He was
likelier
to make a good book out of
his helplessness and his ignorance than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in
perspective.
his helplessness and his ignorance than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in
perspective.
Orwell
Here
was a Fatherland and — at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts — a Fuehrer. All the
loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing
back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory — all in
one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, saviour — all in one word, Stalin. God —
Stalin. The devil — Hitler. Heaven — Moscow. Hell — Berlin. All the gaps were filled up.
So, after all, the ‘Communism’ of the Ebglish intellectual is something explicable
enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated
But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the
English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in
England itself. With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the
over-whelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If
you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a
despotic regime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the
soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of
the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary
executions, imprisonment without trial etc. , etc. , are too remote to be terrifying. They can
swallow totalitarianism BECAUSE they have no experience of anything except
liberalism. Look, for instance, at this extract from Mr Auden’s poem ‘Spain’ (incidentally
this poem is one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war):
To-morrow for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.
To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
The second stanza is intended as a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a day in the life of a ‘good
party man’. In the -morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes’ interlude to stifle
‘bourgeois’ remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening
chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying. But notice the phrase
‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a
WORD. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen
the bodies of numbers of murdered men — I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered.
Therefore I have some conception of what murder means — the terror, the hatred, the
howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to
be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary,
but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is
‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’, or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s brand of
amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else
when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by
people who don’t even know that fire is hot. The warmongering to which the English
intelligentsia gave themselves up in the period 1935-9 was largely based on a sense of
personal immunity. The attitude was very different in France, where the military service
is hard to dodge and even literary men know the weight of a pack.
Towards the end of Mr Cyril Connolly’s recent book, ENEMIES OF PROMISE, there
occurs an interesting and revealing passage. The first part of the book, is, more or less, an
evaluation of present-day literature. Mr Connolly belongs exactly to the generation of the
writers of ‘the movement’, and with not many reservations their values are his values. It
is interesting to notice that among prose-writers her admires chiefly those specialising in
violence — the would-be tough American school, Hemingway, etc. The latter part of the
book, however, is autobiographical and consists of an account, fascinatingly accurate, of
life at a preparatory school and Eton in the years 1910-20. Mr Connolly ends by
remarking:
Were I to deduce anything from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called THE
THEORY OF PERMANENT ADOLESCENCE. It is the theory that the experiences
undergone by boys at the great public schools are so intense as to dominate their lives and
to arrest their development.
When you read the second sentence in this passage, your natural impulse is to look for
the misprint. Presumably there is a ‘not’ left out, or something. But no, not a bit of it! He
means it! And what is more, he is merely speaking the truth, in an inverted fashion.
‘Cultured’ middle-class life has reached a depth of softness at which a public-school
education — five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery — can actually be looked back
upon as an eventful period. To nearly all the writers who have counted during the thirties,
what more has ever happened than Mr Connolly records in ENEMIES OF PROMISE? It
is the same pattern all the time; public school, university, a few trips abroad, then
London. Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour —
hardly even words. No wonder that the huge tribe known as ‘the right left people’ found
it so easy to condone the purge-and-Ogpu side of the Russian regime and the horrors of
the first Five-Year Plan. They were so gloriously incapable of understanding what it all
meant.
By 1937 the whole of the intelligentsia was mentally at war. Left-wing thought had
narrowed down to ‘anti-Fascism’, i. e. to a negative, and a torrent of hate-literature
directed against Germany and the politicians supposedly friendly to Germany was
pouring from the Press. The thing that, to me, was truly frightening about the war in
Spain was not such violence as I witnessed, nor even the party feuds behind the lines, but
the immediate reappearance in left-wing circles of the mental atmosphere of the Great
War. The very people who for twenty years had sniggered over their own superiority to
war hysteria were the ones who rushed straight back into the mental slum of 1915. All the
familiar wartime idiocies, spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good
anti-Fascist? ), the retailing of atrocity stories, came back into vogue as though the
intervening years had never happened. Before the end of the Spanish war, and even
before Munich, some of the better of the left-wing writers were beginning to squirm.
Neither Auden nor, on the whole, Spender wrote about the Spanish war in quite the vein
that was expected of them. Since then there has been a change of feeling and much
dismay and confusion, because the actual course of events has made nonsense of the left-
wing orthodoxy of the last few years. But then it did not need very great acuteness to see
that much of it was nonsense from the start. There is no certainty, therefore, that the next
orthodoxy to emerge will be any better than the last.
On the whole the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer
does well to keep out of politics. For any writer who accepts or partially accepts the
discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or
shut up. It is, of course, possible to toe the line and go on writing — after a fashion. Any
Marxist can demonstrate with the greatest of ease that ‘bourgeois’ liberty of thought is an
illusion. But when he has finished his demonstration there remains the psychological
FACT that without this ‘bourgeois’ liberty the creative powers wither away. In the future
a totalitarian literature may arise, but it will be quite different from anything we can now
imagine. Literature as we know it is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a
minimum of censorship. And this is even truer of prose than of verse. It is probably not a
coincidence that the best writers of the thirties have been poets. The atmosphere of
orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the
novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. How many Roman Catholics have
been good novelists? Even the handful one could name have usually been bad Catholics.
The novel is practically a Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the
autonomous individual. No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has been so barren
of imaginative prose as the nineteen-thirties. There have been good poems, good
sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but practically no fiction of any value at all. From
1933 onwards the mental climate was increasingly against it. Anyone sensitive enough to
be touched by the ZEITGEIST was also involved in politics. Not everyone, of course,
was definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone was on its periphery and
more or less mixed up in propaganda campaigns and squalid controversies. Communists
and near-Communists had a disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It
was a time of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments you were expected to
lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies; at the best a sort of voluntary
censorship (‘Ought I to say this? Is it pro-Fascist? ’) was at work in nearly everyone’s
mind. It is almost inconceivable that good novels should be written in such an
atmosphere. ‘Good novels are not written by by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who
are conscienee-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people
who are NOT FRIGHTENED. This brings me back to Henry Miller.
Ill
If this were a likely, moment for the launching of ‘schools’ literature, Henry Miller might
be the starting-point of a new ‘school’. He does at any rate mark an unexpected swing of
the pendulum. In his books one gets right away from the ‘political animal’ and back to a
viewpoint not only individualistic but completely passive — the view -point of a man who
believes the world-process to be outside his control and who in any case hardly wishes to
control it.
I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing trrough Paris on my way to
Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the
Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible tenns that to go to Spain at that
moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely
selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things FROM
A SENSE OBLIGATION was sheer stupidity. In any case my Ideas about combating
Fascism, defending democracy, etc. , etc. , were all baloney. Our civilization was destined
to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it
as human — a prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit
throughout his work. Everywhere there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm, and
almost everywhere the implied belief that it doesn’t matter. The only political declaration
which, so far as I know, he has ever made in print is a purely negative one. A year or so
ago an American magazine, the MARXIST QUARTERLY, sent out a questionnaire to
various American writers asking them to define their attitude on the subject of war.
Miller replied in terms of extreme pacifism, an individual refusal to fight, with no
apparent wish to convert others to the same opinion — practically, in fact, a declaration of
irresponsibility.
