey the same impression. Picturesqueness keeps breaking in. Take away
the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones and other paraphernalia, and every now and again
you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany and WHERE THE RAINBOW
ENDS.
Curiously, enough, some of the naughty-naughty touches in Dali’s autobiography tie up
with the same period. When I read the passage I quoted at the beginning, about the
kicking of the little sister’s head, I was aware of another phantom resemblance. What was
it? Of course! RUTHLESS RHYMES FOR HEARTLESS HOMES, by Harry Graham.
Such rhymes were very popular round about 1912, and one that ran:
Poor little Willy is crying so sore, A sad little boy is he, For he’s broken his little sister’s
neck And he’ll have no jam for tea,
might almost have been founded on Dali’s anecdote. Dali, of course, is aware of his
Edwardian leanings, and makes capital out of them, more or less in a spirit of pastiche.
He professes an especial affection for the year 1900, and claims that every ornamental
object of 1900 is full of mystery, poetry, eroticism, madness, perversity, et. Pastiche,
however, usually implies a real affection for the thing parodied. It seems to be, if not the
rule, at any rate distinctly common for an intellectual bent to be accompanied by a non-
rational, even childish urge in the same direction. A sculptor, for instance, is interested in
planes and curves, but he is also a person who enjoys the physical act of mucking about
with clay or stone. An engineer is a person who enjoys the feel of tools, the noise of
dynamos and smell of oil. A psychiatrist usually has a leaning toward some sexual
aberration himself. Darwin became a biologist partly because he was a country gentleman
and fond of animals. It may be therefore, that Dali’s seemingly perverse cult of
Edwardian things (for example, his ‘discovery’ of the 1900 subway entrances) is merely
the symptom of a much deeper, less conscious affection. The innumerable, beautifully
executed copies of textbook illustrations, solemnly labelled LE ROSSIGNOL, UNE
MONTRE and so on, which he scatters all over his margins, may be meant partly as a
joke. The little boy in knickerbockers playing with a diabolo on page 103 is a perfect
period piece. But perhaps these things are also there because Dali can’t help drawing that
kind of thing because it is to that period and that style of drawing that he really belongs.
If so, his aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that
he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift
for drawing and an atrocious egoism. ‘At seven’, he says in the first paragraph of his
book, ‘I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since. ’
This is worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such
feelings are common enough. ‘I knew I was a genius’, somebody once said to me, Tong
before I knew what I was going to be a genius about. ’ And suppose that you have nothing
in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose
that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real
METIER to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon?
There is always one escape: INTO WICKEDNESS. Always do the thing that will shock
and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the
face with a whip and break his spectacles — or, at any rate, dream about doing such
things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors.
Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it pays! It is much
less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the probable suppressions in Dali’s
autobiography, it is clear that he had not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would
have done in an earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties,
when sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital swarmed
with aristocrats and RENTIERS who had given up sport and politics and taken to
patronising the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back. A
phobia for grasshoppers — which a few decades back would merely have provoked a
snigger — was now an interesting ‘complex’ which could be profitably exploited. And
when that particular world collapsed before the German Anny, America was waiting.
You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a
shadow of repentance from the fashionable SALONS of Paris to Abraham’s bosom.
That, perhaps is the essential outline of Dali’s history. But why his aberrations should be
the particular ones they were, and why it should be so easy to ‘sell’ such horrors as
rotting corpses to a sophisticated public — those are questions for the psychologist and the
sociological critic. Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism.
They are ‘bourgeois decadence’ (much play is made with the phrases ‘corpse poisons’
and ‘decaying RENTIER class’), and that is that. But though this probably states a fact, it
does not establish a connection. One would still like to know WHY Dali’s leaning was
towards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexuality), and WHY the RENTIERS and the
aristocrats would buy his pictures instead of hunting and making love like their
grandfathers. Mere moral disapproval does not get one any further. But neither ought one
to pretend, in the name of ‘detachment’, that such pictures as ‘Mannequin rotting in a
taxicab’ are morally neutral. They are diseased and disgusting, and any investigation
ought to start out from that fact.
RAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISH (1944)
Nearly half a century after his first appearance, Raffles, ‘the amateur cracksman’, is still
one of the best-known characters in English fiction. Very few people would need telling
that he played cricket for England, had bachelor chambers in the Albany and burgled the
Mayfair houses which he also entered as a guest. Just for that reason he and his exploits
make a suitable background against which to examine a more modem crime story such as
NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH. Any such choice is necessarily arbitrary — I
might equally well have chosen ARSENE LUPIN for instance — but at any rate NO
ORCHIDS and the Raffles books * have the common quality of being crime stories
which play the limelight on the criminal rather than the policeman. For sociological
purposes they can be compared. NO ORCHIDS is the 1939 version of glamorized crime,
RAFFLES the 1900 version. What I am concerned with here is the immense difference in
moral atmosphere between the two books, and the change in the popular attitude that this
probably implies.
* RAFFLES, A THIEF IN THE NIGHT and MR. JUSTICE RAFFLES, by E. W. Homung.
The third of these is definitely a failure, and only the first has the true Raffles atmosphere.
Hornung wrote a number of crime stories, usually with a tendency to take the side of the
criminal. A successful book in rather the same vein as RAFFLES is STIUGAREE.
(Author’s footnote. )
At this date, the charm of RAFFLES is partly in the period atmosphere and partly in the
technical excellence of the stories. Hornung was a very conscientious and on his level a
very able writer. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his work. However,
the truly dramatic thing, about Raffles, the thing that makes him a sort of byword even to
this day (only a few weeks ago, in a burglary case, a magistrate referred to the prisoner as
‘a Raffles in real life’), is the fact that he is a GENTLEMAN. Raffles is presented to us
and this is rubbed home in countless scraps of dialogue and casual remarks — not as an
honest man who has gone astray, but as a public-school man who has gone astray. His
remorse, when he feels any, is almost purely social; he has disgraced ‘the old school’, he
has lost his right to enter ‘decent society’, he has forfeited his amateur status and become
a cad. Neither Raffles nor Bunny appears to feel at all strongly that stealing is wrong in
itself, though Raffles does once justify himself by the casual remark that ‘the distribution
of property is all wrong anyway’. They think of themselves not as sinners but as
renegades, or simply as outcasts. And the moral code of most of us is still so close to
Raffles’ own that we do feel his situation to be an especially ironical one. A West End
club man who is really a burglar! That is almost a story in itself, is it not? But how if it
were a plumber or a greengrocer who was really a burglar? Would there be anything
inherently dramatic in that? No although the theme of the ‘double life’, of respectability
covering crime, is still there. Even Charles Peace in his clergyman’s dog-collar, seems
somewhat less of a hypocrite than Raffles in his Zingari blazer.
