He reasons
logically from observed fact, and his intellectuality is constantly contrasted with the
routine methods of the police.
logically from observed fact, and his intellectuality is constantly contrasted with the
routine methods of the police.
Orwell
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.
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.
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.
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.