However, there is more than one kind of irresponsibility. As a rule, writers who do not
wish to identify themselves with the historical process at the moment either ignore it or
fight against if. If they can ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can understand it
well enough to want to fight against it, they probably have enough vision to realize that
they cannot win. Look, for instance, at a poem like ‘The Scholar Gipsy’, with its railing
against the ‘strange disease of modern life’ and its magnificent defeatist simile is the final
stanza. It expresses one of the normal literary attitudes, perhaps actually the prevailing
attitude during the last hundred years. And on the other hand there are the ‘progressives’,
the yea-sayers, the Shaw-Wells type, always leaping forward to embrace the ego-
projections which they mistake for the future. On the whole the writers of the twenties
took the first line and the writers of the thirties the second. And at any given moment, of
course, there is a huge tribe of Barries and Deepings and Dells who simply don’t notice
what is happening. Where Miller’s work is symptomatically important is in its avoidance
of any of these attitudes. He is neither pushing the world-process forward nor trying to
drag it back, but on the other hand he is by no means ignoring it. I should say that he
believes in the impending ruin of Western Civilization much more firmly than the
majority of ‘revolutionary’ writers; only he does not feel called upon to do anything
about it. He is fiddling While Rome is burning, and, unlike the enonnous majority of
people who do this, fiddling with his face towards the flames.
In MAX AND THE WHITE PHAGOCYTES there is one of those revealing passages in
which a writer tells you a great deal about himself while talking about somebody else.
The book includes a long essay on the diaries of Anais Nin, which I have never read,
except for a few fragments, and which I believe have not been published. Miller claims
that they are the only true feminine writing that has ever appeared, whatever that may
mean. But the interesting passage is one in which he compares Anais Nin — evidently a
completely subjective, introverted writer — to Jonah in the whale’s belly. In passing he
refers to an essay that Aldous Huxley wrote some years ago about El Greco’s picture,
The Dream of Philip the Second. Huxley remarks that the people in El Greco’s pictures
always look as though they were in the bellies of whales, and professes to find something
peculiarly horrible in the idea of being in a ‘visceral prison’. Miller retorts that, on the
contrary, there are many worse things than being swallowed by whales, and the passage
makes it dear that he himself finds the idea rather attractive. Here he is touching upon
what is probably a very widespread fantasy. It is perhaps worth noticing that everyone, at
least every English-speaking person, invariably speaks of Jonah and the WHALE. Of
course the creature that swallowed Jonah was a fish, and was so described in the Bible
(Jonah i. 17), but children naturally confuse it with a whale, and this fragment of baby-
talk is habitually carried into later life — a sign, perhaps, of the hold that the Jonah myth
has upon our imaginations. For the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable,
cosy, homelike thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to
escape, but in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of
course, quite obvious why. The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult.
There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber
between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference,
no matter what HAPPENS. A storm that would sink ah the battleships in the world would
hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale’s own movements would probably be
imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface waves or shooting down
into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but
you would never notice the difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable
stage of irresponsibility. And however it may be with Anais Nin, there is no question that
Miller himself is inside the whale. Ah his best and most characteristic passages are
written from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted —
quite the contrary. In his case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no
impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has perfonned the
essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive,
ACCEPTING.
It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism, implying either complete
unbelief or else a degree of belief amounting to mysticism. The attitude is ‘JE M’EN
FOUS’ or ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him’, whichever way you like to look
at it; for practical purposes both are identical, the moral in either case being ‘Sit on your
bum’. But in a time like ours, is this a defensible attitude? Notice that it is almost
impossible to refrain from asking this question. At the moment of writing, we are still in a
period in which it is taken for granted that books ought always to be positive, serious, and
‘constructive’. A dozen years ago this idea would have been greeted with titters. (‘My
dear aunt, one doesn’t write about anything, one just WRITES. ’) Then the pendulum
swung away from the frivolous notion that art is merely technique, but it swung a very
long distance, to the point of asserting that a book can only be ‘good’ if it is founded on a
‘true’ vision of life. Naturally the people who believe this also believe that they are in
posssion of the truth themselves. Catholic critics, for instance, tend to claim that books
arc only ‘good’ when they are of Catholic tendency. Marxist critics make the same claim
more boldy for Marxist books. For instance, Mr Edward Upward (‘A Marxist
Interpretation of Literature,’ in the MIND IN CHAINS):
Literary criticism which aims at being Marxist must. . . proclaim that no book written at
the present time can be ‘good’ unless it is written from a Marxist or near-Marxist
viewpoint.
Various other writers have made similar or comparable statements. Mr Upward italicizes
‘at the present time’ because, he realizes that you cannot, for instance, dismiss HAMLET
on the ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist. Nevertheless his interesting essay only
glances very shortly at this difficulty. Much of the literature that comes to us out of the
past is penneated by and in fact founded on beliefs (the belief in the immortality of the
soul, for example) which now seem to us false and in some cases contemptibly silly. Yet
if is ‘good’ literature, if survival is any test. Mr Upward would no doubt answer that a
belief which was appropriate several centuries ago might be inappropriate and therefore
stultifying now. But this does not get one much farther, because it assumes that in any
age there will be ONE body of belief which is the current approximation to truth, and that
the best literature of the time will be more or less in hannony with it. Actually no such
uniformity has ever existed. In seventeenth-century England, for instance, there was a
religious and political cleavage which distinctly resembled the left-right antagonism of
to-day. Looking back, most modern people would feel that the bourgeois-Puritan
viewpoint was a better approximation to truth than the Catholic-feudal one. But it is
certainly not the case that all or even a majority of the best writers of the time were
puritans. And more than this, there exist ‘good’ writers whose world-view would in any
age be recognized false and silly. Edgar Allan Poe is an example. Poe’s outlook is at best
a wild romanticism and at worst is not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense.
Why is it, then that stories like The Black Cat, The Tell-tale Heart, The Fall of the House
of Usher and so forth, which might very nearly have been written by a lunatic, do not
convey a feeling of falsity? Because they are true within a certain framework, they keep
the rules of their own peculiar world, like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to write
successfully about such a world you have got to believe in it. One sees the difference
immediately if one compares Poe’s TALES with what is, in my opinion, an insincere
attempt to work up a similar atmosphere, Julian Green’s MINUIT. The thing that
immediately strikes one about MINUIT is that there is no reason why any of the events in
it should happen. Everything is completely arbitrary; there is no emotional sequence. But
this is exactly what one does NOT feel with Poe’s stories. Their maniacal logic, in its
own setting, is quite convincing. When, for instance, the drunkard seizes the black cat
and cuts its eye out with his penknife, one knows exactly WHY he did it, even to the
point of feeling that one would have done the same oneself. It seems therefore that for a
creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity. Even
Mr Upward would not claim that a writer needs nothing beyond a Marxist training. He
also needs a talent. But talent, apparently, is a matter of being able to care, of really
BELIEVING in your beliefs, whether they are true or false. The difference between, for
instance, Celine and Evelyn Waugh is a difference of emotional intensity. It is the
difference between genuine despair and a despair that is at least partly a pretence. And
with this there goes another consideration which is perhaps less obvious: that there are
occasions when an ‘untrue’ belief is more likely to be sincerely held than a ‘true’ one.
If one looks at the books of personal reminiscence written about the war of 1914-18, one
notices that nearly all that have remained readable after a lapse of time are written from a
passive, negative angle. They are the records of something completely meaningless, a
nightmare happening in a void. That was not actually the truth about the war, but it was
the truth about the individual reaction. The soldier advancing into a machine-gun barrage
or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that here was an appalling
experience in which he was all but helpless.
He was likelier to make a good book out of
his helplessness and his ignorance than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in
perspective. As for the books that were written during the war itself, the best of them
were nearly all the work of people who simply turned their backs and tried not to notice
that the war was happening. Mr E. M. Forster has described how in 1917 he read
Prufrock and other of Eliot’s early poems, and how it heartened him at such a time to get
hold of poems that were ‘innocent of public-spiritedness’:
They sang of private disgust and diffidence, and of people who seemed genuine because
they were unattractive or weak. . . . Here was a protest, and a feeble one, and the more
congenial for being o feeble. . . . He who could turn aside to complain of ladies and
drawing rooms preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human
heritage.