Raffles, of course, is good at all games, but it is peculiarly fitting that his chosen game
should be cricket. This allows not only of endless analogies between his cunning as a
slow bowler and his cunning as a burglar, but also helps to define the exact nature of his
crime. Cricket is not in reality a very popular game in England — it is nowhere so popular
as football, for instance — but it gives expression to a well-marked trait in the English
character, the tendency to value ‘form’ or ‘style’ more highly than success. In the eyes of
any true cricket-lover it is possible for an innings of ten runs to be ‘better’ (i. e. more
elegant) than an innings of a hundred runs: cricket is also one of the very few games in
which the amateur can excel the professional. It is a game full of forlorn hopes and
sudden dramatic changes of fortune, and its rules are so defined that their interpretation is
partly an ethical business. When Larwood, for instance, practised bodyline bowling in
Australia he was not actually breaking any rule: he was merely doing something that was
‘not cricket’. Since cricket takes up a lot of time and is rather an expensive game to play,
it is predominantly an upper-class game, but for the whole nation it is bound up with such
concepts as ‘good form’, ‘playing the game’, etc. , and it has declined in popularity just as
the tradition of ‘don’t hit a man when he’s down’ has declined. It is not a twentieth-
century game, and nearly all modern-minded people dislike it. The Nazis, for instance,
were at pains to discourage cricket, which had gained a certain footing in Germany
before and after the last war. In making Raffles a cricketer as well as a burglar, Hornung
was not merely providing him with a plausible disguise; he was also drawing the sharpest
moral contrast that he was able to imagine.
RAFFLES, no less than GREAT EXPECTATIONS or LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR, is a
story of snobbery, and it gains a great deal from the precariousness of Raffles’s social
position. A cruder writer would have made the ‘gentleman burglar’ a member of the
peerage, or at least a baronet. Raffles, however, is of upper-middle-class origin and is
only accepted by the aristocracy because of his personal charm. ‘We were in Society but
not of it’, he says to Bunny towards the end of the book; and ‘I was asked about for my
cricket’. Both he and Bunny accept the values of ‘Society’ unquestioningly, and would
settle down in it for good if only they could get away with a big enough haul. The ruin
that constantly threatens them is all the blacker because they only doubtfully ‘belong’. A
duke who has served a prison sentence is still a duke, whereas a mere man about town, if
once disgraced, ceases to be ‘about town’ for evermore. The closing chapters of the book,
when Raffles has been exposed and is living under an assumed name, have a twilight of
the gods feeling, a mental atmosphere rather similar to that of Kipling’s poem,
‘Gentleman Rankers’:
Yes, a trooper of the forces — Who has run his own six horses! etc.
Raffles now belongs irrevocably to the ‘cohorts of the damned’. He can still commit
successful burglaries, but there is no way back into Paradise, which means Piccadilly and
the M. C. C. According to the public-school code there is only one means of rehabilitation:
death in battle. Raffles dies fighting against the Boers (a practised reader would foresee
this from the start), and in the eyes of both Bunny and his creator this cancels his crimes.
Both Raffles and Bunny, of course, are devoid of religious belief, and they have no real
ethical code, merely certain rules of behaviour which they observe semi-instinctively. But
it is just here that the deep moral difference between RAFFLES and NO ORCHIDS
becomes apparent. Raffles and Bunny, after all, are gentlemen, and such standards as
they do have are not to be violated. Certain things are ‘not done’, and the idea of doing
them hardly arises. Raffles will not, for example, abuse hospitality. He will commit a
burglary in a house where he is staying as a guest, but the victim must be a fellow-guest
and not the host. He will not commit murder *, and he avoids violence wherever possible
and prefers to carry out his robberies unanned. He regards friendship as sacred, and is
chivalrous though not moral in his relations with women. He will take extra risks in the
name of ‘sportsmanship’, and sometimes even for aesthetic reasons. And above all, he is
intensively patriotic. He celebrates the Diamond Jubilee (‘For sixty years, Bunny, we’ve
been ruled over by absolutely the finest sovereign the world has ever seen’) by
dispatching to the Queen, through the post, an antique gold cup which he has stolen from
the British Museum. He steals, from partly political motives, a pearl which the German
Emperor is sending to one of the enemies of Britain, and when the Boer War begins to go
badly his one thought is to find his way into the fighting line.
At the front he unmasks a
spy at the cost of revealing his own identity, and then dies gloriously by a Boer bullet. In
this combination of crime and patriotism he resembles his near-contemporary Arsene
Lupin, who also scores off the German Emperor and wipes out his very dirty past by
enlisting in the Foreign Legion.
* Actually Raffles does kill one man and is more or less consciously responsible for the
death of two others. But all three of them are foreigners and have behaved in a very
reprehensible manner. He also, on one occasion, contemplates murdering a blackmailer. It is
however, a fairly well-established convention in crime stories that murdering a blackmailer
‘doesn’t count’. (Author’s footnote, 1945. )
It is important to note that by modern standards Raffles’s crimes are very petty ones. Four
hundred pounds worth of jewellery seems to him an excellent haul. And though the
stories are convincing in their physical detail, they contain very little sensationalism —
very few corpses, hardly any blood, no sex crimes, no sadism, no perversions of any kind.
It seems to be the case that the crime story, at any rate on its higher levels, has greatly
increased in blood-thirstiness during the past twenty years. Some of the early detective
stories do not even contain a murder. The Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance, are not
all murders, and some of them do not even deal with an indictable crime. So also with the
John Thorndyke stories, while of the Max Carrados stories only a minority are murders.
Since 1918, however, a detective story not containing a murder has been a great rarity,
and the most disgusting details of dismemberment and exhumation are commonly
exploited. Some of the Peter Wimsey stories, for instance, display an extremely morbid
interest in corpses. The Raffles stories, written from the angle of the criminal, are much
less anti-social than many modern stories written from the angle of the detective. The
main impression that they leave behind is of boyishness. They belong to a time when
people had standards, though they happened to be foolish standards. Their key-phrase is
‘not done’. The line that they draw between good and evil is as senseless as a Polynesian
taboo, but at least, like the taboo, it has the advantage that everyone accepts it.
So much for RAFFLES. Now for a header into the cesspool. NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS
BLANDISH, by James Hadley Chase, was published in 1939, but seems to have enjoyed
its greatest popularity in 1940, during the Battle of Britain and the blitz. In its main
outlines its story is this:
Miss Blandish, the daughter of a millionaire, is kidnapped by some gangsters who are
almost immediately surprised and killed off by a larger and better organized gang. They
hold her to ransom and extract half a million dollars from her father. Their original plan
had been to kill her as soon as the ransom-money was received, but a chance keeps her
alive. One of the gang is a young man named Slim, whose sole pleasure in life consists in
driving knives into other people’s bellies. In childhood he has graduated by cutting up
living animals with a pair of rusty scissors. Slim is sexually impotent, but takes a kind of
fancy to Miss Blandish. Slim’s mother, who is the real brains of the gang, sees in this the
chance of curing Slim’s impotence, and decides to keep Miss Blandish in custody till
Slim shall have succeeded in raping her. After many efforts and much persuasion,
including the flogging of Miss Blandish with a length of rubber hosepipe, the rape is
achieved. Meanwhile Miss Blandish’ s father has hired a private detective, and by means
of bribery and torture the detective and the police manage to round up and exterminate
the whole gang. Slim escapes with Miss Blandish and is killed after a final rape, and the
detective prepares to restore Miss Blandish to her family. By this time, however, she has
developed such a taste for Slim’s caresses * that she feels unable to live without him, and
she jumps, out of the window of a sky-scraper.
Several other points need noticing before one can grasp the full implications of this book.
