big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very
often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside
the books he asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment
he had gone. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books away
without paying for them; merely to order them was enough--it gave them,
I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real money.
Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold
second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps--used stamps, I
mean. Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all
ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the
peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also
sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have
foretold the Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I
never opened one of them myself, but the people who bought them often
came back and told us how 'true' their horoscopes had been. (Doubtless
any horoscope seems 'true' if it tells you that you are highly attractive
to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.) We did a good
deal of business in children's books, chiefly 'remainders'. Modern books
for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in
the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petronius
Arbiter than PETER PAN, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome
compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we spent a
feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which
are tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It
used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian
sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms used to
come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase from one of
their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: '2 doz. Infant Jesus with
rabbits'.
But our principal sideline was a lending library--the usual 'twopenny
no-deposit' library of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the
book thieves must love those libraries! It is the easiest crime in the
world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence, remove the label and
sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers
generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books
stolen (we used to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers
away by demanding a deposit.
Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town,
and we were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors.
Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London's
reading public. It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in
our library the one who 'went out' the best was--Priestley? Hemingway?
Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second
and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are
read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one
might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of
tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true
that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly
speaking, what one might call the AVERAGE novel--the ordinary, good-bad,
Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel--seems
to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to
respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories
is terrific. One of our subscribers to my knowledge read four or five
detective stories every week for over a year, besides others which he got
from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read
the same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of
trash (the pages read every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three
quarters of an acre) was stored for ever in his memory. He took no notice
of titles or author's names, but he could tell by merely glancing into a
book whether be had 'had it already'.
In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended
ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the 'classical'
English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put
Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending
library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century
novel people say, 'Oh, but that's OLD!' and shy away immediately. Yet it
is always fairly easy to SELL Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell
Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are 'always
meaning to' read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand.
People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar and that Mr Micawber
had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was found in a
basket of bulrushes and saw the 'back parts' of the Lord. Another thing
that is very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books.
And another--the publishers get into a stew about this every two or
three years--is the unpopularity of short stories. The kind of person
who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly always starts by
saying 'I don't want short stories', or 'I do not desire little stories',
as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they
sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of
characters with every story; they like to 'get into' a novel which
demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe, though,
that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern
short stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless,
far more so than most novels. The short stories which are stories are
popular enough, VIDE D. H. Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular
as his novels.
Would I like to be a bookseller DE M�TIER? On the whole--in spite of my
employer's kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop--no.
Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person
ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless
one goes in for 'rare' books it is not a difficult trade to learn, and
you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of
books. (Most booksellers don't. You can get their measure by having a
look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don't
see an ad. for Boswell's DECLINE AND FALL you are pretty sure to see one
for THE MILL ON THE FLOSS by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade
which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The
combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of
existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours
of work are very long--I was only a part-time employee, but my employer
put in a seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours
to buy books--and it is an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is
horribly
cold in winter, because if it is too warm the windows get misted
over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more and
nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of
a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.
But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for
life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has
to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still
worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to
and fro. There was a time when I really did love books--loved the sight
and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more
years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them
for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about
the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection:
minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of
forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies' magazines of the sixties. For
casual reading--in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you
are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before
lunch--there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper.
But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books.
Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and
even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if
it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk.
The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too
closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead
bluebottles.
SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (1936)
In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people--the
only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen
to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an
aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one
bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As
a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it
seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football
field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd
yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end
the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the
insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my
nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were
several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have
anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already
made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I
chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically--and
secretly, of course--I was all for the Burmese and all against their
oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more
bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the
dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling
in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the
long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged
with bamboos--all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.
But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated
and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is
imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the
British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal
better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew
was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage
against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job
impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an
unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, IN SAECULA SAECULORUM,
upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the
greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist
priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of
imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off
duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It
was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had
had before of the real nature of imperialism--the real motives for which
despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police
station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that
an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something
about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was
happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an
old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought
the noise might be useful IN TERROREM. Various Burmans stopped me on the
way and told me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a
wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must." It had been chained
up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must" is due, but
on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout,
the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set
out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve
hours' journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly
reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were
quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo
hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock;
also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped
out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted
violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me
in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor
quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palm-leaf,
winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy,
stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the
people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any
definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story
always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the
elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in
another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had
almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we
heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of
"Go away, child! Go away this instant!" and an old woman with a switch in
her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd
of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and
exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to
have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the
mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he
could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant
had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with
its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This
was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a
trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly
with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was
coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an
expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the
dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The
friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as
neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an
orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had
already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and
throw me if it smelt the elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges,
and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was
in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started
forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of
the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting
excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much
interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it
was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to
them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat.
It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant--I
had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary--and it is
always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill,
looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an
ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you
got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry
waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy
from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was
standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not
the slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches
of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them
into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with
perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter
to shoot a working elephant--it is comparable to destroying a huge and
costly piece of machinery--and obviously one ought not to do it if it can
possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the
elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think
now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he
would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and
caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided
that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not
turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It
was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute.
It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the
sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited
over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot.
They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a