That is very well said. Mr MacNeice, in the book I have referred to already, quotes this
passage and somewhat smugly adds:
Ten years later less feeble protests were to be made by poets and the human heritage
carried on rather differently. . . . The contemplation of a world of fragments becomes
boring and Eliot’s successors are more interested in tidying it up.
Similar remarks are scattered throughout Mr MacNeice’s book. What he wishes us to
believe is that Eliot’s ‘successors’ (meaning Mr MacNeice and his friends) have in some
way ‘protested’ more effectively than Eliot did by publishing Prufrock at the moment
when the Allied armies were assaulting the Hindenburg Line. Just where these ‘protests’
are to be found I do not know. But in the contrast between Mr Forster’s comment and Mr
MacNeice’s lies all the difference between a man who knows what the 1914-18 war was
like and a man who barely remembers it. The truth is that in 1917 there was nothing that
a thinking and a sensitive person could do, except to remain human, if possible. And a
gesture of helplessness, even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had
been a soldier fighting in the Great War, I would sooner have got hold of Prufrock than
THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND or Horatio Bottomley’s LETTERS TO THE
BOYS IN THE TRENCHES. I should have felt, like Mr Forster, that by simply standing
aloof and keeping touch with pre-war emotions, Eliot was carrying on the human
heritage. What a relief it would have been at such a time, to read about the hesitations of
a middle-aged highbrow with a bald spot! So different from bayonet-drill! After the
bombs and the food-queues and the recruiting-posters, a human voice! What a relief!
But, after all, the war of 1914-18 was only a heightened moment in an almost continuous
crisis. At this date it hardly even needs a war to bring home to us the disintegration of our
society and the increasing helplessness of all, decent people. It is for this reason that I
think that the passive, non-co-operative attitude implied in Henry Miller’s work is
justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people OUGHT to feel, it probably
comes somewhere near to expressing what they DO feel. Once again it is the human
voice among the bomb-explosions, a friendly American voice, ‘innocent of public-
spiritedness’. No sermons, merely the subjective truth. And along those lines, apparently,
it is still possible for a good novel to be written. Not necessarily an edifying novel, but a
novel worth reading and likely to be remembered after it is read.
While I have been writing this essay another European war has broken out. It will either
last several years and tear Western civilization to pieces, or it will end inconclusively and
prepare the way for yet another war which will do the job once and for all. But war is
only ‘peace intensified’. What is quite obviously happening, war or no war, is the break-
up of LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture. Until recently the
full implications of this were not foreseen, because it was generally imagined that
socialism could preserve and even enlarge the atmosphere of liberalism. It is now
beginning to be realized how false this idea was. Almost certainly we are moving into an
age of totalitarian dictatorships — an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a
deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to
be stamped out of existence. But this means that literature, in the form in which we know
it, must suffer at least a temporary death. The literature of liberalism is coming to an end
and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely imaginable. As for
the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg; he is merely an anachronism, a hangover
from the bourgeois age, as surely doomed as the hippopotamus. Miller seems to me a
man out of the common because he saw and proclaimed this fact a long while before
most of his contemporaries — at a time, indeed, when many of them were actually
burbling about a renaissance of literature. Wyndham Lewis had said years earlier that the
major history of the English language was finished, but he was basing this on different
and rather trivial reasons. But from now onwards the all-important fact for the creative
writers going to be that this is not a writer’s world. That does not mean that he cannot
help to bring the new society into being, but he can take no part in the process AS A
WRITER. For AS A WRITER he is a liberal, and what is happening is the destruction of
liberalism. It seems likely, therefore, that in the remaining years of free speech any novel
worth reading will follow more or less along the lines that Miller has followed — I do not
mean in technique or subject matter, but in implied outlook. The passive attitude will
come back, and it will be more consciously passive than before. Progress and reaction
have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism —
robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale — or rather,
admit you are inside the whale (for you ARE, of course). Give yourself over to the worid-
process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it; simply accept it, endure
it, record it. That seems to be the fonnula, that any sensitive novelist is now likely to
adopt. A novel on more positive, ‘constructive’ lines, and not emotionally spurious, is at
present very difficult to imagine.
But do I mean by this that Miller is a ‘great author’, a new hope for English prose?
Nothing of the kind. Miller himself would be the last to claim or want any such thing. No
doubt he will go on writing — anybody who has ones started always goes on writing — and
associated with him there are a number of writers of approximately the same tendency,
Lawrence Durrell, Michael Fraenkel and others, almost amounting to a ‘school’. But he
himself seems to me essentially a man of one book. Sooner or later I should expect him to
descend into unintelligibility, or into charlatanism: there are signs of both in his later
work. His last book, TROPIC OF CAPRICORN, I have not even read. This was not
because I did not want to read it, but because the police and Customs authorities have so
far managed to prevent me from getting hold of it. But it would surprise me if it came
anywhere near TROPIC OF CANCER or the opening chapters of BLACK SPRING. Like
certain other autobiographical novelists, he had it in him to do just one thing perfectly,
and he did it. Considering what the fiction of the nineteen-thirties has been like, that is
something.
Miller’s books are published by the Obelisk Press in Paris. What will happen to the
Obelisk Press, now that war has broken out and Jack Kathane, the publisher, is dead, I do
not know, but at any rate the books are still procurable. I earnestly counsel anyone who
has not done so to read at least TROPIC OF CANCER. With a little ingenuity, or by
paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it
disgust you, it will stick in your memory. It is also an ‘important’ book, in a sense
different from the sense in which that word is generally used. As a rule novels are spoken
of as ‘important’ when they are either a ‘terrible indictment’ of something or other or
when they introduce some technical innovation. Neither of these applies to TROPIC OF
CANCER. Its importance is merely symptomatic. Here in my opinion is the only
imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-
speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will
probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single
glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere
Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. Symptomatically,
that is more significant than the mere fact that five thousand novels are published in
England every year and four thousand nine hundred of them are tripe. It is a
demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself
into its new shape.
THE ART OF DONALD MCGILL (1941)
Who does not know the ‘comics’ of the cheap stationers’ windows, the penny or
twopenny coloured post cards with their endless succession of fat women in tight
bathing-dresses and their crude drawing and unbearable colours, chiefly hedge-
sparrow ’s-egg tint and Post Office red?
This question ought to be rhetorical, but it is curious fact that many people seem to be
unaware of the existence of these things, or else to have a vague notion that they are
something to be found only at the seaside, like nigger minstrels or peppermint rock.
Actually they are on sale everywhere — they can be bought at nearly any Woolworth’s,
for example — and they are evidently produced in enormous numbers, new series
constantly appearing. They are not to be confused with the various other types of comic
illustrated post card, such as the sentimental ones dealing with puppies and kittens or the
Wendyish, sub-pomographic ones which exploit the love affairs of children. They are a
genre of their own, specializing in very Tow’ humour, the mother-in-law, baby’s-nappy,
policemen’ s-boot type of joke, and distinguishable from all the other kinds by having no
artistic pretensions. Some half-dozen publishing houses issue them, though the people
who draw them seem not to be numerous at any one time.
I have associated them especially with the name of Donald McGill because he is not only
the most prolific and by far the best of contemporary post card artists, but also the most
representative, the most perfect in the tradition. Who Donald McGill is, I do not know.
He is apparently a trade name, for at least one series of post cards is issued simply as
‘The Donald McGill Comics’, but he is also unquestionable a real person with a style of
drawing which is recognizable at a glance. Anyone who examines his post cards in bulk
will notice that many of them are not despicable even as drawings, but it would be mere
dilettantism to pretend that they have any direct aesthetic value. A comic post card is
simply an illustration to a joke, invariably a ‘low’ joke, and it stands or falls by its ability
to raise a laugh. Beyond that it has only ‘ideological’ interest. McGill is a clever
draughtsman with a real caricaturist’s touch in the drawing of faces, but the special value
of his post cards is that they are so completely typical. They represent, as it were, the
nonn of the comic post card. Without being in the least imitative, they are exactly what
comic post cards have been any time these last forty years, and from them the meaning
and purpose of the whole genre can be inferred.