To begin with, its central story bears a very marked resemblance to William Fau lk ner’s
novel, Sanctuary. Secondly, it is not, as one might expect, the product of an illiterate
hack, but a brilliant piece of writing, with hardly a wasted word or a jarring note
anywhere. Thirdly, the whole book, recit as well as dialogue, is written in the American
language; the author, an Englishman who has (I believe) never been in the United States,
seems to have made a complete mental transference to the American underworld.
Fourthly, the book sold, according to its publishers, no less than half a million copies.
I have already outlined the plot, but the subject-matter is much more sordid and brutal
than this suggests. The book contains eight full-dress murders, an unassessable number of
casual killings and woundings, an exhumation (with a careful reminder of the stench), the
flogging of Miss Blandish, the torture of another woman with red-hot cigarette-ends, a
strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of unheard-of cruelty and much else of the same kind.
It assumes great sexual sophistication in its readers (there is a scene, for instance, in
which a gangster, presumably of masochistic tendency, has an orgasm in the moment of
being knifed), and it takes for granted the most complete corruption and self-seeking as
the norm of human behaviour. The detective, for instance, is almost as great a rogue as
the gangsters, and actuated by nearly the same motives. Like them, he is in pursuit of
‘five hundred grand’. It is necessary to the machinery of the story that Mr. Blandish
should be anxious to get his daughter back, but apart from this, such things as affection,
friendship, good nature or even ordinary politeness simply do not enter. Nor, to any great
extent does nonnal sexuality. Ultimately only one motive is at work throughout the whole
story: the pursuit of power.
* Another reading of the final episode is possible. It may mean merely that Miss Blandish is
pregnant. But the interpretation I have given above seems more in keeping with the general
brutality of the book. ( Author’s footnote, 1945)
It should be noticed that the book is not in the ordinary sense pornography. Unlike most
books that deal in sexual sadism, it lays the emphasis on the cruelty and not on the
pleasure. Slim, the ravisher of Miss Blandish, has ‘wet slobbering lips’: this is disgusting,
and it is meant to be disgusting. But the scenes describing cruelty to women are
comparatively perfunctory. The real high-spots of the book are cruelties committed by
men upon other men; above all, the third-degreeing of the gangster, Eddie Schultz, who is
lashed into a chair and flogged on the windpipe with truncheons, his arms broken by
fresh blows as he breaks loose. In another of Mr. Chase’s books, HE WON’T NEED IT
NOW, the hero, who is intended to be a sympathetic and perhaps even noble character, is
described as stamping on somebody’s face, and then, having crushed the man’s mouth in,
grinding his heel round and round in it. Even when physical incidents of this kind are not
occurring, the mental atmosphere of these books is always the same. Their whole theme
is the struggle for power and the triumph of the strong over the weak. The big gangsters
wipe out the little ones as mercilessly as a pike gobbling up the little fish in a pond; the
police kill off the criminals as cruelly as the angler kills the pike. If ultimately one sides
with the police against the gangsters, it is merely because they are better organized and
more powerful, because, in fact, the law is a bigger racket than crime. Might is right: vae
victis.
As I have mentioned already, NO ORCHIDS enjoyed its greatest vogue in 1940, though
it was successfully running as a play till some time later. It was, in fact, one of the things
that helped to console people for the boredom of being bombed. Early in the war the
NEW YORKER had a picture of a little man approaching a news-stall littered with paper
with such headlines as ‘Great Tank Battles in Northern France’, ‘Big Naval Battle in the
North Sea’, ‘Huge Air Battles over the Channel’, etc. , etc. The little man is saying
‘ACTION STORIES, please’. That little man stood for all the drugged millions to whom
the world of the gangster and the prize-ring is more ‘real’, more ‘tough’, than such things
as wars, revolutions, earthquakes, famines and pestilences. From the point of view of a
reader of ACTION STORIES, a description of the London blitz, or of the struggles of the
European underground parties, would be ‘sissy stuff. On the other hand, some puny gun-
battle in Chicago, resulting in perhaps half a dozen deaths, would seem genuinely
‘tough’. This habit of mind is now extremely widespread. A soldier sprawls in a muddy
trench, with the machine-gun bullets crackling a foot or two overhead, and whiles away
his intolerable boredom by reading an American gangster story. And what is it that makes
that story so exciting? Precisely the fact that people are shooting at each other with
machine-guns! Neither the soldier nor anyone else sees anything curious in this. It is
taken for granted that an imaginary bullet is more thrilling than a real one.
The obvious explanation is that in real life one is usually a passive victim, whereas in the
adventure story one can think of oneself as being at the centre of events. But there is
more to it than that. Here it is necessary to refer again to the curious fact of NO
ORCHIDS being written — with technical errors, perhaps, but certainly with considerable
skill — in the American language.
There exists in America an enonnous literature of more or less the same stamp as NO
ORCHIDS. Quite apart from books, there is the huge array of ‘pulp magazines’, graded
so as to cater for different kinds of fantasy, but nearly all having much the same mental
atmosphere. A few of them go in for straight pornography, but the great majority are
quite plainly aimed at sadists and masochists. Sold at threepence a copy under the title of
Yank Mags, * these things used to enjoy considerable popularity in England, but when
the supply dried up owing to the war, no satisfactory substitute was forthcoming. English
imitations of the ‘pulp magazine’ do now exist, but they are poor things compared with
the original. English crook films, again, never approach the American crook film in
brutality. And yet the career of Mr. Chase shows how deep the American influence has
already gone. Not only is he himself living a continuous fantasy-life in the Chicago
underworld, but he can count on hundreds of thousands of readers who know what is
meant by a ‘clipshop’ or the ‘hotsquat’, do not have to do mental arithmetic when
confronted by ‘fifty grand’, and understand at sight a sentence like ‘Johnny was a rummy
and only two jumps ahead of the nut-factory’. Evidently there are great numbers of
English people who are partly americanized in language and, one ought to add, in moral
outlook. For there was no popular protest against NO ORCHIDS. In the end it was
withdrawn, but only retrospectively, when a later work, MISS CALLAGHAN COMES
TO GRIEF, brought Mr. Chase’s books to the attention of the authorities. Judging by
casual conversations at the time, ordinary readers got a mild thrill out of the obscenities
of NO ORCHIDS, but saw nothing undesirable in the book as a whole. Many people,
incidentally, were under the impression that it was an American book reissued in
England.
* They are said to have been imported into this country as ballast which accounted for their
low price and crumped appearance. Since the war the ships have been ballasted with
something more useful, probably gravel. (Author’s footnote)
The thing that the ordinary reader OUGHT to have objected to — almost certainly would
have objected to, a few decades earlier — was the equivocal attitude towards crime. It is
implied throughout NO ORCHIDS that being a criminal is only reprehensible in the
sense that it does not pay. Being a policeman pays better, but there is no moral difference,
since the police use essentially criminal methods. In a book like HE WON’T NEED IT
NOW the distinction between crime and crime -prevention practically disappears. This is
a new departure for English sensational fiction, in which till recently there has always
been a sharp distinction between right and wrong and a general agreement that virtue
must triumph in the last chapter. English books glorifying crime (modern crime, that is —
pirates and highwaymen are different) are very rare. Even a book like RAFFLES, as I
have pointed out, is governed by powerful taboos, and it is clearly understood that
Raffles ’s crimes must be expiated sooner or later. In America, both in life and fiction, the
tendency to tolerate crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is success, is very
much more marked. It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude that has made it possible for
crime to flourish upon so huge a scale. Books have been written about A1 Capone that are
hardly different in tone from the books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe
and all the rest of the ‘log cabin to White House’ brigade. And switching back eighty
years, one finds Mark Twain adopting much the same attitude towards the disgusting
bandit Slade, hero of twenty-eight murders, and towards the Western desperadoes
generally. They were successful, they ‘made good’, therefore he admired them.
