continues until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no
identifiable author.
In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible.
Serious prose, in any case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the
excitement of being part of a group is actually an aid to certain kinds
of versification. Verse--and perhaps good verse of its own kind, though
it would not be the highest kind--might survive under even the most
inquisitorial r�gime. Even in a society where liberty and individuality
had been extinguished, there would still be a need either for patriotic
songs and heroic ballads celebrating victories, or for elaborate
exercises in flattery; and these are the kinds of poems that can be
written to order, or composed communally, without necessarily lacking
artistic value. Prose is a different matter, since the prose writer
cannot narrow the range of his thoughts without killing his
inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of
people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of
liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature almost
disappeared during the Hitler r�gime, and the case was not much better in
Italy. Russian literature, so far as one can judge by translations, has
deteriorated markedly since the early days of the revolution, though some
of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any Russian
novels that it is possible to take seriously have been translated for
about fifteen years. In western Europe and America large sections of the
literary intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist Party or
have been warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward movement has
produced extraordinarily few books worth reading. Orthodox Catholicism,
again, seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms,
especially the novel. During a period of three hundred years, how many
people have been at once good novelists and good Catholics? The fact is
that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of
them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition. Poetry
might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such
as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer
would have no choice between silence or death. Prose literature as we
know it is the product of rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of
the autonomous individual. And the destruction of intellectual liberty
cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the
novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In the future it is
possible that a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling
or truthful observation, may arise, but no such thing is at present
imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal culture that we
have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art
will perish with it.
Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to
speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly
totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until
television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it
is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the
industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They
are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading
matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and
stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or
perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced
by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the
minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by
machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work
in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower
reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by
what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly
mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their
individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to
whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand:
even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped
into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books
and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more
machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for
the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the WRITER abound with
advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made
plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the
opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a
sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots
for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and
situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce
ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the
literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature
were still felt to be necessary. Imagination--even consciousness, so far
as possible--would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books
would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass
through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an
individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It
goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but
anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state.
As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be
suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.
Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own
society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of
free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against
strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret
police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are
willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I
said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of
liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do
not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of
persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend
him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian
outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from
the intellectuals themselves.
It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not
succumbed to that particular myth, would have succumbed to another of
much the same kind. But at any rate the Russian myth is there, and the
corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly educated men looking on
indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise
more, their c
ynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for
example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think
that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own
line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large,
rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers
and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear
of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged
persons. Writers, on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It is true
that literary prostitutes like Ilya Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid
huge sums of money, but the only thing which is of any value to the
writer as such--his freedom of expression--is taken away from him.
Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically
of the opportunities to be enjoyed by scientists in Russia are capable of
understanding this. But their reflection appears to be: "Writers are
persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer." They do not see that
any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective
truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it
needs him. Even in Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were
relatively well treated and the German scientific community, as a whole,
offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most
autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly
because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because
of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical reality cannot
altogether be ignored, so long as two and two have to make four when you
are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist
has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His
awakening will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly
established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of
science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with his
literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when
falsified.
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting
and architecture, it is--as I have tried to show--certain that
literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it
doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any
writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for
persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as
a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against "individualism"
and the "ivory tower", no pious platitudes to the effect that "true
individuality is only attained through identification with the
community", can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind.
Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is
impossible, and language itself becomes something totally different from
what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from
intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like
certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or
journalist who denies that fact--and nearly all the current praise of
the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial--is, in effect,
demanding his own destruction.
WHY I WRITE (1946)
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I
grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and
twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the
consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or
later I should have to settle down and write books.
I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on
either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and
other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable
mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the
lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with
imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions
were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew
that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts,
and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get
my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of
serious--i.e. seriously intended--writing which I produced all through
my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote
my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to
dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a
tiger and the tiger had 'chair-like teeth'--a good enough phrase, but I
fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's 'Tiger, Tiger'. At eleven,
when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was
printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the
death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote
bad and usually unfinished 'nature poems' in the Georgian style. I also
attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total
of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all
those years.
However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary
activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I
produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from
school work, I wrote VERS D'OCCASION, semi-comic poems which I could turn
out at what now seems to me astonishing speed--at fourteen I wrote a
whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week--and
helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These
magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine,
and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest
journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I
was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was
the making up of a continuous 'story' about myself, a sort of diary
existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children
and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say,
Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but
quite soon my 'story' ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became
more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I
saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my
sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table,
where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand
in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a
tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf', etc. etc. This habit
con
tinued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary
years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I
seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under
a kind of compulsion from outside. The 'story' must, I suppose, have
reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages,
but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive
quality.
When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words,
i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from PARADISE LOST,
So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my
backbone; and the spelling 'hee' for 'he' was an added pleasure. As for
the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear
what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to
want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic
novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting
similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly
for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel,
BURMESE DAYS, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier,
is rather that kind of book.
I give all this background information because I do not think one can
assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early
development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives
in--at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our
own--but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an
emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his
job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at
some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his
early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.
Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great
motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in
different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions
will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is
living. They are:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be
remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed
you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a
motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with
scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful
businessmen--in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great
mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about
thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all--and
live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But
there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined
to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and
self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world,
or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in
the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the
rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is
valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble
in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will
have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian
reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc.
Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic
considerations.
(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out