Get hold of a dozen of these things, preferably McGill’s — if you pick out from a pile the
ones that seem to you funniest, you will probably find that most of them are McGill’s —
and spread them out on a table. What do you see?
Your first impression is of overpowering vulgarity. This is quite apart from the ever-
present obscenity, and apart also from the hideousness of the colours. They have an utter
low-ness of mental atmosphere which comes out not only in the nature of the jokes but,
even more, in the grotesque, staring, blatant quality of the drawings. The designs, like
those of a child, are full of heavy lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in them,
every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and vacuous, the
women monstrously paradied, with bottoms like Hottentots. Your second impression,
however, is of indefinable familiarity. What do these things remind you of? What are
they ’so like? In the first place, of course, they remind you of the barely different post
cards which you probably gazed at in your childhood. But more than this, what you are
really looking at is something as traditional as Greek tragedy, a sort of sub-world of
smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is a part of Western European
consciousness. Not that the jokes, taken one by one, are necessarily stale. Not being
debarred from smuttiness, comic post cards repeat themselves less often than the joke
columns in reputable magazines, but their basic subject-matter, the KIND of joke they are
aiming at, never varies. A few are genuinely witty, in a Max Millerish style. Examples:
‘I like seeing experienced girls home. ’
‘But I’m not experienced! ’
‘You’re not home yet! ’
‘I’ve been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you get yours? ’
‘I left off struggling. ’
JUDGE: ‘You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this woman? ’
Co — respondent: ‘Not a wink, my lord! ’
In general, however, they are not witty, but humorous, and it must be said for McGill’s
post cards, in particular, that the drawing is often a good deal funnier than the joke
beneath it. Obviously the outstanding characteristic of comic cards is their obscenity, and
I must discuss that more fully later. But I give here a rough analysis of their habitual
subject-matter, with such explanatory remarks as seem to be needed:
SEX. — More than half, perhaps three-quarters, of the jokes are sex jokes, ranging from
the harmless to the all but unprintable. First favourite is probably the illegitimate baby.
Typical captions: ‘Could you exchange this lucky charm for a baby’s feeding-bottle? ’
‘She didn’t ask me to the christening, so I’m not going to the wedding. ’ Also newlyweds,
old maids, nude statues and women in bathing-dresses. All of these are IPSO FACTO
funny, mere mention of them being enough to raise a laugh. The cuckoldry joke is
seldom exploited, and there are no references to homosexuality.
Conventions of the sex joke:
(i) Marriage only benefits women. Every man is plotting seduction and every woman is
plotting marriage. No woman ever remained unmarried voluntarily.
(ii) Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-preserved and good-
looking people beyond their first youth are never represented. The amorous
honeymooning couple reappear as the grim-visaged wife and shapeless, moustachioed,
red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being allowed for.
HOME LIFE — Next to sex, the henpecked husband is the favourite joke. Typical caption:
‘Did they get an X-ray of your wife’s jaw at the hospital? ’ — ‘No, they got a moving
picture instead. ’
Conventions:
(i) There is no such thing as a happy marriage.
(ii) No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument. Drunkenness — Both
drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto funny.
Conventions:
(i) All drunken men have optical illusions.
(ii) Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men. Drunken youths or women
are never represented.
W. C. JOKES — There is not a large number of these. Chamber pots are ipso facto funny,
and so are public lavatories. A typical post card captioned ‘A Friend in Need’, shows a
man’s hat blown off his head and disappearing down the steps of a ladies’ lavatory.
INTER-WORKING-CLASS SNOBBERY — Much in these post cards suggests that they
are aimed at the better-off working class and poorer middle class. There are many jokes
turning on malapropisms, illiteracy, dropped aitches and the rough manners of slum
dwellers. Countless post cards show draggled hags of the stage-charwoman type
exchanging ‘unladylike’ abuse. Typical repartee: ‘I wish you were a statue and I was a
pigeon! ’ A certain number produced since the war treat evacuation from the anti-evacuee
angle. There are the usual jokes about tramps, beggars and criminals, and the comic
maidservant appears fairly frequently. Also the comic navvy, bargee, etc. ; but there are
no anti-Trade-Union jokes. Broadly speaking, everyone with much over or much under
£5 a week is regarded as laughable. The ‘swell’ is almost as automatically a figure of fun
as the slum-dweller.
STOCK FIGURES — Foreigners seldom or never appear. The chief locality joke is the
Scotsman, who is almost inexhaustible. The lawyer is always a swindler, the clergyman
always a nervous idiot who says the wrong thing. The ‘knut’ or ‘masher’ still appears,
almost as in Edwardian days, in out-of-date looking evening-clothes and an opera hat, or
even spats and a knobby cane. Another survival is the Suffragette, one of the big jokes of
the pre-1914 period and too valuable to be relinquished. She has reappeared, unchanged
in physical appearance, as the Feminist lecturer or Temperance fanatic. A feature of the
last few years is the complete absence of anti-Jew post cards. The ‘Jew joke’, always
somewhat more ill-natured than the ‘Scotch joke’, disappeared abruptly soon after the
rise of Hitler.
POLITICS — Any contemporary event, cult or activity which has comic possibilities (for
example, ‘free love’, feminism, A. R. P. , nudism) rapidly finds its way into the picture post
cards, but their general atmosphere is extremely old-fashioned. The implied political
outlook is a Radicalism appropriate to about the year 1900. At normal times they are not
only not patriotic, but go in for a mild guying of patriotism, with jokes about ‘God save
the King’, the Union Jack, etc. The European situation only began to reflect itself in them
at some time in 1939, and first did so through the comic aspects of A. R. P. Even at this
date few post cards mention the war except in A. R. P. jokes (fat woman stuck in the
mouth of Anderson shelter: wardens neglecting their duty while young woman undresses
at window she has forgotten to black out, etc. , etc. ) A few express anti-Hitler sentiments
of a not very vindictive kind. One, not McGill’s, shows Hitler with the usual
hypertrophied backside, bending down to pick a flower. Caption; ‘What would you do,
chums? ’ This is about as high a flight of patriotism as any post card is likely to attain.
Unlike the twopenny weekly papers, comic post cards are not the product of any great
monopoly company, and evidendy they are not regarded as having any importance in
forming public opinion. There is no sign in them of any attempt to induce an outlook
acceptable to the ruling class.
Here one comes back to the outstanding, all-important feature of comic post cards — their
obscenity. It is by this that everyone remembers them, and it is also central to their
purpose, though not in a way diat is immediately obvious.
A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic post cards is the woman with the stuck-out
behind. In perhaps half of them, or more than half, even when the point of the joke has
nothing to do with sex, the same female figure appears, a plump ‘voluptuous’ figure with
the dress clinging to it as tightly as another skin and with breasts or buttocks grossly
over-emphasized according to which way it is turned. There can be no doubt that these
pictures lift the lid off a very widespread repression, natural enough in a country whose
women when young tend to be slim to the point of skimpiness. But at the same time the
McGill post card — and this applies to all other post cards in this genre — is not intended
as pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography. The Hottentot figures of the
women are caricatures of the Englishman’s secret ideal, not portraits of it. When one
examines McGill’s post cards more closely, one notices that his brand of humour only
has a meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code. Whereas in papers like ESQUIRE,
for instance, or LA VIE PARISIENNE, the imaginary background of the jokes is always
promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the McGill post card
is marriage.
was a Fatherland and — at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts — a Fuehrer. All the
loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing
back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory — all in
one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, saviour — all in one word, Stalin. God —
Stalin. The devil — Hitler. Heaven — Moscow. Hell — Berlin. All the gaps were filled up.