In a book like NO ORCHIDS one is not, as in the old-style crime story, simply escaping
from dull reality into an imaginary world of action. One’s escape is essentially into
cruelty and sexual perversion. No Orchids is aimed at the power-instinct, which
RAFFLES or the Sherlock Holmes stories are not. At the same time the English attitude
towards crime is not so superior to the American as I may have seemed to imply. It too is
mixed up with power-worship, and has become more noticeably so in the last twenty
years. A writer who is worth examining is Edgar Wallace, especially in such typical
books as THE ORATOR and the Mr. J. G. Reeder stories. Wallace was one of the first
crime-story writers to break away from the old tradition of the private detective and make
his central figure a Scotland Yard official. Sherlock Holmes is an amateur, solving his
problems without the help and even, in the earlier stories, against the opposition of the
police. Moreover, like Lupin, he is essentially an intellectual, even a scientist. He reasons
logically from observed fact, and his intellectuality is constantly contrasted with the
routine methods of the police. Wallace objected strongly to this slur, as he considered it,
on Scotland Yard, and in several newspaper articles he went out of his way to denounce
Holmes byname. His own ideal was the detective-inspector who catches criminals not
because he is intellectually brilliant but because he is part of an all-powerful organi —
zation. Hence the curious fact that in Wallace’s most characteristic stories the ‘clue’ and
the ‘deduction’ play no part. The criminal is always defeated by an incredible
coincidence, or because in some unexplained manner the police know all about the crime
beforehand. The tone of the stories makes it quite clear that Wallace’s admiration for the
police is pure bully-worship. A Scotland Yard detective is the most powerful kind of
being that he can imagine, while the criminal figures in his mind as an outlaw against
whom anything is permissible, like the condemned slaves in the Roman arena. His
policemen behave much more brutally than British policemen do in real life — they hit
people with out provocation, fire revolvers past their ears to terrify them and so on — and
some of the stories exhibit a fearful intellectual sadism. (For instance, Wallace likes to
arrange things so that the villain is hanged on the same day as the heroine is married. ) But
it is sadism after the English fashion: that is to say, it is unconscious, there is not overtly
any sex in it, and it keeps within the bounds of the law. The British public tolerates a
harsh criminal law and gets a kick out of monstrously unfair murder trials: but still that is
better, on any account, than tolerating or admiring crime. If one must worship a bully, it
is better that he should be a policeman than a gangster. Wallace is still governed to some
extent by the concept of ‘not done. ’ In NO ORCHIDS anything is ‘done’ so long as it
leads on to power. All the barriers are down, all the motives are out in the open. Chase is
a worse symptom than Wallace, to the extent that all-in wrestling is worse than boxing, or
Fascism is worse than capitalist democracy.
In borrowing from William Faul kn er’s SANCTUARY, Chase only took the plot; the
mental atmosphere of the two books is not similar. Chase really derives from other
sources, and this particular bit of borrowing is only symbolic. What it symbolizes is the
vulgarization of ideas which is constantly happening, and which probably happens faster
in an age of print. Chase has been described as ‘Faulkner for the masses’, but it would be
more accurate to describe him as Carlyle for the masses. He is a popular writer — there are
many such in America, but they are still rarities in England — who has caught up with
what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right. The
growth of ‘realism’ has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age.
Why this should be so is a complicated question. The interconnexion between sadism,
masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge
subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered
somewhat indelicate. To take merely the first example that comes to mind, I believe no
one has ever pointed out the sadistic and masochistic element in Bernard Shaw’s work,
still less suggested that this probably has some connexion with Shaw’s admiration for
dictators. Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who
see nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the
countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the
minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts
who preached ‘punch’, ‘drive’, ‘personality’ and ‘learn to be a Tiger man’ in the
nineteen-twenties, nor from that older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey and
the rest of them, who bowed down before Gennan militarism. All of them are
worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power
tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness FOR THEIR OWN SAKES.
A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the
end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided
they are dirty enough’. This idea colours the outlook of all sympathizers with
totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive delight with which many
English intellectuals greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact. It was a step only doubtfully useful to
the U. S. S. R. , but it was entirely unmoral, and for that reason to be admired; the
explanations of it, which were numerous and self-contradictory, could come afterwards.
Until recently the characteristic adventure stories of the English-speaking peoples have
been stories in which the hero fights AGAINST ODDS. This is true all the way from
Robin Hood to Pop-eye the Sailor. Perhaps the basic myth of the Western world is Jack
the Giant-killer, but to be brought up to date this should be renamed Jack the Dwarf-
killer, and there already exists a considerable literature which teaches, either overtly or
implicitly, that one should side with the big man against the little man. Most of what is
now written about foreign policy is simply an embroidery on this theme, and for several
decades such phrases as ‘Play the game’, ‘Don’t hit a man when he’s down’ and ‘It’s not
cricket’ have never failed to draw a snigger from anyone of intellectual pretensions. 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.
debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does
not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society
in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.
Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes,
to THE TIMES leader writers who exult over the ‘eclipse of the highbrow’ — in fact, to
any ‘sensible’ art-hating English person — it is easy to imagine what kind of response you
would get. They would flatly refuse to see any merit in Dali whatever. Such people are
not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be asthetically right, but their
real demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought
is unnecessary. And they can be especially dangerous at a time like the present, when the
Ministry of Information and the British Council put power into their hands. For their
impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well.
Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America,
with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot.
But if you talk to the kind of person who CAN see Dali’s merits, the response that you
get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman,
is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like
rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is
assumed that you lack the aesthetic sense. Since ‘Mannequin rotting in a taxicab’ is a
good composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle position, but we
seldom hear much about it. On the one side KULTURBOLSCHEVISMUS: on the other
(though the phrase itself is out of fashion) ‘Art for Art’s sake. ’ Obscenity is a very
difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be
shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art
and morals.
It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of BENEFIT OF
CLERGY. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary
people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O. K. : kicking little girls
in the head is O. K. ; even a film like L’Age d’Or is O. K. * It is also O. K. that Dali should
batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So
long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.
* Dali mentions L’Age d’Or and adds that its first public showing was broken up by
hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about. According to Henry Miller’s
account of it, it showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman
defecating. (Author’s Footnote)
One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime. In an age like our
own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain
amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a
pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a
claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if
it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we
should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another KING
LEAR. And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By
encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say,
picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously
the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one
does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a
wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what
purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves
to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be
possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the
public hangman. ’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the
implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.
Not, of course, that Dali’s autobiography, or his pictures, ought to be suppressed. Short of
the dirty postcards that used to be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful
policy to suppress anything, and Dali’s fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay
of capitalist civilisation. But what he clearly needs is diagnosis. The question is not so
much WHAT he is as WHY he is like that. It ought not to be in doubt that his is a
diseased intelligence, probably not much altered by his alleged conversion, since genuine
penitents, or people who have returned to sanity, do not flaunt their past vices in that
complacent way. He is a symptom of the world’s illness. The important thing is not to
denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who
ought not to be questioned, but to find out WHY he exhibits that particular set of
aberrations.