So, after all, the ‘Communism’ of the Ebglish intellectual is something explicable
enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated
But there is one other thing that undoubtedly contributed to the cult of Russia among the
English intelligentsia during these years, and that is the softness and security of life in
England itself. With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the
over-whelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If
you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a
despotic regime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the
soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of
the Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary
executions, imprisonment without trial etc. , etc. , are too remote to be terrifying. They can
swallow totalitarianism BECAUSE they have no experience of anything except
liberalism. Look, for instance, at this extract from Mr Auden’s poem ‘Spain’ (incidentally
this poem is one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war):
To-morrow for the young, the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.
To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
The second stanza is intended as a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a day in the life of a ‘good
party man’. In the -morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes’ interlude to stifle
‘bourgeois’ remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening
chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying. But notice the phrase
‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a
WORD. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen
the bodies of numbers of murdered men — I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered.
Therefore I have some conception of what murder means — the terror, the hatred, the
howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to
be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary,
but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is
‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’, or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s brand of
amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else
when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by
people who don’t even know that fire is hot. The warmongering to which the English
intelligentsia gave themselves up in the period 1935-9 was largely based on a sense of
personal immunity. The attitude was very different in France, where the military service
is hard to dodge and even literary men know the weight of a pack.
Towards the end of Mr Cyril Connolly’s recent book, ENEMIES OF PROMISE, there
occurs an interesting and revealing passage. The first part of the book, is, more or less, an
evaluation of present-day literature. Mr Connolly belongs exactly to the generation of the
writers of ‘the movement’, and with not many reservations their values are his values. It
is interesting to notice that among prose-writers her admires chiefly those specialising in
violence — the would-be tough American school, Hemingway, etc. The latter part of the
book, however, is autobiographical and consists of an account, fascinatingly accurate, of
life at a preparatory school and Eton in the years 1910-20. Mr Connolly ends by
remarking:
Were I to deduce anything from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called THE
THEORY OF PERMANENT ADOLESCENCE. It is the theory that the experiences
undergone by boys at the great public schools are so intense as to dominate their lives and
to arrest their development.
When you read the second sentence in this passage, your natural impulse is to look for
the misprint. Presumably there is a ‘not’ left out, or something. But no, not a bit of it! He
means it! And what is more, he is merely speaking the truth, in an inverted fashion.
‘Cultured’ middle-class life has reached a depth of softness at which a public-school
education — five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery — can actually be looked back
upon as an eventful period. To nearly all the writers who have counted during the thirties,
what more has ever happened than Mr Connolly records in ENEMIES OF PROMISE? It
is the same pattern all the time; public school, university, a few trips abroad, then
London. Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour —
hardly even words. No wonder that the huge tribe known as ‘the right left people’ found
it so easy to condone the purge-and-Ogpu side of the Russian regime and the horrors of
the first Five-Year Plan. They were so gloriously incapable of understanding what it all
meant.
By 1937 the whole of the intelligentsia was mentally at war. Left-wing thought had
narrowed down to ‘anti-Fascism’, i. e. to a negative, and a torrent of hate-literature
directed against Germany and the politicians supposedly friendly to Germany was
pouring from the Press. The thing that, to me, was truly frightening about the war in
Spain was not such violence as I witnessed, nor even the party feuds behind the lines, but
the immediate reappearance in left-wing circles of the mental atmosphere of the Great
War. The very people who for twenty years had sniggered over their own superiority to
war hysteria were the ones who rushed straight back into the mental slum of 1915. All the
familiar wartime idiocies, spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff. Are you a good
anti-Fascist? ), the retailing of atrocity stories, came back into vogue as though the
intervening years had never happened. Before the end of the Spanish war, and even
before Munich, some of the better of the left-wing writers were beginning to squirm.
Neither Auden nor, on the whole, Spender wrote about the Spanish war in quite the vein
that was expected of them. Since then there has been a change of feeling and much
dismay and confusion, because the actual course of events has made nonsense of the left-
wing orthodoxy of the last few years. But then it did not need very great acuteness to see
that much of it was nonsense from the start. There is no certainty, therefore, that the next
orthodoxy to emerge will be any better than the last.
On the whole the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer
does well to keep out of politics. For any writer who accepts or partially accepts the
discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or
shut up. It is, of course, possible to toe the line and go on writing — after a fashion. Any
Marxist can demonstrate with the greatest of ease that ‘bourgeois’ liberty of thought is an
illusion. But when he has finished his demonstration there remains the psychological
FACT that without this ‘bourgeois’ liberty the creative powers wither away. In the future
a totalitarian literature may arise, but it will be quite different from anything we can now
imagine. Literature as we know it is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a
minimum of censorship. And this is even truer of prose than of verse. It is probably not a
coincidence that the best writers of the thirties have been poets. The atmosphere of
orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the
novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. How many Roman Catholics have
been good novelists? Even the handful one could name have usually been bad Catholics.
The novel is practically a Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the
autonomous individual. No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has been so barren
of imaginative prose as the nineteen-thirties. There have been good poems, good
sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but practically no fiction of any value at all. From
1933 onwards the mental climate was increasingly against it. Anyone sensitive enough to
be touched by the ZEITGEIST was also involved in politics. Not everyone, of course,
was definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone was on its periphery and
more or less mixed up in propaganda campaigns and squalid controversies. Communists
and near-Communists had a disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It
was a time of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments you were expected to
lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies; at the best a sort of voluntary
censorship (‘Ought I to say this? Is it pro-Fascist? ’) was at work in nearly everyone’s
mind. It is almost inconceivable that good novels should be written in such an
atmosphere. ‘Good novels are not written by by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who
are conscienee-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people
who are NOT FRIGHTENED. This brings me back to Henry Miller.
Ill
If this were a likely, moment for the launching of ‘schools’ literature, Henry Miller might
be the starting-point of a new ‘school’. He does at any rate mark an unexpected swing of
the pendulum. In his books one gets right away from the ‘political animal’ and back to a
viewpoint not only individualistic but completely passive — the view -point of a man who
believes the world-process to be outside his control and who in any case hardly wishes to
control it.
I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing trrough Paris on my way to
Spain. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the
Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible tenns that to go to Spain at that
moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely
selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things FROM
A SENSE OBLIGATION was sheer stupidity. In any case my Ideas about combating
Fascism, defending democracy, etc. , etc. , were all baloney. Our civilization was destined
to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it
as human — a prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit
throughout his work. Everywhere there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm, and
almost everywhere the implied belief that it doesn’t matter. The only political declaration
which, so far as I know, he has ever made in print is a purely negative one. A year or so
ago an American magazine, the MARXIST QUARTERLY, sent out a questionnaire to
various American writers asking them to define their attitude on the subject of war.
Miller replied in terms of extreme pacifism, an individual refusal to fight, with no
apparent wish to convert others to the same opinion — practically, in fact, a declaration of
irresponsibility.
However, there is more than one kind of irresponsibility. As a rule, writers who do not
wish to identify themselves with the historical process at the moment either ignore it or
fight against if. If they can ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can understand it
well enough to want to fight against it, they probably have enough vision to realize that
they cannot win. Look, for instance, at a poem like ‘The Scholar Gipsy’, with its railing
against the ‘strange disease of modern life’ and its magnificent defeatist simile is the final
stanza. It expresses one of the normal literary attitudes, perhaps actually the prevailing
attitude during the last hundred years. And on the other hand there are the ‘progressives’,
the yea-sayers, the Shaw-Wells type, always leaping forward to embrace the ego-
projections which they mistake for the future. On the whole the writers of the twenties
took the first line and the writers of the thirties the second. And at any given moment, of
course, there is a huge tribe of Barries and Deepings and Dells who simply don’t notice
what is happening. Where Miller’s work is symptomatically important is in its avoidance
of any of these attitudes. He is neither pushing the world-process forward nor trying to
drag it back, but on the other hand he is by no means ignoring it. I should say that he
believes in the impending ruin of Western Civilization much more firmly than the
majority of ‘revolutionary’ writers; only he does not feel called upon to do anything
about it. He is fiddling While Rome is burning, and, unlike the enonnous majority of
people who do this, fiddling with his face towards the flames.
In MAX AND THE WHITE PHAGOCYTES there is one of those revealing passages in
which a writer tells you a great deal about himself while talking about somebody else.
The book includes a long essay on the diaries of Anais Nin, which I have never read,
except for a few fragments, and which I believe have not been published. Miller claims
that they are the only true feminine writing that has ever appeared, whatever that may
mean. But the interesting passage is one in which he compares Anais Nin — evidently a
completely subjective, introverted writer — to Jonah in the whale’s belly. In passing he
refers to an essay that Aldous Huxley wrote some years ago about El Greco’s picture,
The Dream of Philip the Second. Huxley remarks that the people in El Greco’s pictures
always look as though they were in the bellies of whales, and professes to find something
peculiarly horrible in the idea of being in a ‘visceral prison’. Miller retorts that, on the
contrary, there are many worse things than being swallowed by whales, and the passage
makes it dear that he himself finds the idea rather attractive. Here he is touching upon
what is probably a very widespread fantasy. It is perhaps worth noticing that everyone, at
least every English-speaking person, invariably speaks of Jonah and the WHALE. Of
course the creature that swallowed Jonah was a fish, and was so described in the Bible
(Jonah i. 17), but children naturally confuse it with a whale, and this fragment of baby-
talk is habitually carried into later life — a sign, perhaps, of the hold that the Jonah myth
has upon our imaginations. For the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable,
cosy, homelike thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to
escape, but in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of
course, quite obvious why. The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult.
There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber
between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference,
no matter what HAPPENS. A storm that would sink ah the battleships in the world would
hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale’s own movements would probably be
imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface waves or shooting down
into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but
you would never notice the difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable
stage of irresponsibility. And however it may be with Anais Nin, there is no question that
Miller himself is inside the whale. Ah his best and most characteristic passages are
written from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted —
quite the contrary. In his case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no
impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has perfonned the
essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive,
ACCEPTING.
It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism, implying either complete
unbelief or else a degree of belief amounting to mysticism. The attitude is ‘JE M’EN
FOUS’ or ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him’, whichever way you like to look
at it; for practical purposes both are identical, the moral in either case being ‘Sit on your
bum’. But in a time like ours, is this a defensible attitude? Notice that it is almost
impossible to refrain from asking this question. At the moment of writing, we are still in a
period in which it is taken for granted that books ought always to be positive, serious, and
‘constructive’. A dozen years ago this idea would have been greeted with titters. (‘My
dear aunt, one doesn’t write about anything, one just WRITES. ’) Then the pendulum
swung away from the frivolous notion that art is merely technique, but it swung a very
long distance, to the point of asserting that a book can only be ‘good’ if it is founded on a
‘true’ vision of life. Naturally the people who believe this also believe that they are in
posssion of the truth themselves. Catholic critics, for instance, tend to claim that books
arc only ‘good’ when they are of Catholic tendency. Marxist critics make the same claim
more boldy for Marxist books. For instance, Mr Edward Upward (‘A Marxist
Interpretation of Literature,’ in the MIND IN CHAINS):
Literary criticism which aims at being Marxist must. . . proclaim that no book written at
the present time can be ‘good’ unless it is written from a Marxist or near-Marxist
viewpoint.
Various other writers have made similar or comparable statements. Mr Upward italicizes
‘at the present time’ because, he realizes that you cannot, for instance, dismiss HAMLET
on the ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist. Nevertheless his interesting essay only
glances very shortly at this difficulty. Much of the literature that comes to us out of the
past is penneated by and in fact founded on beliefs (the belief in the immortality of the
soul, for example) which now seem to us false and in some cases contemptibly silly. Yet
if is ‘good’ literature, if survival is any test. Mr Upward would no doubt answer that a
belief which was appropriate several centuries ago might be inappropriate and therefore
stultifying now. But this does not get one much farther, because it assumes that in any
age there will be ONE body of belief which is the current approximation to truth, and that
the best literature of the time will be more or less in hannony with it. Actually no such
uniformity has ever existed. In seventeenth-century England, for instance, there was a
religious and political cleavage which distinctly resembled the left-right antagonism of
to-day. Looking back, most modern people would feel that the bourgeois-Puritan
viewpoint was a better approximation to truth than the Catholic-feudal one. But it is
certainly not the case that all or even a majority of the best writers of the time were
puritans. And more than this, there exist ‘good’ writers whose world-view would in any
age be recognized false and silly. Edgar Allan Poe is an example. Poe’s outlook is at best
a wild romanticism and at worst is not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense.
Why is it, then that stories like The Black Cat, The Tell-tale Heart, The Fall of the House
of Usher and so forth, which might very nearly have been written by a lunatic, do not
convey a feeling of falsity? Because they are true within a certain framework, they keep
the rules of their own peculiar world, like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to write
successfully about such a world you have got to believe in it. One sees the difference
immediately if one compares Poe’s TALES with what is, in my opinion, an insincere
attempt to work up a similar atmosphere, Julian Green’s MINUIT. The thing that
immediately strikes one about MINUIT is that there is no reason why any of the events in
it should happen. Everything is completely arbitrary; there is no emotional sequence. But
this is exactly what one does NOT feel with Poe’s stories. Their maniacal logic, in its
own setting, is quite convincing. When, for instance, the drunkard seizes the black cat
and cuts its eye out with his penknife, one knows exactly WHY he did it, even to the
point of feeling that one would have done the same oneself. It seems therefore that for a
creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity. Even
Mr Upward would not claim that a writer needs nothing beyond a Marxist training. He
also needs a talent. But talent, apparently, is a matter of being able to care, of really
BELIEVING in your beliefs, whether they are true or false. The difference between, for
instance, Celine and Evelyn Waugh is a difference of emotional intensity. It is the
difference between genuine despair and a despair that is at least partly a pretence. And
with this there goes another consideration which is perhaps less obvious: that there are
occasions when an ‘untrue’ belief is more likely to be sincerely held than a ‘true’ one.
If one looks at the books of personal reminiscence written about the war of 1914-18, one
notices that nearly all that have remained readable after a lapse of time are written from a
passive, negative angle. They are the records of something completely meaningless, a
nightmare happening in a void. That was not actually the truth about the war, but it was
the truth about the individual reaction. The soldier advancing into a machine-gun barrage
or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that here was an appalling
experience in which he was all but helpless.
He was likelier to make a good book out of
his helplessness and his ignorance than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in
perspective. As for the books that were written during the war itself, the best of them
were nearly all the work of people who simply turned their backs and tried not to notice
that the war was happening. Mr E. M. Forster has described how in 1917 he read
Prufrock and other of Eliot’s early poems, and how it heartened him at such a time to get
hold of poems that were ‘innocent of public-spiritedness’:
They sang of private disgust and diffidence, and of people who seemed genuine because
they were unattractive or weak. . . . Here was a protest, and a feeble one, and the more
congenial for being o feeble. . . . He who could turn aside to complain of ladies and
drawing rooms preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human
heritage.