The answer is probably discoverable in his pictures, and those I myself am not competent
to examine. But I can point to one clue which perhaps takes one part of the distance. This
is the old-fashioned, over-omate Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to revert
when he is not being Surrealist. Some of Dali’s drawings are reminiscent of Diirer, one
(p. 113) seems to show the influence of Beardsley, another (p. 269) seems to borrow
something from Blake. But the most persistent strain is the Edwardian one. When I
opened the book for the first time and looked at its innumerable marginal illustrations, I
was haunted by a resemblance which I could not immediately pin down. I fetched up at
the ornamental candlestick at the beginning of Part I (p. 7). What did this remind me of?
Finally I tracked it down. It reminded me of a large vulgar, expensively got-up edition of
Anatole France (in translation) which must have been published about 1914. That had
ornamental chapter headings and tailpieces after this style. Dali’s candlestick displays at
one end a curly fish-like creature that looks curiously familiar (it seems to be based on
the conventional dolphin), and at the other is the burning candle. This candle, which
recurs in one picture after another, is a very old friend. You will find it, with the same
picturesque gouts of wax arranged on its sides, in those phoney electric lights done up as
candlesticks which are popular in sham-Tudor country hotels. This candle, and the design
beneath it, convey at once an intense feeling of sentimentality. As though to counteract
this, Dali has spattered a quill-ful of ink all over the page, but without avail. The same
impression keeps popping up on page after page. The sign at the bottom of page 62, for
instance, would nearly go into PETER PAN. The figure on page 224, in spite of having
her cranium elongated in to an immense sausage-like shape, is the witch of the fairy-tale
books. The horse on page 234 and the unicorn on page 218 might be illustrations to
James Branch Cabell. The rather pansified drawings of youths on pages 97, 100 and
elsewhere convey the same impression. Picturesqueness keeps breaking in. Take away
the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones and other paraphernalia, and every now and again
you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany and WHERE THE RAINBOW
ENDS.
Curiously, enough, some of the naughty-naughty touches in Dali’s autobiography tie up
with the same period. When I read the passage I quoted at the beginning, about the
kicking of the little sister’s head, I was aware of another phantom resemblance. What was
it? Of course! RUTHLESS RHYMES FOR HEARTLESS HOMES, by Harry Graham.
Such rhymes were very popular round about 1912, and one that ran:
Poor little Willy is crying so sore, A sad little boy is he, For he’s broken his little sister’s
neck And he’ll have no jam for tea,
might almost have been founded on Dali’s anecdote. Dali, of course, is aware of his
Edwardian leanings, and makes capital out of them, more or less in a spirit of pastiche.
He professes an especial affection for the year 1900, and claims that every ornamental
object of 1900 is full of mystery, poetry, eroticism, madness, perversity, et. Pastiche,
however, usually implies a real affection for the thing parodied. It seems to be, if not the
rule, at any rate distinctly common for an intellectual bent to be accompanied by a non-
rational, even childish urge in the same direction. A sculptor, for instance, is interested in
planes and curves, but he is also a person who enjoys the physical act of mucking about
with clay or stone. An engineer is a person who enjoys the feel of tools, the noise of
dynamos and smell of oil. A psychiatrist usually has a leaning toward some sexual
aberration himself. Darwin became a biologist partly because he was a country gentleman
and fond of animals. It may be therefore, that Dali’s seemingly perverse cult of
Edwardian things (for example, his ‘discovery’ of the 1900 subway entrances) is merely
the symptom of a much deeper, less conscious affection. The innumerable, beautifully
executed copies of textbook illustrations, solemnly labelled LE ROSSIGNOL, UNE
MONTRE and so on, which he scatters all over his margins, may be meant partly as a
joke. The little boy in knickerbockers playing with a diabolo on page 103 is a perfect
period piece. But perhaps these things are also there because Dali can’t help drawing that
kind of thing because it is to that period and that style of drawing that he really belongs.
If so, his aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that
he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift
for drawing and an atrocious egoism. ‘At seven’, he says in the first paragraph of his
book, ‘I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since. ’
This is worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such
feelings are common enough. ‘I knew I was a genius’, somebody once said to me, Tong
before I knew what I was going to be a genius about. ’ And suppose that you have nothing
in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose
that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real
METIER to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon?
There is always one escape: INTO WICKEDNESS. Always do the thing that will shock
and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the
face with a whip and break his spectacles — or, at any rate, dream about doing such
things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors.
Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it pays! It is much
less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the probable suppressions in Dali’s
autobiography, it is clear that he had not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would
have done in an earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties,
when sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital swarmed
with aristocrats and RENTIERS who had given up sport and politics and taken to
patronising the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back. A
phobia for grasshoppers — which a few decades back would merely have provoked a
snigger — was now an interesting ‘complex’ which could be profitably exploited. And
when that particular world collapsed before the German Anny, America was waiting.
You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a
shadow of repentance from the fashionable SALONS of Paris to Abraham’s bosom.
That, perhaps is the essential outline of Dali’s history. But why his aberrations should be
the particular ones they were, and why it should be so easy to ‘sell’ such horrors as
rotting corpses to a sophisticated public — those are questions for the psychologist and the
sociological critic. Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism.
They are ‘bourgeois decadence’ (much play is made with the phrases ‘corpse poisons’
and ‘decaying RENTIER class’), and that is that. But though this probably states a fact, it
does not establish a connection. One would still like to know WHY Dali’s leaning was
towards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexuality), and WHY the RENTIERS and the
aristocrats would buy his pictures instead of hunting and making love like their
grandfathers. Mere moral disapproval does not get one any further. But neither ought one
to pretend, in the name of ‘detachment’, that such pictures as ‘Mannequin rotting in a
taxicab’ are morally neutral. They are diseased and disgusting, and any investigation
ought to start out from that fact.
RAFFLES AND MISS BLANDISH (1944)
Nearly half a century after his first appearance, Raffles, ‘the amateur cracksman’, is still
one of the best-known characters in English fiction. Very few people would need telling
that he played cricket for England, had bachelor chambers in the Albany and burgled the
Mayfair houses which he also entered as a guest. Just for that reason he and his exploits
make a suitable background against which to examine a more modem crime story such as
NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH. Any such choice is necessarily arbitrary — I
might equally well have chosen ARSENE LUPIN for instance — but at any rate NO
ORCHIDS and the Raffles books * have the common quality of being crime stories
which play the limelight on the criminal rather than the policeman. For sociological
purposes they can be compared. NO ORCHIDS is the 1939 version of glamorized crime,
RAFFLES the 1900 version. What I am concerned with here is the immense difference in
moral atmosphere between the two books, and the change in the popular attitude that this
probably implies.
* RAFFLES, A THIEF IN THE NIGHT and MR. JUSTICE RAFFLES, by E. W. Homung.
The third of these is definitely a failure, and only the first has the true Raffles atmosphere.
Hornung wrote a number of crime stories, usually with a tendency to take the side of the
criminal. A successful book in rather the same vein as RAFFLES is STIUGAREE.
(Author’s footnote. )
At this date, the charm of RAFFLES is partly in the period atmosphere and partly in the
technical excellence of the stories. Hornung was a very conscientious and on his level a
very able writer. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his work. However,
the truly dramatic thing, about Raffles, the thing that makes him a sort of byword even to
this day (only a few weeks ago, in a burglary case, a magistrate referred to the prisoner as
‘a Raffles in real life’), is the fact that he is a GENTLEMAN. Raffles is presented to us
and this is rubbed home in countless scraps of dialogue and casual remarks — not as an
honest man who has gone astray, but as a public-school man who has gone astray. His
remorse, when he feels any, is almost purely social; he has disgraced ‘the old school’, he
has lost his right to enter ‘decent society’, he has forfeited his amateur status and become
a cad. Neither Raffles nor Bunny appears to feel at all strongly that stealing is wrong in
itself, though Raffles does once justify himself by the casual remark that ‘the distribution
of property is all wrong anyway’. They think of themselves not as sinners but as
renegades, or simply as outcasts. And the moral code of most of us is still so close to
Raffles’ own that we do feel his situation to be an especially ironical one. A West End
club man who is really a burglar! That is almost a story in itself, is it not? But how if it
were a plumber or a greengrocer who was really a burglar? Would there be anything
inherently dramatic in that? No although the theme of the ‘double life’, of respectability
covering crime, is still there. Even Charles Peace in his clergyman’s dog-collar, seems
somewhat less of a hypocrite than Raffles in his Zingari blazer.
Raffles, of course, is good at all games, but it is peculiarly fitting that his chosen game
should be cricket. This allows not only of endless analogies between his cunning as a
slow bowler and his cunning as a burglar, but also helps to define the exact nature of his
crime. Cricket is not in reality a very popular game in England — it is nowhere so popular
as football, for instance — but it gives expression to a well-marked trait in the English
character, the tendency to value ‘form’ or ‘style’ more highly than success. In the eyes of
any true cricket-lover it is possible for an innings of ten runs to be ‘better’ (i. e. more
elegant) than an innings of a hundred runs: cricket is also one of the very few games in
which the amateur can excel the professional. It is a game full of forlorn hopes and
sudden dramatic changes of fortune, and its rules are so defined that their interpretation is
partly an ethical business. When Larwood, for instance, practised bodyline bowling in
Australia he was not actually breaking any rule: he was merely doing something that was
‘not cricket’. Since cricket takes up a lot of time and is rather an expensive game to play,
it is predominantly an upper-class game, but for the whole nation it is bound up with such
concepts as ‘good form’, ‘playing the game’, etc. , and it has declined in popularity just as
the tradition of ‘don’t hit a man when he’s down’ has declined. It is not a twentieth-
century game, and nearly all modern-minded people dislike it. The Nazis, for instance,
were at pains to discourage cricket, which had gained a certain footing in Germany
before and after the last war. In making Raffles a cricketer as well as a burglar, Hornung
was not merely providing him with a plausible disguise; he was also drawing the sharpest
moral contrast that he was able to imagine.
RAFFLES, no less than GREAT EXPECTATIONS or LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR, is a
story of snobbery, and it gains a great deal from the precariousness of Raffles’s social
position. A cruder writer would have made the ‘gentleman burglar’ a member of the
peerage, or at least a baronet. Raffles, however, is of upper-middle-class origin and is
only accepted by the aristocracy because of his personal charm. ‘We were in Society but
not of it’, he says to Bunny towards the end of the book; and ‘I was asked about for my
cricket’. Both he and Bunny accept the values of ‘Society’ unquestioningly, and would
settle down in it for good if only they could get away with a big enough haul. The ruin
that constantly threatens them is all the blacker because they only doubtfully ‘belong’. A
duke who has served a prison sentence is still a duke, whereas a mere man about town, if
once disgraced, ceases to be ‘about town’ for evermore. The closing chapters of the book,
when Raffles has been exposed and is living under an assumed name, have a twilight of
the gods feeling, a mental atmosphere rather similar to that of Kipling’s poem,
‘Gentleman Rankers’:
Yes, a trooper of the forces — Who has run his own six horses! etc.
Raffles now belongs irrevocably to the ‘cohorts of the damned’. He can still commit
successful burglaries, but there is no way back into Paradise, which means Piccadilly and
the M. C. C. According to the public-school code there is only one means of rehabilitation:
death in battle. Raffles dies fighting against the Boers (a practised reader would foresee
this from the start), and in the eyes of both Bunny and his creator this cancels his crimes.
Both Raffles and Bunny, of course, are devoid of religious belief, and they have no real
ethical code, merely certain rules of behaviour which they observe semi-instinctively. But
it is just here that the deep moral difference between RAFFLES and NO ORCHIDS
becomes apparent. Raffles and Bunny, after all, are gentlemen, and such standards as
they do have are not to be violated. Certain things are ‘not done’, and the idea of doing
them hardly arises. Raffles will not, for example, abuse hospitality. He will commit a
burglary in a house where he is staying as a guest, but the victim must be a fellow-guest
and not the host. He will not commit murder *, and he avoids violence wherever possible
and prefers to carry out his robberies unanned. He regards friendship as sacred, and is
chivalrous though not moral in his relations with women. He will take extra risks in the
name of ‘sportsmanship’, and sometimes even for aesthetic reasons. And above all, he is
intensively patriotic. He celebrates the Diamond Jubilee (‘For sixty years, Bunny, we’ve
been ruled over by absolutely the finest sovereign the world has ever seen’) by
dispatching to the Queen, through the post, an antique gold cup which he has stolen from
the British Museum. He steals, from partly political motives, a pearl which the German
Emperor is sending to one of the enemies of Britain, and when the Boer War begins to go
badly his one thought is to find his way into the fighting line.
At the front he unmasks a
spy at the cost of revealing his own identity, and then dies gloriously by a Boer bullet. In
this combination of crime and patriotism he resembles his near-contemporary Arsene
Lupin, who also scores off the German Emperor and wipes out his very dirty past by
enlisting in the Foreign Legion.
* Actually Raffles does kill one man and is more or less consciously responsible for the
death of two others. But all three of them are foreigners and have behaved in a very
reprehensible manner. He also, on one occasion, contemplates murdering a blackmailer. It is
however, a fairly well-established convention in crime stories that murdering a blackmailer
‘doesn’t count’. (Author’s footnote, 1945. )
It is important to note that by modern standards Raffles’s crimes are very petty ones. Four
hundred pounds worth of jewellery seems to him an excellent haul. And though the
stories are convincing in their physical detail, they contain very little sensationalism —
very few corpses, hardly any blood, no sex crimes, no sadism, no perversions of any kind.
It seems to be the case that the crime story, at any rate on its higher levels, has greatly
increased in blood-thirstiness during the past twenty years. Some of the early detective
stories do not even contain a murder. The Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance, are not
all murders, and some of them do not even deal with an indictable crime. So also with the
John Thorndyke stories, while of the Max Carrados stories only a minority are murders.
Since 1918, however, a detective story not containing a murder has been a great rarity,
and the most disgusting details of dismemberment and exhumation are commonly
exploited. Some of the Peter Wimsey stories, for instance, display an extremely morbid
interest in corpses. The Raffles stories, written from the angle of the criminal, are much
less anti-social than many modern stories written from the angle of the detective. The
main impression that they leave behind is of boyishness. They belong to a time when
people had standards, though they happened to be foolish standards. Their key-phrase is
‘not done’. The line that they draw between good and evil is as senseless as a Polynesian
taboo, but at least, like the taboo, it has the advantage that everyone accepts it.