That is very well said. Mr MacNeice, in the book I have referred to already, quotes this
passage and somewhat smugly adds:
Ten years later less feeble protests were to be made by poets and the human heritage
carried on rather differently. . . . The contemplation of a world of fragments becomes
boring and Eliot’s successors are more interested in tidying it up.
Similar remarks are scattered throughout Mr MacNeice’s book. What he wishes us to
believe is that Eliot’s ‘successors’ (meaning Mr MacNeice and his friends) have in some
way ‘protested’ more effectively than Eliot did by publishing Prufrock at the moment
when the Allied armies were assaulting the Hindenburg Line. Just where these ‘protests’
are to be found I do not know. But in the contrast between Mr Forster’s comment and Mr
MacNeice’s lies all the difference between a man who knows what the 1914-18 war was
like and a man who barely remembers it. The truth is that in 1917 there was nothing that
a thinking and a sensitive person could do, except to remain human, if possible. And a
gesture of helplessness, even of frivolity, might be the best way of doing that. If I had
been a soldier fighting in the Great War, I would sooner have got hold of Prufrock than
THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND or Horatio Bottomley’s LETTERS TO THE
BOYS IN THE TRENCHES. I should have felt, like Mr Forster, that by simply standing
aloof and keeping touch with pre-war emotions, Eliot was carrying on the human
heritage. What a relief it would have been at such a time, to read about the hesitations of
a middle-aged highbrow with a bald spot! So different from bayonet-drill! After the
bombs and the food-queues and the recruiting-posters, a human voice! What a relief!
But, after all, the war of 1914-18 was only a heightened moment in an almost continuous
crisis. At this date it hardly even needs a war to bring home to us the disintegration of our
society and the increasing helplessness of all, decent people. It is for this reason that I
think that the passive, non-co-operative attitude implied in Henry Miller’s work is
justified. Whether or not it is an expression of what people OUGHT to feel, it probably
comes somewhere near to expressing what they DO feel. Once again it is the human
voice among the bomb-explosions, a friendly American voice, ‘innocent of public-
spiritedness’. No sermons, merely the subjective truth. And along those lines, apparently,
it is still possible for a good novel to be written. Not necessarily an edifying novel, but a
novel worth reading and likely to be remembered after it is read.
While I have been writing this essay another European war has broken out. It will either
last several years and tear Western civilization to pieces, or it will end inconclusively and
prepare the way for yet another war which will do the job once and for all. But war is
only ‘peace intensified’. What is quite obviously happening, war or no war, is the break-
up of LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture. Until recently the
full implications of this were not foreseen, because it was generally imagined that
socialism could preserve and even enlarge the atmosphere of liberalism. It is now
beginning to be realized how false this idea was. Almost certainly we are moving into an
age of totalitarian dictatorships — an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a
deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to
be stamped out of existence. But this means that literature, in the form in which we know
it, must suffer at least a temporary death. The literature of liberalism is coming to an end
and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely imaginable. As for
the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg; he is merely an anachronism, a hangover
from the bourgeois age, as surely doomed as the hippopotamus. Miller seems to me a
man out of the common because he saw and proclaimed this fact a long while before
most of his contemporaries — at a time, indeed, when many of them were actually
burbling about a renaissance of literature. Wyndham Lewis had said years earlier that the
major history of the English language was finished, but he was basing this on different
and rather trivial reasons. But from now onwards the all-important fact for the creative
writers going to be that this is not a writer’s world. That does not mean that he cannot
help to bring the new society into being, but he can take no part in the process AS A
WRITER. For AS A WRITER he is a liberal, and what is happening is the destruction of
liberalism. It seems likely, therefore, that in the remaining years of free speech any novel
worth reading will follow more or less along the lines that Miller has followed — I do not
mean in technique or subject matter, but in implied outlook. The passive attitude will
come back, and it will be more consciously passive than before. Progress and reaction
have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism —
robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale — or rather,
admit you are inside the whale (for you ARE, of course). Give yourself over to the worid-
process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it; simply accept it, endure
it, record it. That seems to be the fonnula, that any sensitive novelist is now likely to
adopt. A novel on more positive, ‘constructive’ lines, and not emotionally spurious, is at
present very difficult to imagine.
But do I mean by this that Miller is a ‘great author’, a new hope for English prose?
Nothing of the kind. Miller himself would be the last to claim or want any such thing. No
doubt he will go on writing — anybody who has ones started always goes on writing — and
associated with him there are a number of writers of approximately the same tendency,
Lawrence Durrell, Michael Fraenkel and others, almost amounting to a ‘school’. But he
himself seems to me essentially a man of one book. Sooner or later I should expect him to
descend into unintelligibility, or into charlatanism: there are signs of both in his later
work. His last book, TROPIC OF CAPRICORN, I have not even read. This was not
because I did not want to read it, but because the police and Customs authorities have so
far managed to prevent me from getting hold of it. But it would surprise me if it came
anywhere near TROPIC OF CANCER or the opening chapters of BLACK SPRING. Like
certain other autobiographical novelists, he had it in him to do just one thing perfectly,
and he did it. Considering what the fiction of the nineteen-thirties has been like, that is
something.
Miller’s books are published by the Obelisk Press in Paris. What will happen to the
Obelisk Press, now that war has broken out and Jack Kathane, the publisher, is dead, I do
not know, but at any rate the books are still procurable. I earnestly counsel anyone who
has not done so to read at least TROPIC OF CANCER. With a little ingenuity, or by
paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it
disgust you, it will stick in your memory. It is also an ‘important’ book, in a sense
different from the sense in which that word is generally used. As a rule novels are spoken
of as ‘important’ when they are either a ‘terrible indictment’ of something or other or
when they introduce some technical innovation. Neither of these applies to TROPIC OF
CANCER. Its importance is merely symptomatic. Here in my opinion is the only
imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-
speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will
probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single
glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere
Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. Symptomatically,
that is more significant than the mere fact that five thousand novels are published in
England every year and four thousand nine hundred of them are tripe. It is a
demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself
into its new shape.
THE ART OF DONALD MCGILL (1941)
Who does not know the ‘comics’ of the cheap stationers’ windows, the penny or
twopenny coloured post cards with their endless succession of fat women in tight
bathing-dresses and their crude drawing and unbearable colours, chiefly hedge-
sparrow ’s-egg tint and Post Office red?
This question ought to be rhetorical, but it is curious fact that many people seem to be
unaware of the existence of these things, or else to have a vague notion that they are
something to be found only at the seaside, like nigger minstrels or peppermint rock.
Actually they are on sale everywhere — they can be bought at nearly any Woolworth’s,
for example — and they are evidently produced in enormous numbers, new series
constantly appearing. They are not to be confused with the various other types of comic
illustrated post card, such as the sentimental ones dealing with puppies and kittens or the
Wendyish, sub-pomographic ones which exploit the love affairs of children. They are a
genre of their own, specializing in very Tow’ humour, the mother-in-law, baby’s-nappy,
policemen’ s-boot type of joke, and distinguishable from all the other kinds by having no
artistic pretensions. Some half-dozen publishing houses issue them, though the people
who draw them seem not to be numerous at any one time.
I have associated them especially with the name of Donald McGill because he is not only
the most prolific and by far the best of contemporary post card artists, but also the most
representative, the most perfect in the tradition. Who Donald McGill is, I do not know.
He is apparently a trade name, for at least one series of post cards is issued simply as
‘The Donald McGill Comics’, but he is also unquestionable a real person with a style of
drawing which is recognizable at a glance. Anyone who examines his post cards in bulk
will notice that many of them are not despicable even as drawings, but it would be mere
dilettantism to pretend that they have any direct aesthetic value. A comic post card is
simply an illustration to a joke, invariably a ‘low’ joke, and it stands or falls by its ability
to raise a laugh. Beyond that it has only ‘ideological’ interest. McGill is a clever
draughtsman with a real caricaturist’s touch in the drawing of faces, but the special value
of his post cards is that they are so completely typical. They represent, as it were, the
nonn of the comic post card. Without being in the least imitative, they are exactly what
comic post cards have been any time these last forty years, and from them the meaning
and purpose of the whole genre can be inferred.