So much for RAFFLES. Now for a header into the cesspool. NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS
BLANDISH, by James Hadley Chase, was published in 1939, but seems to have enjoyed
its greatest popularity in 1940, during the Battle of Britain and the blitz. In its main
outlines its story is this:
Miss Blandish, the daughter of a millionaire, is kidnapped by some gangsters who are
almost immediately surprised and killed off by a larger and better organized gang. They
hold her to ransom and extract half a million dollars from her father. Their original plan
had been to kill her as soon as the ransom-money was received, but a chance keeps her
alive. One of the gang is a young man named Slim, whose sole pleasure in life consists in
driving knives into other people’s bellies. In childhood he has graduated by cutting up
living animals with a pair of rusty scissors. Slim is sexually impotent, but takes a kind of
fancy to Miss Blandish. Slim’s mother, who is the real brains of the gang, sees in this the
chance of curing Slim’s impotence, and decides to keep Miss Blandish in custody till
Slim shall have succeeded in raping her. After many efforts and much persuasion,
including the flogging of Miss Blandish with a length of rubber hosepipe, the rape is
achieved. Meanwhile Miss Blandish’ s father has hired a private detective, and by means
of bribery and torture the detective and the police manage to round up and exterminate
the whole gang. Slim escapes with Miss Blandish and is killed after a final rape, and the
detective prepares to restore Miss Blandish to her family. By this time, however, she has
developed such a taste for Slim’s caresses * that she feels unable to live without him, and
she jumps, out of the window of a sky-scraper.
Several other points need noticing before one can grasp the full implications of this book.
To begin with, its central story bears a very marked resemblance to William Fau lk ner’s
novel, Sanctuary. Secondly, it is not, as one might expect, the product of an illiterate
hack, but a brilliant piece of writing, with hardly a wasted word or a jarring note
anywhere. Thirdly, the whole book, recit as well as dialogue, is written in the American
language; the author, an Englishman who has (I believe) never been in the United States,
seems to have made a complete mental transference to the American underworld.
Fourthly, the book sold, according to its publishers, no less than half a million copies.
I have already outlined the plot, but the subject-matter is much more sordid and brutal
than this suggests. The book contains eight full-dress murders, an unassessable number of
casual killings and woundings, an exhumation (with a careful reminder of the stench), the
flogging of Miss Blandish, the torture of another woman with red-hot cigarette-ends, a
strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of unheard-of cruelty and much else of the same kind.
It assumes great sexual sophistication in its readers (there is a scene, for instance, in
which a gangster, presumably of masochistic tendency, has an orgasm in the moment of
being knifed), and it takes for granted the most complete corruption and self-seeking as
the norm of human behaviour. The detective, for instance, is almost as great a rogue as
the gangsters, and actuated by nearly the same motives. Like them, he is in pursuit of
‘five hundred grand’. It is necessary to the machinery of the story that Mr. Blandish
should be anxious to get his daughter back, but apart from this, such things as affection,
friendship, good nature or even ordinary politeness simply do not enter. Nor, to any great
extent does nonnal sexuality. Ultimately only one motive is at work throughout the whole
story: the pursuit of power.
* Another reading of the final episode is possible. It may mean merely that Miss Blandish is
pregnant. But the interpretation I have given above seems more in keeping with the general
brutality of the book. ( Author’s footnote, 1945)
It should be noticed that the book is not in the ordinary sense pornography. Unlike most
books that deal in sexual sadism, it lays the emphasis on the cruelty and not on the
pleasure. Slim, the ravisher of Miss Blandish, has ‘wet slobbering lips’: this is disgusting,
and it is meant to be disgusting. But the scenes describing cruelty to women are
comparatively perfunctory. The real high-spots of the book are cruelties committed by
men upon other men; above all, the third-degreeing of the gangster, Eddie Schultz, who is
lashed into a chair and flogged on the windpipe with truncheons, his arms broken by
fresh blows as he breaks loose. In another of Mr. Chase’s books, HE WON’T NEED IT
NOW, the hero, who is intended to be a sympathetic and perhaps even noble character, is
described as stamping on somebody’s face, and then, having crushed the man’s mouth in,
grinding his heel round and round in it. Even when physical incidents of this kind are not
occurring, the mental atmosphere of these books is always the same. Their whole theme
is the struggle for power and the triumph of the strong over the weak. The big gangsters
wipe out the little ones as mercilessly as a pike gobbling up the little fish in a pond; the
police kill off the criminals as cruelly as the angler kills the pike. If ultimately one sides
with the police against the gangsters, it is merely because they are better organized and
more powerful, because, in fact, the law is a bigger racket than crime. Might is right: vae
victis.
As I have mentioned already, NO ORCHIDS enjoyed its greatest vogue in 1940, though
it was successfully running as a play till some time later. It was, in fact, one of the things
that helped to console people for the boredom of being bombed. Early in the war the
NEW YORKER had a picture of a little man approaching a news-stall littered with paper
with such headlines as ‘Great Tank Battles in Northern France’, ‘Big Naval Battle in the
North Sea’, ‘Huge Air Battles over the Channel’, etc. , etc. The little man is saying
‘ACTION STORIES, please’. That little man stood for all the drugged millions to whom
the world of the gangster and the prize-ring is more ‘real’, more ‘tough’, than such things
as wars, revolutions, earthquakes, famines and pestilences. From the point of view of a
reader of ACTION STORIES, a description of the London blitz, or of the struggles of the
European underground parties, would be ‘sissy stuff. On the other hand, some puny gun-
battle in Chicago, resulting in perhaps half a dozen deaths, would seem genuinely
‘tough’. This habit of mind is now extremely widespread. A soldier sprawls in a muddy
trench, with the machine-gun bullets crackling a foot or two overhead, and whiles away
his intolerable boredom by reading an American gangster story. And what is it that makes
that story so exciting? Precisely the fact that people are shooting at each other with
machine-guns! Neither the soldier nor anyone else sees anything curious in this. It is
taken for granted that an imaginary bullet is more thrilling than a real one.
The obvious explanation is that in real life one is usually a passive victim, whereas in the
adventure story one can think of oneself as being at the centre of events. But there is
more to it than that. Here it is necessary to refer again to the curious fact of NO
ORCHIDS being written — with technical errors, perhaps, but certainly with considerable
skill — in the American language.