Get hold of a dozen of these things, preferably McGill’s — if you pick out from a pile the
ones that seem to you funniest, you will probably find that most of them are McGill’s —
and spread them out on a table. What do you see?
Your first impression is of overpowering vulgarity. This is quite apart from the ever-
present obscenity, and apart also from the hideousness of the colours. They have an utter
low-ness of mental atmosphere which comes out not only in the nature of the jokes but,
even more, in the grotesque, staring, blatant quality of the drawings. The designs, like
those of a child, are full of heavy lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in them,
every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and vacuous, the
women monstrously paradied, with bottoms like Hottentots. Your second impression,
however, is of indefinable familiarity. What do these things remind you of? What are
they ’so like? In the first place, of course, they remind you of the barely different post
cards which you probably gazed at in your childhood. But more than this, what you are
really looking at is something as traditional as Greek tragedy, a sort of sub-world of
smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is a part of Western European
consciousness. Not that the jokes, taken one by one, are necessarily stale. Not being
debarred from smuttiness, comic post cards repeat themselves less often than the joke
columns in reputable magazines, but their basic subject-matter, the KIND of joke they are
aiming at, never varies. A few are genuinely witty, in a Max Millerish style. Examples:
‘I like seeing experienced girls home. ’
‘But I’m not experienced! ’
‘You’re not home yet! ’
‘I’ve been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you get yours? ’
‘I left off struggling. ’
JUDGE: ‘You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this woman? ’
Co — respondent: ‘Not a wink, my lord! ’
In general, however, they are not witty, but humorous, and it must be said for McGill’s
post cards, in particular, that the drawing is often a good deal funnier than the joke
beneath it. Obviously the outstanding characteristic of comic cards is their obscenity, and
I must discuss that more fully later. But I give here a rough analysis of their habitual
subject-matter, with such explanatory remarks as seem to be needed:
SEX. — More than half, perhaps three-quarters, of the jokes are sex jokes, ranging from
the harmless to the all but unprintable. First favourite is probably the illegitimate baby.
Typical captions: ‘Could you exchange this lucky charm for a baby’s feeding-bottle? ’
‘She didn’t ask me to the christening, so I’m not going to the wedding. ’ Also newlyweds,
old maids, nude statues and women in bathing-dresses. All of these are IPSO FACTO
funny, mere mention of them being enough to raise a laugh. The cuckoldry joke is
seldom exploited, and there are no references to homosexuality.
Conventions of the sex joke:
(i) Marriage only benefits women. Every man is plotting seduction and every woman is
plotting marriage. No woman ever remained unmarried voluntarily.
(ii) Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-preserved and good-
looking people beyond their first youth are never represented. The amorous
honeymooning couple reappear as the grim-visaged wife and shapeless, moustachioed,
red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being allowed for.
HOME LIFE — Next to sex, the henpecked husband is the favourite joke. Typical caption:
‘Did they get an X-ray of your wife’s jaw at the hospital? ’ — ‘No, they got a moving
picture instead. ’
Conventions:
(i) There is no such thing as a happy marriage.
(ii) No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument. Drunkenness — Both
drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto funny.
Conventions:
(i) All drunken men have optical illusions.
(ii) Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men. Drunken youths or women
are never represented.
W. C. JOKES — There is not a large number of these. Chamber pots are ipso facto funny,
and so are public lavatories. A typical post card captioned ‘A Friend in Need’, shows a
man’s hat blown off his head and disappearing down the steps of a ladies’ lavatory.
INTER-WORKING-CLASS SNOBBERY — Much in these post cards suggests that they
are aimed at the better-off working class and poorer middle class. There are many jokes
turning on malapropisms, illiteracy, dropped aitches and the rough manners of slum
dwellers. Countless post cards show draggled hags of the stage-charwoman type
exchanging ‘unladylike’ abuse. Typical repartee: ‘I wish you were a statue and I was a
pigeon! ’ A certain number produced since the war treat evacuation from the anti-evacuee
angle. There are the usual jokes about tramps, beggars and criminals, and the comic
maidservant appears fairly frequently. Also the comic navvy, bargee, etc. ; but there are
no anti-Trade-Union jokes. Broadly speaking, everyone with much over or much under
£5 a week is regarded as laughable. The ‘swell’ is almost as automatically a figure of fun
as the slum-dweller.
STOCK FIGURES — Foreigners seldom or never appear. The chief locality joke is the
Scotsman, who is almost inexhaustible. The lawyer is always a swindler, the clergyman
always a nervous idiot who says the wrong thing. The ‘knut’ or ‘masher’ still appears,
almost as in Edwardian days, in out-of-date looking evening-clothes and an opera hat, or
even spats and a knobby cane. Another survival is the Suffragette, one of the big jokes of
the pre-1914 period and too valuable to be relinquished. She has reappeared, unchanged
in physical appearance, as the Feminist lecturer or Temperance fanatic. A feature of the
last few years is the complete absence of anti-Jew post cards. The ‘Jew joke’, always
somewhat more ill-natured than the ‘Scotch joke’, disappeared abruptly soon after the
rise of Hitler.
POLITICS — Any contemporary event, cult or activity which has comic possibilities (for
example, ‘free love’, feminism, A. R. P. , nudism) rapidly finds its way into the picture post
cards, but their general atmosphere is extremely old-fashioned. The implied political
outlook is a Radicalism appropriate to about the year 1900. At normal times they are not
only not patriotic, but go in for a mild guying of patriotism, with jokes about ‘God save
the King’, the Union Jack, etc. The European situation only began to reflect itself in them
at some time in 1939, and first did so through the comic aspects of A. R. P. Even at this
date few post cards mention the war except in A. R. P. jokes (fat woman stuck in the
mouth of Anderson shelter: wardens neglecting their duty while young woman undresses
at window she has forgotten to black out, etc. , etc. ) A few express anti-Hitler sentiments
of a not very vindictive kind. One, not McGill’s, shows Hitler with the usual
hypertrophied backside, bending down to pick a flower. Caption; ‘What would you do,
chums? ’ This is about as high a flight of patriotism as any post card is likely to attain.
Unlike the twopenny weekly papers, comic post cards are not the product of any great
monopoly company, and evidendy they are not regarded as having any importance in
forming public opinion. There is no sign in them of any attempt to induce an outlook
acceptable to the ruling class.
Here one comes back to the outstanding, all-important feature of comic post cards — their
obscenity. It is by this that everyone remembers them, and it is also central to their
purpose, though not in a way diat is immediately obvious.
A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic post cards is the woman with the stuck-out
behind. In perhaps half of them, or more than half, even when the point of the joke has
nothing to do with sex, the same female figure appears, a plump ‘voluptuous’ figure with
the dress clinging to it as tightly as another skin and with breasts or buttocks grossly
over-emphasized according to which way it is turned. There can be no doubt that these
pictures lift the lid off a very widespread repression, natural enough in a country whose
women when young tend to be slim to the point of skimpiness. But at the same time the
McGill post card — and this applies to all other post cards in this genre — is not intended
as pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography. The Hottentot figures of the
women are caricatures of the Englishman’s secret ideal, not portraits of it. When one
examines McGill’s post cards more closely, one notices that his brand of humour only
has a meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code. Whereas in papers like ESQUIRE,
for instance, or LA VIE PARISIENNE, the imaginary background of the jokes is always
promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the McGill post card
is marriage.