There exists in America an enonnous literature of more or less the same stamp as NO
ORCHIDS. Quite apart from books, there is the huge array of ‘pulp magazines’, graded
so as to cater for different kinds of fantasy, but nearly all having much the same mental
atmosphere. A few of them go in for straight pornography, but the great majority are
quite plainly aimed at sadists and masochists. Sold at threepence a copy under the title of
Yank Mags, * these things used to enjoy considerable popularity in England, but when
the supply dried up owing to the war, no satisfactory substitute was forthcoming. English
imitations of the ‘pulp magazine’ do now exist, but they are poor things compared with
the original. English crook films, again, never approach the American crook film in
brutality. And yet the career of Mr. Chase shows how deep the American influence has
already gone. Not only is he himself living a continuous fantasy-life in the Chicago
underworld, but he can count on hundreds of thousands of readers who know what is
meant by a ‘clipshop’ or the ‘hotsquat’, do not have to do mental arithmetic when
confronted by ‘fifty grand’, and understand at sight a sentence like ‘Johnny was a rummy
and only two jumps ahead of the nut-factory’. Evidently there are great numbers of
English people who are partly americanized in language and, one ought to add, in moral
outlook. For there was no popular protest against NO ORCHIDS. In the end it was
withdrawn, but only retrospectively, when a later work, MISS CALLAGHAN COMES
TO GRIEF, brought Mr. Chase’s books to the attention of the authorities. Judging by
casual conversations at the time, ordinary readers got a mild thrill out of the obscenities
of NO ORCHIDS, but saw nothing undesirable in the book as a whole. Many people,
incidentally, were under the impression that it was an American book reissued in
England.
* They are said to have been imported into this country as ballast which accounted for their
low price and crumped appearance. Since the war the ships have been ballasted with
something more useful, probably gravel. (Author’s footnote)
The thing that the ordinary reader OUGHT to have objected to — almost certainly would
have objected to, a few decades earlier — was the equivocal attitude towards crime. It is
implied throughout NO ORCHIDS that being a criminal is only reprehensible in the
sense that it does not pay. Being a policeman pays better, but there is no moral difference,
since the police use essentially criminal methods. In a book like HE WON’T NEED IT
NOW the distinction between crime and crime -prevention practically disappears. This is
a new departure for English sensational fiction, in which till recently there has always
been a sharp distinction between right and wrong and a general agreement that virtue
must triumph in the last chapter. English books glorifying crime (modern crime, that is —
pirates and highwaymen are different) are very rare. Even a book like RAFFLES, as I
have pointed out, is governed by powerful taboos, and it is clearly understood that
Raffles ’s crimes must be expiated sooner or later. In America, both in life and fiction, the
tendency to tolerate crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is success, is very
much more marked. It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude that has made it possible for
crime to flourish upon so huge a scale. Books have been written about A1 Capone that are
hardly different in tone from the books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe
and all the rest of the ‘log cabin to White House’ brigade. And switching back eighty
years, one finds Mark Twain adopting much the same attitude towards the disgusting
bandit Slade, hero of twenty-eight murders, and towards the Western desperadoes
generally. They were successful, they ‘made good’, therefore he admired them.
In a book like NO ORCHIDS one is not, as in the old-style crime story, simply escaping
from dull reality into an imaginary world of action. One’s escape is essentially into
cruelty and sexual perversion. No Orchids is aimed at the power-instinct, which
RAFFLES or the Sherlock Holmes stories are not. At the same time the English attitude
towards crime is not so superior to the American as I may have seemed to imply. It too is
mixed up with power-worship, and has become more noticeably so in the last twenty
years. A writer who is worth examining is Edgar Wallace, especially in such typical
books as THE ORATOR and the Mr. J. G. Reeder stories. Wallace was one of the first
crime-story writers to break away from the old tradition of the private detective and make
his central figure a Scotland Yard official. Sherlock Holmes is an amateur, solving his
problems without the help and even, in the earlier stories, against the opposition of the
police. Moreover, like Lupin, he is essentially an intellectual, even a scientist. He reasons
logically from observed fact, and his intellectuality is constantly contrasted with the
routine methods of the police. Wallace objected strongly to this slur, as he considered it,
on Scotland Yard, and in several newspaper articles he went out of his way to denounce
Holmes byname. His own ideal was the detective-inspector who catches criminals not
because he is intellectually brilliant but because he is part of an all-powerful organi —
zation. Hence the curious fact that in Wallace’s most characteristic stories the ‘clue’ and
the ‘deduction’ play no part. The criminal is always defeated by an incredible
coincidence, or because in some unexplained manner the police know all about the crime
beforehand. The tone of the stories makes it quite clear that Wallace’s admiration for the
police is pure bully-worship. A Scotland Yard detective is the most powerful kind of
being that he can imagine, while the criminal figures in his mind as an outlaw against
whom anything is permissible, like the condemned slaves in the Roman arena. His
policemen behave much more brutally than British policemen do in real life — they hit
people with out provocation, fire revolvers past their ears to terrify them and so on — and
some of the stories exhibit a fearful intellectual sadism. (For instance, Wallace likes to
arrange things so that the villain is hanged on the same day as the heroine is married. ) But
it is sadism after the English fashion: that is to say, it is unconscious, there is not overtly
any sex in it, and it keeps within the bounds of the law. The British public tolerates a
harsh criminal law and gets a kick out of monstrously unfair murder trials: but still that is
better, on any account, than tolerating or admiring crime. If one must worship a bully, it
is better that he should be a policeman than a gangster. Wallace is still governed to some
extent by the concept of ‘not done. ’ In NO ORCHIDS anything is ‘done’ so long as it
leads on to power. All the barriers are down, all the motives are out in the open. Chase is
a worse symptom than Wallace, to the extent that all-in wrestling is worse than boxing, or
Fascism is worse than capitalist democracy.
In borrowing from William Faul kn er’s SANCTUARY, Chase only took the plot; the
mental atmosphere of the two books is not similar. Chase really derives from other
sources, and this particular bit of borrowing is only symbolic. What it symbolizes is the
vulgarization of ideas which is constantly happening, and which probably happens faster
in an age of print. Chase has been described as ‘Faulkner for the masses’, but it would be
more accurate to describe him as Carlyle for the masses. He is a popular writer — there are
many such in America, but they are still rarities in England — who has caught up with
what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right. The
growth of ‘realism’ has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age.
Why this should be so is a complicated question. The interconnexion between sadism,
masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge
subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered
somewhat indelicate. To take merely the first example that comes to mind, I believe no
one has ever pointed out the sadistic and masochistic element in Bernard Shaw’s work,
still less suggested that this probably has some connexion with Shaw’s admiration for
dictators. Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who
see nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the
countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the
minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts
who preached ‘punch’, ‘drive’, ‘personality’ and ‘learn to be a Tiger man’ in the
nineteen-twenties, nor from that older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey and
the rest of them, who bowed down before Gennan militarism. All of them are
worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power
tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness FOR THEIR OWN SAKES.
A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the
end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided
they are dirty enough’. This idea colours the outlook of all sympathizers with
totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive delight with which many
English intellectuals greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact. It was a step only doubtfully useful to
the U. S. S. R. , but it was entirely unmoral, and for that reason to be admired; the
explanations of it, which were numerous and self-contradictory, could come afterwards.
Until recently the characteristic adventure stories of the English-speaking peoples have
been stories in which the hero fights AGAINST ODDS. This is true all the way from
Robin Hood to Pop-eye the Sailor. Perhaps the basic myth of the Western world is Jack
the Giant-killer, but to be brought up to date this should be renamed Jack the Dwarf-
killer, and there already exists a considerable literature which teaches, either overtly or
implicitly, that one should side with the big man against the little man. Most of what is
now written about foreign policy is simply an embroidery on this theme, and for several
decades such phrases as ‘Play the game’, ‘Don’t hit a man when he’s down’ and ‘It’s not
cricket’ have never failed to draw a snigger from anyone of intellectual pretensions. 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.
